True Love

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

- James Baldwin

This week's featured article is "The Islamic State: Separating Insight from Stereotype".

This week everybody was talking about what the Islamic State wants

It all started with "What ISIS Really Wants" in The Atlantic. The reason that article inspired so much back-and-forth is that it's the hardest kind of article to sort out: one that contains both major insights and major flaws. So I want to encourage you both to learn from it and not to be fooled by it. Hence this week's featured article.

and who loves America

One measure of our democracy's lack of vitality is the triviality of the things we talk about. This week at a Scott Walker event, Rudy Giuliani said:

I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.

Walker avoided committing himself, saying that he doesn't know whether Obama loves America. He also doesn't know whether Obama is Christian.

People who had any substantive vision of their own to put forward wouldn't be talking about stuff like this.

And if we're going to talk about loving America, consider this: After 9-11, President Bush's approval rating shot above 90%, because when the country was threatened, liberals lined up behind a president they didn't like and didn't even necessarily believe had legitimately won the election. How many conservatives love America like that?

and Netanyahu's upcoming speech to Congress

It's really a weird situation: Congress is providing a platform for a foreign leader to campaign for re-election by denouncing American policy. Rabbi David Teutsch has responded with his "first fully public statement criticizing a sitting Israeli government official".

Netanyahu has stated that in coming to speak to Congress, he represents the voice of world Jewry. At best, that claim is a delusion, and at worse, a self-serving lie. There has never been any one person able to speak for world Jewry, an ideologically, theologically, and culturally diverse group of communities. He surely does not speak for me, nor for thousands of active, Jews committed to Israel.

Back when JFK was running for president, anti-Catholic rhetoric said that Catholics couldn't be loyal Americans, because their first loyalty was to the Pope. Anti-Semites say the same thing about American Jews and Israel. This kind of rhetoric from Netanyahu doesn't help. M.J. Rosenberg responds:

If American Jews feel that they are being forced to choose between the United States and Israel, there can be little doubt that they will choose the country they live in and to which they have always been devoted. Netanyahu is playing with fire when he even hints at such a choice.

On the substance of the issue Netanyahu wants to talk about -- a nuclear deal with Iran -- see James Fallows.

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One question that I hope gets raised repeatedly in the 2016 presidential campaign is: Can conservatives acknowledge past mistakes and learn new lessons?

Paul Krugman raised that question with regard to economic policy. He notes that Scott Walker and Rick Perry have been courting the supply-side economics crowd, whose predictions have been consistently wrong for the past eight or nine years: Not only didn't they see the real-estate bubble or the Great Recession coming, but they have spent the Obama years warning about the return of inflation and high interest rates -- the exact opposite of what has been happening.

It also came up this week when Jeb Bush made a lackluster foreign policy speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. (He read the text as if his speechwriters had left it sitting on the podium and he was seeing it for the first time.) His claims to be his "own man" clashed with his list of foreign-policy advisers, nearly all of whom were architects of his father and brother's foreign policy -- including Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney's only rival for the title "The Man Most Consistently Wrong About Iraq".

Krugman sums up:

Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there. ... If anything, alleged experts seem to get points by showing that they’re willing to keep saying the same things no matter how embarrassingly wrong they’ve been in the past.

Whether they share his name or not, Republican presidential candidates (other than maybe Rand Paul) still seem to be running for George W. Bush's third term. Even after eight years to think about it, they have announced no lessons that they have learned from the across-the-board failures of his first two terms.

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Matt Yglesias has a good analysis of the gender wage gap.

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Ben Carson says that all's fair in war. I'm afraid to ask him about love.

OK, that was too flip. What Carson actually did was object to fighting a "politically correct war". Instead, he said: "If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win."

What is lost in this point of view -- and marks Carson as dangerously naive in military affairs -- is that the tactics of war have to serve the objectives of war. If your objectives are more subtle than just "kill everybody and come home", you need rules of engagement, and you need to punish soldiers who break those rules.

and let's close with a simple sex fantasy

Undying Legacies

Did I die?

-- Jon Stewart, 2-11-2015

This week's featured article "When Hate Stays in the Closet" is my attempt to answer some of the more well-intentioned arguments against same-sex marriage.

This week everybody was talking about war

Once in a while, it's instructive to take the long view and consider how different the world is from the one the Founders envisioned. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but makes the the President commander-in-chief. Today, that separation of powers tilts in the President's direction. But originally it tilted towards Congress.

In the Founders' vision, the United States wouldn't have much of a peacetime military. State and local militias would handle smaller-scale stuff like Indian raids, slave uprisings, and criminal gangs -- that's what the 2nd amendment was really about* -- while the federal military would only come into play in the event of a war with a distant power like Britain, France, or Spain. Wars on that scale took a long time to develop, so as long as we had an officers corps to build a larger force around, a big standing army wouldn't be necessary.

Most of the time, then, the President would be commander of not very much. To move towards war, he'd have to ask Congress for a larger military appropriation or to federalize the state militias (a power that Article I, Section 8 assigns to Congress). Probably it would probably say no unless it was ready to declare war.

That's all turned around now. There's huge standing military establishment, which the President needs to be able to put into action instantaneously, without waiting for Congress. (During the Cold War, the Soviet Union could have destroyed most of the country by the time Congress could assemble.) And once hostilities begin, Congress has a hard time refusing to support a war the President has already committed forces to.

So we wind up with after-the-fact debates like the current one about whether Congress should authorize the ongoing air war against ISIL. President Obama has been fighting that war since September, under the authority that he claims was granted by the AUMF Congress passed immediately after 9-11, against

those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

That's kind of a stretch, since ISIL didn't exist in 2001, but might be considered a successor of Al Qaeda. President Obama says he'd ultimately like Congress to repeal that open-ended AUMF and replace it with a narrower authorization. This week he proposed a more specific ISIL authorization, which would include a repeal of the 2002 authorization to use force in Iraq.

Obama's proposal has some good features that I hope will be in any future AUMFs: It's time-limited, for example, so Congress would need to re-authorize it (or not) in three years. But it may still be too broad. Politico has a good discussion of the issues involved.

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* The 2nd amendment starts "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State ..." The NRA thinks that means that in order to maintain their freedom, the People need to have the weapons necessary to rebel against an oppressive central government. But originally it just meant that locally-controlled militias would eliminate the need for a large peacetime army that might tempt a President (or some general) to start a military coup, as Rome's Praetorian Guard often had.

and news anchors, real and otherwise

Jon Stewart announced he is leaving The Daily Show later this year. That inspired a number of tributes and summaries of his 17-year run, prompting Stewart to ask, "Did I die?"

Meanwhile, Brian Williams has been suspended for six months by NBC News, following the revelation that his account of being on a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003 was not true. Subsequently, questions are being raised about his claims that he flew with Seal Team 6, that he was present when the Berlin Wall came down, and that he saw a dead body float by in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Except for the Katrina piece (which seems unlikely, but is not obviously untrue), the questions are not about his news reporting, but about exaggerated accounts of his experiences that he gave later. (His original report of the RPG incident appears to have been accurate: He was in a copter that was behind the one that was hit.) So given what we know so far, NBC's response seems to be based on a Caesar's-wife principle: The public ought to be able to trust everything that NBC's news anchor says, no matter where he says it.

Humorist P. J. O'Rourke was a little less outraged, and observed that all correspondents tell tall tales about the dangers they've faced.

Welcome, Brian Williams, to the International Association of Guys Who’ve Been to War – And Lied About It Later in the Bar. (I.A.G.W.B2W. -- L.A.I.L.) Membership includes everybody who’s been to war or near a war or in rough proximity to something that is remotely comparable to the dangers and hazards of war, such a being a teenage volunteer fireman who saved puppies from a smoky building.

A more biting response came from Scott Long at Mondoweiss:

What I don’t get is why this is an issue. Williams made up a story. But he was in the middle of the most fantastic made-up story in American history. The Iraq war, written by Bush with a little help from Tony Blair and Micronesia and Poland, was a gigantic fiction, as beautifully told and expressive of the moment’s cultural mythology as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, or A Million Little Pieces, or Three Cups of Tea. The reasons were fake, the goals were fake, the triumph was fake. Nothing was true except the dead people, who aren’t talking. The war countered imaginary threats and villainies with imaginary victories and valor. Williams added his embroidery in the spirit of invention. Why are the other tale-spinners turning on him now?

Or, as Jon Stewart put it:

I am happy. Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War. Finally. Now, it might not necessarily be the first person you'd want held accountable on that list. But never again will Brian Williams mislead this great nation about being shot at in a war we probably wouldn't have ended up in if the media had applied this level of scrutiny to the actual f--king war.

What will we do without you, Jon?

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This is a good time to look back at Atlantic's discussion of why there's no conservative Jon Stewart. It's a little more complicated than just the observable fact that conservatives aren't funny, but not a lot more complicated.

and a government shutdown

When the 2014 elections completed the Republican takeover of Congress, a lot of ink was spilled about governing responsibly and not playing chicken with government shutdowns.

Well, now John Boehner is starting to talk about shutting down the government. Not the whole thing, just the part that keeps us safe.

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Not all of us in New England are as happy about the weather as the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore was when he recorded thundersnow -- or as happy as the toddler who watched him do it.

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Science is still too suspicious an activity for a Republican presidential candidate to associate himself with. Asked if he believed in the theory of evolution, Scott Walker replied "I'm going to punt on that one."

Here's a question I'd like to ask every candidate who courts the Religious Right: "Do you believe we are in the end times described in the Book of Revelation?" And if the answer is yes, follow up with: "How will that affect your foreign policy? In particular, if events in the Middle East seemed headed towards the Battle of Armageddon that heralds the return of Christ, would you regard that as a good thing or a bad thing?"

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Bad Astronomy explains why the adjustments scientists make to temperature data are just good science, and not the "scandal" that global-warming deniers claim.

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Authorities are still trying to figure out whether the murder of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, NC was a hate crime or not. The alleged shooter's alleged Facebook page is full of anti-religious stuff, but a quick scan didn't reveal anything uglier than what comes across my news feed every day from people who don't seem particularly dangerous. I didn't see any threats of violence or Muslims-must-die messages. Neither did atheist blogger Michael Nugent, who has done a more thorough search.

Still, the idea of an self-described "anti-theist" turning violent has captured the dark side of the public imagination (and promoted some introspection among atheists). For example, what happens if someone takes literally a text cherry-picked from, say, Sam Harris' The End of Faith:

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

(The quote is really there, but the link argues -- I'm not sure how convincingly -- that it isn't nearly so bad in its larger context.)

Secularist groups (including a local one I have spoken to and am a not-terribly-active member of) have been debating whether to issue a statement denouncing hate crimes against believers, or whether such statements might cement the public's speculative interpretation that this really was an atheist hate crime. On the flip side, I'm not aware of any atheist group that has endorsed the murders. (I'm sure that would make headlines, so I'll go out on a limb and say it hasn't happened.)

Whatever the facts turn out to be, one lesson to draw from this is that there are violent people in every religious and/or political movement. If you yourself are non-violent and see the essence of your movement as non-violent, it stings to suddenly feel like the public is picking out that one lunatic to be the poster boy who represents you.

If you've ever had that experience, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The next time somebody from a different religious/political group does something horrible, don't hold everybody from that group responsible -- or cherry-pick the movement's favorite texts to find justifications.

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Meanwhile, somebody burned down a Muslim school in Houston.

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TPM's Ed Kilgore sees the religious-right's freak-out over President Obama's prayer breakfast remarks as an attack on liberal Christianity in general.

and let's close with something amazing

Linsey Pollack shows TedxSydney how to turn a carrot into a clarinet. (Why do I think this is harder than he makes it look?)

Sanctifying Power

Christianity did not "cause" slavery, anymore than Christianity "caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates,
"The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech" (2-6-2015)

This week's featured post is "The Individual and the Herd".

This week everybody was talking about vaccinations

The week was a lesson in the unpredictability of presidential campaigns. When Chris Christie planned his trip to London, it probably never occurred to him that the headline would be his comments on vaccinations, or that before it was all said and done, just about all the other Republican hopefuls would have to respond.

In "The Individual and the Herd" I discuss what I think is really behind this argument: Many Republicans want to use an extremist rhetoric of individual freedom without being willing to go where it leads. In particular, you can't understand public health without looking at things from the point of view of society and the public good. If all you can see are individual trees, any discussion about the health of the forest is going to go over your head.

But, politics of the issue aside, there really is a measles problem developing. We had this disease beaten, and now we don't.



And let's face it: To the extent that we are unable to come to terms with public-health and public-good problems like this, we're uncivilized. The rest of the world sees this clearly.

and Christian/Muslim history

Thursday, at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama gave a wonderful talk that I recommend everyone read. You can skip past the loosening-the-room-up humor to where he starts to get serious: "And certainly for me, this is always a chance to reflect on my own faith journey."

Several times (most recently two weeks ago) I've focused on the difference between liberal religion and fundamentalist religion. One aspect of that difference is summed up in a quote often attributed to President Lincoln:

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.

In fundamentalism, it's obvious which side is God's: It's all spelled out very clearly in a "literal" interpretation of scripture. So there's no problem problem going to extremes, because you begin with 100% certainty.

But in liberal religion, how to bring the spirit of your faith into the nitty-gritty of human experience is always a bit mysterious, and you constantly have to re-examine your actions and motives to be sure you're still getting it right. That's what Obama is talking about:

We should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt -- not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

He goes on in that vein, in a way that I find beautiful.

But you'd never know that from the public discussion of his talk, which focused on this small excerpt, one that comes right after Obama has criticized ISIL and "those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends":

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

That statement is entirely accurate historically. But Christian-good/Muslim-bad is a central tenet of American conservatism these days, so this response from former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore was far too typical:

The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime. He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.

Apparently one value Gilmore thinks "we all share" is to regard whatever story makes us feel good as "history", no matter what actually happened. And he's right: Obama doesn't believe in that. But neither do I or a lot of other Americans ... or even a lot of "believing Christians".

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The theory that Islam is an inherently violent religion runs head-on into a study showing that the murder rates in Muslim countries are much lower than in non-Muslim countries.

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Some secularists segued from Obama's criticism of Christianity to a denunciation of religion in general: They all have been used to justify wars and atrocities at one time or another, so they should all be done away with.

This is where I think the Ta-Nehisi Coates quote at the top of this post fits in: People seeking power or exercising power are always going to justify what they do in whatever way things get justified in their culture. (Stalinists used to describe their version of Marxism as "scientific" and make reference to the "laws of History" rather than the will of God.) For most of history, that's meant justification in religious terms. But getting rid of religion wouldn't change the underlying dynamic. Rationalization will use whatever tools are at hand.

And religiously-justified atrocities are never going to convince ordinary people stop practicing religion. It's like drinking alcohol: If you regularly enjoy a glass of wine at dinner without it ever leading to anything horrible, hearing about drunk drivers who kill innocent children or alcoholics who wreck their own lives isn't going to persuade you to stop. Your own positive experiences are always going to trump horror stories about somebody else.

and the budget

From the news coverage, you'd never know that President Obama has proposed a budget for the next fiscal year. It fleshes out some of the ideas he floated in the State of the Union, like free community college and a middle-class tax break. Given that Republicans control Congress, the Obama budget probably isn't going anywhere. But Paul Ryan's budgets have also been doomed the last few years, and they got quite a bit of coverage.

The Dealbook blog at the NYT highlights Obama's corporate tax reform proposal, and explains why no corporate tax reform is likely to be passed, no matter how much each party calls for it.

The basic idea of corporate tax reform is simple: Compared to other countries we have a high nominal corporate tax rate, but the tax code also has so many special breaks in it that few corporations (and really few large corporations) pay anything like the nominal rate. (According to Citizens for Tax Justice, when you aggregate the years 2008-2012, General Electric, Verizon, and Boeing paid a negative tax rate on their very large profits.) In theory, American business in general would benefit if we could lower the nominal rate while getting rid of loopholes.

The problem is, neither party really wants to do that. Democrats mainly want to reverse the long-term slide in the percentage of revenue the government gets from corporations, while Republicans want revenue to slide further. The corporations whose campaign contributions call the tune in Congress just want to pay less tax; preferably they'd get lower tax rates and more loopholes. Or maybe the loopholes could go away temporarily and then get put right back in.

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Rick Perry's case for becoming president rests on his record in Texas, which he says created 1/3 of all the new jobs in America during his tenure, and claims as proof that his keep-taxes-low and get-government-out-of-the-way policies work. Another view, though, is that he was governor of an oil state during a time of high oil prices. Now oil prices have fallen, so it will be interesting to see if the Texas "miracle" continues.

The collapse of oil prices is happening on his successor's watch, though, so Perry may be able to avoid blame for the consequences. But Louisiana's Bobby Jindal is not so lucky. He's still governor, his state is still largely dependent on oil, and it faces a projected $1.6 billion deficit in the coming year, caused partly by the big tax cuts he pushed through during the boom part of the boom-and-bust cycle. Jindal's presidential prospects will end if he raises taxes, and Louisiana already ranks near the bottom of all states in per capita education and health-care spending (and in results; the people of Louisiana are relatively unhealthy and uneducated, compared to other states), so it will be interesting to see what he does.

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It looks like that Oregon bakery is going to have to pay damages to the same-sex couple it refused to make a wedding cake for. (The amount is still to be determined.) Salon's Gabriel Arana is not sympathetic.

At heart, what the religious right is asking for with its “religious liberty” campaign is to rewrite our secular code to allow the practice of refusing service to members of society for no substantive reason other than to express moral disapproval. They are unlikely to succeed. That’s because this is a debate we’ve already had and settled. ... As a society, we decided, after more than a century of wrangling, that our civic code required citizens to treat each other equally in the arenas of commerce, housing and public accommodations—even if your religion says you don’t have to, or that you shouldn’t.

... The problem with these [anti-gay religious liberty] bills is that it’s impossible to write them in a way that doesn’t also uphold the right to discriminate against people on the basis of race; you either have to use broad language to write the bill so it can’t be construed as singling out gay people, or specify that all other forms of discrimination are bad except discrimination against gays.

These attempts to write prejudice into our civic code will fail. We long ago decided the mantle of religion does not override our basic duty to be decent to one another.

and let's close with something creative

Steven Benedict did a smash-up of lines from Coen brothers movies to create a conversation. As he describes it:

The characters talk to one another across the films so we can more clearly hear the Coens’ dominant concerns: identity, miscommunication and morality. Taken as a trinity, these elements indicate that the Coens’ true subject is the search for value in a random and amoral universe.

Drive It Home

When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

-- Julian Sanchez, "Chait Speech"

This week's featured post is "The Liberal-on-Liberal Debate Over Political Correctness".

If you're in the area, you can hear me speak next Sunday at First Parish Church in Billerica, Massachusetts. I'll be talking more about religion than politics, but some of you may find it interesting.

This week everybody was talking about political correctness

Jonathan Chait's "Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say" should be written up in textbooks as an example of how to make yourself the center of an argument on the internet. It's simple:

• Start with a controversial topic, preferably one centering on a buzzword that different people use differently.
• Take a position your usual friends will hate and your usual enemies will love.
• Don't do a particularly good job, so that the people who hate what you say have a lot to work with.
• Make sure there's a legitimate point somewhere in the background, so that the people who agree with that point will have to come rescue it, even if they don't want to rescue you.

I am in awe of the master. And I collect some of the best points people made (and at least one bad one) in "The Liberal-on-Liberal Debate Over Political Correctness".

and in Europe, Greece was the word

A quote that's been attributed to various people at various times goes something like this:

If I owe a million dollars and can't pay, I am lost. If I owe a billion dollars and can't pay, the banker is lost.

That's usually when some government steps in with a bail-out. It may look like the debtor is getting bailed out, but really the rescue helicopter is coming for the banker.

The illusion that the debtor is the beneficiary, though, is usually used to get some concessions out of him. But if the conditions of the bail-out are too harsh, eventually the debtor starts asking, "What exactly am I getting out of this?"

That's more-or-less what happened in the recent Greek elections, where the left-wing party Syriza won, making its leader, Alexis Tsipras the new prime minister. The new government is giving hints in both directions, saying sometimes that its creditors will just have to write off some of its debt, and at others that it will pay everything off.

An even more interesting question is whether the revolt of voters in debt-ridden countries against the bankers will spread to larger European countries like, say, Spain, where the local left-wing party held this demonstration:

and 2016

As recently as last week, I was making fun of people who wanted to talk about 2016 already. But now Republicans are out there in front of real audiences of activists and donors, trying out their stump speeches and seeing if they can raise some interest.

The conservative activists were at the Iowa Freedom Summit. You can watch the YouTubes of the speeches. I thought Ted Cruz did a good job staking his claim as the true leader of the anti-Obama movement. Scott Walker impressed a lot of people, and is rumored to be the first choice of establishment donors who want a new face rather than, say, Jeb Bush. I thought Rick Perry did surprising well. Maybe his problem in 2011 really was that medication for his back made him ditzy. (What's Sarah Palin's explanation for her disjointed speech? The model Jonathan Korman presented in 2013, using the Orwellian term duckspeak, seems to work better and better all the time.)

Meanwhile, the Koch Brothers were putting on the invitation-only Freedom Partners candidate forum to help its network of donors decide who to support. It was mostly behind closed doors, but the discussion among Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul was public (transcript). And if you want to see the full influence of big-money donors on today's politics, watch Rubio, Cruz, and Paul tiptoe around the idea that big-money donors might have too much influence.

We even have a poll out of Iowa now, showing Scott Walker in the lead with an I-guess-that's-formidible 15%. And Marco Rubio won the straw poll at the Koch event.

And finally, Mitt called it quits on a third run for the presidency, which started a rush to claim his donors, most of whom are believed to be shifting to Jeb Bush. Among my friends, I hear people starting to panic about a third Bush presidency. But I remember how inevitable Rick Perry seemed for a brief moment in 2011. Money matters, but performance on the campaign trail also matters. There's a long way to go.

and the weather

Well over two feet of snow here, and more falling as I type. I loved this tweet from Ringo Starr.

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Is it wrong for me to enjoy watching Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin snipe at each other?

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As a New Englander and a Patriots fan, it's best I say as little as possible about the Super Bowl. But Matt Yglesias has a plausible explanation of what Pete Carroll was thinking when he called that pass.

And you don't have to be a football fan at all to appreciate the night Malcolm Butler had. Beginning the year as an undrafted rookie (i.e., a player nobody really wanted), he was first the victim of one of the craziest bounces in Super Bowl history, and then (two plays later) the guy who won the game.

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Last year in "What Should 'Racism' Mean?" I recalled a a series of examples to illustrate this claim:

There’s a type of faux scandal that’s been happening … well, I haven’t exactly kept track, but it seems like there’s a new one every month or two. They all fit this pattern: President Obama does something that symbolically asserts his status as president, and the right-wing press gets outraged by how he’s “disrespecting” something-or-other related to the presidency.

Well, this week we had another one: The flap over Michelle not covering her head at King Abdullah's funeral. Nobody much cared when Laura Bush left her head uncovered in the conservative Muslim kingdom.

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Guillotine bait: A guy who got rich shorting subprime mortgages says

America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence.

Naturally, he doesn't mean himself. His own five mansions aren't going anywhere.

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Vox does one of its 3-minute explanations about what's wrong with American Sniper.

and let's close with the best school-cancellation announcement ever

The Moses Brown School of Providence, Rhode Island, did a parody of Frozen's "Let it Go". If you're a kid with an unexpected day off school, the cold never bothered you anyway.