You might have read in the news about four new elements being added to the periodic table, but did you know how many names of elements have been revised or plain old rejected? If you’re having trouble reading the version above, check out Compound Interest for a larger version.
Mary Sanchez asks a question that’s going to become more important over the next couple of weeks.
Bill Clinton, so the saying goes, was America’s first black president.
Novelist Toni Morrison dubbed him so...
His wife is not blessed with the same attributes. This became starkly apparent in 2008 when she faced a formidable political challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination and lost as African-American voters flocked to him.
This go-around, it’s not an upstart biracial senator from Illinois who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the coveted prize in this election cycle. It’s a 74-year-old white guy with a Mister Rogers appeal. …
I kind of get a more Bill Nye vibe from Bernie, though I can see him kicking off the shoes and getting comfortable when he comes through the door.
Clinton cannot take black voters for granted. Sanders may not win enough African-American support to snag the Democratic nomination away, but he'll give her a considerable run for it, even in Southern states like South Carolina, whose Democratic primary will take place at the end of the month.
Sanders’ appeal is that he acknowledges something that African Americans know viscerally: There is no post-racial America. He has also offered a forthright critique of wealth and income equality in America, along with measures to rectify it. All he has to do is package his message right.
If Bernie would get past the idea that helping the poor, including those who happen to be black, is an adequate response to calls for restitution, maybe he could land more than “enough” African-American support. There’s still time for him to move on this.
And now it’s time for you to move. Below the fold, where the rest of today’s pundits are waiting.
The New York Times on bad law and worse legislators.
An opportunity to pass the most significant federal criminal justice reform in a generation may be slipping away — despite the tireless efforts of many top Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as a rare exhortation from President Obama during last month’s State of the Union address.
The bill, known as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, is the product of years of negotiation over how best to roll back the imprisonment spree of the past four decades, a period in which the federal prison population grew from just under 25,000 to more than 195,000. …
So what’s the problem? There are two, in fact — and both are serious threats to the bill’s chances of passage.
First, some congressional Republicans now say they will approve the bill only if it includes an across-the-board change in federal law that would make corporations and their executives harder to prosecute for environmental or financial crimes by imposing a new intent, or “mens rea,” standard on these crimes.
Does it even matter what the second item is? Republicans flat out say they won’t support reasonable sentencing for regular folks, unless corporate executives are given a free pass on rape and pillage. Tell me that’s not the GOP in a nutshell. The second item, by the way, is plenty of good old racially tinged dog-whistling from Ted Cruz about the horrible criminals who will be released if you, you know, don’t give ten year mandatory sentences for something that’s already completely legal in several states.
Frank Bruni has a ticket to the Tedpocalypse.
Another Ted Cruz rally, another Ted Cruz rant about the media’s failure to give him his due. I endured one in the tiny town of Weare, N.H., on Thursday afternoon and had two thoughts.
The first was that I’d seldom heard a voice as ripe with self-regard — as juicy with it — as his. He’s pomposity’s plum tomato.
The second thought was that he’s right.
We’ve sold him short. We continue to underestimate him. He’s even craftier than we appreciated. He’s more devious than we realized.
And he has a better chance to win the Republican nomination than we want to admit, because he’s not just a preternaturally slick political animal. He’s an uncommonly lucky one.
He’s getting huge, unintended breaks from Republican elders and rivals who mostly detest him and rightly believe that he’d lead the party to ruin in a general election but are distracted by other quarry — Donald Trump, Marco Rubio — and are letting him slither by.
Bruni thinks that Cruz is unlikely to do well in New Hampshire, but should survive well enough to ride a narcissistic wind in Cruz-friendly states. The scary thing? There are Cruz-friendly states.
Ross Douthat is… is… not here this week. As I promised, I’m going cold turkey. Where Douthat = turkey. Even though he… said… No. I won’t do it. Nope. Go see if Maureen will let you set at the mean girls table, Ross.
Dana Milbank is also aiming missiles at Cruz.
When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) last month mocked Donald Trump’s “New York values,” it wasn’t entirely clear what he was implying.
This week we got a clue: For Cruz, “New York” is another way of saying “Jewish.”
At an event in New Hampshire, Cruz, the Republican Iowa caucuses winner, was asked about campaign money he and his wife borrowed from Goldman Sachs. Cruz, asserting that Trump had “upward of $480 million of loans from giant Wall Street banks,” said: “For him to make this attack, to use a New York term, it’s the height of chutzpah.” Cruz, pausing for laughter after the phrase “New York term,” exaggerated the guttural “ch” to more laughter and applause.
But “chutzpah,” of course, is not a “New York” term. It’s a Yiddish — a Jewish — one. And using “New York” as a euphemism for “Jewish” has long been an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
Well, we have plenty of anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-African-American, anti-LGBT rhetoric coming from the GOP candidates already. I doubt any of them would hesitate to throw a little anti-Semitism into the mix. Gypsies? Has any Republican candidate talked about rounding up Gypsies yet? It’s in the rule book.
Nicholas Kristof says Flint is just a microcosm.
We have been rightfully outraged by the lead poisoning of children in Flint, Mich. — an outrage that one health expert called “state-sponsored child abuse.”
But lead poisoning goes far beyond Flint, and in many parts of America seems to be even worse.
“Lead in Flint is the tip of the iceberg,” notes Dr. Richard J. Jackson, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Flint is a teachable moment for America.”
I agree about that “teachable moment.” The lesson: don’t elect Rick Snyder (or Brownback, or Scott, or Raumer, or LePage or any of the crop of GOP governors who think taking apart the state government for fun and profit—mostly profit—is what God intended them to do).
Across America, 535,000 children ages 1 through 5 suffer lead poisoning, by C.D.C. estimates.
...
None of this diminishes the tragedy of Flint, which is particularly horrifying because it was delivered by the government through the municipal water system even as state officials scoffed at the local outcry.
Nobody seemed to understand that the role of “emergency managers” was to manage things into an emergency.
Ruth Marcus doesn’t think either Democratic candidate has identified the real money in politics issue.
The role of money in politics is neither as crude as Bernie Sanders suggests, nor as benign — at least when it comes to herself — as Hillary Clinton would have you think.
Sanders presents a mechanistic view of the impact of campaign donors: contributions in, results out. Thus, in Sanders’s view, Hillary Clinton, and the money she scoops up, offers a disturbing illustration of a larger problem. ...
Clinton bristled at what she called his “artful smear.” Sanders’s “attack,” she said, “comes down to . . . anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought. And I just absolutely reject that. . . . You will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received.”
I’ve written about money in politics for years now, and I would suggest: Both candidates have it wrong.
And then… and then… Marcus goes on to explain how the Koch brothers and the NRA don’t affect policy with their dollars. Which suggests that, no matter how long Marcus has been writing about the subject, she’s still painfully naive.
Kathleen Parker charges to Hillary’s defense on speaking fees.
As speaking fees go, Hillary Clinton’s allegedly scandalous $200,000 per engagement is chump change compared with Donald Trump’s $1.5 million.
But, of course Trump wouldn’t bother to part his lips for less. It costs at least a million just to wake up in the rarified world he occupies.
So what’s the big fuss about Clinton’s fees, which are negotiated by her speaking agency?
Well, it’s several times what most folks see in a year for just a couple of hours work, and it certainly gives the appearance of a conflict, and… Wait. Let’s let Kathleen tell us why it’s not a problem.
The Sanders crowd is on firm ground in its assessment that Clinton is out of touch with everyday Americans. This is not news, folks. The Clintons have been living the life of millionaires since their first giggly night inside the White House. Except for dealing with domestic help, chauffeurs, chefs and Secret Service agents, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been in touch with regular folks ever since.
That said, there’s no basis for insisting that one must be poor to work for the interests of those less fortunate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were hardly from the barrio. Indeed, it’s often the privileged who most fiercely embrace the adage that from those to whom much is given, much is expected. Giving back, after all, is a privilege of having something to give.
Parker then follows this with an absolute word salad ala Palin on what the Democrats believe about the rich, why being wealthy is more holy because you can give away your wealth (which would make you poor and less worthy, but don’t fight it. Or bring up 90% of the New Testament), and how Oprah is rich. So there. While a lot of Parker’s cash good, poor bad speech covers some standard Republican ground, the trust of her article makes me wonder if the Republican establishment is looking for a new landing in Hurricane Crump — Port Hillary.
Ruth Marcus is doing double duty this week, to tell us why this is a scary year for candidates. Democratic candidates.
... the raging argument last week between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton reflected the opposite impulse of Clinton 1992 — not who is the different-est Democrat but who is the most traditionally progressive one. Clinton bristled at what she described as the Vermont senator’s “low blow,” questioning whether she was merely a part-time progressive; the Clinton campaign scrambled to explain away her September self-assessment as a “moderate.”
Pause to consider the irony. Clinton has spent much of the past few decades trying to refute suggestions that she is a shade to the right of Madame Mao; recall Pat Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech railing against her as a radical feminist who wanted to let children sue parents and compared the institution of marriage to slavery.
This is a tempting and dangerous moment for Democrats. The party has clearly become more liberal, reflecting the increasing polarization of both sides. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Democrats described themselves as liberal in 2015, compared with 27 percent in 2000. The share of Democrats identifying themselves as moderate fell from 43 percent in 2000 to 35 percent in 2015.
The biggest thing that’s made the party, and the nation, become more liberal? Watching the utter failure of conservative policies and the pain caused by the “moderates” who unleashed the economic collapse.
Leonard Pitts on the role that fiction can play in fighting bigotry.
So it turns out sitcoms can erase bigotry.
That’s the bottom line of a study recently presented before a conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. And it doesn’t even have to be a particularly good sitcom.
To judge, at least, from a screening of its first two episodes, the Canadian sitcom on which the study is based was earnest, amiable, and about as funny as Schindler’s List. Apparently, however, Canadian television viewers liked it well enough. Little Mosque on the Prairie, a culture clash show about life at a Muslim worship house in small town Canada, premiered in 2007 and ran for five years. Here in the United States, it’s available on Hulu. ...
Prejudice … derives from the identification of an “in” group and an “out” group and the social distancing of the former from the latter. It’s a process some have dubbed “otherization.”
For all that academia and news media might do to combat that process, entertainment media are uniquely positioned to neutralize it. It is one thing, after all, to read statistics or hear arguments on the humanity and equality of, say, African Americans. It is quite another to have Anthony Anderson in your den every week giving you belly laughs or to root for Denzel Washington shooting it out with bad guys on the big screen.
The idea that fiction can cut through these boundaries in a way that the news rarely does is an idea that’s as old as fiction.
It’s also the reason I’m writing my novel, On Whetsday, the second episode of which made its premiere on this site last evening. If you haven’t read it, go. Give it a try.