Strangers

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

-- Leviticus 19:34

This week's featured post is "One-and-a-Half Cheers for Executive Action".

This week everybody was talking about President Obama's immigration move

The weirdest immigration conversation you're going to hear was on Kris Kobach's radio show. A caller suggested that when Hispanics become the majority in parts of America, they might do an ethnic cleansing on the whites. And Kobach took it seriously:

What protects us in America from any kind of ethnic cleansing is the rule of law, of course. And the rule of law used to be unassailable, used to be taken for granted in America. And now, of course, we have a president who disregards the law when it suits his interests. So, while I normally would answer that by saying, ‘Steve, of course we have the rule of law, that could never happen in America,’ I wonder what could happen. I still don’t think it’s going to happen in America, but I have to admit, things are strange and they are happening.

I wonder when Kobach thought the rule of law in America was "unassailable". For non-whites, the rule of law has always been shaky and still is, as the families of Michael Brown and John Crawford can tell you. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post for some reason thinks that portraying Obama as the Statue of Liberty is an attack. Senator Tom Coburn warned, "you could see instances of anarchy. ... You could see violence." It's funny: When right-wingers don't get what they want, any subsequent violence is the fault of the people who didn't give them what they want. The same principle does not apply in, say, Ferguson. Here's what's most dangerous about the Republicans' over-the-top wolf-crying about "disregarding the law" and so forth: What if the next president actually does disregard the law and start making decrees? If rhetoric has already been turned up to 11 over something like this, any objections then will just sound like more rhetoric.

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TPM elaborates on a point I've been making here: "No, Your Ancestors Didn't Come Here Legally".

Prior to 1875’s Page Act and 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, there were no national immigration laws. None.

My ancestors came to America anarchically, or pre-legally. But no, they didn't follow the law, because there was no law.

and Bill Cosby

I've mostly ignored the Bill Cosby controversy, because fundamentally it's a celebrity story. Rape is wrong; rapists should be punished; and the fact that the accusations are about Bill Cosby doesn't interest me that much. AlterNet's Amanda Marcotte, though, raised a question that does interest me: Similar accusations from a number of women have been out there for years, so why is the story only getting traction now? Her theory, which I would like to believe, is that society is losing its acceptance of the kind of rape Cosby is accused of: acquaintance rape via drugs rather than violence.

A major obstacle in changing attitudes about rape is there are literally decades of cultural endorsement of the idea that sex is a matter of a man getting one over on a woman, and therefore it’s okay to have sex with unwilling women using trickery, bullying or intoxicants. ... But now another conversation is happening: People are beginning to key into the fact that it’s not normal to want sex with someone who is laying there like a dead fish, crying, or otherwise giving in because she fears she isn’t getting out of this situation safely otherwise. In fact, that behavior is not funny or cool, but sad at best, and usually downright violent and predatory. A man who bullies an unwilling woman into bed isn’t “scoring” but a real creep.

There's more to her argument, and it's well worth your time. Another Cosby story I found worthwhile was Ta-Nehisi Coates' account of why he, as a journalist, wrote a story about Cosby years ago without mentioning the rape accusations, even though he believed them.

I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.

and snow

The southern edge of Buffalo got an incredible six feet of snow in one storm. This time-lapse video taken from a downtown office building shows the amazing quality of lake-effect snow: There is a wall of snow on one side of an apparently arbitrary line, and little-to-no snow on the other side. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxuacZudBPU] The photos are ridiculous, like this one: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Don't go out there.[/caption]

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Another Benghazi report clears the administration of wrong-doing. This one comes from the House Intelligence Committee, which has a Republican majority. Will this finally be the end of it? Lindsey Graham says no.

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A meaty article from 2012 that a friend pointed out to me this week. Thinking of social class in America as a ladder creates some illusions, because not everybody is climbing the same ladder. Michael O. Church describes three separate social ladders, and the relationships between them.

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Australian TV-morning-news anchor Karl Stefanovic got sick of all the criticism his female co-anchor got for her appearance, so he ran an experiment: Every day for a year, he did the show wearing the same suit, changing only his shirt and tie. No viewers complained or even appeared to notice. He says:

I'm judged on my interviews, my appalling sense of humor — on how I do my job, basically. Whereas women are quite often judged on what they're wearing or how their hair is.

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I'll bet a Kindle wouldn't do this: After Thursday's shooting incident at Florida State, a student found a bullet in his backpack, in the middle of some books he'd just checked out of the library.

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Sunday Cleveland police shot dead a 12-year-old who had an air gun. Needless to say, the kid was black.

and let's close with something cute

As video cameras got smaller, at some point a squirrel was bound to steal one and run up a tree with it.

So Much That Ain't So

It is better to know less than to know so much that ain't so. -- Josh Billings
(ironically, the line is usually attributed to Will Rogers or Mark Twain)

This week's featured post is "Rethinking Immigration".

This week the audacity of hope was back

With his administration's final election behind him, President Obama has started acting like he's President of the United States or something. I'm picturing him like the high school girl who finally gives up on getting asked to the big dance, and goes back to acing her tests, running cross country, working on her novel, and just generally being her amazing self again.

I guess we'll never know whether a Democratic Party centered on this Obama would have done better in the midterm elections. Anyway, here's what he's been up to.

Net neutrality. It started Monday with his net neutrality statement. He called on the FCC to implement net neutrality rules that preserved four principles: no blocking (if a web site is legal, an ISP can't keep you from accessing it), no throttling (an ISP can't intentionally slow down some sites and speed up others), increased transparency (monitoring what happens to internet traffic up and down the line, rather than just at the "last mile"), and no paid prioritization (a web site or internet service can't pay a fee to have its content delivered faster).

What this comes down to is a debate over what kind of economy we want to have and how we want people to make money: Do you get rich by creating innovative new products that people want, or by getting control of a choke-point where you can charge a big toll? (I described that choice here two years ago.) Comcast and Verizon are building a big toll gate that will prosper at the expense of whoever is creating the next FaceBook or NetFlix. Net neutrality is about preventing that.

In order to have the legal authority to implement these net neutrality principles, the FCC needs to re-classify ISPs as providing a telecommunications service rather than an information service. Courts have already said the FCC can do that (as I explained here).

The FCC is an independent agency that can do what it wants. So Obama's statement is a bully-pulpit thing, not a unitary-executive thing. But net neutrality is a struggle between organized people and organized money. If it happens in the dark, Comcast/Verizon money will certainly win. So the spotlight Obama is shining on the issue might make a big difference.

Funny or Die has the cleverest approach to this issue: "Porn Stars Explain Net Neutrality". Whether it's safe for work or not depends on where you work.

Carbon and China. Until Wednesday, the final argument of the do-nothing-about-global-warming crowd was: "Even if we cut our carbon emissions, it won't make any difference because China won't." On Wednesday night's All In, Chris Hayes collected video clips of congressional Republicans making that argument.

That framing makes climate change fit the barbarians-at-the-gates story I described last week: Environmentalists want to handicap the United States in its economic death-struggle against the Yellow Peril. It never made sense, though, because China has an internal motivation to get its emissions under control: Its major cities are choking on their own coal dust. According to the Boston Globe:

China now holds two seemingly contradictory titles: It creates the most greenhouse gas pollution of any country, and it has developed more renewable energy than any country.

It is the largest producer of wind turbines, followed by the United States and Germany. It produces the most photovoltaic solar panels. It has shut down inefficient old manufacturing plants. And the agreement it announced Wednesday follows other ambitious — and largely successful — long-range planning goals to cut carbon.

But Wednesday, the U.S. and China agreed on mutual goals for carbon-emission reduction. Vox gives more context, and Grist outlines the pressure the U.S./China agreement puts on India.

Next up: Immigration and Impeachment. Speculation is always more fun than reporting on something real, and you never have to issue an embarrassing correction when your speculation turns out to be wrong. (Just move on and speculate about the next thing.) So most of the media jumped ahead to the immigration executive order Obama hasn't issued yet, and how Republicans will respond to it. They speculate that the order will be bigger than most people expected, and that the Republicans will respond by either shutting down the government or starting impeachment proceedings.

This should all sound familiar. Two years ago, when Obama was about to issue an executive order about guns, right-wingers panicked that he was going to order an unconstitutional confiscation and threatened to impeach him when he did. His actual order was well within his powers and the Republican response was minimal. So let's wait until he does something before we get excited.

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Among people upset about Obama's possible immigration moves, National Review's Mark Krikorian takes it to a whole other level:

With all due respect to Andy McCarthy, impeachment is out of the question; there is almost nothing the first black president could do that would lead to his impeachment. Yes, it’s a double standard, but Obama was only nominated and elected because of his race, so his de facto immunity from impeachment should not come as a surprise.

Because when white presidents like Ronald Reagan did the exact same thing, they were impeached immediately. Weren't they?

This is how the racial thing has played out all through the Obama administration. The Right doesn't hate him because he's black; they hate him because everything he does seems unique and horrible to them. And it seems that way because he's black.

Meanwhile, everybody was talking about a comet

The European Space Agency landed an unmanned probe on a comet, which had never been done before. (Remember when we used to lead the world in stuff like that?) Unfortunately, the solar-powered probe landed in a shady spot, so its battery is dead now (though it may get enough occasional light to perk up later). Sky and Telescope gives full geeky details, and Vox explains why the mission is already a huge success.

and Democrats were talking about fixing the Party

Here's one plan:



But I'm going in a different direction. Last week's "Republicans have a story to tell. We're stuck with facts." was the kick-off to a long, vague project that will proceed at no particular pace: What story of America should Democrats be telling?

The reason it will proceed at no particular pace is that I want the historical parts of the story to be true, and its projections into the future to be based on the way the world actually works. If the problem were just to make up some bullshit that might fool some low-information voters into voting Democratic, I could probably do that now, and so could a lot of other people.

So this week's "Rethinking Immigration", which reviews Aviva Chomsky's Undocumented, is part of the background for that project. We need to understand how things really are before we start trying to explain them to the public.

Meanwhile, other people have been outlining the biggest problem that needs to be addressed: Why doesn't rising productivity lead to higher wages, like it used to? (That's a root cause of the pervasive middle-class anxiety I described last week.) Josh Marshall posted this graph:

and commented:

[A] stark reality: Democrats don't have a set of policies to turn around this trend. Republicans don't either, of course. But they don't need to. Not in the same way. As a party they are basically indifferent to middle class wages. ... But you cannot make middle class wage growth and wealth inequality the center of your politics unless you have a set of policies which credibly claims some real shot at addressing the problem. At least not for long.

Economist Alan Blinder lists "Seven ways to raise wages", but whether his plan -- education, unions, higher minimum wage, fiscal stimulus -- would fix things or just tinker around the edges, it doesn't sound like a fix. And that's a big chunk of the problem.

One thing did come clear to me from reading these articles: The standard Republican response to any of the stuff on Blinder's list is that it would hurt productivity growth. We can argue, but that's not the right conversation to have. The right answer to the productivity objection is: "So bleeping what?" If increases in productivity don't benefit ordinary people any more, why should we care about them?

and ObamaCare's second season

ObamaCare enrollment season started Saturday, which of course means that the second-year premiums are out. How to read those numbers varied a lot from one source to the next. One set of NYT writers led with the negative:

The Obama administration on Friday unveiled data showing that many Americans with health insurance bought under the Affordable Care Act could face substantial price increases next year — in some cases as much as 20 percent — unless they switch plans.

While another NYT writer led with the positive:

Early evidence suggests that competition in the new Affordable Care Act marketplaces is working, at least in some areas. Health insurance premiums in major cities around the country are barely rising.

TPM was positive with caveats:

Taken in the aggregate, Obamacare premiums for the 34 states using Healthcare.gov are almost completely level in 2015 compared to 2014, according to a new analysis from Avalere Health.

That comes with a lot of caveats. Premium changes vary widely from state to state, and individual consumers who are re-enrolling might need to shop around to avoid substantial spikes in what they pay next year.

But ThinkProgress was just positive:

For the second year in a row, Obamacare premiums are lower than anticipated and millions of Americans can expect to find affordable health insurance options during the second open enrollment period.

And CBS was just negative:

With the Affordable Care Act to start enrollment for its second year on Nov. 15, some unpleasant surprises may be in store for some.

That's because a number of low-priced Obamacare plans will raise their rates in 2015, making those options less affordable.

The gist, as best I can piece it together from these Rashomon-like accounts, is that a few insurance companies are raising rates substantially, but even if you are one of the affected consumers, you should be able to keep both your cost and level-of-coverage relatively stable if you are willing to switch to another insurer. Averaged over the whole country, premiums will increase, but far less than the average premium was increasing before ObamaCare.

I guess that must make a crappy headline or something.

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I know that what everybody was really talking about: Kim Kardashian's internet-breaking photo shoot. I tried to come up with an insightful comment about that story's deep cultural significance, but I got nothing. I thought about not even providing a link, but that would just be acting out against the trivialization of news, which is a real thing. Go ahead and look. Promise me you'll come right back.

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October numbers are in: another global temperature record. 2014 continues on pace to replace 2010 as the hottest year ever.

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Former coal executive Don Blankenship was indicted for his role in the safety violations that killed 29 miners in 2010. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Subtext in this story: why industry can't regulate itself, and why we need to get money out of politics. Here's an account of Blankenship buying a state supreme court judgeship for an ally in 2004.

and let's close by singing the blues

or maybe by letting a toddler sing them for us.

Broken Pieces of Truth

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

-- Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

This week's featured post is "Republicans have a story to tell. We're stuck with facts."

This week everybody was wondering how that happened

The Republicans not only took control of the Senate -- either 52-48 or 53-47, depending on the Louisiana run-off -- but they re-elected some of the worst governors in the country: Sam Brownback in Kansas, Paul LePage in Maine, Rick Scott in Florida, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and Scott Walker in Wisconsin. And they nearly knocked off Senator Mark Warner in Virginia, a result that would have surprised both parties.

Good people lost. The best, in my opinion, being Mark Udall in Colorado. And some absolute loons are going to the Senate, the worst being Joni Ernst of Iowa. You'll hear a lot more from her in the next six years, because she will be at the forefront of every act of right-wing craziness. And since conservatism has its own perverse form of affirmative action, I suspect she's going to wind up on the short list for Republican VPs next year.

So how did that happen? As in the Republican sweep of 2010, they didn't do it by changing people's minds; they did it because the Democrats' target audience didn't vote.

Comparing yesterday’s exit polls to those of 2012, the first thing that jumps out at you is a big shift in age demographics: under-30 voters dropped from 19 percent of the electorate in 2012 to 13 percent in 2014, while over-65 voters climbed from 16 percent in 2012 to 22 percent in 2014. That’s quite close to the age demographics of 2010.

In terms of race and ethnicity, the white share of the electorate increased modestly from 72 percent in 2012 to 75 percent this year, not quite back up to the 77 percent whites represented in 2010. And interestingly enough, Republican performance among white voters didn’t change at all from the 59/39 margin achieved by Mitt Romney.

There are two possible responses to this. One asks, "What's wrong with those people?" What's wrong with young people and non-whites, that they're letting Republicans they disagree with take over the country? The other asks, "What's wrong with the Democrats' message, that it's not motivating their voters to get out and vote?" I take the second approach in "Republicans have a story to tell. We're stuck with facts."

and what will happen next

Back in the waning days of the Soviet Union, leading up to Gorbachev, a series of short-lived old men filled the top chair: Andropov, Chernenko, and some other geezers even I don't remember. Every time a new one took over, the same story would get leaked to the Western press: The new boss only appeared to be a faceless party functionary; actually he had been a behind-the-scenes force for liberalization and better relations with the West. It was never true, but feeding people's fantasies like that was good PR.

Well, this week we heard that Mitch McConnell wants to fix the broken Senate and get things done. He swore off the brinksmanship of the past: "There will be no government shutdowns and no default on the national debt." It's as if the filibuster-everything McConnell never existed, and the Ted Cruz wing of the party didn't control enough votes to leave McConnell without a working majority. It's good PR.

In the short term, what will happen is that the Senate will have one more session before the new Republican majority arrives in January. Harry Reid will try to approve as many Obama nominees as possible, maybe including Loretta Lynch to replace Attorney General Holder. Republicans will claim that this use of the Senate's constitutional power is illegitimate, because they only venerate the Constitution when it suits them.

Longer term, the interesting question isn't whether the Republican agenda and the Obama agenda will intersect enough to get some laws passed and signed, but whether there will be a Republican agenda at all. What unites Republicans is hatred of Obama, not loyalty to their own leaders or to any particular plan of action. Again and again since he became Speaker four years ago, John Boehner has tried to negotiate with Obama, only to discover that he didn't have the votes to pass what he offered. (I love Steve Benen's summary: "the right hand doesn't know what the far-right hand is doing.") Now Mitch McConnell can join those games.

Case in point: ObamaCare. "Repeal and replace" makes a good slogan, and occasionally someone on the Republican side releases a sketch of a replacement. But any attempt to fill in the details always starts an argument that goes nowhere, and no actual replacement law ever gets voted on.

The argument about whether to pass laws or to continue monkey-wrenching everything to create issues for a 2016 presidential nominee has already started. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy says Republicans need to "prove we could govern", while National Review warns about "the governing trap": Any attempt to find common ground with President Obama or Democrats in Congress should be avoided in favor of maneuvering for 2016.

not much progress is possible until we have a better president. Getting one ought to be conservatism’s main political goal over the next two years.

Here's the only reason for optimism: Mitch finally has the job he wants, and maybe he'll want to keep it. The 2016 Senate map look as bad for Republicans as 2014's did for Democrats. To hold the majority, McConnell will need to defend blue-state Republican senators like Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and Mark Kirk in Illinois. If he wants to help his party win the White House in 2016, he won't want to create jobs or do anything else that the outgoing Democratic administration can take credit for. But if he wants Ayotte and Kirk and the rest of his 24 incumbents to have some accomplishments to run on, he will.

OK, one more reason: Boehner's larger majority in the House means that he has a little room for error. He no longer needs the vote of every last Tea Party lunatic, every Louie Gohmert and Steve King, to pass a bill. So there's a chance he could actually deliver on a deal with Obama. Maybe.

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The best thing I can hope for from President Obama these next two years is that he'll take an aw-fuck-it attitude and just do what he thinks is right, without worrying how the Republicans or the commentariat will react. His net neutrality statement seems like a good start.

and talking about the Supreme Court

Marriage equality is going to the Supreme Court sooner rather than later. That became inevitable Thursday when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals bucked the consensus of the other appellate courts and upheld several state bans on same-sex marriages.

You may remember that I have been consistently critical of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Windsor, which came out in 2013. It produced the immediate results I wanted, but its legal reasoning was mushy; it didn't lay out clear principles that lower courts could follow in future cases. But since then -- until Thursday -- lower courts all over the country had ruled in favor of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples, finding that although Windsor didn't establish such a right, it left marriage equality's opponents without a place to stand.

As long as all the appellate courts agreed with that assessment, the Supremes could avoid the issue. But now, same-sex marriage bans violate equal-protection and due-process rights in some states, but are fine in others. There could be a ruling by the end of the term in June.

The disagreement between Sixth Circuit Judges Jeffrey Sutton (for the 2-1 majority) and Martha Daughtrey (dissenting) is stark. Sutton's opinion has a general air of condescension, like an elder uncle explaining something you kids are too young to understand: that courts are not legislatures, so they shouldn't be changing the "traditional definition of marriage". (Already there, you can tell he's going nowhere good, because there is no "traditional definition of marriage". Marriage has meant something different in every generation. In 1765, for example, it meant, "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage".)

Sutton's opinion revolves around the question "who should decide" whether and how "the traditional definition of marriage" should change. He concludes that such social engineering is not his job, so he leaves state same-sex marriage bans in place. Daughtrey reminds Sutton that actually they both have a different job: American citizens have come to court asking for their rights, and the judges owe them an answer.

the majority treats both the issues and the litigants here as mere abstractions. Instead of recognizing the plaintiffs as persons, suffering actual harm as a result of being denied the right to marry where they reside or the right to have their valid marriages recognized there, my colleagues view the plaintiffs as social activists who have somehow stumbled into federal court, inadvisably, when they should be out campaigning to win “the hearts and minds” of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee voters to their cause. But these plaintiffs are not political zealots trying to push reform on their fellow citizens; they are committed same-sex couples, many of them heading up de facto families, who want to achieve equal status -- de jure status, if you will -- with their married neighbors, friends, and coworkers, to be accepted as contributing members of their social and religious communities, and to be welcomed as fully legitimate parents at their children’s schools. They seek to do this by virtue of exercising a civil right that most of us take for granted -- the right to marry.

ObamaCare. The Court will hear King v Burwell, the case that claims ObamaCare subsidies don't apply in the 36 states that left the federal government to set up the state exchanges. The case hangs on a quirk of wording in the Affordable Care Act. Traditionally, the Court has given the executive branch wide latitude to interpret a law in a way that succeeds in fulfilling Congress' intention in passing a law, rather than in a way that fails. And neither the record of congressional debate nor anything ACA sponsors have said afterwards lends credence to the idea that Congress intended to limit the subsidies in this way.

But no matter. When the Court first considered the ACA, it embraced an interpretation of the Commerce Clause that Congress never considered because it did not exist when the ACA was passed, and only a clever application of the Taxing Clause by Chief Justice Roberts saved the law. Four justices, it seems, will do whatever it takes to scuttle ObamaCare. The question is whether they can get a fifth.

Vox summarizes the situation here, and Balkinization provides a theory of what might be going on behind the scenes.

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The Ebola scare in Dallas is over. Friday, "the last person being monitored for symptoms of Ebola in Dallas was cleared by officials".

Nationally, the U.S. has had nine Ebola cases. One died, seven recovered, and one is still in treatment -- Dr. Craig Spencer, who returned to New York from Guinea and is in NYC's Bellevue Hospital. He is said to be improving and is listed in stable condition.

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According to an exit poll, 63% of American voters believe that our economic system favors the rich. I wonder what the rest believe, and what color they think the sky is.

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The voter-suppression group True the Vote distributed a smart-phone app to its members before the election, to help them document the massive "voter fraud" the organization ostensibly exists to fight. If anything, they documented the exact opposite.

and let's close with a warning from Ned Stark

With the Halloween line breached, nothing can stop it. Its carols and jingles are already echoing throughout the land.

Little by Little

Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.

-- Benjamin Franklin

This week's featured posts are "Vote. It's not nearly enough, but it's something." and "The Case for Voting Democrat".

And this is what I did during my week off.

This week everybody has been talking about the election

In case the non-stop TV ads haven't gotten through to you, the election is tomorrow. In many states you can vote today. Control of the Senate is up for grabs, there are a lot of cliff-hanging governor's races, and everybody has a House race. My case for voting is in "Vote. It's not nearly enough. But it's something." My more detailed case for voting for Democrats is in "The Case for Voting Democrat".

Normally, I do a viewer's guide for watching the election returns. But this year has so many weird Senate races that are close for their own unique reasons that I have no idea what's going to happen. The Democrats need an upset somewhere to hold the Senate, but there are a lot of places where that upset could happen. If the election had been held two weeks ago, when the nation was suffering a mysterious epidemic of fear, I think Republicans would have won easily. Since then, the stock market has recovered to a new high, ISIS has mostly been out of the headlines, and the news about Ebola has been more good than bad. So I think fear has receded and we're back in anything-can-happen territory.

Anyway, here's Daily Kos' map of poll-closing times.



 

and Ebola

The big story this week was the symptom-free nurse in Maine fighting Governor LePage's effort to quarantine her in her home. A court sided with the nurse. An NBC/WSJ poll says that 71% support quarantining health-care workers who come back from Ebola-afflicted areas. There's no reason to think such a quarantine is medically necessary, and it will intimidate American doctors and nurses who might otherwise take a month or two to go to Africa and fight this virus on the front lines. But people like to respond with decisive action when they're scared.

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The Sift's claim that Rand Paul had called for cuts in the CDC budget back in 2011 drew the attention of Politifact. (That's the first time my name has appeared in that column.) They judged the claim to be True. So I guess I can tell people that my Politifact score is 100%.

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One of the stranger Tumblr pages is "Women Against Feminism". In the manner of "We Are the 99%", it consists of pictures of (mostly) young women holding up pieces of paper explaining why they don't need feminism. The fact that some young women feel that way isn't what's weird; it's a big country, a few people are bound to think almost anything. But here's the weird thing: Many of their self-described philosophies could be definitions of the feminism they say they don't need. Like:

I don't need feminism or masculism because the only thing that should determine my life is my own potential, not my gender (or race). We are all human and we should all be equal.

If you replace "I don't need feminism or masculism because" with "I am a feminist because", the quote makes perfect sense. I read this whole page not as a comment on feminism, but as a measure of just how successful the Right has been at tarring the word feminist. Women who by any reasonable definition are feminists have been convinced that they're anti-feminists, because feminism is ... some other damn thing.

The best counter I've heard -- not specifically to this Tumblr, but to similar stuff from celebrities like Shailene Woodley -- is this YouTube by marinashutup.

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In what Jonathan Chait says may be "the craziest idea ever proposed by a Fox News personality", Fox' resident psychologist Dr. Keith Ablow called for "an American jihad". Because our constitution is a "sacred document" and our nation's founding is a "miracle", we have a "manifest destiny not only to preserve our borders and safety and national character at home, but to spread around the world our love of individual freedom and insist on its reflection in every government." That might mean fighting a bunch of wars, but they'd be justified, "Because wherever leaders and movements appear that seek to trample upon the human spirit, we have a God-given right to intervene — because we have been to the mountaintop of freedom, and we have seen the Promised Land spanning the globe."

Liberals have been saying for a while that the Right -- especially the Religious Right -- resembles the Taliban. But now at least one of them seems to be embracing that comparison himself.

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The only possible thing I can follow that with is satirist Andy Borowitz:

President Obama is coming under increasing pressure to apologize for a controversial remark that he made on Tuesday, in which he said that the nation’s Ebola policy should be based on facts rather than fear.

and let's close with some wonderful Halloween costumes