Pigeons. Roosting. These happen to be passenger pigeons, which are sadly extinct. Too bad some political attitudes haven't changed since these birds were around.
Timothy Egan on... oh, what else?
The adults patrolling the playpen of Republican politics are appalled that we’ve become a society where it’s O.K. to make fun of veterans, to call anyone who isn’t rich a loser, to cast an entire group of newly arrived strivers as rapists and shiftless criminals.
Somewhere, we crossed a line — from our mothers’ modesty to strutting braggadocio, from dutiful decorum to smashing all the china in the room, from respecting a base set of facts to a trumpeting of willful ignorance.
Yes, how did we get to a point where up to one-fourth of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan now aligns itself with Donald Trump?
Deliberately. That's how.
Deliberately.
Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!” at their commander in chief.
It was fine when all this crossing-of-the-line was directed at President Obama or other Democrats. But now that the ugliness is intramural, Trump has forced party leaders to decry something they have not only tolerated, but encouraged.
Damn straight. One might even say... "ditto," were one inclined to agree that the problem afflicting the Republican Party is entirely, completely, and satisfyingly one of ugly, mean-spirited pigeons swarming home to roost. Oh, and just one good example...
“All of our veterans, particularly P.O.W.s, deserve our respect and admiration,” said Jeb Bush. The Republican National Committee was quick to lay down a similar principle, saying, “There is no place in our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably.”
No place except a presidential campaign, that being the 2004 attempt to destroy the honorable Vietnam service of candidate John Kerry. Where was Bush’s “respect and admiration” when his brother was benefiting from a multimillion-dollar smear of a Navy veteran with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart?
There is nothing that Trump is doing that hasn't become not just accepted, but demanded, in his party. Nothing he's doing that hasn't already become standard Republican operating procedures from talk radio to the Senate floor. Trump isn't some renegade going against the tide. He's just surfing.
Come on in, let's see what's up on the pundit pages today...
Leonard Pitts on love of country.
Here’s the thing about principle.
Unless applied equally it is not really principle at all. He who climbs on his moral high horse when a wrong is done to him or his, but leaves the horse stabled when an identical wrong is done to someone else, acts from self-interest and that is the opposite of principle.
All of which renders rather hollow the GOP’s recent chastisement of its problem child, Donald Trump, over an insult to Sen. John McCain. As you’ve no doubt heard, Trump, speaking at a conference of Christian conservatives, took issue with a suggestion that McCain, a Vietnam-era Navy flier shot down by the North Vietnamese, is a war hero.
...Trump deserves every bit of scorn his party has heaped upon him. He deserved to have Jeb Bush call his remark “slanderous” and Rick Perry to call it “offensive.” He deserved Rick Santorum’s tweet that “McCain is an American hero,” and the Republican National Committee’s statement that “there is no place in our party or our country” for such remarks. In a word, he deserved condemnation.
But the people who slandered John Kerry deserved it, too. The secretary of state is also a war hero, period, full stop. If that term doesn’t fit a wounded man who braved enemy fire to fish another man out of a river, then it doesn’t fit anyone. Yet in 2004 when then-Sen. Kerry ran for president and a shadowy Republican-allied group mocked that heroism and baselessly called Kerry a liar, the GOP had a different response.
Will no reporter put a microphone in Jeb Bush's face and ask him about how his brother stayed in office exactly by benefiting for the kind of insults—and far worse—than those put forward by Trump?
Dana Milbank on why, while we're all looking at Trump, there's actually a dangerous man in this race.
“First off,” Scott Walker proclaimed, “we took on the unions, and we won. We won!”
Taking on the unions is usually first off for Walker, the Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential candidate. It is the very rationale for his candidacy. And on Thursday, he took a detour from the campaign trail to appear here before the annual meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of state legislators dedicated in large part to defeating unions. ...
Walker then went on to celebrate his triumphs over the demonstrators who objected to his dismantling of Wisconsin’s public-sector unions, portraying the pro-union forces as violent thugs. ...
This is the essence of Walker’s appeal — and why he is so dangerous. He is not as outrageous as Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), but his technique of scapegoating unions for the nation’s ills is no less demagogic. Sixty-five years ago, another man from Wisconsin made himself a national reputation by frightening the country about the menace of communists, though the actual danger they represented was negligible. Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy, but his technique is similar: He suggests that the nation’s ills can be cured by fighting labor unions (foremost among the “big government special interests” hurting the United States), even though unions represent just 11 percent of the U.S. workforce and have been at a low ebb.
This year, Walker likened the union protesters in Madison, Wis., to the murderous Islamic State: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.” Before that, he described public-sector union members as the “haves” taking advantage of the “have-nots” — the taxpayers.
Yeah, you just know that the 1% is composed of union school teachers, squeezing poor stockbrokers for unreasonable salaries and sending NEA thugs to threaten them. The really sad/incredible thing? That's pretty much what Walker's been selling. And he's been winning.
The New York Times on yet another surrender to money in politics.
The federal government has all but surrendered to the powerful, rich donors whose anonymous contributions threaten to undermine the 2016 elections. The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, John Koskinen, signaled as much on Thursday when he told a House committee that there would be no change in the tax code in 2016 to end its growing abuse by political operatives using nonprofit “social welfare” institutions to disguise the identities of affluent campaign contributors.
“I don’t want people thinking we are trying to get these regs done so we can influence the election,” Mr. Koskinen declared later to reporters. The statement was remarkable for blessing further procrastination at the I.R.S., whose clear obligation is to enforce existing law in a way that would end the current flood of “dark money” financing politics. The commissioner said the earliest that tighter rules could take effect would be 2017. The I.R.S. has been increasingly timorous on this issue ever since House Republicans opened partisan hearings into complaints that I.R.S. officials have been biased against conservative political groups that claim tax exemptions as nonprofit social welfare groups.
The Citizens for Fluffy Bunnies and Flaky Pie Crust appreciate this. Here, Jeb Bush, have another hundred million from private prisons and the makers of fracking juice.
Ross Douthat is upset that there's not more focus on abortion in 2016.
...in the end, Planned Parenthood’s defenders insist, listening to an abortionist discuss manipulating the “calvarium” (that is, the dying fetus’s skull) so that it emerges research-ready from the womb is fundamentally no different than listening to a doctor discuss heart surgery or organ transplants. It’s unsettling, yes, but just because it’s gross doesn’t prove it’s wrong.
... the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood. ...
Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer’s tipping point — that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.
Hey, setting people up is perfectly fine if they are doing something you don't like. It's not like Douthat (guts!) is trying (body parts!) to gross you out (people being carved up!) to make sure there's no way to (crushing babies!) talk about this issue without (crushing dead baby skulls! For profit!) generating disgust. Because, you know, in 2014 there were more restrictions passed on abortion than in any other year. Except that the 332 restrictions passed in 2014 were eclipsed by April of 2015, with the count of new laws still climbing. Not appearing in Douthat's column? The word "woman." Or "women" Bodies does get in there once, but you can guess what it's referring to.
Colbert King on how the Israeli government is making Trump look good.
“Do u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak.”
— A June 21 tweet by Judy Mozes, wife of Israeli interior minister and vice prime minister Silvan Shalom. ...
U.S.-born Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, has done his own anti-Obama number. Citing President Obama’s upbringing, Oren suggested in a series of recent articles in Foreign Policy that the president’s “abandonment” by his mother’s “two Muslim husbands” created in him a desire for “acceptance by their co-religionists” that has now influenced his foreign policy. Conspiracy theorists and birthers could hardly have said it better — Obama’s Christianity notwithstanding. ...
It would be a pity if the nuclear arms debate shapes up as a dispute between U.S. supporters of Netanyahu’s policies and Americans who respect and trust Obama’s judgment. And it would be a sorrow to those of us who still look with favor upon an alliance that has stood the test in the hardest of times.
That may explain why the “Obama Coffee” insult, the rabbinical slurs and the below-the-belt punches of Israeli officials are so sad, dispiriting and potentially disrupting in ways that once seemed unimaginable.
Has the Donald talked with Netanyahu yet? Their joint press conference could set a new record for insults.
Frank Bruni looks past the primaries to those other states that get way more attention than their population would deserve.
... on the far side of the parties’ nominating conventions, another cluster of states — the ones said to “swing” — crowd out all the others. This cluster has shrunk over the last four decades, as most other states turned inalterably blue or red in presidential elections.
It used to be that dozens of states were up for grabs. In 1976, 20 of them, including California, New York and Texas, were decided by 5 percentage points or less.needed for the White House.
But in 2012, only five were: Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina. Only a few more were fiercely contested.
The result was some pretty incredible differences in the attention given to voters.
“While the Obama and Romney campaigns and their allied groups spent an average of more than $30 per eligible voter in New Hampshire and Nevada after April 10,” Richie and Levien wrote in the Presidential Studies Quarterly, “they spent less than one cent per eligible voter in 34 states that together represented two-thirds of all eligible voters.”
...There’s little cause to think that 2016 will differ from 2012, and that’s worrisome, because scholars have found strong evidence that presidents favor swing states with spending over which the executive branch has discretion.
So... continue to reveal in your independence, swing states, while your economies are awash in campaign funds and every little burb sports the benefits of directed federal funds. Fear neither party! Just fair elections.
Oliver Sacks gets the last word. Because I love Oliver Sacks, and because we're soon to be sadly deprived of any more of his words. I hope that Dr. Sacks, and the Times will forgive me for excepting a bit more than normal.
I look forward eagerly, almost greedily, to the weekly arrival of journals like Nature and Science, and turn at once to articles on the physical sciences — not, as perhaps I should, to articles on biology and medicine. It was the physical sciences that provided my first enchantment as a boy.
...
Francis Crick was convinced that “the hard problem” — understanding how the brain gives rise to consciousness — would be solved by 2030. “You will see it,” he often said to my neuroscientist friend Ralph, “and you may, too, Oliver, if you live to my age.” Crick lived to his late 80s, working and thinking about consciousness till the last. Ralph died prematurely, at age 52, and now I am terminally ill, at the age of 82. I have to say that I am not too exercised by “the hard problem” of consciousness — indeed, I do not see it as a problem at all; but I am sad that I will not see the new nuclear physics ... nor a thousand other breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences.
A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.
I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.”
“We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.
I have been comforted, since I wrote in February about having metastatic cancer, by the hundreds of letters I have received, the expressions of love and appreciation, and the sense that (despite everything) I may have lived a good and useful life. I remain very glad and grateful for all this — yet none of it hits me as did that night sky full of stars.
...And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity.
Okay, I better stop there, but you don't have to. Follow the link. Read the rest. 82 is not young. It's not a tragedy. Except that it's
always a tragedy, and one that hits hard when the person nearing the exit is one who has provided so much personal insight, so much humane knowledge.