Goals

No one wakes up in the morning and says "I think I want to be in poverty today" or "I want to apply for food stamps", [or] wakes up with the enthusiastic goals of sitting in the county assistant’s office or waiting in the pantry line.

-- Tianna Gaines-Turner

This week's featured article is "Republican Judges Take Another Shot at ObamaCare".

This week everybody was talking about the D. C. Appeals Court trying to kill ObamaCare subsidies

In "Republican Judges Take Another Shot at ObamaCare" I explain why I don't think this crisis is going to take down ObamaCare either.

and Gaza

Every day or two there's a ceasefire proposal, but so far nothing has lasted.

My article last week drew a lot of comment from both sides, on the blog as well as via private email. I do regret one thing: referring to the Hamas missile attacks as "pinpricks". That was insensitive. But I stand the larger point I was making: that the risks to Israelis are not remotely on the same scale as the risks faced by Gazans.

I also regret not mentioning the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which is a constant background issue, without which a lot of Palestinian anger seems senseless. AlterNet's Steven Pizzo put it like this:

One Fatah negotiator said that negotiating with Israel over land is like negotiating with a guy over a pizza while the other guy keeps eating the pizza. Recall that the next time you hear some Israel politician claiming that all Israel was doing was minding its own business when Hamas started shooting missiles at it.

Today's NYT has an article by Israeli writer David Grossman. He voices a where-does-this-end perspective similar to what I was trying to evoke last week. His metaphor of Israelis and Palestinians alike trudging around a grindstone is very apt. He sees more reason for hope in the current Israeli national conversation, and I can only hope he is better plugged in than I am.

and Paul Ryan's new approach to poverty

I read Ryan's new report Expanding Opportunity in America and am writing a review of it, but I ran out of both time and my word limit. So that will post next week. In the mean time I invite you to go back and look at my review of Ryan's previous report on poverty The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later, which came out in March. Much of what I pointed out there still applies: Americans by-and-large agree on what to do with people who are poor for various reasons. The disagreement is over how many people fall into the various categories (i.e., how many lazy able-bodied people we're talking about), and how many genuinely needy people we're willing to cut off in order to stop one moocher.

You might also read these articles for and against Ryan's ideas.

Another worthwhile thing to look at is what happened when Ryan let an actual poor person testify to his committee. That's who I'm quoting at the top.

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BTW, last week I complained about the misuse of the term "blank check" in Republican rhetoric. A blank check is literally a signed check where the amount has been left blank, so that the recipient can fill in whatever amount is desired. So no proposal that has a specific dollar total attached to it -- like President Obama's $3.7 billion proposal for dealing with the Central American refugee kids -- can truthfully be described as a blank check.

However, this week I ran into a new example of the Republican usage of "blank check", so I was finally able to figure out what they mean by it. Stewart Butler of the Heritage Foundation was talking about Ryan's poverty plan, which pushes a lot of programs down to the state level and pays for them with block grants: "There have got to be real performance measurements — it’s not just giving the states a blank check."

Now, this is the same kind of misuse, because a block grant is for a specific amount. But I now get the meaning: a check with no strings attached. (That interpretation works in the refugee kids proposal too.) They could just say that, of course, but wanting to attach strings sounds more sinister than refusing to sign a blank check.

This is how you use language when you don't want your listeners to think clearly about what you're saying.

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Friday, Rachel Maddow did a great piece on the general dysfunctionality of Congress. She began with a harmless, but spectacularly embarrassing episode Thursday, when new Florida Congressman Curt Clawson (during his first day on the Asia and Pacific subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) apparently thought two dark-skinned U. S. government officials were actually representatives of India. "I think your question is to the Indian government," one replied.

Rachel then proceeded to the Senate's inability to confirm ambassadors. About 1/4 of ambassador positions are unfilled, including Russia. Also Guatemala (where a lot of those refugee kids are coming from) and Cameroon and Niger (two of the countries trying to control the Boko Haram terrorist group). In response to the Democrats eliminating the filibuster on appointments -- a move that figures in the ObamaCare subsidy issue -- Republicans have been making every approval take up as much Senate floor time as possible, forcing Harry Reid to prioritize what he wants to spend floor time on. Ambassadors have been falling through the cracks. "Anything Congress is responsible for," Maddow summarizes, "we apparently just have to get by without."

Then there are the bills passed (or not passed). The recent low was the 104th Congress of 1995-1996. Newt Gingrich was fighting Bill Clinton, and only 333 bills passed in two years. Then the 112th Congress (2011-2012) got even less done: 284. This Congress is on pace to do even less.



And there is a case to be made that the numbers don't tell the full story: The quality of what gets done makes it even worse. The 112th Congress, for example, did manage to avoid a government shutdown; the 113th didn't. Immigration reform apparently is impossible. An emergency bill to do something about the refugee kids is apparently impossible. Keeping the Highway Trust Fund from going dry was so tricky that it required an accounting gimmick. We'll be lucky if we avoid another government shutdown.

This was all to lead up to Maddow's main point: Even after all the scandal about the Veterans Administration and about veterans who have died waiting for medical care, Congress may adjourn for their August vacation without doing anything about it. Apparently, that last possibility isn't going to happen. Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Jeff Miller are supposed to announce a compromise this afternoon.

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I finally got around to seeing Frozen, and I note an interesting similarity to Maleficent: The true love that will heal a girl is not romantic love. Finding your handsome prince is not the ticket.

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Nothing really new about the Central American refugee kids. It seemed like Congress would have to pass something before its August recess, but now it's not clear whether they will.

and let's close with Weird Al again

Do you have First World Problems?

Foreigners in Egypt

Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

-- Exodus 22:21

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

-- "The New Colussus" by Emma Lazarus

This week's featured posts are "Gaza as seen from a distance" and "There's Something About Todd".

This week everybody was talking about yet another Malaysian Air flight

This one was shot down over the disputed eastern region of the Ukraine. Apparently, missiles sophisticated enough to take down an airliner at cruising altitude require months of training to operate. That fact doesn't align with the official Russian story: that pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine are a spontaneous uprising it supports but is not aiding with its own forces.

Vox has a good account of the situation. Presumably the Malaysian Air flight was mistaken for a military transport plane. Pro-Russian rebels have been shooting at Ukrainian planes for a while now, but the early shoot-downs had been planes low enough to be targeted by shoulder-fired rockets requiring relatively little training. More recently, two Ukrainian planes have been shot down from higher altitudes, suggesting a more complicated system. Three possibilities: Russia is shooting down the planes from its own territory (the U.S. doesn't think so), or Russian military advisers are operating the missiles from the rebel-controlled territories, or Russia started training Ukrainian rebels before the current uprising began.

The wreckage fell onto territory controlled by the rebels, who are not cooperating with outside investigators. Or maybe they are: a rebel leader has promised to turn over the plane's black box.

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Lost in all this is the story of the time we shot down an airliner: Iran Air 655 in 1988.

and Israel invading Gaza

Last week I said I hadn't made enough sense out of the Gaza conflict to comment, so I felt a responsibility to provide more insight this week in "Gaza as seen from a distance".

and those refugee kids

Ukraine and Gaza have driven the kids-at-the-border problem off the front pages, but the story is still percolating. At first it appeared the issue was getting so much attention that even this Congress would have to do something. But that is getting less and less likely.

Back on July 9, Kevin Drum predicted that the Republican House would refuse to act on President Obama's proposal to deal with the child refugee crisis.

Well, of course it won't happen. The crisis along the border is tailor made for Republicans. It makes their base hopping mad, it juices their campaign fundraising, and anytime the government is unable to address a problem it makes Obama look bad. Why on earth would Republicans want to do anything to change any of this?

As long as Obama is president, chaos is good for Republicans. After all, most voters don't really know who's at fault when things go wrong, they just know there's a crisis and Obama doesn't seem to be doing anything about it. Exploiting that may be cynical and revolting, but hey, politics ain't beanbag. And in case you haven't heard, there's an election coming up.

Friday, Steve Benen came around:

I was skeptical when Kevin wrote this, but his assessment is looking quite prescient now.

Keep in mind, this isn’t a situation in which the Republican-led House wants one solution, the Democratic-led Senate wants another, and a compromise is elusive. Rather, we’re looking at a dynamic in which the GOP House majority simply can’t pass anything ... So there is no bill and the Speaker’s office doesn’t seem to think there will be a bill. Once again, met with a real challenge in need of a responsible remedy from lawmakers, Republicans aren’t prepared.

Today's closing links to Weird Al's new video "Word Crimes". Here's a word crime: Describing Obama's itemized $3.7 billion proposal as a "blank check", which seems to be theRepublicantalkingpoint. The phrase must rile up focus groups or something, but there's nothing "blank" about $3.7 billion.

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Several article have brought some historical perspective: "Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island" in Mother Jones and "America’s Long History of Immigrant Scaremongering" in Slate, which recounts all the bogus scares about immigrants and disease through the centuries.

but I couldn't stop myself from writing about Todd Akin

who is not worth your time or mine. I advice you not to read "There's Something About Todd". You have better things to do.

and you also might be interested in ...

How long before the Supreme Court has to rule on this? President Obama's executive order protecting LGBT folks from discrimination by corporations holding government contracts has no religious exemption, something religious leaders had been asking for. In the Hobby Lobby case, Justice Alito denied that his ruling would "provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice." We may find out whether that's true.

Alito's statement has some weasel words in it. It may apply only to insincere religious beliefs adopted to "cloak" discrimination. But Alito also said: "It is not for the Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable." It will be interesting to see if in the future he will claim the ability to look into people's souls to see if their beliefs are sincere or motivated by bigotry. And what about people whose bigotry is sincere?

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Why don't these visionary efforts happen in America any more? Helsinki has a plan to integrate all forms of transit -- including some that don't exist yet, like driverless cars -- into a single smartphone app. The goal is to make private automobiles pointless in ten years. You'll just tell your phone where you want to go and it will give you a list of itineraries and prices, then make the arrangements.

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Jonathan Chait charts the story of ObamaCare's success via the retreating claims of disaster from arch-critic Peter Suderman at Reason.

The message of every individual dispatch is a confident prediction of the hated enemy's demise, yet the terms described in each, taken together, tell the story of retreat. The enemy’s invasion fleet has been destroyed; its huge losses on the field of battle have left it on the brink of surrender; the enemy soldiers will be slaughtered by our brave civilian defenders as they attempt to enter the capital; the resistance will triumph!

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The folks at Politifact have started releasing statistics by network. No surprise: Fox News is the least trustworthy, with 60% of tested claims rated Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire.

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Researchers are deciding that the "beauty-status exchange" -- beautiful women marrying rich men -- is less common than they expected. More typically, similarity rules: beautiful people marry beautiful people and rich people marry rich people.

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I don't know who I'm rooting for at the Emmys. Cosmos and Years of Living Dangerously are both nominated in the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series category. At first I thought "Of course it's Cosmos", but this week I started watching YoLD. (Episode 1 and some shorter clips are on YouTube, but to watch the Episodes 2-9 you have to find a friend who subscribes to Showtime.) YoLD is the most comprehensive look at climate change I've ever seen, and it pulls off the remarkable trick of having big-name hosts without turning them into attractive-but-phony mouthpieces.

Each of the hosts is pursuing some question s/he had a prior connection to. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, has long wondered why California wildfires got so much worse during his term as governor. Conservation International board member Harrison Ford seems completely engaged in tracking down the connection between deforestation and corruption in the Indonesian government. (His celebrity status works for us rather than on us; it gets him interviews with officials who would probably dodge a journalist. At least one got pissed when the interview turned serious.) Middle-East-focused Thomas Friedman sneaks across the Turkish/Syrian border to interview farmers driven into the revolution by drought. New Yorker Chris Hayes traces the effect of Hurricane Sandy on a climate-change-denying Staten Island congressman. And so on.

The effect is to get completely outside the standard arguments about hockey-stick graphs and Al Gore. You start to see just how ecological climate change is. It affects everything and is affected by everything.

I think there's something important to learn here about fighting science denialism in general. Remember that John Oliver sketch where he brings out 97 climate scientists to debate three deniers? It's funny because it can't possibly work on TV. But it does illustrate the strategy of denial: Like the Greeks against the Persians at Themopylae and Salamis, the smaller force needs to choose a narrow battlefield (like televised debate) where the larger force can't deploy.

So if climate-change deniers can reduce the argument to something narrow, like the details behind temperature graphs, their position can seem competitive. But climate-change denial isn't competitive, because to do it consistently you have to deny everything; all fields of Earth science are implicated. Ditto for other forms of denial, like young-Earth creationism: It isn't just about the fossil record or carbon-14 dating; it's about everything.

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I'd love to hear the backstory of YoLD. I'm sure it's easy to get people to buy in after you can say that Matt Damon and Jessica Alba are involved, but who did they get first and who convinced who later?

and let's close with something fun

Weird Al claims every one of his albums is a comeback album. Well, he's come back with this parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines".

The Other Guys

I'm the guy doing my job. You must be the other guy.

-- President Obama, referencing a line in The Departed

This week's featured article is Boehner's Lawsuit and Palin's "25 Impeachable Offenses".

This week everybody was talking about the House suing/impeaching President Obama

Speaker Boehner hopes his lawsuit will mollify the base enough to keep them from demanding impeachment before the fall elections. But Sarah Palin isn't cooperating, as I describe in Boehner's Lawsuit and Palin's "25 Impeachable Offenses".

and the refugee kids at our southern border

It's a real problem, so naturally the extreme Right has created a conspiracy theory to explain it: President Obama has deliberately induced Central American families to send their unaccompanied kids on a dangerous journey to America, so that he can pressure Congress to pass immigration reform. It's just like his Fast & Furious plot to flood the border with guns to promote gun control. And just like Benghazi, Obama gave a stand-down order.

In some universe, maybe, but not this one.

Vox does its usual good job describing the reality of the situation: Tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors are fleeing drug and gang violence in Central America and being caught at the U.S. border. (Somehow, these captures prove to Republicans that Obama isn't securing the border.) The Border Patrol has been overwhelmed trying to provide detention facilities, because of the unexpected consequences of a Bush-administration law.

U.S. policy allows Mexican child migrants to be sent back quickly across the border. However, under a [law] meant to combat child trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, children from Central America must be given a court hearing before they are deported (or allowed to stay). Given the huge backlog of cases, they may have to wait years for a hearing.

Homeland Security has been trying to relieve the overcrowding by spreading the children out to facilities in other parts of the country, provoking some ugly scenes, like the one in Murrieta, California. Protesters have focused their rhetoric on wildly exaggerated concerns about disease. "We don’t even know what all diseases they have," Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert said. But Friday, Chris Hayes interviewed Rachel Pearson, who pointed out that Guatemalan kids are more likely to get key vaccinations than Texas kids. (Texas had a measles outbreak last year, while Guatemala and Honduras haven't had a single case since 1990.) To the extent that the detained kids are unhealthy, the problem is most likely due to the overcrowded conditions DHS is trying to eliminate. So why the disease hysteria? Pearson explains:

What we see historically is that when diseases or conditions occur in people who are social outsiders -- immigrants, people of color, women -- those diseases are seen by the wider society as markers ... that people are impure or lacking in virtue. So whereas lice has one meaning for American kids in a summer camp in Pennsylvania, the meaning becomes totally different if it's a group of kids that we think of as outsiders.

In other words, irrational fear of disease is one of the screens people use to hide their bigotry.

President Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion to deal with the problem. But given the conservative base's state of outrage over anything having to do with Hispanic immigrants, it's questionable whether any money can get through the House without something horrible attached to it.

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Here's the weirdest thing about the claims that the Constitution requires securing the border or the no borders, no country talking point: The Founders didn't secure the border. The hyperbolic charge "anyone can waltz right in to America" is a pretty accurate summary of how things were from the Founding until after the Civil War.

and Israel/Palestine

I'm having trouble finding an article that explains what the current Gaza conflict is about. I mean, Hamas is firing rockets into Israel and Israel is attacking what they believe to be the sources of those rockets, but that's same-old-same-old. I have no idea why this is happening now. So I'll punt this issue to next week.

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Follow-up on the Hobby Lobby decision: In a piece in The Immanent Frame that got picked up by Salon, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (a professor of religious studies at Indiana University) challenged the whole notion of laws that protect religious freedom. The problem: You can't protect what you can't define. When the First Amendment was written, religion meant a handful of churches and doctrines; but now things are much fuzzier.

The notion that religion exists and can be regulated without being defined is a fiction at the heart of religious freedom protection.

Justice Alito's majority opinion holds that Hobby Lobby's refusal to participate in the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate is a legally protected exercise of religion, and Justice Ginsberg's dissent denies it. But neither defines what an "exercise of religion" is or gives a test for recognizing it. Both keep repeating the adjective religious, because that word is a veil they can't see behind.

Is it really possible to distinguish the religious from the non-religious in these cases? Do we have a shared theory of religion that permits such distinctions to be made? Isn’t the religious always mixed with the political and the cultural and the economic? The constant repetition of the adjective seems necessary only in order to reify a notion about which everyone is, in fact, very uncertain.

The law can't just protect churches, because

[M]uch—perhaps most—American religion today does not happen in churches. Many American Christians have, for a long time, engaged in a kind of DIY religion free from the regulations of church authorities. Their religion is radically disestablished free religion, defined not by bishops and church councils, but by themselves—ordinary Americans reading their Bibles, picking and choosing from among a wide array of religious practices. Indeed, Americans have always been incredibly varied, creative, and entrepreneurial in living out what they take to be their religious obligations—religious obligations that range far beyond the prescriptions of the mainline churches, which seem staid, contained, and tamed to the many who consider their own religious practices, unapproved by traditional religious authorities, to be alive with the spirit. They find their religious community and their religious fields of action in places other than churches—including the marketplace.

Lacking a definition, and recognizing the impracticality protecting everything people might do from whatever motives they might claim as religious, each side tries to stretch the word to cover the kind of religion they like, but not the kind they don't like.

There is no neutral place from which to distinguish the religious from the non-religious. ... Judges cannot do this work.

Sullivan leaves us not with an answer, but with a challenge: "We need fictions to live," she writes, meaning social/cultural/legal fictions like corporations and churches and rights -- all things that will never be detected in a laboratory. And if the old fictions can no longer work together without becoming lies, we need to get on with "creating new fictions together, political, legal, and religious".

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Has anybody ever seen Glenn Greenwald and Chris McDaniel in the same room? Just asking.

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Remember Todd Akin? The guy who blew Missouri Republicans' excellent chance to unseat Claire McCaskell in 2012 by denying the need for a rape exception to abortion bans, because women almost never get pregnant from a "legitimate rape"? He's back.

His new book Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith (foreword by Mike Huckabee) will come out Tuesday. From pre-publication accounts in the media, it appears Akin is un-apologizing for his rape remarks and blaming the Republican establishment, including Mitt Romney, for not going down the drain with him. He claims he was right: "stress infertility" is a real thing, so "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

The only thing he admits to doing wrong is apologizing. And he shouldn't be held morally accountable for that lie, because it was coerced out of him by the Republican establishment. But Joan Walsh thinks he might be making up that coercion story:

Poor Todd. He doesn’t want to take responsibility for a decision made in the heat of lust – lust for a Senate seat, in his case – so he’s claiming he was cruelly assaulted by party bosses and coerced into apologizing. It’s too bad his conscience didn’t have a way to shut that whole thing down.

Two thoughts: Akin should have to explain how that stress-infertility thing works when you've been drugged unconscious. And if Mike Huckabee runs for president and gets nominated, Democrats should make Todd Akin his unofficial running mate.

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Liberals (like Paul Krugman and me) have been noting for a while the increasing evidence that ObamaCare is working as designed. Now that realization is starting to appear in the "centrist" media. Politico hedges as much as it can, but acknowledges:

The evidence is piling up now: Obamacare really does seem to be helping the uninsured.

In the quotes that are supposed to provide "balance", ObamaCare critics deny they ever said the number of uninsured Americans would go up, but of course they did. False prophesies about ObamaCare vanish down the memory hole as soon as they're disproved, and the false prophets move on to predict new calamities.

And you have to go to the second page of Politico's article to find any mention of the millions of people who would have coverage under ObamaCare if the red states would participate in the law's Medicaid expansion. It's in a quote from an "Obama administration official" -- as if this were some partisan talking point rather than an objective fact.

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One of the stories that never dies is the "welfare queen": Somebody is getting rich off welfare, driving a Cadillac, and so on. Everybody thinks they've seen somebody who was cheating -- wearing nice clothes or talking on an iPhone while cashing Food Stamps, etc.

Tuesday, the WaPo published an article looking at such a case from the other side: Darlena Cunha described the fast series of reverses that took her and her husband from being prosperous homeowners with a Mercedes to unemployed parents of medically-needy infants who own an underwater-mortgage house ... and a Mercedes. "This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps" is a fascinating human-interest story that exposes a lot of the assumptions we make about people who (temporarily or permanently) need help.

and let's end with something creative

In general, I love the Worth 1000 site, devoted to imaginative photoshopping. A recent challenge was Celebrity Time Travel, putting today's celebrities into classic photos. The winner is called "Morgan Freedman", though I'm also fond of the Obama/Louis Armstrong combo at #12.

Belief and Reality

Thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened—no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be—does not make it so.

-- Sonia Sotomayor

This week's featured article: "How Threatening Is the Hobby Lobby Decision?"

This week everybody was talking about the Hobby Lobby decision

The majority opinion claimed to be narrow; the dissent said it was sweeping. I'm coming to look at it as a narrow gate into a vast new realm of judge-bestowed rights for some people and burdens for others.

I tried to cover the legal landscape in "How Threatening Is the Hobby Lobby Decision?". That already ran so long that I didn't want to extend it with the many satires of the decision. Here are a few: "Supreme Court Rules JCPenney Allowed to Sacrifice Employees to Appease Cthulhu", "My Breakup Letter to Hobby Lobby", and "Supreme Court Upholds Little Caesar's Right to Feed Christian Employees to Lions".

A point I didn't get around to making there is that not everything you don't want to do is a violation of your religious rights, even if you share your distaste with the members of your church. Compare a conservative-Christian baker who doesn't want to make a same-sex-wedding cake to a black waitress who doesn't want to serve a table of guys wearing Confederate-flag t-shirts. One has a religious justification for his distaste and the other doesn't, but I contend the two situations are more similar than different, and the feelings affronted are more tribal than spiritual. Each feels his/her identity threatened by being required to serve members of an opposing tribe.

and the Fourth of July

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to fly through a fireworks display, this drone did it for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9KZ3jgbbmI#t=133]

If flag-waving and fireworks isn't your style of patriotism, consider re-affirming your commitment to democracy. Lawrence Lessig has started the Mayday PAC, a SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. It supports candidates for Congress who are committed to reforming the way we finance political campaigns.

and the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1964, about a thousand college students from all over the country descended on Mississippi to help black citizens register to vote, to educate black children about subjects their Jim Crow schools wouldn't touch, and to challenge the right of an all-white delegation to represent Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention.

It's worthwhile to be reminded that, back in the day, freedom was a liberal word. It pointed to the desire of traditionally oppressed peoples to be listened to, to vote, to have the equal protection of the laws. Today, by contrast, freedom typically means the right of corporations and wealthy individuals to exercise their power without government restraint or consideration of the public interest.

If you want to educate yourself about that summer, a lot of good stuff is out there.

• PBS' American Experience did a Freedom Summer episode. Some clips and further interviews are available online.
• The movie Mississippi Burning about the investigation into the murder of three civil rights activists at the beginning of the summer. Like most mass-market movies, it's not entirely historical, but it does capture the sense of time and place. It was a best-picture nominee in 1989.
• The documentary Neshoba, about the attempt to prosecute one of the people responsible for the murders, forty years later.
• Episode 5 of CNN's The Sixties, "The Long March to Freedom".

It's easy to forget the sheer terrorism that dominated Mississippi in those days. The whole point of sending white students down there wasn't that they had some special voter-registration magic, it was that if they were beaten or killed, the country would notice; white supremacists had been killing uppity blacks for a long time and Northern whites didn't care. But as the Neshoba murders showed, the whites weren't safe either. Not everyone had a headline-grabbing experience, but a lot came home with stories like this:

I was walking along a road. We were told never to leave the place we were staying, by ourselves. They jumped out of the car. They started calling me "Hey, nigger lover! We got you. We finally got you. We ain't killed ourselves a-a white girl yet. You're going to be the first." They get this lynch rope. It really was a noose like you see like I had seen in the pictures of the hangings, right? They put this noose over my head. And this is attached to a long rope. They jump back into the car, and I just saw myself being dragged to death. I'm walking like this. And they're laughing and calling me all kinds of names. And then they moved along, slowly, a little bit faster. I'm walking faster. And it was like, "Okay, this is it." And then they dropped the rope. And I just stood there. Because we had to wear skirts. We weren't allowed to wear pants in those days, so we all had our little shifts on and everything. I peed all over myself. Just stood on the [road], and just peed.

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One thing we've learned from the seemingly endless series of mass shootings is that a shooter is mostvulnerablewhilereloading. So if gun magazines hold fewer bullets, maybe fewer people will be killed before shooters are stopped. It seems worth a try.

The New Jersey legislature tried it, and Wednesday Governor Christie vetoed it. I can't see this pander to the NRA winning him many votes in New Jersey, so I think it means he still sees himself as a presidential contender.

I've been ignoring BridgeGate for the last several months. The legislature's investigation continues, but hasn't yet turned up a smoking gun with Christie's fingerprints on it. The U.S. attorney's investigation seems to be the important one, but it's also the hardest to keep tabs on. We won't really know what they have until they start issuing indictments, and no one knows when that might be.

If Christie isn't indicted, and if none of the people who are indicted hang their defense on blaming him, then he's probably a viable candidate again. What he lost in bad publicity he can regain by appealing to the far Right's delusions of persecution.

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Interesting article in the NYT Magazine: "Can the G.O.P. Be the Party of Ideas?" In other words, can the Republican Party stop saying "no" to everything and instead come up with localist and free-market plans to help solve the problems ordinary people face? And if they could, would the base of the party go for it?

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Salon published an amazing conversation between Thomas Frank (What's the Matter With Kansas?) and Barry Lynn (Cornered) about the hidden monopolization of our economy, what it has to do with inequality, how it happened, and what can be done about it. Something they agree on is that completely unfettered markets are unstable; they lead to private monopolies that then make the markets unfree.

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When the open-carry folks show up in the same shops and restaurants you frequent, what should you do? PQED advises that you just walk out with your food on the table and your bill unpaid. Carte Blanchfield disagrees, arguing that the armed crazies might then shoot you. Both are discussing what philosophers call the problem of other minds: You know that you have good intentions and aren't threatening anyone else, but they don't know that. The problem of judging other people's intentions becomes very important when deadly weapons are involved. Tom the Dancing Bug also addresses that issue:

and let's end with something cute

Here's how you know you've been letting your dog and turtle watch too much of the World Cup.