The Amazing Idiot Asshole Identifier

If you need to select who the dumbest asshole in a particular group is, let rural people vote on it.

Trump's Poorly Educated Voters May Be Key In Rust Belt

Wall Street Journal:

For now, Mr. Trump leads the GOP race in convention delegates and states won, largely built on a cadre of supporters—mostly white and without college degrees—who are angry about economic stagnation and are drawn to his aggressive immigration proposals, among other stances.
Some demographers and political analysts say Mr. Trump, if he wins the nomination, may boost voting rates among white, working-class residents in states where their turnout was low in 2008 and 2012. These include Pennsylvania and upper Midwest states such as Michigan, although a Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Marist poll released Sunday showed Mr. Trump trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton in that state by 17 percentage points in a potential general-election matchup. The upper Midwest is diversifying more slowly than the nation as a whole.
Some two million fewer whites voted in 2012 than in 2008, census data show. Turnout among white, non-Hispanic voters fell from 67% nationally in President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election bid to 66% and 64% in the following two cycles...
States that saw a downturn in white voting rates in recent years included those in the Rust Belt where a majority of eligible voters are whites without a college degree, an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey found. These included Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. Analysts commonly use lack of a college degree to designate voters as working-class or blue-collar.
Some strategists say the falloff in white turnout rates reflects a relative lack of enthusiasm for recent GOP presidential nominees. A candidate such as Mr. Trump, they suggest, could boost turnout rates among working-class, white voters, who as a group have increasingly favored GOP candidates....
In 125 counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—more than half of all counties—the share of white residents without college degrees was higher than the state average, census data reviewed by the Journal show. In 94 of those counties, or 75%, voter turnout was below the state average—in some cases, far below.
In Lawrence County, Ohio, 53% of registered voters cast ballots in 2012, according to the secretary of state, well below the statewide average of 70.5%. In Fayette County, Pa., turnout was 53%, well below the statewide average of 67.6%. In both counties, nearly three-quarters of voting-age residents are whites without college degrees.
The numbers suggest that tens of thousands of nonvoting residents remain available to be moved to the polls—if a candidate is able to motivate them.

I would expect voters in Mercer, Auglaize and Shelby Counties, which are highlighted on the map as high turnout, low percentage of college degree counties, to probably support Cruz over Trump.  However, with Kasich in the mix, things will be interesting.

Fog Begins To Lift On Flint Water Crisis

Motor City Muckraker:

The Flint water crisis that led to thousands of people being poisoned began because state officials maintained it would save the cash-strapped city money by disconnecting from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) and using a different source.
But it turns out, DWSD offered the state-controlled city a deal that would have saved Flint more money by staying with Detroit.
An e-mail obtained by Motor City Muckraker shows the deal would have saved the city $800 million over 30 years, which was 20% more inexpensive than switching to the Karegnondi Water Authority.
A high-ranking DWSD official told us today that Detroit offered a 50% reduction over what Flint had been paying Detroit. In fact, documents show that DWSD made at least six proposals to Flint, saying “the KWA pipeline can only be attributed to a ‘political’ objective that has nothing to do with the delivery – or the price – of water.”...
“When compared over the 30 year horizon the DWSD proposal saves $800 million dollars or said differently – saves 20% over the KWA proposal,” then-DWSD Director Sue McCormick said in the e-mail dated April 15, 2013....
Then-state Treasurer Andy Dillon signed off on the KWA deal in April 2013, which ultimately led to the emergency manager deciding to draw water from the Flint River until the city connected to a new regional system....

Saying he was sorry for the mistake, Snyder pledged full transparency during his State of the State address last week and released e-mails related to the water crisis from 2014 and 2o15. Curiously, he refused to release e-mails from 2013, which would have showed why state officials decided to make the switch from DWSD to the KWA.

Now it seems clear why Snyder wouldn’t release the e-mails: They would have revealed that the switch was not about saving money.

So what was it about? Some have suggested that Snyder was motivated by a desire to break up DWSD and ultimately privatize it. In the summer of 2015, DWSD was split into two entities: the DWSD and the Great Lakes Water Authority.

When I first heard of the problems with the Flint water supply, and found out the city, under an emergency manager, had decided to build a pipeline to get water independently of the city of Detroit, my first thought was that the state was trying to put pressure on the DWSD to force them to turn control of the water system over to the suburban counties.  However, some of the information presented, like DWSD cutting off Flint when they announced the intention to build the pipeline, and leading to the city switching to the Flint River as a water source, tended to undermine that theory.  Now we see that there is probably more to that possibility, although I fear, like with the actual motivations for engaging in the Iraq war, we'll never fully know the truth.

However, based on what I can see from looking at a map, and trying to think logically, I think I'm starting to understand how this played out.  Looking at a map of the Detroit water system, and reading about where the proposed water line was going to go, I just don't understand how the new project could have been cheaper than what Flint already had:

 map of proposed pipeline compared to existing DSWD system

According to Wikipedia, the proposed pipeline originates on the St. Clair-Sanilac County line, just north of the existing water plant which currently served Flint.  The Wikipedia article also indicated that Flint bought the water from the DWSD, then supplied it to Genesee County.  I can only see justification for building the new water line if, A) it resulted in cheaper water for Lapeer and Genesee County, and B) put pressure on DWSD to agree to privatization or handing control over to Oakland and Macomb Counties.  There is no way in hell that you could build a new treatment plant and a new pipeline that would be cheaper than the existing system, with or without surcharges from Detroit.  Apparently, there was some discussion of that at the time of the deal.  Once Detroit proposed a better deal, the Flint pipeline was dead in the water. 

But taking a step back, it would appear that DWSD was a major player in the decline of the city of Detroit.  The system's expansion fed the development of the suburbs which killed the city.  Those suburbs pretend to be better than the city, but they wouldn't exist without it.  Like every major metropolitan area, the suburbs have benefited by robbing the city of high income residents while leaving the city to get by serving a much smaller, poorer citizenry.  It has gutted the core cities, and if there is any justice in the world, it will destroy those suburbs, too.

Let's Not Jump To Conclusions

CNN:

What moved a man to kill three people and wound nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado has not been disclosed. But the suspect accused of carrying out the shooting spree, Robert Lewis Dear, made remarks about "baby parts" to investigators after his surrender, a law enforcement official told CNN.

Dear, 57, told them he has anti-abortion and anti-government views, but that doesn't mean those opinions were his motive for allegedly shooting up the Colorado Springs clinic on Friday, the official said. It's too early to tell, as investigators are still processing evidence.

Well, Occam's Razor could probably be used to determine what motivated the shooter, but it doesn't appear that Ted Cruz is using it:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is the latest presidential candidate trying to downplay the role anti-abortion rhetoric may have played in motivating the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs Friday afternoon. When a reporter asked him at an Iowa campaign stop Sunday evening about suspect Robert Lewis Dear saying he was motivated by “no more baby parts,” Cruz countered that he’s also been reported to be a “transgendered [sic] leftist activist.”
Cruz explained, “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” This discrepancy on Dear’s voter registration was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, a self-described “right-of-center news website,” under the claim that he “identifies as [a] woman.” Conservatives have since run with the claim that Dear is transgender.
There is actually no evidence to suggest that he is transgender, nor a “leftist,” nor any kind of activist. In fact, all of the available information suggests he was none of those things....The Times’ profile also identifies him as “generally conservative,” having been raised as a Baptist, but as someone who did not discuss politics much. According to his ex-wife, “he believed wholeheartedly in the Bible” and believed that abortion was wrong. He also distributed pamphlets criticizing President Obama to his neighbors in Colorado. On the voter registration form with the gender discrepancy, his party is listed as “UAF,” meaning unaffliated.

I'll bet against that transgender theory.  I'll also bet against the theory that Ted Cruz isn't a slimy, manipulative charlatan who pretends to be religious.

University of Dayton Football vs. the Ku Klux Klan

Tom Archdeacon had a great story yesterday about how the UD football team busted up a Klan gathering meant to intimidate students, teachers and administrators at the Catholic school at the height of the Klan's strength in the 1920s:

According to a 1920 census, 28 percent of Dayton’s population was either foreign born or had foreign-born parents. Most were from central, southern and eastern Europe and the majority were Catholic.
Add to that the growing prominence of the University of Dayton — which had changed its name in 1920 from St. Mary’s College — and you had a Catholic presence in the city that became a real target for a xenophobic, white Protestant hate group.
During that time it was estimated that Ohio had the most Klan members of any state. Summit County was said to have the largest chapter in the United States, some 50,000 members who included the county sheriff, the Akron mayor, several judges and county commissioners and most people on the Akron school board.
Licking County used to host the Klan’s state conventions at Buckeye Lake, annual affairs that regularly drew over 70,000 people.
Dayton, Trollinger discovered, was one of six cities in the nation to be designated Klan-friendly ‘’hooded capitals.” There were said to be 15,000 Klan members here and while they often held rallies around the city, nothing matched that crowd that poured into the Fairgrounds on Sept. 21, 1923.
I went through microfilm copies of the newspapers from back then and found several stories on the rally that drew some 32,000 to the fairgrounds.
“Dayton Mecca For Meeting of Klansmen” read the front page headline in the Dayton Evening Herald.
Special trains brought thousands of participants to town.
There was a massive parade up Main Street from the fairgrounds through downtown to the river and back again. The sidewalks were filled with cheering crowds who watched the spectacle that included:
Some 25 robed and masked men on horseback, a white-robed 70-piece Klan band and numerous floats including one by the Junior KKK and some representing area schoolhouses. Klan contingents from as close as Springfield and Middletown, as well as Mercer, Miami, Warren and Greene counties marched in the parade alongside groups from as far away as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana.
Once back at the fairgrounds, a masked keynote speaker addressed the crowd. According to newspaper reports, he hammered home the same themes that again are popular with certain politicians today.
He warned of “the hordes of (immigrants) coming to these shores” and how the Klan was the one to stop all that....

One day, UD's football coach got a jump on the Klan:

Baujan recounted how he had gotten tipped that the Klan was coming to campus and was going to burn crosses on a hill in Woodland Cemetery just across the street from the school.
As Trollinger wrote, Baujan said he went “to the halls and called out my biggest football players.” He brought them to the cemetery and told them to wait until the Klan gathered around their burning cross and then to “take after them” and “tear their shirts off … or anything else you want to do.”
The Klan saw the football boys coming and ran through the cemetery without getting caught.
Baujan told Gaudet that soon after he was downtown and “some fellows at the Dayton Noon Luncheon Club” admitted they had been “among the Klan members who had been chased.”
He said “one of the best ones” was a well-known referee who regularly worked Dayton football games.

Notre Dame had a similar fight with the Klan back at that time.  It is hard to believe how almost nobody knows that the Ku Klux Klan, in its anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew incarnation in the 1920s, was a massive organization which essentially ran the Republican party in a number of states.  The Klan was allied to the Womens' Christian Temperance Union in support of Prohibition.  These groups were able to retain political power by preventing the 1920 census from being used to reapportion Congressional districts.  This would have yielded power to rapidly growing cities which favored the end of Prohibition, and granted equal representation to the large Catholic and Jewish immigrant populations these groups detested.  It is one of the less impressive periods in American history.

A More Perfect Union

Ferguson: An Extreme Example of Our Misplaced Economic Priorities

The Atlantic:

Outwardly, at least, the City of Ferguson would appear to occupy an enviable position. It is home to a Fortune 500 firm [Emerson Electric]. It has successfully revitalized a commercial corridor through its downtown. It hosts an office park filled with corporate tenants. Its coffers should be overflowing with tax dollars.
Instead, the cash-starved municipality relies on its cops and its courts to extract millions in fines and fees from its poorest residents, issuing thousands of citations each year. Those tickets plug a financial hole created by the ways in which the city, the county, and the state have chosen to apportion the costs of public services. A century or more of public-policy choices protect the wallets of largely white business and property owners and pass the bills along to disproportionately black renters and local residents. It's easy to see the drama of a fatal police shooting, but harder to understand the complexities of municipal finances that created many thousands of hostile encounters, one of which turned fatal.....How can all this be happening in a community that is home to a Fortune 500 company? Why is the city government filling out its budget with municipal court fines when Emerson Electric is doing $24 billion a year in business out of its headquarters on West Florissant Avenue?...
But Ferguson is extraordinarily constrained in its ability to pay for the services that its residents require. Municipal tax revenue is limited by the Missouri constitution. In 1980, Representative Mel Hancock—the founder of a group called the Taxpayer Survival Association—wrote an amendment that required any increase of local taxes, licenses, or fees to be approved by a citywide referendum, with very few exceptions. Along with gun-license fees, which are explicitly exempted from the provisions of the “Hancock Amendment,” municipal fines provide Missouri cities with one of the few sources of revenue they can expand without a referendum.
The Hancock Amendment, like similar laws in other states, radically constrains the possibilities of municipal governance. Unable to raise tax rates, many municipal governments have only one tool at their disposal: lowering them. They cannot raise money, but they can give it away.
Take Emerson Electric. On July 27, 2009, Emerson opened a brand-new $50 million flagship data center on its Ferguson campus. Subsequent press reports about the data center were filled with numbers: 100 dignitaries at the ribbon cutting, including Missouri Governor Jay Nixon; 35,000 square feet; 550 solar panels; $100,000 in annual energy savings for the company; ability to withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake. They noted how many people Emerson employed globally, nationally, and in the St. Louis metropolitan area, although the number of people who might eventually be employed in the new data center itself was hard to find.
In fact, a state-of-the art data center might eventually employ about two dozen people, none of whom were guaranteed to live in (or anywhere near) Ferguson...
In 2014, the assessed valuation of real and personal property on Emerson’s entire 152-acre, seven-building campus was roughly $15 million. That value has gone up and down over the last five years as Emerson has sold off some buildings and built others, but it has not exceeded $15 million in the period since the data center was completed. So what happened to that brand-new $50 million dollar building?
One explanation would be if Emerson had received a Chapter 353 “local real property tax abatement” to support the construction of the building....Even after a 2013 property tax increase (from $0.65 to the state-maximum $1 per $100 of assessed value), Ferguson received an estimated $68,000 in property taxes from the corporate headquarters that occupies 152 acres of its tax base—not even enough to pay the municipal judge and his clerk to hand out the fines and sign the arrest warrants.

Read the entire article.  The massive efforts to keep communities segregated, the giveaways to corporations, developers and other monied interests, the shifting of the tax burden onto the poorest members of the community: they are all just extreme examples of how our society has been structured to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.  I really thought that the Great Recession would make it clear to everybody that these policies had to end.  I believed it would be obvious that a consumption-based economy wouldn't function when consumers couldn't afford to keep consuming.  I was wrong.  In the face of obvious signs that we'd been doing almost everything wrong in our economy for 30 years, conservatives, who somehow managed to take control of more of the state and local governments than they had when they drove the economy into the ground (mainly because the wealthy, the elderly and rural whites vote much more frequently than urban dwellers, the young and minorities) have doubled down on the failed policies that increased inequality and eroded the middle class.  Ferguson, St. Louis County and Missouri are extreme examples of what happens when these failed policies are given free rein, but they are by no means the only examples.  Any state with a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature is putting similar policies in place: handing our corporate welfare, cutting income taxes and increasing sales taxes and other regressive forms of revenue, such as fines and fees.  Spending on education is capped, or funneled to privately-run charter schools and well-off suburban schools at the expense of urban and rural districts.  Infrastructure spending is put off.  Public worker pensions are underfunded and starved to the point of insolvency.  Programs supporting the ever-growing cadre of poor citizens are cut. But income taxes can always be cut (which always return the largest amounts to the wealthiest citizens who have no need for it), and tax giveaways are always available for "economic development."  These policies will continue to lead to greater inequality, and will continue to trigger demonstrations and riots, like we saw last year in Ferguson, and today in Baltimore.  Our government for the rich at the expense of the poor is reaching the breaking point.  Can we change the system before it gets burned down?

A Final St. Patrick's Day Link

John Dolan, on how the Irish ended a WASP effort to enshrine Twelfth of July parades in New York City.  I thought this portion of the article was really fascinating:

“The average Catholic Irishman of the first generation, as represented in the [New York State] Assembly … [is a] low, venal, corrupt, and unintelligent brute.”

That was Teddy Roosevelt in 1885.
The stats are unbelievable, and would shut the mouths of America’s current crop of skin-color (as opposed to European-style tribal/sectarian) racists, if those morons could read. Here are some samples of what the Famine Irish got up to when they hit the streets of NYC:

55% of those arrested NYC in the 1850′s were Irish-born
35% of the prostitutes arrested in NYC in 1858 were Irish-born.
70% of all admissions to Bellevue Hospital (NYC’s public hospital) in the 1850s were Irish
85% of foreign-born admissions to Bellevue Hospital (NYC’s public hospital) in the 1850s were Irish
63% of foreign-born admissions to the NYC Alms House (Poor House) 1849-1858 were Irish
56% of all prison NYC Prison commitments in 1858 were Irish-born
74% of foreign-born prison NYC Prison commitments in 1858 were Irish-born
70% of persons convicted of disorderly conduct NYC Courts of Special Sessions, 1859,  were Irish-born
74% of persons convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct NYC Courts of Special Sessions, 1859, were Irish-born

All that horror bubbled over a few times, sometimes shamefully, as in the Draft Riots of 1863. Like a lot of populist rage, it started well enough, with resentment of buyable draft exemptions, but turned about as bad as it gets, with mobs of drunken Irish pigs chasing down African-Americans and beating them to death. Misery doesn’t ennoble, and oppression doesn’t fucking teach any-fucking-body any-fucking-thing.

The whole thing is worth reading, if, for nothing else, people remember how hated Catholics were in this country back in the day.  Keep that in mind when you hear Catholic politicians talking about other immigrants, whether Latin American Catholics or Middle Eastern Muslims.  Goddamn historically ignorant bigots.

They Really Are Slow Learners in The Deep South

As if they were out to prove Alabama didn't learn a damn thing from the Civil War or the battle for civil rights, Judge Roy Moore and crew decided to pretend they could overrule the federal courts.  Again.  What a fucking shithole.  They are really taking any flexibility the Supreme Court could have had out of their hands.  Looks like Alabama will have to be put in its place.  Again.  Exhibit A against states rights.  Again. 

Halloween / All Saints Weekend Reads

Some interesting stories to browse:

No Guarantee of Safety: Inside the Belgrade Derby - SBNation

Horned and Dangerous: How Defensive Guru Gary Patterson Built College Football's Most Prolific Offense at TCU - Grantland

Candy Corn Is Garbage - Deadspin.  Haters gonna hate.  I disagree.  Some candy corn history here.

A Rare Peek Inside the Factory Where Ferraris are Born - Wired. See also, Amazing Things Happen When Texans Get Their Hands On Ferraris - Business Insider

The Biggest Ship in the World (Though It Isn't Exactly a Ship) - New York Times

It's Not Just Tang: NASA's widespread influence on everyday design - Medium

The little-know Soviet space mission to rescue a dead space station - Ars Technica

The Great Paper Caper - GQ.  The greatest counterfeiter ever?

One of Us - Boston Magazine. Growing up black in Southie.

The Lowe's Robot and the Future of Service Work - The New Yorker.  Sure this won't eliminate jobs.  Tell me another one.

John Maynard Keynes is the Economist the World Needs Now - Businessweek.  Germans and Republicans disagree, to the detriment of all.

How Dark Money Got a Mining Company Everything It Wanted - Pacific Standard

Even Israel's Best Friends Understand That It Is Disconnecting From Reality - Jeffrey Goldberg

Mississippi's Race to the Bottom - Slate

Democrats Lose Their Grip on Voters With Keys to the House - Wall Street Journal.  It's always about the welfare and the brown people when it comes to rural whites.  The chart tells me that it probably won't matter much in the not-too-distant future.  It still depresses the hell out of me that so many decent, rural folks are so virulently racist.

Map of the Day

From FiveThirtyEight:

Republicans have missed their chance to get ahead of this wave, so they will continue to look like hateful bigots when it has been obvious which way the tide is heading.  Catering to a bigoted base is bad foe the future in a more diverse, tolerant population.  Oh well.

NFL Opening Weekend Links

Some interesting stories to check out this weekend:

The Michigan-Notre Dame rivalry's ending, but there's a bright spot for fans - SBNation.  Great line:
"I took a business trip to Knoxville, where I walked to Neyland Stadium. I meandered through campus, eventually finding that massive structure. Standing on the edge of the Tennessee River, looking up at the imposing stadium on a bluff, I was struck by an overpowering thought: my favorite sport is stupid."

America Without the Makeup: Artez Hurston's Ferguson - The Intercept.

In the minds of some Ferguson residents, the hours that Brown’s corpse lay in the street read like a direct communication from the police.
“They were sending a message,” said 21-year-old Stevon Statom, who moved into Canfield the night before the shooting and awoke to find Brown in the road outside his home. “’We don’t give a fuck about y’all.’”

How Ferguson's Rotting Suburbia Helped Create a Powder Keg - Buzzfeed.

The Rising - 5280 Magazine.  The story of some of the folks in the path of the worst of the flooding in Colorado last September.

Is There Any Rational Case for Banning Same-Sex Marriage? - The Atlantic.  Garrett Epps delves into Richard Posner's opinion overturning the same-sex marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin. When a formerly reliable conservative judge tells the bigots to fuck off, I think it is game over for the gay marriage bans.  I see a 6-3 decision overturning the bans in the Supreme Court by June 2016, which will take the issue out of play before the Presidential election.

The Non-Wave Election - National Journal

How America Made ISIS - Tom Engelhardt.  I don't understand all this bed-wetting about ISIS.  They decapitate two Americans, and now we have to spend billions and billions of dollars killing Muslims?  How many Mexicans did the drug cartels decapitate just across that very porous border the conservatives keep saying ISIS is going to sneak across into this country?  And while you can never underestimate how hard it is for white folks to differentiate between brown people (to the eternal harm of Sikhs wearing their turbans), I think it would be much easier for a Mexican drug kingpin to blend in amongst the millions of other Mexicans in this country, than it would for some ISIS bad guy to blend in.  But hey, I'm not going to shit my drawers because some loons who are busy killing each other don't like this nation of 315 million, with the highest gun ownership rate in the world.  Just count me as not worried about those jackasses.

The War Nerd: The long, twisted history of beheadings as propaganda - Pando

North Carolina Men Are Released After Convictions Are Overturned - New York Times.  See also, Just Making Shit Up To Kill People - John Cole

This Pope Means Business - Fortune

FAO Numbers In Agriculture Infographic - Big Picture Agriculture

End of June Weekend Reads

 Some good reads for the middle of the year:

Why the Voting Rights Act Still Matters: The Case of Jasper, Texas - Norm Ornstein.  Includes a mention of Piqua's own William McCulloch.  I don't think he'd fit into today's Republican Party, but he'd definitely recognize today's Jasper, Texas.

The Ugly Cycle of Air Pollution and Climate Change - Pacific Standard

Top Green Beret Officer Forced To Resign Over Affair With WaPo Reporter - ABC News, via Longreads.  She lived at his combat post in Afghanistan for 9 months.

A Century Ago in Sarajevo: A Plot, A Farce and a Fateful Shot - Morning Edition.  See also, The War to End All Wars? Hardly.  But It Did Change Them Forever - New York Times

Where are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.? - New York Times.  Of course the Upper Midwest and the northern Plains are amongst the best places, while the South is generally worst.  It looks like Western Ohio gets hurt by being too close to Indiana.

Hero worship of the military is getting in the way of good policy - Washington Post

Wind Power Production Record Broken in Texas and Tiny Electric Grids Help States Weather Extreme Storms - Scientific American

The Near-Death of Grand Central Terminal - Harper's

Belgium: One Team, Divided Nation - AP

Why You Hate Work - New York Times

Against the Grains - Aeon

The Next Breadbasket - National Geographic.  African agriculture and the foreign land grab.

Look at All These Design Masterpieces, Created By Anonymous Geniuses - Wired (see video below)

The Changing Map

The window for conservatives to accede to reality is swiftly closing:

I can't think of another display of such hateful, willful blindness to reality and common sense than the still bitter fight that conservatives continue to mount against gay marriage.  If I Republican legislator in any of the states which still had a ban, I would sponsor legislation to overturn it.  It's much better to get right with history and admit your prior stupidity and bigotry than to go down in flames claiming to be on God's side (which, if He or She or It is around, I'm guessing is incorrect).

Mothers' Day Weekend Reads

May this be a good weekend for all the mothers out there.  Here are a few stories that caught my eye:

Run, Joe, Run: Why Democrats Need A Biden Candidacy - The Atlantic. A similar case can be made that a Paul candidacy can allow a similar debate in the GOP, but the extremism there makes it less likely.

'What could be more interesting than how the mind works?' Steven Pinker's history of thought - Harvard Gazette

How to Trap the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves - Wall Street Journal

Hardship Makes a New Home in the Suburbs - New York Times

Alan Guth: What Made the Big Bang bang - The Boston Globe Magazine.  A very accessible article about the inflation theory of the origin of the universe, and the fascinating man who birthed it. More on this later.

Black Pastors Help Rand Paul Divine That Voter ID Laws Are 'Offending People' - The Wire.  The sad part is that Rand Paul's brush with reality will tank him with the racist base of the GOP.

Also, more links later as I can get to it.  I have a few things I need to do.

Update: The rain never came, so I ended up planting corn all day (and much of the night).  We have 55 acres of corn left, so we'll see if we can beat the rain.

Solna subway station, Stockholm - The Big Picture in 2013

Leading From Behind

John Kasich digs in on opposing gay marriage:

Gov. John Kasich reaffirmed his position on gay marriage yesterday. He’s still against it.
Following an economic-development announcement at AmerisourceBergen in Lockbourne, Kasich said he supports Attorney General Mike DeWine’s appeal of an upcoming ruling by a federal judge that will require the state of Ohio to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and areas where it’s legal.
“He is going to appeal it; he should,” Kasich said in response to a reporter’s question. Kasich’s comments on the subject were his first since U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black announced his intentions on Friday.
DeWine’s office says if Black rules as he said he would, DeWine will appeal his decision to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and also seek an immediate stay to prevent the ruling from taking effect.
Black’s ruling is not expected to immediately affect Ohio’s ban on gay marriages inside the state.
“The people of the state, including me, voted years ago on a constitutional amendment to say that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Kasich said. “(Black) has overruled that in some respects, and that’s what a federal judge can do. But it doesn’t change the fact of how people voted.”

Will Republicans ask people to vote on the gay marriage ban again?  We're talking about an issue on which an extremely sizable percentage of the population has changed its mind in the last 10 years.  Besides the fact that Republicans are being damaged electorally by holding their ground on this, they are also on the wrong side of  history on a civil rights issue.  The longer the gay marriage ban hangs around, the longer Republicans' opposition to a civil right which WILL become the law of the land will fester among voters who have already accepted the right of gays to marry, specifically, voters who will be alive more than twenty years from now. Appealing the ruling leaves this fight in the courts until the Supreme Court strikes it down, which they will have to, or until another referendum overturns the ban.  The sensible thing to do would be to accept the ruling, which allows gay marriage in Ohio through marriage out-of-state, and begin the legislative process to bring a referendum to eliminate the ban.  This would be actual leadership on the part of the Republicans, instead of hiding behind an out-of-date popular measurement of bigotry.  A sizable percentage of the population which voted for the ban is now dead, while a sizable percentage of opponents to the ban weren't old enough to vote in 2004.  Again, Republicans can hide behind the decade-old vote and wait for the inevitable demographic changes to force the issue, but that isn't what leaders would do.

Idiot State Rep Wants Federal Judge Impeached

John Becker (Moron-Clermont County) wants Federal Judge Timothy Black impeached for pointing out the federal unconstitutionality of Ohio's gay marriage ban:

A Clermont County state representative reiterated his call for the impeachment of federal Judge Timothy Black, after Black on Friday said he plans to overturn Ohio's ban on recognizing same-sex marriages conducted in other states.
"In an epic display of arrogance and incompetence, Judge Black announced that he will require the people of Ohio to disregard the Ohio Constitution and force the recognition of 'homosexual marriages' performed outside of Ohio," state Rep. John Becker's office said a statement. "He persists in allowing his personal political bias to supersede jurisprudence."
Becker, R-Union Township, said Black's ruling would violate both the Ohio Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. Voters in 2004 amended Ohio's constitution to ban the state from validating or recognizing a same-sex marriage. The 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states all rights not delegated to the federal government in the Constituation. Becker first called for Black's impeachment after the U.S. District Court judge ruled last year that Ohio must recognize the out-of-state marriage of an Over-the-Rhine couple on a death certificate. James Obergefell wanted to be listed on the certificate as the spouse of John Arthur after Arthur died last year of ALS. The couple had been married in Maryland weeks earlier.
Attorney Jean Geoppinger McCoy, president of the Cincinnati Bar Association, said Black was upholding the Constitution, not violating it. She cited the U.S. Constitution's clause that says each state must give "full faith and credit" to public acts and records in other states, such as legal marriages.
"Perhaps it takes a lawyer (which Becker is not) to understand," she wrote in a January bar association publication. "Rather than having faith in the legal system and trusting it to function as our forefathers envisioned through the appellate process, Rep. Becker has chosen to attempt to leverage his legislative position by taking the public stage with an impeachment resolution."

I just love seeing these idiots fight and fight in a losing clause because they think gay marriage will hurt Jesus's fee fees. Instead of making Ohio look like a laughingstock, Rep. Becker could make Ohio more business-friendly by moving to remove the ban on gay marriage from the state Constitution (said ban making the Constitution a travesty). I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen, though. My guess is that if the Supreme Court doesn't overturn such bans by then, Ohio's will fall to a voter referendum in 2016.

Update-here's a quote from Rep. Becker's campaign website:

Being a minimalist would best describe my philosophy on government. Regarding taxes and regulations, let's start with zero and negotiate from there. Obviously, some level of both is required for a functioning society. Only an anarchist would think otherwise. I want to keep taxes and regulations as minimal as possible.

How does a moron like this get elected? Hey idiot, we tried zero taxes and regulations and did negotiate from there. This shit didn't fall from the fucking sky like a magic Coke bottle. You start from where we are at and negotiate from there. This isn't rocket science. The grassroots of the Republican Party that elects these dumbfucks is really pushing to make this nation a failed state.

Mississippi Passes "Religious Freedom" Law

This probably should say, "Gays allowed, but we reserve the right to discriminate"

Apparently, the state wants to retain its ranking as the leading state in the nation - in bigotry:

Mississippi, the state where it's not illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of his sexual identity and only ratified the Constitutional amendment banning slavery last year, just got a new "religious liberty" law.
The Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed into law tonight by Gov. Phil Bryant after the state's Senate and House passed it by significant majorities on Tuesday. Its vague wording is similar to an Arizona bill that Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed in February, which would have made it legal for businesses to refuse to serve people for religious reasons. The bill was prompted by lawsuits against wedding cake makers and photographers who refused to work at a same-sex ceremony.
Effective July 1 of this year, any person (and Mississippi defines businesses as persons) "whose religious exercise is substantially burdened by government" may use this law as a defense.
The law also changes Mississippi's seal. Since the state was founded in 1817, its seal has been an eagle and the words "the Great Seal of the State of Mississippi." Now, the seal will also say "In God We Trust." The law didn't make any changes to Mississippi's flag, which is the only one in the country with the Confederate flag on it. Earlier this year, Bryant said he would not change his state's flag.

Didn't Mississippians claim a religious justification for businesses refusing to serve black people (amongst numerous apartheid policies) a few decades back?  Boy, wasn't that a shining beacon of freedom to the world?  It's also nice of the legislature to work on the important issues, like adding "In God We Trust" to the state motto, as opposed to fixing the nation's worst schools and highest poverty rate.  At least the state comes in below Texas for highest percentage of the population without health insurance.  It also still tops the list of states I'm least likely to ever move to.

Sir Trevelyan of Janesville

Timothy Egan considers Paul Ryan's knowledge of his family's history for St. Patrick's Day:

IN advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.....

Ryan’s running mate in 2012, Mitt Romney, made the Tory case with his infamous remark that 47 percent of Americans are moochers, “dependent upon government.” Part of that dependence, he said, extended to people “who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Food — the gall!

You can’t make these kinds of heartless remarks unless you think the poor deserve their fate — that they have a character flaw, born of public assistance. And there hovers another awful haunt of Irish history. In 2012, Ryan said that the network of programs for the American poor made people not want to work.

On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

Egan qualifies his criticism, but the point is clear enough.  I know Ryan can empathize with folks.  He's made clear that he really feels the pain of rich people who are required to pay taxes on their wealth, but he's shown almost no ability to empathize with people who have been considered a worthless race, just as his forebears were considered by the wealthy English.  Sir Trevelyan, indeed:

Why Democrats Face Rough Going in Fall Elections

Frank Rich:

The Democrats are in deep trouble this fall, but not because of any reading of the tea leaves in this single district, and not because the entire country hates Obamacare. The fundamentals are far more basic. As in 2010, the year of the Democrats’ shellacking, older white voters are more likely to go to the polls than young and minority voters. Part of that is structural: There’s not the excitement of a presidential race (let alone one with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket) to motivate Democrats to show up. And it gets worse: The new Wall Street Journal—NBC News poll this week finds that not only is Obama’s approval rating at a new low (41 percent), but that his disapproval rating among Democrats is up to 20 percent. Thus, Democrats may be even less motivated to go to the polls than they were in 2010. And Republicans — who do hate Obamacare, or, to put a finer point on it, hate Obama — are highly motivated. There’s a lot of talk among Democrats about what message they might come up with to reverse these fundamentals, but I have my doubts there’s any panacea. Perhaps the most optimistic way for a Democrat to look at 2014 is that if it’s a rout, it sets up the Republicans to indulge in overconfidence and other forms of self-destructive hubris in 2016, just as they did in 2012 after their success of 2010.

I really agree with the analysis here.  If you take a look at the election results of 2010, you'll see Republicans winning a lot of seats by not many votes.  For instance, John Kasich won slightly in a year when turnout was significantly down in big cities.  If voters turned out in those areas in 2010 (or 2014) like they did in 2008 or 2012, Ted Strickland is our governor.  Likewise in a number of congressional races that year.  The Democrats' biggest weakness is the apathy of their voters.  And Republicans know this.  That's why they use every trick they can to make it difficult for those voters to cast ballots, whether it is ID requirements, shorter hours for early voting,  fewer polling places in poor areas or relocating polling places.  Whatever they can do to get fewer people to show up is beneficial to them.  I honestly think that is one reason why they govern so fabulously shitty when they get the chance.  It just turns off people from voting.  Except for the elderly folks who vote Republican.  That's also why any Republican plan to fuck with Social Security and Medicare doesn't mess with anybody already in the programs.