What I’m Reading, August 18, 2014

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Republicans Got Nothing…, Tom Levenson, Balloon Juice, August 13th, 2014

The Republican party has a deep, long term problem. The GOP is wrong on every major policy question. Economics and recession? Wrong. Environment, climate change, public health? Wrong. Health care? Wrong. Income inequality? Wrong. Tax policy? A joke. Foreign policy? Explosively wrong. Infrastructure investment? Wrong. Border security and immigration? Comically (if there weren’t so often tragic consequences) wrong. Race in America? Viciously wrong. Industrial safety? Wrong. Regulation? Ask the phosphate loving folks of Toledo. Scientific research? Wrong….and so on. No links for now because I’m in the middle of day-job urgency, but they’re all there. For now, the take-away is that the major policy options that are the central pillars of the Republican party’s approach to governance have a track record, and to a startling degree (not to folks here, I know) those options have failed

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One last note: the basic GOP approach to elections: to deny the franchise; to construct the mechanics of elections to achieve near-certainty of result; and to create a fictional simulacrum of the media to make reality harder and harder to distinguish — all these are the tools of authoritarians, of one-party states, of dictators. Which is to say, this is the work of an organization committing treason against the ideal of American democracy.

Families of Afghan Civilians Killed by US/NATO Cannot get Justice, Bruce Pannier, Informed Comment, August 14, 2014 Continue reading →

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7 out of 8

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Of the eight largest cities in Texas, seven of them lean to the left, politically, based on residents’ stated views:

Arlington, Fort Worth, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, and Austin were all featured in the study—and the researchers discovered that Arlington was the only metropolitan area that leaned right.

The researchers, Chris Warshaw (MIT) and Chris Tausanovitch (UCLA), found that Austin was the most liberal city in Texas, followed by Dallas, then Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio. Each of these cities also has Democratic mayors. [Emphasis in original.]

Austin is hardly a surprise, but I wasn’t expecting Dallas to be second. I’m also not sure how they assess “left” and “right,” but those words are sure to bring on all sorts of varying assumptions.

Oh, and Texas Republicans might want to take note of this:

Coincidentally, these liberal-leaning cities led by Democrats happen to be the same cities driving the economic growth behind Perry’s “Texas Miracle.”

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The Monopoly on Violence

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I asked this question on Twitter yesterday. Still no answer, but I’ll just put it out to the whole world here. Any libertarian-minded folk want to take a crack at it?

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“It sounds like a war zone.”

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At what point do we start saying Ferguson actually is a “war zone”?

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A Right to an Education

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One way to interpret the decision in El Paso ISD v. McIntyre is to say that the Texas Court of Appeals for the Eighth District held that home-school kids have a right to some basic level of education, or that parents who home-school their kids have an obligation to teach them something.

It’s not at all that straightforward, though (is it ever?) The court’s decision was largely based on procedural issues, with a considerable amount of attention given to whether the McIntyres had “exhausted their administrative remedies.” In plain English, people have to go through an administrative procedure before filing certain types of lawsuits, including a suit against a government entity. In this type of case, the process would require a complaint to a school administrator, followed by the superintendent, followed by the school board.

The school district asked the appeals court to rule that the trial court lacked jurisdiction over the case because the plaintiffs went to court before going through the required administrative process. The appellate court agreed.

The facts of the case, as depicted by the appellate court, make it tempting to hope that this decision will have a far-reaching impact on the more extreme forms of religious homeschooling. The McIntyres sound, uh, interesting: Continue reading →

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Losing the War of Ideas

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I haven’t written anything about the war in Gaza over the past few weeks, but I’ve gotten in more than a few arguments with people about it. One thing I hear a lot is that the Palestinians are winning the “PR war,” as though this were all a matter of messaging. This bit of news suggests that, whether or not the Palestinians are “winning” anything relating to PR, Israel isn’t doing so well at it.

Henk Zanoli, a 91-year-old Dutch attorney who in 1943 saved a Jewish boy from the Nazis, has returned to Israel the “Righteous among the Nations” medal awarded him three years ago by the Yad Vashem museum. Zanoli’s mother had sheltered the boy, Elchanan Pinto, at risk to her own life, until the end of the war.

Zanoli’s grand-niece married a Palestinian, Ismail Ziadah, who had a house in Gaza where some of his relatives continued to reside. On July 20, an Israeli fighter jet bombed Ziadah’s home, killing his mother, three of his brothers, his sister-in-law and a nephew. These were, as Zanoli noted in his letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, the blood relatives of Zanoli’s mother’s own descendants: “The great- great grandchildren of my mother have lost their grandmother, three uncles, an aunt and a cousin at the hands of the Israeli army…”

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Something for Shark Week Producers to Consider

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If you have to lie to scientists to get them to be in your faux-documentaries, you’re doing documentary filmmaking wrong.

Besides that, it might be easier—and not significantly more expensive—just to hire actors to pretend to be scientists. Plus, you’ll avoid any potentially pesky fraud or defamation claims.

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Alleged Jaywalking

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Michael Brown will forever be an alleged shoplifter. And an alleged jaywalker. He will never be convicted of any offense, because an officer of the Ferguson Police Department killed him before he could ever stand trial.

Of course this won’t stop some people from assuming that Michael Brown is guilty of some offense. Cowards, fools, and racists will call Michael Brown a robber, or shoplifter, or “thug,” as if that somehow settles the matter.

The Ferguson chief of police did nothing today to alleviate the tensions that he did so much to create. All he did was make a pathetic effort to deflect criticism off of himself and his department, and onto the person that one of his officers killed. An officer who, let us not forget, had no idea about the suspected robbery or shoplifting.

I’d say that the Ferguson Chief of Police should be ashamed of himself, but I think we’re past that point now don’t you?

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What I’m Reading, August 15, 2014

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This Is Why We’re Mad About the Shooting of Mike Brown, Kara Brown, Jezebel, August 11, 2014

As a black person in America, it’s getting exhausting to still have to explain, in the year 2014, your right to exist in this country. To explain that you are a human being whose value sits no lower than anyone else’s. To explain our basic humanity. And perhaps worst of all, to explain exactly why we are outraged.

We shouldn’t have to explain why it’s not acceptable for unarmed teenagers to be gunned down by the police.

We shouldn’t have to explain why even though Mike Brown’s life didn’t matter to you or a Ferguson police officer, it mattered to someone.

Political Ambitionz az a Rioter, RobtheIdealist, Orchestrated Pulse, August 12, 2014

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