Month: October 2013

Post-Partum Extinction

Video of yesterday’s police chase in DC:

Marshall defends the use of lethal force:

Given what was known and her behavior, it makes perfect sense to me that the Capitol Police and whatever other federal authorities were in the mix were focusing on threat elimination as their primary goal rather than apprehension. Even the attempts to get her to surrender were rebuffed.

I wouldn’t second-guess the cops for reasons Ambers lays out, but I hope this incident prompts us again to appreciate the need for more serious mental health coverage. Post-partum depression is an extremely serious illness – in this case, apparently untreated. Its victims – especially children – are manifold. And killing the mentally ill is always a tragedy.

What A Functional Republican Party Might Offer

Ramesh admits that the GOP’s debt ceiling demands are unprecedented:

Look back at every previous piece of legislation that raised the debt limit while also making changes to other government policies, and almost always the debt limit was the occasion for a bipartisan deal rather than the achievement of only one party’s goals.

As part of a debt-limit deal, he encourages Republicans to “offer a temporary increase in spending from the levels of sequestration in order to delay the time when the Internal Revenue Service starts fining people for not buying insurance.” His other suggestion:

[A] deal should include policies that minimize the potential damage of a future debt-limit standoff. The most important one would be a law stipulating that even if the debt limit is breached in the future, the government will still be authorized to make debt-service payments in full, taking a default off the table. Republicans in the House have already passed a bill that would come close to doing this. Once this change is enacted, hitting the debt limit would mean having a partial government shutdown — which isn’t great, but not the disaster a default would be.

Losing Judaism, Staying Jewish

Marc Tracy parses a new study that suggests that, despite popular belief, Jewish life in America is not in decline:

[A]s Jews increasingly tolerate intermarriage and focus on other signifiers—pride, religious participation, and above all child-rearing—some good news appears. Ninety-four percent of U.S. Jews are proud to be Jewish, says Pew, and three-quarters feel a “strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people.” Seventy percent attended a Passover Seder, and more than half fasted during Yom Kippur. Fewer than 20 percent are not raising their children Jewish to at least some extent; 59 percent are raising them Jewish by religion, although, again, this number is insanely divergent depending on whether the marriage is all-Jewish (96 percent) or interfaith (20 percent).

“The most important finding is that contrary to the lachrymose narrative of a declining, disappearing, vanishing Jewish population, there are many more people who say that they are Jewish, claim Jewish identity, and the vast majority [who] say it is their religion,” Leonard Saxe, a Brandeis professor and prominent Jewish-American demographics expert who consulted on the Pew survey, told me Tuesday.

Jessica Grose takes a different interpretation of the study, stressing that actual religious observance has dropped significantly:

[A]s we get further and further away from virulent anti-Semitism (according to the Pew Survey, 15 percent of American Jews say they have been called offensive names or snubbed in a social setting because they are Jewish, and Jews think other groups, like gays and Muslims, face more discrimination than they do), perhaps it is not surprising that fewer Jews are religious. Other people do let us forget who we are. Plus we don’t have to believe to be Jewish: Judaism, unlike Christianity, is passed down through blood. It’s also difficult to convert to Judaism, and we welcome questioning. Not exactly a recipe for creating generations of faithful devotees.

Gabriel Roth doesn’t despair:

For my grandchildren, the fact that some of their ancestors were Jewish will have no more significance than the fact that others were Welsh. That will be a real loss. But we should be realistic about what’s being lost and what isn’t. Here are some of the things I cherish about Jewishness:

unsnobbish intellectualism, sympathy for the disadvantaged, psychoanalytic insight, rueful comedy, smoked fish. Those things have been thoroughly incorporated into American upper-middlebrow culture. Philip Roth and Bob Dylan and Woody Allen no longer read as “Jewish” artists but as emblematic Americans; their influence is as palpable in the work of young gentiles as young Jews.

The loss of Jewishness as a meaningful identity in America is the kind of loss that occurs when individuals are free to engage in the pursuit of happiness. It’s the loss of something that has great meaning to many people and an important place in history but that is, essentially, tribal.

To that point, Douglas Rushkoff suggests  that “if we want to promote Judaism and its practices, we might need to transcend our rather primitive misconception of Judaism as a race”:

It was Pharaoh who first called the Jews a “people”. The notion of a Jewish bloodline didn’t emerge until the Inquisition as a justification for executing even those Jews who had converted. And it was Hitler (repurposing a bit of Jung) who called the Jews a race.

As I look at history and the Torah, Judaism isn’t really a religion at all, but a path beyond religion. It was developed by the equivalent of recovering cult members, as a way beyond the idolatry and death worship of Ancient Egypt. Instead of “believing” things, a disparate amalgam of tribes (those mythic sons of Jacob), developed a living myth together – as well as a system of law that could be amended as civilization evolved. Everything from the Sabbath to the US Constitution came out of these insights and this continuous process of revision and renewal.

By applying the techniques of the census taker to the Jewish people (a practice actually forbidden in Talmud – we’re not allowed to count ourselves) the would-be protectors of Judaism are practicing a dangerous game with diminishing returns.

When Being An Amateur Is An Advantage

In our final video from Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, they recall how their perceived inexperience ended up being an asset in the filming of After Tiller:

The documentary, which features the four remaining doctors who still perform third-trimester abortions in the wake of George Tiller’s assassination, opens today in Los Angeles and Toronto. It will continue to play in New York until October 8 and then open in many more cities across the country. Trailer here. Martha and Lana’s previous Dish videos are here. Our “It’s So Personal” series, in which readers share their experiences with late-term abortion, is here. Another reader writes:

I worked on a response to your abortion dissent, but a followup reader said it so much better than I ever could:

Is abortion ever immoral? This pro-choice advocate says: Of course it is. But there are many immoral things that are not illegal, and imposing the blunt instrument of the law on a complex moral decision is not going to help people make better choices. The sooner pro-life activists take legal bans off the table, the sooner we can have productive talks about effective programs to help people make better moral choices about abortion and reproductive issues generally.

I have a story to go with that comment.

Many years ago I lived in a house with multiple roommates. We selected a seemingly charming, successful graduate student to fill a vacancy, but within months it was clear she was seriously disturbed.  Any number of things (e.g., polite requests to clean up weeks worth of dirty dishes or to allow someone else to watch TV) triggered abusive, screaming diatribes and implied threats of violence.  We were so freaked out we all decided to move until one brave soul convinced us to band together and boot her out.  She smashed holes in the walls the day she left. If it happened today, I’d worry that she’d return with a gun.

During the year this woman lived with us, she had two abortions.  She also told us she was sloppy with contraception and had had several abortions in the past. It’s easy to argue that these abortions were immoral, but should that translate into law?  Do we want to force a woman like this (who might be unwilling to give up a child) to bear unwanted children at risk for serious abuse?  I’m uncomfortable when the left discusses abortion in terms of rights and when the right discusses it in terms of morality. It’s so much more complicated than that.

The GOP Doesn’t Know It’s Losing

That’s the suspicion of First Read:

Despite polls showing that more Americans are blaming Republicans than Democrats for the shutdown, and despite establishment Republicans admitting they aren’t winning this fight, conservatives aren’t backing down. In fact, they feel they have survived the fallout from the first few days. Case in point is Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) admission in that hot-mic moment that “We’re gonna win this, I think.” Is that the reality of this standoff? Or it is simply due to the conservative echo chamber? After all, one of the major differences between the last shutdown (in 1995-1996) and now is the rise of FOX News, Drudge, and Breitbart News. As the New York Times recently wrote, “a fervent group of conservatives — bloggers, pundits, activists and even members of Congress — is harnessing the power of the Internet, determined to tell the story of the current budget showdown on its terms.” It explains why conservatives aren’t as convinced as many others are that this will do significant damage to the party.

Larison connects shutdown spin to the larger GOP misinformation problem:

Some Republicans are making all of the same mistakes that they made when they ignored all of the evidence suggesting that the GOP was likely to lose in 2012. Most of the time, the echo chamber hurts conservatives and Republicans by making them oblivious to inconvenient facts and ideas, but in this case it is leading them to believe in an alternate political reality with its own set of rules.

In a follow-up, he tackles Kristol’s latest nonsense.

Democrats’ Message Discipline

It could use improvement, starting with the ever-insufferable Harry Reid:

Drum face-palms:

Democrats need to have better answers, and they need to explain just why the Republican CRs are such contemptuous exercises in trying to gull the American public. … [Reid] sounds as though he’s comparing some furloughed civilian workers in his home state with kids who have cancer. Fair or not, that’s going to sound bad.

Weigel describes the current GOP strategy as “take credit for trying to save cancer kids from heartless Democrats”:

Reid had made a mistake—a gaffe, if you will. He could have said something about how his Democrats had passed several continuing resolutions that would have funded the NIH, or that the sequestration cuts also tagged the NIH, or that the Republican budget recommendations also cut back NIH funding, or that there were probably plenty of poor kids with TV movie ailments in states where Republicans had opted out of the Medicaid expansion—well, whatever, instead he rejected the premise and insulted the reporter. He did not actually say “I don’t care about kids with cancer,” but his partial quote was enough to make the Drudge Report, Hannity, and the rest of the reliable wurlitzers of conservative opinion.

Snowballing Dysfunction

Gleckman worries about the consequences of any surrender to economic and fiscal blackmail:

Just take a look at what’s happened to the Senate in recent years. Once, filibusters were rare exceptions. Now, they are constant. Nearly every bill, no matter how trivial, requires 60 votes for passage in a body that historically required a mere majority.

Similarly, presidential nominations are now routinely blocked for reasons only occasionally having to do with the qualifications of the nominee. Lawmakers have learned that they can take a nominee hostage in order to send an ideological message or convince an administration to change a regulation.

As a result, behavior that was once rare has become as routine as the Senate’s daily prayer. … I fear the same is about to happen with government shutdowns. Once those who would use the shutdown as a useful legislative lever succeed, it will become a tool of choice. True, it couldn’t be used in every circumstance, but there would be enough opportunities to make it the next filibuster.

Which is why the fightback for constitutional governance and political moderation begins now.

Why They’ll Die On This Hill

The Democratic group headed up by Stan Greenberg and James Carville has just put out a report on their recent focus group discussions with Republican voters. It’s a sobering read (pdf) – and definitely helps explain the primal scream now threatening to take down the entire American system of elective government.

Here, for starters, is the word cloud for what these voters say when talking in like-minded focus groups about president Obama:

Screen Shot 2013-10-04 at 11.30.54 AM

The base Republican voters in these focus groups view themselves as besieged by minorities seeking free benefits, and see Obama as the Pied Piper of those hoping to abuse the system. They are not explicitly racist about the president or about the beneficiaries of the new goodies (though they had no such qualms during Bush’s Medicare D entitlement). But they believe they are losing an America that a Roanoke evangelical describes like this:

Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogeneous.

This is the America they believe is being taken away from them. Some money quotes:

“The government’s giving in to a minority, to push an agenda, as far as getting the votes for the next time”. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

“There’s so much of the electorate in those groups that Democrats are going to take every time because they’ve been on the rolls of the government their entire lives. They don’t know better.” (Tea Party man, Raleigh)

But this is the core conclusion of the study and why it helps us understand our current predicament – nothing represents their sense of loss and anger more powerfully than Obamacare:

When Evangelicals talk about what is wrong in the country, Obamacare is first on their list and they see it as the embodiment of what is wrong in both the economy and American politics. In fact, when asked what she talks about most, one woman in Colorado replied, “Obamacare, hands down, around our house.” In Roanoke, it was the first thing mentioned when asked “what’s the hot topic in your world?”

To participants in these groups, Obamacare “just looks like a wave’s coming, that we’re all going to get screwed very soon. ” (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)

“Obamacare’s just another intrusion on the Constitution … And I just – I’m appalled. I’m appalled by what’s going on in our country.”(Evangelical man, Roanoke)

“It’s putting us at the mercy of the government again.” (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)

“[Our rights] are slowly being taken away… like health care.” (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)

I’ve long argued that you have to see the bigger cultural and religious picture when analyzing what has happened to American conservatism these past two decades or so.

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox. It does not occur to them, for example, that Obamacare might actually help them. And you get no actual specifics on policies they like or dislike. It is all abstractions based on impressions.

More to the point, the bulk of these Republicans no longer believe in the Republican party. They identify more strongly with the Tea Party or Evangelical groups or Fox News than the GOP. On social issues, the defining issue is homosexuality – not abortion. That intransigence will alienate them them even further from the future mainstream. Their next big issue: denying climate change. Right now, I see no way to integrate these groups and people into the broader body politic or conversation. Their alienation is so deep it is close to unbridgeable. And further defeats will make their isolation worse, not better, their anger more, not less, intense.

This is the deeper crisis we face – and without strong economic growth, it is hard to see how it can be ameliorated in the near future. Perhaps if moderate Republicans – a mere quarter of the whole – jumped ship to the Democrats, then the electoral losses would be so great as to demand some kind of reform. But the center is not holding. And I fear it will get even worse than this until it gets better.

Except it’s hard to imagine political dysfunction getting worse than risking the first ever default by the Treasury of the United States because a key minority feels “disrespected.”