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Do Mascots Need Modernizing? Ctd

Readers keep the popular thread going:

I, too, find several currently-used mascots to be unnecessary and out-of-touch, and I would not presume to suggest that offense taken at certain mascots should be minimized, but on balance, surely intent and context do matter. They are, after all, sports mascots; they are supposed to be cartoonish caricatures of the characters/groups they represent. That doesn’t necessarily render them or the selection of the related team names offensive enough to send to the trash bin.

For example, the mascot at my high school was a Viking – a cartoonish figure with a giant horned helmet wielding a cartoonish sword and a giant, cartoonish smile. Surely the fact that this mascot and related logo were intended solely as cheerleader-type figures, while the name itself was chosen to symbolize those things one would presumably admire about our visions of the Vikings – strength, bravery, and exploration – weighs in their favor despite not being an accurate visual representation of actual Northern Europeans.

At Notre Dame, my alma mater, the mascot is a fighting leprechaun, for Christ’s sake – surely about as much of a stereotype of a drunken Irishman as one could imagine – yet it is a beloved image of the university’s teams. Why? Because context and intent matter. It’s a sports mascot, not designed to mock those of Irish heritage but to serve as a reminder, even in cartoonish form, of their fighting spirit.

Another reader:

There are plenty of examples of ethnicities in team names throughout history.

The Negro League had teams like the Birmingham Black Barons, the New York Cubans and the Chicago Brown Bombers. These weren’t chosen to insult their fans but to honor them. I would dare say that if you were to visit a local softball or soccer league, self-chosen team names there would represent the same ethnic, professional, or even sexual orientation of the players. A team name is a mark of pride, not a walking insult. That’s why we don’t see people of Irish descent picketing Boston Celtics games or Northeasterners who don’t pronounce r’s at the end of sentences protesting the Yankees. The best historic nicknames reflected the ethnic, their working-class (Packers, Steelers, Brewers, Aggies, Cornhuskers) or economic class (Brooklyn Bums/Dodgers).

This slippery slope is two-sided. If Braves and Indians offend, what about nicknames that refer to European attempts to subjugate native tribes, such as Rangers, Padres, Pioneers or Oklahoma’s “Sooners” and “89ers” which refer to that state’s huge land grab?

(Photo: The Notre Dame Fighting mascot looks on during the Big East Quarterfinal College Basketball Championship game against the Pittsburgh Panthers on March 11, 2010 at Madison Square Garden. By Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)

Should States Roll The Dice On Medicaid?

In a recent study in Health Affairs, Carter C. Price and Christine Eibner calculate the impact of the states opting out of the Medicaid expansion:

With fourteen states opting out, we estimate that 3.6 million fewer people would be insured, federal transfer payments to those states could fall by $8.4 billion, and state spending on uncompensated care could increase by $1 billion in 2016, compared to what would be expected if all states participated in the expansion. These effects were only partially mitigated by alternative options we considered. We conclude that in terms of coverage, cost, and federal payments, states would do best to expand Medicaid.

Tyler Cowen counters that their analysis ignores the “real chance” of Republican control of the House, Senate, and Presidency after the next election:

I often interpret the Republicans as operating in a “they don’t really mean what they say” mode, but on Medicaid I think they basically do mean it and we already can see some of the demonstrated preference evidence. Furthermore a new Republican President would face very real pressure to “repeal Obamacare,” yet we all know that the “three-legged stool” centered around the mandate is hard to undo selectively. That ups the chance Medicaid will be the target and much of the rest will be relabeled (“repealed,” in the press release) but in some manner kept in place in its essentials. …

[I]f someone wants to argue that, given these considerations, Medicaid expansion still makes financial sense for a state, fine, I would be keen to read such an analysis. But that is not what I am seeing. The Price and Eibner piece doesn’t analyze these considerations or even bring up most of them. Governors are not stupid, or their chiefs of staff are not stupid, and many governors are far less ideological than they let on. They are politicians.

“A Menace That Is Called Twitter” Ctd

Brian Merchant shares some troubling news out of Turkey:

[Tuesday] night, police raided 38 homes where citizens who had tweeted messages sympathetic to the protests lived—16 were arrested.

Many of them are apparently teenagers. The local police apparently honed in on tweets they deemed to be propagandic, and traced them back to protesters’ IP addresses at home. Their purported crime? Using social media to “instigate public hatred and animosity.” In reality, that means tweeting out supportive words or encouraging fellow citizens to join upcoming demonstrations. …

This is the paranoid behavior of an autocratic regime; though it is unfortunately unsurprising, given the rampant police brutality that has wracked the nation over the last few days. It also demonstrates a terribly poor understanding of how social media works, as did Erdogan’s now-infamous ‘menace to society’ comment. The move is likely only to further incense protesters, generate more sympathy for them, and inspire the tech-savvy to block their IPs. Meanwhile, a social media post left by one of the protesters killed in action has helped transform him into a hero to the movement.

Previous Dish on Twitter and the Turkish protests here.

Senators For Life

Barro encourages greater turnover in Congress and looks for a “politically salable option”:

Frank Lautenberg missed most Senate votes this year because of ill health. Still, when Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, announced his plan to run for Senate whether Lautenberg retired or not, some Democrats were aghast. Lautenberg aides told reporters that Booker was being “disrespectful,” and Lautenberg himself mused about spanking Booker like a disobedient child.

This is nuts.

Senate seats aren’t property, and Lautenberg wasn’t entitled to cling to his job even as he became too old and infirm to carry it out. We should have an expectation about Congress, as we do with other high-powered and demanding jobs, that people will retire when they are no longer up to the demands. …

[T]he best option is to change our norms about incumbency. Booker had this one right: being a good team player shouldn’t always mean waiting around for your party’s incumbents to retire. More politicians should be willing to make primary challenges, and state political parties should be more tolerant of them. And voters should recognize that “senator” is a job that benefits from turnover.

Claire Potter adds:

[P]erhaps the real question is not how old the Senate is, but how young it is not. If 37 senators are older than 65, only 12 senators are younger than 50. Demographically, the middle-aged, old and elderly are governing a nation entirely unlike the one they were formed by and educated in. Our most urgent policy questions – education, health care, immigration, communications technology, climate change, social security, long-term care for disabled veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq – are about what country the young will inherit.

Isn’t this why we could use some retirements in the Senate?

Recent Dish on the political age gap in Britain here.

Can This Party Be Saved? Ctd

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry summarizes the goals of reform conservatism:

Reform conservatives believe that the GOP should put forward serious and credible policies that directly address the issue of family formation and breakdown. It will be good for the economy, good for people, and is a prerequisite to shrinking government over the long term since voters will not acquiesce to shrinking public handouts if they do not feel that they have private safety nets available, first among which is the family. Furthermore, as Jonathan V Last has pointed out, it’s good politics since family formation is a key driver of voting for the GOP.

The reform conservative blueprint, then, goes something like this: Address family formation seriously -> win elections -> make it easier to start families and have kids -> more families and more kids -> a better economy, a healthier society, less demand for big government, more GOP voters -> win more elections -> shrink government, grow the economy and civil society -> win more elections -> rinse, lather, repeat.

The alternative scenario would go something like this: Don’t address middle income voters’ day-to-day concerns seriously, don’t make family formation more affordable -> concede the field to Democrats -> increase economic and social insecurity -> increase demand for government -> lose elections -> government grows bigger -> social pathologies get worse -> keep conceding the field -> increase demand for government -> etc. 2012 was Act I of that nightmare scenario.

I need to fess up. I endorsed Ross’ and Reihan’s book, but took longer than they did to let go of my libertarian instincts in the face of yawning social inequality. It’s only been since the impact of the Great Recession sank in that I have truly come to terms with the fact that, say, flat taxes are irrelevant right now to our major problems, or that publicly subsidized private health insurance is an important response to a middle class facing an epic (if much predicted) employment and economic crisis.

I do believe, with Reihan and Ross, that supporting family formation is vital – hence my support for marriage equality (and my bafflement at Ross’ ambivalence). But my preference is for government to stop doing things that actively harm family life, rather than using money transfers to shore it up against some resilient social trends that may actually be helping marriage become more moral over time. Hence my passionate support for welfare reform in the 1990s. But there’s a core agreement: the times demand a different response than that imprinted on so many of us under Reagan-Thatcher; and encouraging self-government is the best way to keep big government at bay. If the GOP were to accept the principles of Romneycare/Obamacare, for example, they could then help reform the architecture to control costs better, empower individual choices more, and win people like me back.

Bouie makes the rather obvious but no less potent point that conservative reformers have almost no actual, you know, power:

The Republican Party is broken, and fixing it is the only way to bring long-term sanity to our politics. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of change. Last week, writers on the left and the right engaged in a debate over the conservative “reform” movement, and who counted as a “reformer.” It was a fascinating conversation with one major takeaway: Regardless of who “counts” as a reform, the obvious fact is that they have little influence over the current direction of the GOP. They lack the power necessary to challenge Republican leadership, break the party’s “fever,” and begin to reestablish it as a mainstream institution.

There is, as yet, no Tony Blair of the American right, grabbing his party by the scruff of the neck and forcing it to adapt to a new reality. And there is the persistence of the fundamentalist psyche which regards any sort of pragmatic accommodation to new political and economic realities as psychologically destabilizing. Yes, I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.” And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.

The greatest failure of the GOP is not realizing that Obama is a president they could have worked with on policy grounds, and whose relationship with them could have actually defused some of the very traits that suburban voters and most generations under 40 still find so disturbing in the GOP base.

Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.

And even the reformers are constrained. Have Ross or Reihan ever said that although they’d prefer a different healthcare reform, Obamacare is better than nothing? If they did, they’d be Frummed out. Or take Yuval Levin, recently tackled by Chait:

Levin may arrive at conclusions that gratify the tea party, but he does not merely rant against big government. He presents his analysis as the considered result of careful study. He harnessed himself, at least rhetorically, to a series of falsifiable claims. They are being falsified, but the restraints of his ideology give him no room to do anything but obfuscate.

I’d qualify that as the restraints that partisanship imposes on him. But they rode this tiger for so long it’s hard to feel pity as they try both to get off and not be eaten at the same time. Previous thoughts on the subject here.

Baseball’s War On Steroids

Major League Baseball recently announced the suspension of “about 20 players” for their connection to the performance-enhancing drug clinic Biogenesis. Update from a reader:

The MLB has not yet officially announced any suspensions, and the article you linked to references only leaked reports about potential upcoming suspensions. For a more in-depth discussion of the potential effect the suspensions may have on future labor relations you should check out this Grantland piece by Jonah Keri.

Pareene compares the MLB’s efforts to eliminate steroids to the war on drugs:

Years after BALCO, it looks as if just as many players are using. The league’s stricter enforcement has simply led to players getting more creative, and apparently relying on even less reliable sources. … Like the federal War on Drugs, enforcement is draconian and unequal (minor leaguers don’t get the protection and defense provided by the MLBPA). It is also occasionally incoherent: Marijuana use subjects players to suspensions and bans, though drunk driving doesn’t. There’s no concrete evidence that HGH does much for players beyond making them look really cut. At least Major League players have access, unlike your typical subject of the criminal justice system, to the best defense money can buy.

I’d say Alex is under-rating HGH, but his general point stands. Travis Waldron weighs in:

There exists … virtually no evidence that drug testing deters drug use.

Baseball doesn’t have records of drug use from before the testing era, so there isn’t any way to measure its efficacy. But the existence of tests and suspensions obviously hasn’t stopped Rodriguez, who admitted to steroid use in 2009, from associating with shady figures like Bosch, and it hasn’t stopped countless other players from using drugs either. Drug use is rampant in sports like cycling and the Olympics that have aggressive testing policies, and academic research has suggested that “testing alone is not a sufficient deterrent to eliminate drug use among college athletes.”

As for aggressive drug testing and busts of professionals serving as a deterrent for young athletes, Dr. Linn Goldberg testified in front of the House of Representatives in December that his two-year testing of high school athletes had no deterrent effect on their use of performance enhancing drugs. If drug testing young athletes doesn’t stop them from using drugs, should we really expect that drug testing professional athletes is going to stop young athletes from using drugs?

Obama’s Foreign Policy Shake-Up

The above comments will mean the usual brutal attacks on Power from the usual sources. But I have written similar things, and believe passionately that acquiescence to Israel’s continued settlement policy – designed to create a permanent Greater Israel – must be challenged by the United States. The constantly expanding occupation is against our values and against our interests. We should be using all our leverage to stop it, rather than funding it, as we continue to do. But Larison argues it’s the realists rather than the neocons who should be upset:

The one major issue that distinguished Rice and Power in the first term was their support for the Libyan war, and in spite of backing that misguided intervention both of them are being promoted. That tells current and future officials that there is no penalty in supporting unwise military action, and indicates that ambitious officials should push for more aggressive policies whether they are in the national interest or not. I don’t understand the selection of Power for the U.N. unless it is simply a reward to a long-time Obama loyalist. I suppose that the position has sometimes been filled in the past to make a political or ideological statement (see Bolton, John), and appointing Power to this post might be an exercise in placating liberal hawks disaffected with Obama’s recent foreign policy record. If so, I doubt it will work, since it will just make Obama’s liberal hawkish detractors more vocal in their demands that the U.S. intervene in Syria.

I suspect it won’t. Both Rice and Power have taken an anti-interventionist position on Syria, for the usual sane reasons (even if we could do something, what would that something possibly be? Arming branches of al Qaeda?). Besides, foreign policy under this president is made in the Oval Office. I’d say the reason behind these appointments is, as my shrink will often say, multi-determined. Rice and Power have extraordinary minds, moral clarity and the kind of self-discipline that Obama rewards. (Samantha’s campaign outburst against Hillary was, I like to think, the Irish in her temporarily escaping.)

I also think their gender matters. With Kerry replacing Clinton, the need for female prominence in foreign policy is all the more politically astute. While Erick Erickson is opining that women should naturally submit to their husbands as a matter of science, and the GOP wanders off into la-la land on abortion and contraception, Obama is shrewd to balance John Kerry at State with Rice and Power at the NSA and UN. (Full disclosure: I’ve known and admired Samantha ever since I turned her down for an internship at TNR way back when, but am not that close. And yes, that was a dumb mistake in retrospect.)

And if you were a president with a conscience but also a very cold, realist approach to foreign policy, wouldn’t you do exactly what he’s done? Find those most likely to argue for liberal intervention and bring them closer into the tent rather than risk them smoldering from a distance? They act as liberal buffers to an inherently conservative foreign policy (by which I mean the antithesis of neoconservative.)

Max Fisher sees the point:

[E]ven if Power and Rice did disagree with Obama on Syria, he’s already overruled more senior and experienced officials who wanted to upgrade U.S. involvement. He shot down a 2012 plan, backed by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, CIA chief David H. Petraeus and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to directly arm the Syrian rebels. Even if they wanted to, it’s not clear that Power and Rice would be better positioned to change U.S. policy.

Ali Gharib expects Power to be attacked, once again, over her comments about Israel (some of the most controversial seen above):

Will re-hashing these 2008 attacks squash Power’s nomination? Probably not. But will those segments of the pro-Israel right that attacked her in 2008 have at it again in 2013? Most definitely. And if the first salvos are any indication, they’ll use the exact same playbook they did five years ago. Like Chuck Hagel’s embattled nomination as Defense Secretary, Power will survive. But she’ll take some shots and come out hesitant to say ‘boo” about Israel.

Fisher puts Power’s old comments in context:

It appears that Kreisler asked Power how she, if she were a presidential adviser and human rights atrocities broke out in Israel-Palestine, would advise the president to “put a structure in place to monitor that situation [where] at least one party or another [may] be looking like they might be moving toward genocide.”

That last part is important: the hypothetical she’s addressing is about what to do if genocide appears imminent. He’s not asking Power, hey, do you think we should invade Israel to impose a two-state solution? Still, even remembering that she was being prompted with an extreme and unlikely worst-case hypothetical, Power’s answer was not ideal.

And James Gibney previews Power’s confirmation hearings:

Even if this doesn’t end up putting U.S. boots on the ground in Syria, Power’s confirmation hearings will showcase cognitive dissonance on both sides of the bench: Power as she bobs and weaves to avoid criticizing the administration’s relative inaction to stop the slaughter in Syria, and Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham as they hammer away at a nominee whose more robust views on intervention they doubtless have great sympathy for.

Samantha can take it. As long as she doesn’t get her Irish up.

I have to say on a personal note that I’m also moved by this Irish immigrant with such brilliance and passion representing the United States. In some ways, we actual immigrants, born abroad, represent a quintessentially and uniquely American experience: we chose this country because we love it and wanted to start our lives over. And it rewards us by treating us (if not in my case for a long time because of HIV) as if we belong here. That’s uniquely American.

(Thumbnail photo by Eric Bridiers, United States Mission Geneva)

What’s Up With Immigration?

The bill’s chances appear to have taken a turn for the worse. Chait assesses the situation:

Is the deal exactly what Rubio wanted? No. It wasn’t exactly what anybody wanted. But, again, that’s called “negotiation.” That’s why Democrats had to vote for utterly obnoxious provisions excluding gay couples. They didn’t like the things they voted for, but were under the impression that both sides were bound by the terms of the deal. Now Rubio is saying only they’re bound by it.

The question for Democrats is, at what point do they insist that a deal’s a deal? The dynamic here is that Republicans have a mainly political objective, and Democrats a mainly policy objective. The Republicans do want some changes to the law that would benefit businesses, but mainly they want to take immigration off the table as an issue in order to give themselves an opening to court Latino voters. Democrats are willing to take the issue off the table in order to get a substantive policy accomplishment.

He follows up here. My worry is that if this doesn’t get done by the fall, we’re entering primary season on the right and the lunatic choke-hold on pragmatic reform will tighten. Allahpundit analyzes Rubio’s recent demands for border-security guarantees:

If Rubio’s decided the bill’s current border-security provisions are untenable, it’s not because he’s been troubled by them all along and feels obliged to keep his initial promise. It’s because, despite his best efforts, the Gang of Eight simply won’t fly as-is among conservatives. He did his best to sell it and he couldn’t pull it off. Time for Plan B.

Drum is growing pessimistic:

“Those amendments” [that Rubio wants] are poison pills that would require 100 percent operational control of the border before any new green cards are issued, a standard that’s pretty obviously impossible to meet. The only reason to insist on them is to give Rubio a plausible exit strategy from his own bill.

Or so it seems. Maybe Rubio has something else in mind. But it’s sure starting to look like Rubio has figured out that his support for immigration reform is doing him more harm than good with the tea party folks he needs if he ever wants to become president. What’s more, he’s probably less confident than he used to be about the chances of getting the House to go along anyway, which makes it pointless for him to keep taking damage over the issue.

Ezra searches for a silver lining:

Letting Republicans break the bill into pieces makes it likelier that some of those pieces will pass. It also makes it easier for Republicans to vent their anger against certain parts of immigration reform — like the path to citizenship — without imperiling the whole bill. It makes it likelier that something, anything, passes the House.

Bernstein’s bottom line:

What Rubio’s apparent defection could mean is that the vote in the Senate will be a lot less overwhelming. But that only really matters to the extent that it puts pressure on the House. And what really matters in the House probably isn’t media pressure, but the basic calculation by mainstream conservatives about whether passing a bill is better than not passing a bill.

Whom Will Obamacare Burden?

Chait is unconvinced by the most recent ACA “victim” put forth by opponents of the law:

It is true — and nobody has ever denied this — that the hypothetical 25-year-old male will pay higher insurance premiums under Obamacare. Now, this 25-year-old male probably won’t pay higher premiums under Obamacare if he does smoke, or have any potentially worrisome medical history, or have family members with any potential medical history, or even if he’s a perfectly healthy non-smoker from a perfectly healthy family but has a low enough income to qualify for tax credits to cover his premium costs. And of course he’d be unaffected if he already gets insurance through his employer.

Will Wilkinson assesses the claim that the young and healthy will be forced into the insurance pool by the individual mandate, using a hypothetical 25-year-old freelancer named Nicole who makes $30K a year:

Over the next two years, as the penalty scales up, it’s pretty clear that Nicole would be smartest to pay the initially meagre fine and not sign up for insurance unless she comes down with something expensive. (No exclusions for pre-existing conditions!) But what about in 2016, when the non-compliance penalty is finally fully unfurled? That will be the greater of $695 per uninsured person, or 2.5% of household income over the filing threshold, which is not yet set, but this year was about $10,000 for individuals. So in Nicole’s case, that’s 2.5% of $20,000, which is only $500. So she’s on the hook for $695. For Nicole in 2016, then, the difference between going uninsured and getting a Bronze plan is $1,224, which is just a touch more than I recently paid for a cheap catastrophic plan. If America’s Nicoles are going without insurance due to cost, they’re not going to be induced to get it under Obamacare. If the programme is going to bring down the cost of an average policy by goading the likes of Nicole into the risk pool, it needs a bigger carrot, stick or both.

Sarah Kliff adds some important context:

Young Americans tend to have lower incomes than their older counterparts. That means they’re more likely to qualify for subsidies than their parents. In a new analysis released Wednesday, consulting firm Avalere Health estimates that “approximately two-thirds of young adults (30 and under) who are currently uninsured or enrolled in non-group coverage and who will not qualify for Medicaid—the population most likely to experience rate shock— have incomes between 133 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL), making them eligible for premium tax credits.”

To translate that out of health wonk speak: The federal government will help most young, uninsured people buy coverage under Obamacare. But, there’s also a significant contingent who won’t receive help–and those are the ones most likely to see their rates increase.

Cohn, who flags the above chart, goes into more detail:

A 25-year-old single man, making $35,000 a year, can expect to pay the full price of a bronze policy: About $2,511 a year in 2014. We can argue whether that constitutes true “shock,” given that it’s far less than employer policies cost. Still, it’s a lot more than the $1,104 premiums Roy found on eHealthInsurance. The same would be true for a 25-year-old non-smoker with even higher income. These are the young and healthy people who will end up paying more. That’s important and must be part of conversation.

But look what happens when we think about somebody making less money. If this young man’s annual income was $25,000, he’d pay just $1,184 a year. That’s basically the same as the eHealthInsurance bids, give or take a few six packs of beer. Dude! At $20,000 a year in earnings, the expected bronze premium comes all the way down to $481 a year. And at $15,000 a year, insurance is free. That’s right, the premium would be zero dollars. (If you’re interested, you can run the same calculations for silver policies, which are more generous, although the comparison to cheap eHealthInsurance plans becomes even more unfair to Obamacare. You can also run it for older people, or consider the possiblity of catastrophic-only coverage that Obamacare makes available to people younger than 30.)

What IRS Scandal? Ctd

After learning that conservative groups make up two-thirds of the groups that had “received special scrutiny and been approved for tax-exempt status,” Kevin Drum is even less convinced by Republican attempts to play up the scandal:

This doesn’t tell us anything definitive about the entire set of groups that got special scrutiny. If the whole set is similar to the approved set, then about two-thirds were conservative and one-third liberal—most likely because of the boom in new tea party groups in 2010. But that’s just a guess. One thing isn’t a guess, however: Two-thirds of the groups who were approved for tax-exempt status were conservative. If the IRS was on a partisan witch hunt against conservative groups, that’s sure an odd way of showing it, isn’t it?

Garance Franke-Ruta lists some of the progressive organizations whose tax exempt status was checked by the IRS:

Non-conservative advocacy groups given special scrutiny by the IRS in or after 2010 included the Coffee Party USA, the alternative to the Tea Party movement that got a bunch of press in 2010, as well as such explicitly progressive groups as the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada; Rebuild the Dream, founded by former Obama administration official Van Jones; and Progressives United Inc., which was founded by former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold.

Also included in the special scrutiny were Progress Texas and Progress Missouri Inc.; Tie the Knot, which sells bow ties to raise money to promote same-sex marriage; and ProgressNow, which describes itself as “a year-round never-ending progressive campaign.”