Look down. Further. Just a little further. There you go. See that story? The one titled Fiction / On Whetsday / Episode 10. Yeah, you do. For the last three months, I’ve been putting a novel on the front page in the form of weekly installments. This is the next to the last one. I try not to pester you about it in this space because… well, frankly because I feel very lucky to be here at all. Getting to put something on the front page here, it’s a gift. And in this case I not only got to spray a novel’s worth of words all over the primary season, but DK regulars Brian Zink and Amy Jones stepped forward to provide original art that’s better than anything I ever got from the big publishing houses back in the day. So if you haven’t been reading it, give it a try. I think you’ll like it.
After next week, it’ll be done. And I promise not to pester you again.
And now, punditry.
David Yassky on the Clinton Crime Bill, the War on Drugs, Black Life Matters, and more.
At a campaign event in Philadelphia last week, former President Bill Clinton was interrupted by protesters incensed about his 1994 crime bill.
… The bill... actually reduced sentences for federal drug crimes by exempting first-time, nonviolent drug offenders from the onerous “mandatory minimum” penalties created under earlier administrations. It funded specialized drug courts, drug treatment programs, “boot camps” and other efforts to rehabilitate offenders without incarceration. It allocated more than $3 billion to keep at-risk young people away from gangs and the drug trade.
The bill also banned semiautomatic assault weapons… the bill incorporated Senator Biden’s Violence Against Women Act, which has transformed enforcement against domestic violence and sexual assault.
Yassky, who helped to draft the bill, also argues that it was pretty effective.
These policies set in motion a reversal of crime trends. Since 1994, violent crime rates have essentially been cut in half. As Bill Clinton pointed out in Philadelphia, the people who benefit most from decreased crime are residents of poor urban neighborhoods. And — crucially for progressives — the reduction in crime has helped restore citizens’ confidence that government can accomplish important goals.
And all that sounds great. Only, well, come on in. Let’s continue after the break.
Clinton’s 1994 bill wasn’t all reductions in sentencing and treatment programs. It left in place many of the harshest sentences, including those that fell disproportionately on minority communities. It also expanded the federal death penalty and awarded block grants to police departments which sometimes went to “old-fashioned cops on the beat” but in other locations was turned into the military style weaponry and training that’s come to characterize the worst of modern policing.
The results were far from all sunshine and roses.
But those benefits have come with two enormous costs. First, far too many young African-American and Latino men have been subjected to unconstitutional or inappropriate stops by police officers. The Black Lives Matter movement is right to demand change in this practice. …
The second cost is that an unacceptable number of Americans are in prison. This mass incarceration will be much harder to fix because it has resulted from the same “broken windows” policing that has helped to push down crime rates. Beefed-up police departments, pushing officers to be more active, have produced many more convictions and therefore many more inmates.
And here’s where I’m going to seriously disagree with Yassky. While we can draw a direct correlation to more aggressive policing and increased incarceration, the relationship of the “broken windows” style policing to actual decreases in the crime rate is tenuous. Yes, areas where this was practiced so decreases. So did areas where it wasn’t. And beefed up police departments with officers becoming more “active” has too often translated into assault vehicles prowling American streets and police whose answer to any perceived threat is a dozen bullets. Or two dozen.
Leonard Pitts on the new law in Mississippi.
A portrait of Mississippi.
It has a lower percentage of high school graduates than almost any other state. It has an unemployment rate higher than almost any other state.
Mississippi’s fourth-graders perform more poorly than any other children in the country in math. Also in reading. Its smoking rates are among the highest in the country. Along with West Virginia, it is the fattest state in the Union. It has the highest poverty rate and the lowest life expectancy.
Small wonder 24/7 Wall Street, a content provider for Yahoo!, Time and USA Today, among others, has dubbed Mississippi the “worst state to live in.”
But if you’re a Mississippi legislator, you have to be thinking: what could I do to really nail down that worst state thing, before West Virginia steals it away?
… last week Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law a bill legalizing discrimination against LGBT people. …
it says that any gay, transgendered or adulterous individual whose behavior offends the “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” of a person, for-profit business, government employee or religious organization can be refused service.
And here comes Mississippi’s secret weapon.
It is worth nothing that similar laws have been propounded in other states — Georgia, Indiana, Arkansas — only to be turned back under threat of boycott by Fortune 500 companies and professional sports teams doing business there. “The worst state to live in,” was immune to that kind of pressure because it has no such teams or businesses.
Mississippi is playing a kind of Cold War-esque Mutually Assured Destruction. Only Mississippi is playing both sides.
Gregory Diskant believes there’s a route around the road block.
On Nov. 12, 1975, while I was serving as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Justice William O. Douglas resigned. On Nov. 28, President Gerald R. Ford nominated John Paul Stevens for the vacant seat. Nineteen days after receiving the nomination, the Senate voted 98 to 0 to confirm the president’s choice. Two days later, I had the pleasure of seeing Ford present Stevens to the court for his swearing-in. The business of the court continued unabated. There were no 4-to-4 decisions that term.
Today, the system seems to be broken. Both parties are at fault, seemingly locked in a death spiral to outdo the other in outrageous behavior.
No. No they are not. I defy anyone to name the “outrageous behavior” that President Obama, Democrats in the Senate, or Democrats in the House have engaged in. Anybody? Mr. Diskant, I call bullshit. But go on anyway.
Now, the Senate has simply refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, dozens of nominations to federal judgeships and executive offices are pending before the Senate, many for more than a year. …
Note that the president has two powers: the power to “nominate” and the separate power to “appoint.” In between the nomination and the appointment, the president must seek the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.” What does that mean, and what happens when the Senate does nothing?
And here comes the bit people are going to like.
It is altogether proper to view a decision by the Senate not to act as a waiver of its right to provide advice and consent. A waiver is an intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right or privilege. As the Supreme Court has said, “ ‘No procedural principle is more familiar to this Court than that a constitutional right,’ or a right of any other sort, ‘may be forfeited in criminal as well as civil cases by the failure to make timely assertion of the right before a tribunal having jurisdiction to determine it.’ ”
In other words. the Senate has to use it or lose it. And if they fail to use it, then hey qui tacet consentire videtur.
Ross Douthat spends his time this week wringing his hands over Catholic policy on divorce. Again. The idea that divorced people might not get their eternity of pitchforks in the face really seems to bother him. But Douthat is on a time out this week, so no link.
Dan Lyons on the insane level of hypocritical cruelty that passes for HR at many tech firms.
At HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called “graduation.” We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, “Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers in her next big adventure.” One day this happened to a friend of mine. She was 35, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her 28-year-old manager that she had two weeks to get out. On her last day, that manager organized a farewell party for her.
If someone had sent this email to me, I would surely do something worthy of life under the 1994 crime bill.
Many tech companies are proud of this kind of culture. … I am old enough to remember the 1980s and early ’90s, when technology executives were obsessed with retaining talent. “Our most important asset walks out the door every night,” was the cliché of the day. No longer. The average Amazonian — that’s really what they call themselves — lasts only about a year at the company, according to a 2013 report by PayScale, a Seattle company that studies compensation data.
Thirty five years ago, I started a job at a company that offered a defined pension, full coverage of health insurance for life, free tuition for college courses, and a promise of regular raises based on seniority. I just left a job that offered none of that. It was the same company. The changes in the American workplace over the last decades aren’t just wrong, they should be criminal.
Faroll Hammer says Trump is far from one of a kind.
I spent 30 years as a city planner in the D.C. area, and a big part of my job was meeting with developers. Over time, I created what I called the Developer Profile to entertain my staff. If you want to understand Donald Trump, start here. Of course, I would never say all developers are like this. (But they are.)
They have short attention spans. They’re terrible listeners. … They don’t read. Sending a letter or an email is useless. You have to pick up the phone and talk to them.
They view themselves as victims. They see regulations as getting in the way of what’s good for economic development and society as a whole, and believe governments exist to pick on them.
I don’t doubt that most building developers are this way. Unfortunately, it’s not only building developers. That pretty much describes every executive I ever worked with.
Kathleen Parker on Bernie’s call from Rome.
Some people have all the kismet. Or, maybe sometimes people just happen to agree that communism isn’t really so bad. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but only a smidgen.
Oh, good one, Kathleen. Both Bernie and the pope are like Mao! I kid, I kid.
What’s radical about this pope is that he, like both Sanders and Jesus, says fresh, untraditional things that sound an awful lot like liberal ideas. …
Sanders, who thinks more or less as Francis does, just makes us nervous. Some of us, anyway.
The core difference between the two men is that one wants to raise consciousness about our obligation to the less fortunate; the other wants to restructure America’s economic institutions to ensure that money trickles down — mandatorily rather than charitably.
See, Parker, like all good Republicans, believes that giving should be voluntary. Which means they are extremely happy with the idea that someone else can take care of the poor, they just don’t want to participate. She then follows up with Randian nonsense. But she sure likes that pope—just so long as she doesn’t have to do anything.
Andrew DeLaski has seen the light… and it is good.
Remember the hue and cry about how the federal government was going to force consumers to switch from the incandescent lightbulbs we’ve used since the days of Thomas Edison to those curlicue compact fluorescent ones?
Now, just a few years later, there has been almost no political sniping as the Energy Department has proposed a lighting standard that would move the United States to a record achievement in energy efficiency. ...
Thanks to the second phase of minimum standards, a typical U.S. household will save about $90 annually on its electric bill, which is like getting nearly a month of free electricity every year. From 2020 to 2030, the standards will cumulatively save 1.5 trillion kilowatt hours of energy, or more than enough to meet the electricity needs of every U.S. home for one year.
Don’t worry. Republicans will still demand the right to waste money, time, and energy. Because acting like idiots when they think it bothers liberals thrills them.
Dana Milbank says… Look. At this point I feel I should say explicitly that I am not Dana Milbank, don’t know Dana Milbank, have no association with Dana Milbank. Say, Mr. Pilate, would you hand me that bowl? Okay. Hands clean.
Free trade agreements “have been disastrous” for the United States, the candidate said, and have sent jobs to Mexico and China. “I will stop it by renegotiating all of the trade agreements that we have.”
It sounded like just another threat from Donald Trump to “rip up those trade deals” and “make really good ones” instead. Such a policy could set off a global trade war and impoverish millions.
But the candidate who said this was Bernie Sanders, April 1 in New York. And that’s no coincidence: He and Trump are peas in a pod.
I’ll be standing over here. Behind this lead apron.
… the two are the yin and yang of outlandish policy proposals. Both men — and to a great extent Ted Cruz, too — have grounded their platforms in fantasy.
All right. We’re going to stop there. I feel I’ve given you enough to get more than a little feel for Milbank’s column, and the heat from all those torches is getting uncomfortable.
Grover Norquist says… oh, hell, It’s Grover Norquist. But it’s funny. Really.
Democrats have approached the 2016 presidential election with great confidence, arguing that changing demographics will guarantee them victory. By this, they mean the growing number of African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans expected to vote in November.
So, Republicans are losing blacks. And Hispanics, And Asians. And women. And the country. Which, yes, sounds bad. But not so fast! Norquist has invented his own new minorities! Minorities that all happen to be white, of course, but by putting new names on these groups, he can generate incredible numbers of people who hate Hillary Clinton.
Those new groups: Home schoolers, Charter School supporters, Concealed Carry supporters, Fracking workers, E-cigarette smokers (not even kidding), and Uber drivers. These are the groups that will carry Republicans to victory! So long as none of those e-cigarette types gets a spark too close to the fracking folks, in which case they may all be going to the moon.
I can’t help but think that pretty much everyone on this list is a prime candidate for the Golgafrincham “B” Ark.