Monday, May 25, 2015

Buying and Owning

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, there is no background check if you want to buy a senator.

-- David Letterman

I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where American billionaires own the political process.

-- Bernie Sanders


This week's featured posts are "Turning the Theocracy Against Itself" and "The 2016 Stump Speeches: Bernie Sanders".

This week everybody was talking about Ireland



Friday, the Irish voted to legalize same-sex marriage by a whopping 62%-38% margin. Turnout was impressive: 61% of the electorate. This is the first time a country has legalized same-sex marriage by a national referendum, and points out just how fast public opinion has been changing: Homosexual acts were illegal in Ireland just 22 years ago.

From The Guardian:
All but one of the republic’s 43 parliamentary constituencies voted Yes to same-sex marriage. And fears of an urban-rural, Yes/No split were not realised either. Constituencies such as Donegal South West, which in the past voted against divorce and abortion reform, backed the Yes side.

There's some debate about whether a referendum is proper when we're talking about a basic right. (I've seen a t-shirt that says "How about we vote on your marriage?") But when the result comes in clear and strong like this, it's the most satisfying way to establish marriage equality. Nobody can argue that out-of-touch elitists forced this change on a silent majority.

And so the Archbishop of Dublin reacted like this:
I ask myself, most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the church.



Here's what I don't understand about the Catholic Church and all the other religious groups who are dead-set against marriage equality: Compare to divorce. A web site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says:
The Church does not recognize a civil divorce because the State cannot dissolve what is indissoluble.

Or, as Catholics sometimes put it, the couple is still married "in the eyes of God". If a person who gets a civil divorce then marries someone else, those marriages aren't valid "in the eyes of God", who sees the sex in those second marriages as adulterous and sinful.

And yet, Catholic politicians like Rick Santorum aren't campaigning to make second marriages illegal. Bakers and caterers aren't asserting their "religious freedom" to deny service to the receptions after second marriages -- which, just like same-sex marriages, are public announcements of the couple's intention to sin.

In short, American Catholics long ago made peace with the notion that civil marriage and sacramental marriage are different things. Why isn't a similar outcome sufficient here, for all the conservative religious groups? Why not accept that same-sex couples can be married under the law, with all the legal rights and privileges civil marriage offers, but go on teaching that they aren't married in the eyes of the Deity? Like taxes and currency, the civil code is a thing of Caesar, not of God.

and the coverage of the Waco shoot-out


A week ago yesterday, nine people died in a shoot-out between biker gangs at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. A large number of liberal pundits have noticed how this has been covered compared to, say, the violence in Baltimore or Ferguson.

The apparent difference is the number of white people involved. Violence among whites is covered as some bizarre exception -- crazy people do crazy things -- while black violence is presented as an indictment of the whole community. Charles Blow comments:

Does the violence in Waco say something universal about white culture or Hispanic culture? Even the question sounds ridiculous — and yet we don’t hesitate to ask such questions around black violence, and to answer it, in the affirmative. And invariably, the single-mother, absent-father trope is dragged out.

But a father in the home is no guarantor against violence. By the way, is anyone asking about the family makeup of the bikers in Waco?

No? Exactly.


The shooting also drew attention to Twin Peaks, a racier version of Hooters that was the fastest-growing restaurant chain of 2013. Some of that attention has exposed TP's demeaning image of its customers. "Men are simple creatures," TP's director of marketing (a woman) told Huffington Post in January. A leaked internal memo says the restaurant targets men who "love to have their ego stroked by beautiful girls." Especially beautiful girls who are paid, I guess. Simple creatures crave simple relationships.

and the Santa Barbara oil spill


A pipe owned by Plains All-American Pipeline broke Tuesday, spilling oil into the waters near Santa Barbara and sludging about nine miles of previously beautiful beach. The exact whys and wherefores are still under investigation, but The LA Times reports that Plains has had a "long record of problems".




For me, the oil spill has a personal angle: To what extent am I responsible for it?

You see, when my Dad died, I inherited half his shares in Plains. I still have them. So while the rest of you look at Plains spokemen on TV and think "those evil bastards", I'm thinking "they believe they represent me".

And that raises an issue that I seldom write about, but think about quite a bit: I've never come up with a theory of socially responsible investing I like. Occasionally I make a decision to avoid companies out of sheer moral repugnance -- tobacco companies, for example. After the 2008 crash, I sold my Citicorp shares at a huge loss without waiting to see if the bank could cash in on this government-bailout thing. But this is always an emotional response rather than a thought-out principle. I'm trying to soothe my conscience, not improve the world.

Other times, I invest in something socially responsible because I believe the world will eventually see its potential the way I do. (Sometimes it does. A year or so ago I mentioned Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure, which provides capital for sustainable-energy projects. Its shares were around 14 then and are near 20 now.)

But divestment movements in general leave me scratching my head. Me selling a stock drives the price down (by a miniscule amount, given the quantities I trade in) and makes it a better deal for somebody else. (Thursday, when I asked my broker what he knew about the oil spill, he opined that this price dip might be a good time to buy more of Plains. That's how the investment community thinks.) No matter what socially responsible investors do with their money, we're still going to live in a fossil fuel economy. There are still going to be oil wells and pipelines -- partly to service customers like me, who drive cars.

So anyway, I'm feeling an emotional repugnance towards Plains right now -- not because they're a pipeline company, but because it looks like they're a bad pipeline company (rather than a decent company that had the kind of accident that could happen to anybody). I'm watching the news to see if their/our actions have really been as negligent/corrupt as I suspect.

But I'm still no closer to a principle. If you have one you're happy with, please talk about it in the comments.

and you also might be interested in ...


Republicans and 14 Democrats in the Senate voted to give President Obama and the next president "trade promotion authority" to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The bill requires an up-or-down vote on the treaty as the president signs it, with no amendments of filibusters. The bill goes to the House now, where the vote should be close. Few Democrats currently support it, while far-right Republicans are balking. Rush Limbaugh has announced his opposition, on the general principle that Obama should not be given more authority to do anything.




David Letterman signed off. The tributes were so glowing that he admonished well-wishers to "save a little for my funeral".




An Atlanta TV station shines a light on the secretive ALEC meetings.


Robert Reich points to an interesting political fault line that someday -- but probably no time soon -- will cause an earthquake: the uneasy juncture between small business owners and giant corporations. Currently it's having a tiny rumble over the push to lower the corporate tax rate. Small business associations aren't supporting that push, because the majority of small businesspeople don't pay the corporate tax rate. (Their profits show up on Schedule C or some other part of their individual 1040s.) So lowering the corporate rate while leaving individual rates fixed would shift the balance in favor of big business and against small business.

In general, small businesses provide political cover for big businesses and get little in return. Whenever some proposal would hurt Citicorp or Walmart, their PR flacks want you to focus instead on your favorite chef-owned restaurant or your cousin's hardware store. And they want the chef and your cousin to identify with them and support their full political agenda, even as that agenda favors the banks who won't loan small businesses money or the big chains that are squeezing individual proprietors out of the market. They want the 600-acre farmer to blame government regulations for his problems, and not the monopolistic power of the Monsantos who supply him or the Cargills he has to sell to.

There's room for a psychological study here, and a polemic along the lines of What's the Matter With Kansas?. What's the matter with small businesspeople? When the mega-corps completely take over, they'll be peons just like the rest of us. Why can't they see that their best allies are below them on the economic scale, not above?




It took a while, but Prime Minister Netanyahu has put together a new government following the recent Israeli elections. He himself is the acting foreign minister, so the deputy foreign minister is the country's top full-time diplomat.

That would be Tzipi Hotovely, who gave a speech Thursday re-orienting Israel's diplomatic rhetoric. Those who speak for Israel abroad, she said, need to start talking about the morality of Israel's domination of the occupied territories, not just Israel's practical need for security.
It’s important to say [that] this land is ours. All of it is ours. We didn’t come here to apologize for that.

She referenced a great medieval Jewish scholar:
Rashi says the Torah opens with the story of the creation of the world so that if the nations of the world come and tell you that you are occupiers, you must respond that all of the land belonged to the creator of world and when he wanted to, he took from them and gave to us.

In short, the religious fanatics in the Middle East aren't all on one side.

and this week, let's do a double closing


I mean, I've already blown away my weekly word limit, so why not?

First, this cartoon is supposed to encourage people to travel in groups, but I find a political message here too.

and then there's Coldplay's idea to do a Game of Thrones musical with the original cast. What could go wrong?

Monday, May 18, 2015

The Memory Hole

The official forgetting we are supposed to do will not produce the desired result.
[Eventually] people forget why they are supposed to forget, and then they start to remember.

-- an anonymous Chinese man commenting on the Cultural Revolution,
quoted in Patrick Smith's Somebody Else's Century.

This week's featured posts are "2016's Mission Impossible: Support Jeb While Forgetting George" and "Civics for Dummies: Judicial Review", where I explain why Mike Huckabee should have flunked 9th grade.

This week everybody was talking about the Amtrak accident

A derailment in Philadelphia killed 8 and injured 200. It's still not clear whether bad track played any role, or if better tech would have avoided the accident, but the incident did provide an opening to discuss our generally crumbling infrastructure.

Whatever caused this week's derailment, it's crazy that we just went through years of high unemployment and low interest rates, but we didn't borrow money to hire people to fix our at-risk bridges, build a 21st-century power grid, and upgrade our railroads.

and the Boston Marathon Bomber


Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother of the pair who planted the bomb near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, was sentenced to death on Friday. Three died in the bombing and at least 260 were injured. The brothers also killed an MIT policeman while trying to escape.

Several factors weighed against a death sentence: His age (19 at the time of the bombing), the possibly dominating influence of his older brother (who died in the shoot-out with police), and a plea from the parents of an 8-year-old victim that the state settle for life imprisonment in order to get the case completed. (If this case follows the usual pattern, appeals could continue for a decade or more before Tsarnaev is executed.) A Boston Globe poll showed that 57% of Bostonians favored life without parole, against only 33% who wanted death. (Death is a possibility only because Tsarnaev's case is federal; Massachusetts has no death penalty.)

I seldom discuss the death penalty on this blog, because my position is mushy. I'm against the vast majority of executions, but I don't have a clear set of principles to put forward, and I would rather save my effort for injustices with more deserving victims.

A thought-provoking book on the death penalty is Debbie Morris' Forgiving the Dead Man Walking. Morris is a surviving victim of Robert Willie, whose execution inspired the book and movie Dead Man Walking. Willie kidnapped and raped Morris, but she managed to escape before being murdered like Willie's other victims.

Morris became an anti-death-penalty activist, and her book describes the sense of peace she found after she "forgave" Willie, an event of mostly spiritual/psychological significance, because it happened only after Willie's execution. To me, that's what makes the book so thought-provoking: I wonder if Willie being dead played a role in the peace Morris reached, even if she doesn't see it that way.

Morris' situation is one of the rare examples in which I could support the death penalty: when there are traumatized surviving victims who will always be looking over their shoulders as long as the murderer is alive. (Morris testified against Willie, and the one time he briefly escaped from prison, he might have been headed in her direction.)

But the simple desire of surviving friends and relatives for revenge doesn't move me. And I don't think national trauma justifies executions either: Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, is serving Year 47 of his life sentence, and I'm fine with that. I'd be fine with Tsarnaev in prison for the next half-century too.

and Jeb Bush's bad week


He had trouble fielding one of the campaign's most predictable questions: "On the subject of Iraq, knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" After four days with four different answers, he finally found the one he should have been practicing in front of a mirror for months: "I would not have engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq." I discuss all this in detail in one of the featured posts: "2016's Mission Impossible: Support Jeb While Forgetting George".




This week's other 2016 news was best expressed by Gail Collins:
Former ambassador John Bolton announced he would not be running this week, stunning many Americans who had no idea former ambassador John Bolton even existed.

If Donald Trump runs, that will stun many other people who believe he's a fictional TV character.




Also, Marco Rubio spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations on the "three pillars" of his foreign policy:
  • American strength. He called for higher defense spending and making the domestic-spying part of the Patriot Act (Section 215) permanent. I found this statement a bit chilling: "We must never find ourselves looking back after a terrorist attack and saying we could have done more to save American lives." As long as we're not a completely totalitarian state, we could always do more to save American lives.
  • "Protect the economy" through free trade. Rubio inverted the typical usage of the word protect, which usually means protecting American industries from foreign competition. He endorsed TPP and similar trade agreements, and pledged to "use American power to oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace, or outer space."
  • Moral clarity regarding America's core values. He defined those values as: "a passionate defense of human rights, the strong support of democratic principles, and the protection of the sovereignty of our allies". But this is just rhetoric unless he gets down to cases, because those principles are often in conflict. Take the overthrow of Muburak's regime in Egypt, for example. Should we have supported human rights or protected our ally? What if the sexist, autocratic Saudi monarchy faces a revolution?



One piece of Rubio's "moral clarity" is a point that virtually every Republican candidate has voiced: We should not "hesitate in calling the source of atrocities in the Middle East by its real name — radical Islam."

I don't think the Obama administration or its defenders have done a good job explaining why this is such a bad idea. So let me give it a try.

The most important battlefield of the current struggle is inside the minds of Muslim teen-agers, particularly the talented ones who have opportunities in their personal lives. (Anwar al-Awlaki comes to mind. His formative years are recounted in some early chapters of Jeremy Scahill's book Dirty Wars.) They could go to college and become engineers or dentists or something. On the other hand, they could join ISIS or al Qaeda, or do some lone-wolf terrorism wherever they happen to live, like the Tsarnaev brothers.

I know radical Islam sounds terrifying to many Americans, but how does it sound to those kids? For comparison, imagine how radical Christianity sounds to kids growing up Baptist in Georgia or Catholic in Boston. I suspect it sounds like something they should aspire to. So wouldn't it be a huge mistake to tell those Baptist or Catholic kids that the way to be a "radical Christian" is to assassinate doctors and blow up abortion clinics?

Similarly, ISIS recruiters would love to convince Muslim teens around the world that the way to practice radical Islam is to join them. Radical Islam is a term of strategic importance. We should fight ISIS for it, not surrender it to them.

[Slate's William Saletan details how Republican rhetoric about Islam echoes ISIS rhetoric, then comments: "Remind me again who’s naïve."]


Josh Marshall's hindsight on Iraq is more interesting than Jeb Bush's.

and you also might be interested in ...


In a current article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nahisi Coates points out a double-standard in President Obama's rhetoric: He's willing to single out the black community for moral lectures, but
[Y]ou will hear no policy targeted toward black people coming out of the Obama White House, or probably any White House in the near future. That is because the standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. It is not hard to see why that might be the case. Asserting the moral faults of black people tend to gain votes. Asserting the moral faults of their government, not so much. I am sure Obama sincerely believes in the moral invective he offers. But I suspect he believes a lot more about his country which he chooses not to share.

Coates has long argued that since the oppression of black people was very color-conscious, helping them overcome that oppression needs to be color-conscious too (rather than relying on generic anti-poverty programs like Food Stamps). Last year he wrote "The Case for Reparations", which I reviewed.

The current article's most striking quote:
In a country where Walter Scott was shot in the back, where Eric Garner was choked to death, where whole municipalities are—at this very hour — funding themselves through racist plunder, fleeting references to “past injustice” will not do.



Can anybody spot what's wrong with this tweet from the Texas Senate Republican Caucus?



Yes, it's the cross. Apparently, only Christian religious freedom is protected in Texas. But why would anybody outside the majority religion need protection, anyway?




Remember the 20-week abortion ban the House almost passed last January, but pulled after the female representatives they need for cover balked? It's back, and this time it passed.

and let's close with something enviable


Those of us who don't own dogs never get greeted like this.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Sure Signs

The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.

-- Anonymous (or maybe they just don't want us to know who said it)


This week's featured post is "Rating This Week's Craziness". It introduces the Weekly Sift's Crazy Scale, for rating the relative danger posed by the sheer insanity of stories and events that need more than just a debunking.

If you're wondering what I was up to last week when I didn't put out a Sift. I was telling a Unitarian Universalist congregation how Universalism provides a religious unification of a bunch of positions that often get dismissed as "politically correct".

This week everybody was talking about crazy stuff


In addition to the stuff that made it into the featured article, this NYT cartoon summarized a bunch of other crazy-sounding things that are really happening:

and Baltimore


The riots are over and the National Guard is packing up, but Baltimore gave rise to a lot of interesting public discussion (as well as a lot of complete crap).

For one thing, who knew street gangs were this articulate?

The NYT Magazine's "Our Demand is Simple: Stop Killing Us" is well worth your time. So is Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Clock Didn't Start With the Riots", which makes this excellent point:
I read the governor in the New York Times today and he was saying in the paper that—you know, because it’s going to be a big day tomorrow—he was saying “violence will not be tolerated.” And I thought about that as a young man who’s from West Baltimore and grew up in West Baltimore and I thought about how violence was tolerated for all of my life here in West Baltimore. ...

I don’t want to come off as if I’m sympathizing or saying that it is necessarily okay, to inflict violence just out of anger, no matter how legitimate that anger is. But I have a problem when you begin the clock with the violence on Tuesday. Because the fact of the matter is that the lives of black people in this city, the lives of black people in this country have been violent for a long time.

There's a similar problem with all those columns about how street violence is the wrong way to make the point that police violence against already-subdued black men has got to stop. If we call for communities like Baltimore and Ferguson to quiet down, that's got to be coupled with a commitment to start listening when they speak in softer voices. Otherwise we're just saying: "Pipe down to make it easier for me to ignore you."

Larry Wilmore makes this point humorously but effectively in his "Justice for Tamir Rice" piece. Tamar Rice is the 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park near his home, when Cleveland police rolled up and killed him within seconds, all of which was captured on video. Cleveland has been peacefully waiting for some kind of resolution in this case for five months. With a Comedy Central lawyer standing over his shoulder to make sure he doesn't actually call for violence, Wilmore observes that non-confrontation isn't getting anything done.

There's a self-fulfilling pattern here: If violence is the only kind of speech you'll pay attention to, then sooner or later you'll get violence.



Finally, there are all the white pundits saying or writing something along the lines of: We elected Obama to make race relations better, and they've gotten worse. Elspeth Reeve answers that point in The New Republic with "The White Man's Bargain". She starts with an NYT report quoting Republican strategist Rick Wilson:
A number of people “crafted this tacit bargain in their heads,” he said, speaking of Mr. Obama’s election. “This is going to be the end of the ugly parts of racial division in American.”

Reeve then raises this question about the "tacit bargain":
What is being exchanged? Wilson is probably not saying people thought police would stop killing unarmed black kids because Obama was elected. Perhaps instead he is saying people thought black people would stop getting so mad when it happened. What he means is that people (and, let's say this right here: white people) are eager to pay off the whole legacy-of-slavery-and-systemic-racism tab, to finally settle up and not have to think about social justice anymore. Wasn't making a black guy president enough?

She goes through the long history of whites making imaginary bargains, which goes all the way back to slavery. She concludes:
What tacit bargainers have always been asking is: Isn't there something else we can substitute for true equality? The answer is no.

and new presidential candidates


The big political news since the last Sift is that Bernie Sanders is running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. So Hillary won't simply be coronated, and somebody will make the case for real liberalism in this cycle.

I'm trying not to make the Sift all-2016 all-the-time, so I won't get to Bernie's announcement speech until next week. My snap reaction is that everybody left of Hillary should be happy that the primary campaign will keep her from drifting too far right. Beyond that, I need to decide how far my enthusiasm for Bernie should go: Will I vote for him in the New Hampshire primary? If do, is that because I'm making a statement or because I want him to get the nomination? If he did get nominated, would he stand a chance in the general election against, say, Jeb Bush or Scott Walker? Give me another week to think it through.

On the Republican side, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee all joined the race, which is getting unusually crowded. Rick Santorum announced a date for his announcement: May 27. (I don't know why he hadn't previously announced that he was going to announce the date of his announcement. It just came totally out of the blue.)

Again, it will take some time for me to add these candidates to my 2016 speech series. I do have a snap reaction to Carson: I'm not sure he understands his role in the Republican Party, which is to provide cover against accusations of racism, as Herman Cain did in 2012. White audiences can cheer Carson's aggressive and disrespectful criticisms of President Obama without worrying about being called racists.

But as Obama starts to fade from the scene, that role becomes less important. If Carson wants to stay relevant, he'll have to move on to providing cover for more general I'm-not-a-racist-but criticisms of the black community. His path forward is to say things about Baltimore that are more extreme than a white candidate can get away with. I'm not sure he realizes he signed up for that.

Fiorina, meanwhile, is well set up to provide the same service for sexist Republicans who need to trash Hillary. She could easily wind up with the VP nomination.




The religious right has Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz to choose from. But in view of the bad advice God has given his family in the past, it's Jeb Bush who should be pushed to spell out exactly what role God will play in his administration.

and you also might be interested in ...


We're about six weeks from a Supreme Court decision on King v. Burwell, the suit that might make ObamaCare subsidies illegal in about half the country. Congressional Republicans have written in the WaPo "Republicans have a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare" so that millions of people would not instantly lose health insurance.

Unfortunately, only one relatively unimportant committee in the Senate and none in the House have held any public hearings about this plan. As for assembling a coalition in the House to pass it -- the kind of thing John Boehner has not been particularly good at -- there seems to be no motion at all. HuffPost's Jonathan Cohn says what I've been thinking:
the absence of a public effort to match the public rhetoric matters only if Republicans are actually serious about passing a plan. They may not be. Their real goals may be purely cosmetic -- to insulate the party from a political backlash should millions of people suddenly lose health insurance and, more immediately, to ease the anxiety of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, either of whom might hesitate to issue a ruling with such potentially devastating consequences to so many people.

Two weeks ago, I told you about a poll that showed how sensitive opinions on abortion are to how the question is phrased. (You get a more pro-life response if you phrase the question in terms of abstract right-and-wrong, and a more pro-choice response if you phrase it in terms of women's rights.) Wednesday, the NYT's Upshot blog described how poll results about abortion get less polarized as the questions focus on specific cases: Many people who say that abortion should be "illegal in all cases" will nonetheless say it should be legal if the mother will die. Conversely, many people who say it should be "legal in all cases" still think it should be illegal to abort a healthy fetus ready to be born.

That's the extreme edge of a more general phenomenon: People who think they are diametrically opposed to each other on abortion often agree on a lot of specific cases. Apparently, much of the polarization centers on what comes to mind when you hear the word abortion. Do you think of a promiscuous woman who couldn't be bothered to use birth control, and now wants to get rid of a problem-free pregnancy rather than offer a healthy baby to a couple who would give it a good life? Or do you think of woman carrying a child for her rapist, or facing serious health issues?

I think the winning choice-leaning argument goes something like this: Every woman, every family, and every pregnancy is different, so ideally the decision to carry a fetus to term would be made by the people involved, and not by a legislature or a court or a bureaucrat. But the decision to abort becomes more morally weighty the longer the fetus develops, so the law should push women to decide promptly, and demand higher levels of justification for later-term abortions.

Sweden seems to have it about right, in my opinion:
The current legislation is the Abortion Act of 1974 (SFS 1974:595). This states that up until the end of the eighteenth week of the pregnancy the choice of an abortion is entirely up to the woman, for any reason whatsoever. After the 18th a woman needs a permission from the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to have an abortion. Permission for these late abortions is usually granted for cases in which the fetus or mother are unhealthy. Abortion is not allowed if the fetus is viable, which generally means that abortions after the 22nd week are not allowed. However, abortions after the 22nd week may be allowed in the rare cases where the fetus can not survive outside the womb even if it is carried to term.

Wikipedia adds:
The issue is largely settled in Sweden and the question of the legality of abortion is not a highly controversial political issue. ... Consensus in Sweden is in favour of preventing unwanted pregnancies by the use of birth control and the primary goal is not to lower the amount of abortions, but rather the goal is that all children that are born should be wanted.



In the Republican-controlled Congress, climate-change denial is a two-step dance:
  1. Claim that the science isn't settled yet, so more research is necessary before we take any action.
  2. Defund that research.

and let's close with something fantastic

like Key & Peele's musical trip to Negrotown, where you can wear your hoodie and not get shot.