Linda Greenhouse on the politics of fear, and what happens when people stop being afraid.
When he ran for president the second time almost half a century ago, Richard M. Nixon made Earl Warren’s Supreme Court a target of his campaign. It was a brilliant move.... Fear was in the air, fear that Nixon and his henchmen knew how to exploit.
I thought of Nixon last week as I watched the parade of Republican would-be presidents outdoing one another in denouncing the "lawless" and "brazen" Supreme Court. With its "hubris and thirst for power," the court threatens "the very foundations of our representative form of government," the most Nixonian of them all, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, warned.
Senator Cruz... is calling for a constitutional amendment that would strip the justices of their life tenure by making them subject to retention elections. Senator Cruz once clerked for William H. Rehnquist, a fierce defender of judicial independence even when he disagreed with a particular judge. While Senator Cruz wrote in National Review that he had “no doubt that Rehnquist would be heartbroken at what has befallen our highest court,” I think it much more likely that the late chief justice is turning over in his grave at his former law clerk’s antics.
Well, Rehnquist might be heartbroken about what has befallen our court... as long as what's befallen them is Cruz. But here's the thing: all the stuff Cruz is whining about? That's exactly how it's coming off, as whining. Because no one outside a vanishingly small demographic, is actually afraid of the things the court said.
Just as fire needs oxygen, stoking public anger against the Supreme Court can’t succeed in a vacuum. Backlash needs to be fed and sustained by fear: fear of crime; fear of a threat to "our Southern way of life"; fear, in the case of abortion, of a revolution in women’s traditional role in the family and in society.
And what, exactly, are people supposed to be afraid of now? A same-sex married couple with affordable health insurance?
Here's the problem for Cruz and Co. Those decisions that the court made last week? They're done. Gay marriage is
never going to be illegal again, anywhere in the United States. Obamacare is going to be the law until someone comes up with something
better not just repeal and think of something later. The number of people that can be fooled into thinking that either of these things is going to be "rolled back" can be measured... well, by an Iowa straw poll.
Cruz' argument that it's time to tear apart the Constitution to save, um, the Constitution. It's just not going to fly. The funny thing is, I suspect even Ted Cruz knows that. He just doesn't have anything better to say.
Come on in. Let's see if some of these other pundits can think of something...
The New York Times thinks the Robert's court definitely is an activist court... but not in the way Republicans believe.
What is the most useful way to understand the direction of the Supreme Court 10 years into the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.? After a series of high-profile end-of-term rulings that mostly came out the way liberals wanted, it is tempting to see a leftward shift among the justices.
That would be a mistake. Against the backdrop of the last decade, the recent decisions on same-sex marriage, discrimination in housing, the Affordable Care Act and others seem more like exceptions than anything else. If they reflect any particular trend, it is not a growing liberalism, but rather the failure of hard-line conservative activists trying to win in court what they have failed to achieve through legislation.
This court's leanings remain just where they've always been: pro-corporate. No matter how obvious the answer may seem to be, or how much legal precedent may point the other way, the Robert's answer is "corporations win."
Frank Bruni on a win for Science! And a loss for ignorance.
If you had told me a while back that I’d someday dread, dodge and elect not to return phone calls from a prominent member of the Kennedy dynasty, I would have said you were nuts.
Then Robert Kennedy Jr. started reaching out.
Not just reaching out, mind you, but volunteering to educate me. To illuminate me. That was his tone of voice, somewhat pitying and vaguely patronizing, the one time we talked at length, after he’d left messages and before he left more.
It was important, he said, that we meet.
If we did, he said, he could correct me.
My error?
I had disparaged the alarmists who claim a connection between vaccines and autism and fill parents with needless fears about immunizing their children.
Thank goodness Jerry Brown was there to act with frickin' common sense.
Leonard Pitts on why the Girl Scouts beat the Boy Scouts. And no. The answer is not cookies.
... we are here to thank heaven for little Girl Scouts — and for former girl, Megan Ferland, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Western Washington. We are indebted to her for a recent inspiring example of moral courage.
Last spring, a donor she declines to identify gave Ferland’s chapter an outsized gift: $100,000. Ferland told Seattle Met, a local magazine, that this represented nearly a quarter of the council’s annual fundraising goal — and an opportunity for 500 girls to go to camp. She and her staff were over the moon.
They came back to Earth quickly. In May, as Bruce Jenner’s transformation into a woman named Caitlyn was dominating the news, Ferland received a note from her donor: “Please guarantee that our gift will not be used to support transgender girls. If you can’t, please return the money.”
Ferland returned the money.
Asked why she did it, she gave a simple explanation: “Girl Scouts is for every girl.”
That is such a fine answer, it makes me tear up to read it. You go girl... scouts! Meanwhile...
[Boy Scouts] did not fully banish racial segregation until 1974, did not welcome gay boys until 2013 and are still mulling over the acceptance of gay men as leaders — the girls have made it part of their DNA. From their founding 103 years ago, they have welcomed girls regardless of race. You will not hear of them rejecting anyone on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2012, they affirmed a policy of case-by-case acceptance of transgender girls.
Well, you know, boys take a lot longer to mature. So do the supposedly grown men running the Boy Scouts.
The New York Times argues for keeping Hamilton and giving the spot on the twenty to some deserving woman.
There is no question that the United States should put a woman on its paper currency. But the Treasury Department’s plan to put one on the $10 bill, which currently has the image of Alexander Hamilton, is the wrong way to do it.
Treasury is proposing to put a woman’s portrait alongside Hamilton’s on the $10 bill, which is due for a redesign for anti-counterfeiting purposes. ... There is good reason to keep Hamilton on the $10 bill. After all, he was the first Treasury secretary and the creator of the foundations of the American financial system.
Hamilton is an important, and respectable figure whose theories and philosophy weighed heavily in the kind of nation we are today. I say, keep him. Ditch Jackson. The twenty is the primo spot in any case, and Jackson needs to go.
Colbert King on one of those all to often forgotten details about the American Revolution.
...the American Revolution, although not fought on behalf of slaves, was not a whites-only undertaking.
The political freedom resulting from the war was earned on battlefields at Lexington and Concord, at the Battle of Bunker Hill and beyond, with the help of black soldiers, both free and enslaved, who fought with the Continental Army.
The Revolutionary War victory was every bit theirs, as well.
... After the war, as the Army’s official Web site reports, some black soldiers, like those who served in the 1st Rhode Island, went on to live as freed men. However, many others, after having fought for freedom, were returned to slavery.
Men risked their lives to help found a country that them returned them to chains. These are heroes we should know more about... and a shame we should never forget.
Kathleen Parker somehow equates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Stranger things have happened in American politics, but the sudden surge of Democratic/populist Bernie Sanders and Republican/pompulist Donald Trump puts one in mind of alternate universes. ...
Both men are holding second place in some polls behind Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, respectively. And both are steadily ascending in the polls at a greater pace than anyone could have predicted — or imagined.
You are going to love this description.
Sanders, a socialist running on a platform that should send shivers up the spines of most Americans, drew his largest crowd of the season — nearly 10,000 — in Madison, Wis., last Wednesday night. The anti-establishment candidate, who wants to break up big banks and redistribute wealth, makes President Obama (and Clinton) look like robber barons by comparison.
Oh, Kathleen, indeed I'm shivering. But I don't think it's fear.
Alan Feuer on billionaire sympathy for the un-billionated.
For several years now, populist politicians and liberal intellectuals have been inveighing against income inequality, an issue that is gaining traction among the broader body politic, as shown by a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found that nearly 60 percent of American voters want their government to do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. But in the last several months, this topic has been taken up by a different and unlikely group of advocates: a small but vocal band of billionaires.
... Are all these anxious magnates really interested in leveling the playing field or are they simply paying lip service to a shift in the political winds? Or perhaps it’s just a statistical blip, given that most of the world’s 1,800 billionaires are not exactly out at the barricades lifting pitchforks for economic change.
Here's the truth of it: all too often, philanthropy is just power by another means. You can alter the educational system, insert yourself into how the government provides services, or even affect international affairs if you hold up a check with enough zeros... and significant strings. This isn't to say that "foundations" funded by the ultra-rich are a bad thing, only that having the richest few give away some of their money is not, not, not the same as closing the income gap.
Of course, it may be that some of these outspoken billionaires are not responding to politics so much as playing it themselves. “I’m not surprised to hear the wealthy saying these things, but talk is cheap,” said Dennis Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, which advocates financial reform. “These people know exactly how to move the levers of power and, until that happens, whatever they say is nothing but empty words.”
Exactly. They want to donate? Let them donate to funds urging politicians to raise the top tax rate.
Moises Valesquez-Manoff explains one of those areas where far, far too many people are anti-science.
As many as one in three Americans tries to avoid gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten-free menus, gluten-free labels and gluten-free guests at summer dinners have proliferated.
Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.
Celiac disease is a real thing, though there's no evidence that you get it by eating gluten. If you have it, your reaction to gluten is pretty well as strong as the reaction someone with a peanut allergy has to a spoonful of Skippy's. It's extremely serious. But if you don't have celiac disease... then you don't have a "gluten intolerance". Because the evidence is, there's no such thing.
Maybe we should stop asking what’s wrong with wheat, and begin asking what’s wrong with us.
People eat
less gluten than they did a hundred years ago. Modern forms of wheat
do not have more gluten than ancient forms. And all that gluten-free crap on the shelves is just a source of very bad brownies. You can convince yourself otherwise, and I suppose that, unlike the folks who think vaccines cause autism, you're not really hurting anyone. Except maybe me. Because it just makes my head ache to see the shelves fill up with second-rate food missing a harmless protein.
I am going to go make some bread. Good, crusty bread with a nice crumb using plain old unbleached wheat flour. And then I'm going to smear it with honest to God butter and drip on some local honey from a bear-shaped container. I will eat it warm. And I will enjoy it. A lot.