If this week's Ross Douthat piece was a SyFy movie of the week, it might cross that "so bad it's good" line. But while Douthat has written more than his share of political Sharknadoes, this week falls firmly in the "so bad it's just really bad" camp.
Ross Douthat is angry. You won't like him when he's angry.
In the months since President Obama first seem poised — as he now seems poised again — to issue a sweeping executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, we’ve learned two important things about how this administration approaches its constitutional obligations.
Hang on. I have to skip to the last paragraph. It's just too good.
But if that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses it. And make no mistake, the president is free to choose. No immediate crisis forces his hand; no doom awaits the country if he waits. He once campaigned on constitutionalism and executive restraint; he once abjured exactly this power. There is still time for him to respect the limits of his office, the lines of authority established by the Constitution, the outcome of the last election.
Heyzeus Haitch Roosevelt. Really? If there was a Bulwer-Lytton award for the most ridiculously stilted political language of the year, this would take it hands down. "If that evil must come, woe to the president who chooses..." Quick, someone get this man to an editor.
I can only imagine that Douthat wrote this week's column with a quill pen and ink from the dampened ashes of Dreams from my Father, all the while feeling pretty good about how he restrained from using the word "pox" or lapsing into Attic Greek.
Truthfully, you wouldn't really like Douthat when he's not angry.
Yea verily, let us now explore the merits of others who seek to illumine the woebegone physiognomy of our benighted land... (that means "come on in")
Kevin Baker says that those who expect changing demographics to hand a majority to Democrats are mistaken.
For years now, it’s been an article of faith among Democrats that the future belongs to them, thanks to the country’s changing demographic mix. The rising percentage of voters who are women, Americans of color and especially Latinos were always about to turn the country deep “blue.” ...
The future failed to arrive on time again this fall. Democrats lost all over America, and they lost big, by much wider margins than predicted. They lost statewide races in the Midwest where Democrats have won repeatedly in presidential elections for more than 20 years. They lost in races against radical right-wing Republicans they might have been expected to defeat, like Sam Brownback in Kansas and Paul R. LePage in Maine. ...
The people who built that party rallied around big things — and usually big things they had come up with themselves. The reforms that Democrats embraced were almost all culled from grass-roots movements, and they were big enough to erase the lines between cultural and economic issues.
Go read the rest of this. I'll wait. Don't come back until you're ready to work for a plan that involves winning by offering real change, not a plan that expects effortless change to deliver a win.
Frank Bruni asks you to come with him to the show.
“THE most interesting man in politics” is what Politico Magazine crowned Rand Paul in September, when it placed him at the top of a list of 50 people to keep an eye on. And Time magazine used those exact six words, in that exact order, next to a photograph of Paul on its cover last month.
The adjective bears notice. Interesting. Not powerful. Not popular. Not even influential.
They’re saying that he’s a great character.
And that’s not the same as a great candidate. ...
At this point Paul is as much a political fable as a political reality, and his supposed strengths — a libertarian streak that appeals to some young people, an apparent comfort with reaching out to minorities and expanding the Republican base — pale beside his weaknesses. They’re many.
And they’re potentially ruinous.
Don't worry. If Rand Paul can't win the election, he'll just create an alternative certifying body and declare himself president that way.
Jed Rubenfeld argues that college "sex courts" are letting dangerous rapists go, while making criminals of the innocent.
Our strategy for dealing with rape on college campuses has failed abysmally. Female students are raped in appalling numbers, and their rapists almost invariably go free. Forced by the federal government, colleges have now gotten into the business of conducting rape trials, but they are not competent to handle this job. They are simultaneously failing to punish rapists adequately and branding students sexual assailants when no sexual assault occurred.
... because of low arrest and conviction rates, lack of confidentiality, and fear they won’t be believed, only a minuscule percentage of college women who are raped — perhaps only 5 percent or less — report the assault to the police. Research suggests that more than 90 percent of campus rapes are committed by a relatively small percentage of college men — possibly as few as 4 percent — who rape repeatedly, averaging six victims each. Yet these serial rapists overwhelmingly remain at large, escaping serious punishment.
... At Columbia University and Barnard College, more than 20 students have filed complaints against the school for mishandling and rejecting their sexual assault claims. But at Vassar College, Duke University, The University of Michigan and elsewhere, male students who claim innocence have sued because they were found guilty. Mistaken findings of guilt are a real possibility because the federal government is forcing schools to use a lowered evidentiary standard — the “more likely than not” standard, which is much less exacting than criminal law’s “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” requirement — at their rape trials.
If you were trying to design a system that was cruel to innocent women and men as well, you couldn't do much better.
The New York Times thinks those lower gas prices are just part of a big, dangerous package.
For many consumers and businesses the recent drop in commodity prices has provided a tidy windfall — one analyst estimated that the typical American household would save $400 a year thanks to lower gasoline prices. But the tumbling price of fuels, metals and other commodities is also sending a warning about the global economy.
Short term: the US wins and almost everyone else loses. The longer term: a possible worldwide recession.
Dana Milbank on Nancy Pelosi, post-election.
There are five 2014 House races still to be decided before we can answer a question of historical interest:
Was this the worst election for House Democrats since 1928? Or was it merely their worst since 1946? ...
The drubbing and the denial have naturally raised doubts about whether Pelosi should remain on the job. But her interpretation was the opposite. “Quite frankly, if we would have won, I would have thought about leaving,” Pelosi told Politico. But because of the, er, ebb, she needs to stay — a classic argument for rewarding failure.
During the election, I certainly herd Pelosi's name often—and always from Republicans. It's amazing how many GOP ads came down to "my opponent takes orders from a black man and a woman!"
Ruth Marcus with another of those stories from our "justice" system.
Reginald Latson’s path to solitary confinement began four years ago as he waited for the public library to open in Stafford County, Va.
Latson, known as Neli, has an IQ of 69 and is autistic. Teachers and therapists describe him as generally sweet and eager to please.
He is also a black man, now 22, who on the day in question was wearing a hoodie — which prompted a concerned citizen to call police about a suspicious person loitering outside the library.
Oh, of course it did. A young black man near a
library. Hell, I'm surprised they didn't go straight for the National Guard.
Meanwhile, [Latson] is being punished in the most severe manner the criminal justice system can concoct. He has spent most of the last year in solitary confinement and has lost almost 50 pounds from an already trim frame.
Leonard Pitts calls for some protest education by those who have been there, and more agency from those who haven't.
Last week, I spent a day at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where some students and I talked about protest. Des Moines is six hours up the road from Ferguson, Missouri, the St. Louis suburb where Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot to death by a police officer in August, prompting weeks of often violent clashes between protesters, rioters and heavily militarized police.
Some of the kids have ties in that area, so they were waiting — even more tensely than the rest of us — to see if a grand jury would indict the officer and whether the failure to do so would mean renewed violence. These were serious-minded young people concerned about the state of their nation and they were wondering what they could do to effect change. ...
It amazes me that half a century ago people their age fought for civil rights, women’s rights and an end to a useless war in Southeast Asia using no technology more sophisticated than mimeograph machines and rotary-dial telephones, while kids with iPads and social-media accounts feel helpless to make themselves heard. I’ve walked away from many encounters with students feeling that they were earnest, well-intentioned — and utterly clueless about their power to better the world.
David Kaiser and spooky action at a distance.
Fifty years ago this month, the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell submitted a short, quirky article to a fly-by-night journal titled Physics, Physique, Fizika. He had been too shy to ask his American hosts, whom he was visiting during a sabbatical, to cover the steep page charges at a mainstream journal, the Physical Review. Though the journal he selected folded a few years later, his paper became a blockbuster. Today it is among the most frequently cited physics articles of all time.
Bell’s paper made important claims about quantum entanglement, one of those captivating features of quantum theory that depart strongly from our common sense. Entanglement concerns the behavior of tiny particles, such as electrons, that have interacted in the past and then moved apart. Tickle one particle here, by measuring one of its properties — its position, momentum or “spin” — and its partner should dance, instantaneously, no matter how far away the second particle has traveled.
The key word is “instantaneously.” The entangled particles could be separated across the galaxy, and somehow, according to quantum theory, measurements on one particle should affect the behavior of the far-off twin faster than light could have traveled between them.
Not only is this part of quantum looking pretty much like fact, we're getting better at it all the time.