You'll have to excuse me. I'm skipping every pundit who chose to spend their column inches this Sunday talking about "Deflategate." Because... 1) there's already commentary on the sports page, and 2) this isn't deserving of a "...gate." It doesn't even rate a "...ghazi."
Instead, I'm going to address something even less consequential than a missing bit of air in a pigskin— Mike Huckabee.
Frank Bruni starts us off with why Republicans have a fine strategy... in bizarro world.
...Her Republican rivals convince themselves that "I'm not Hillary" is their strongest argument and best bet, although the reverse holds true. At least for now, not being any one of them is her ace in the hole.
The 2016 race in its adolescence is between the dependably messy, perpetually maddening spectacle of the Clintons and a party with a brand-decimating profusion of mad hatters like the two who announced their bids and grabbed the spotlight last week, Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson.
Advantage: Hillary Clinton.
...
A New York Times/CBS News poll found that over the past month and a half, during which she weathered a veritable hurricane of negative news coverage, her favorability rating improved, and the percentage of voters who see her as a strong leader rose to 65 from 57. Nearly 80 percent of the Democrats surveyed deemed her honest and trustworthy.
A charitable organization that does most of its work overseas is taking overseas contributions? Gasp. No one seems to be shocked except Swiftboat book writers and the NYT columnists who love them. In the meantime, let's check in on the honesty of the good preacher from Arkansas.
As recounted by Trip Gabriel in The Times, Ron Fournier in the National Journal and Max Brantley in Salon, he’s a case study in financial high jinks, a master class in shamelessness. He reportedly used the Arkansas governor’s office “as a personal ATM,” in Fournier’s description, channeling public money toward private expenditures (a doghouse, Taco Bell) and accepting tens of thousands of dollars in highly questionable gifts, some from people who later received prominent political appointments.
More recently he did an infomercial hawking dietary supplements as a diabetes cure, even though reputable physicians and medical associations call it poppycock. Only three of the following four adjectives correctly describe that decision: tacky, mercenary, irresponsible and presidential.
How laughably bad is Mike Huckabee? He's so bad...(feel free to read all or part of this in the voice of Ed McMahon). How bad is he? He's so bad that I'm going to break with more than five years of tradition and actually quote from
a George Will column. Yeah. I'm going there.
Huckabee was unsurprised when a lunatic murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012: “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” So, the slaughter was a consequence of the 1962 Supreme Court decision against government schools administering prayers? Was the 2012 massacre of 12 people at the Aurora, Colo., movie theater caused by insufficient praying at America’s cineplexes? ...
For many voters, a party is largely defined by the behavior of its presidential aspirants. For Republicans worried about broadening their party’s appeal, there is one word for Huckabee’s stances: Appalling.
Now, let's just try to forget this happened. While I wipe seven decades of fustiness off my keyboard, go on inside and see what the rest of the pundits are up to this morning.
Kathleen Parker hasn't appeared in this round-up lately, but she's back this week to talk about events in Texas.
The recent spectacle of Pamela Geller, the erstwhile journalist who organized a provocative contest in Texas of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, gives pause to even the most passionate defenders of the First Amendment.
Not since Westboro Baptist Church’s “God Hates Fags” message and Florida pastor Terry Jones burning the Koran has the principle of free speech been so sullied and abused. ...
Geller’s contribution to these protections and our unwavering dedication to its preservation is, exactly, what? A taunt. Shouldn’t one at least aspire to some originality? It’s been done. And each time, the result is the same. You haul out a picture of Muhammad; “they” haul out a fatwa. Cat puts out cheese; mouse gets eaten. What does one expect? ...
As an operating principle, mightn’t we try less incendiary means of problem-solving? I don’t know, maybe something less likely to lead to violence?
I'll defend to the death your right to say whatever you want... However, I don't have to find what you said admirable. That's true of pretty much everyone involved in this story... Parker included. Parker and Will in the same morning. Welcome to Republicans Round-up.
Ross Douthat on the UK elections. Because once you've quoted Will, you might as well drown yourself in pompous, right-wing Anglophiles tossing off seven-shilling words.
Like its rivals, the United Kingdom lost its overseas colonies, but it kept much of its domestic empire, the several nations — English, Scottish, Welsh and Ulster Irish — that still share a flag and crown. And as befits its anachronistic status, Britain has held itself somewhat aloof from the European Union’s postmodern imperium, joining the union but not its common currency. ...
But neither arrangement may last much longer. In the headlines, last week’s British elections were a big victory for David Cameron’s Conservatives. But the deep winners were the forces of nationalism, Scottish and English, which suddenly have the United Kingdom as we know it on the ropes. ...
In Thursday’s vote, the nationalists took 56 out of 59 parliamentary seats in Scotland, effectively turning the heathered north into a single-party state.
What the Scottish nationalists ultimately want is to trade the Union Jack for the E.U.’s postmodern bargain: ethnically-rooted self-government under a distant supranational umbrella, rather than a political union that can back wars or budget cuts that most Scots oppose.
You know, even though the American Civil War always was, and always will be, about slavery, nothing but slavery, and also slavery, it would be interesting to test the idea of whether or not we've reached a point where states really should be allowed to leave the Union. I'd be wholly in favor of it if I didn't think that some of the "independent states" that resulted would have the human rights of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the economic viability of Yo!
Orlando Patterson says that's what is happening in Baltimore, and Ferguson, is not about just racism in police departments.
The recent unrest in Baltimore raises complex and confounding questions, and in response many people have attempted to define the problem solely in terms of insurgent American racism and violent police behavior.
But that is a gross oversimplification. America is not reverting to earlier racist patterns, and calling for a national conversation on race is a cliché that evades the real problem we now face: on one hand, a vicious tangle of concentrated poverty, disconnected youth and a culture of violence among a small but destructive minority in the inner cities; and, on the other hand, of out-of-control law-enforcement practices abetted by a police culture that prioritizes racial profiling and violent constraint.
First, we need a more realistic understanding of America’s inner cities. They are socially and culturally heterogeneous, and a great majority of residents are law-abiding, God-fearing and often socially conservative.
I'm rankled by the idea that there's a relationship between those three adjectives. Patterson has done some very interesting work in looking at the cultural influences in the black community, and his works have helped push back against decades old arguments that made African-Americans seem like outsiders in their own nation. But this time the remainder of the article, which focuses on the high numbers of poor, under-educated youth in the inner city and the relationship between this and gang membership, seems oddly misaligned with the problem at hand. While improving conditions for young people in the inner cities is admirable, necessary, and good in every meaning of the word, none of this excuses the violence practiced
against the African-American community in Baltimore.
The New York Times has a related view of Baltimore.
The Baltimore riots threw a spotlight on the poverty and isolation of the African-American community where the unrest began last month. The problems were underscored on Friday when the Justice Department, in response to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s request, started an investigation of the Police Department, which has an egregious history of brutality and misconduct.
Other cities are plagued by the same difficulties, but they have proved especially intractable in Baltimore. A new study from Harvard offers evidence that Baltimore is perhaps the worst large city in the country when measured by a child’s chances of escaping poverty.
The NYT editors do a good job summarizing the institutional racism that squeezed Baltimore's African-American community into defined boundaries and kept that community in poverty and starved for political clout. However, this article also fails to address the real cause of rioting in Baltimore. Which is
police beating the shit out of people on a regular basis and killing them all too often. The protests are a
response to the problem. The problem is a culture of brutality among the police, not among Baltimore's black neighborhoods.
The Miami Herald asks the Florida legislature to get honest about Obamacare.
Given the hard feelings in the Legislature over the failure to complete a budget during this year’s regular session, we offer a modest hope for the upcoming special session: that lawmakers can engage in an honest discussion about Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act.
They owe at least that much to the people of Florida. Until this year, the very mention of “Obamacare” ignited a knee-jerk rejection of the law among the Legislature’s Republican leaders. They refused to consider the benefits that federal law bestows on eligible citizens who need health insurance.
The result has been a callous denial of Medicaid services to 850,000 uncovered Floridians.
The cost of he Affordable Care Act has been 20% less than predicted, and Florida has some of the highest sign-up rates. But clearly Floridians don't like the program that they're signing up for (and which they support in polls). Instead, why won't the Feds just turn over money on Florida's terms to continue the expired LIPS program, and forget things like, you know, the law.
Gov. Rick Scott made a vain attempt last week to negotiate an extension of that program — with the federal agency that he had earlier sued! Not surprisingly, he failed. He had more than a year’s notice that this was coming down the pike and chose to ignore the impending crisis.
Gov. Scott has a fine record of ignoring impending crises. It's kind of his thing.
Carl Hiaasen on... hey, it's more Rick Scott!
Gov. Rick Scott removed his Harry Potter invisibility cloak and flew to Washington the other day.
There he begged for billions of federal dollars from a person he is suing, Sylvia Burwell, the secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. Burwell patiently listened to the governor and, predictably, sent him back to Florida with nothing.
Last summer the feds informed Scott that the government was phasing out a fund that reimburses local hospitals for taking care of low-income patients, basically replacing it with an expanded version of Medicaid.
At first Scott was in favor of the Medicaid move, even though it was a tangent of Obamacare. Then the governor changed his mind. Later, as an afterthought, he sued Burwell and the HHS.
Because there's no way you can be a good Tea Party governor and do something that helps the people of your state, much less something tainted with Obama cooties.
It’s impossible to imagine any of the fully functioning governors in Florida’s past — Lawton Chiles, Bob Graham, Jeb Bush, to name a few — vanishing from Tallahassee during a Code Red meltdown of the Legislature.
But Scott isn't a functioning governor. He is the emptiest of empty suits — no talent for leadership, no muscle for compromise, no sense whatsoever of the big picture
Scott knows there's no better way of kicking off a Republican campaign these days than by doing something utterly ridiculous.
Leonard Pitts on the Republican response to his article about the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Twenty years ago,” I wrote, “the idea of anti-government resistance seemed confined to a lunatic fringe operating in the shadows beyond the mainstream. Twenty years later, it is the mainstream, the beating heart of the Republican Party. And while certainly no responsible figure on the right advocates or condones what he did, it is just as certain that McVeigh’s violent antipathy toward Washington, his conviction that America’s government is America’s enemy, has bound itself to the very DNA of modern conservatism.”
That’s the argument conservatives found “hateful” “sickening” and “dishonest.”
So it is, depending upon your religious outlook, a fortuitous coincidence or superfluous evidence of God’s puckish sense of humor that a few days later comes news of conservatives accusing the federal government of trying to take over the state of Texas. ...
Nor is this being laughed off by conservatives in positions of authority. To the contrary, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the state guard to monitor the exercise to safeguard Texan’s “civil liberties.” ... Forgive me if I don’t spend a lot of space pointing out that this is stupid, though I can’t resist asking: If the Navy, Army, Marines and Air Force were, indeed, planning to take over Texas, just what does Gov. Abbott think the state guard would be able to do about it?
Well, they could join all those people who believe the purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the people from their own government. People like... umm, that McVeigh guy.
Paul Greenberg and Boris Worm on a war that started just as World War II was ending, how we've been winning it for seventy years, and how that makes us losers.
World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans. Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous, but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s catch for months at a time.
Meanwhile, new technologies developed by the tuna were... well, none. Evolution is hard pressed to work in the kind of time spans that define changing technology. The fish were significantly outgunned.
Taken collectively, the rise of postwar fishing technology meant that the global reported catch rose from some 15 million metric tons at war’s end to 85 million metric tons today — the equivalent, in weight, of the entire human population at the turn of the 20th century, removed from the sea each and every year.
That's a lot of flounder. And grouper. And cod. Only not so much of any of them as it was a few years ago, as major fisheries have been collapsing one after another. Human beings turned their war machine on fish, and fish proved to be no match for it. So now that we've won... what do we win?