10-21-15

Liberal Opinion Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Vol. 26 NO.42 October 21, 2015

Week

Clarence Page

Clinton Signals Willingness To Regulate Guns By Executive Action

After a gunman killed nine people at an Oregon community college last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed a new attitude on gun control. She sounds a lot like President Barack Obama’s new attitude on immigration: If Congress doesn’t act, she says, she will.

“This epidemic of gun violence knows no boundaries,” the Democratic presidential candidate said, “knows no limits of any kind.”

Her voice seemed to choke back tears as she introduced the mother of a six-year-old boy killed in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting three years ago.

With that she showed both the urgency and the futility of today’s national gun debate. If the slaughter of 20 schoolchildren and six adults by one deranged gunman failed to move this Congress to pass such commonsense gun safety measures as universal background checks, can anything?

Since Newtown, today’s Congress has only become more conservative as Republicans and, it often seems, the National Rifle Association have gained control of both houses.

With that in mind, Clinton made it apparent through her top aides that if Congress doesn’t act, she’s willing to take the executive action route that President Obama has taken with immigration and other issues.

If Republicans want to challenge her in court, she reasons, let ‘em.

Her position not only puts her out in front of an issue with high appeal for Democratic and moderate swing voters; it also puts her to the left of someone who usually is on her left: Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-

Neither he nor his relatives, who authorities say purchased the killer’s guns, have criminal or mental health records that would have blocked the purchases.

identified “democratic from Vermont.

But as a sensible reform, background checks are the least intrusive, considering the potential benefits including prevention of suicides, which have outnumbered homicides by almost two-to-one among deaths by gun violence.

Still, Democrats can expect a fight, no matter what they propose. After more than a dozen mass shootings since his election, President Obama sounded both outraged and weary a day after the Oregon shootings.

To those who lament how “routine” mass shootings have become, he said, “What’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of commonsense gun legislation.”

Even if he can’t get legislation passed as his final months in office approach, he at least is going to talk relentlessly about the issue and push for “commonsense” laws, he said, such as expanded background checks -- which polls show are supported by most gun owners, although not by the NRA. Executive action to work around congressional opposition is a far-from-ideal way to govern.

But it unfortunately has become Washington’s way of doing business as a GOP majority is willing to shut down the government to prevent a liberal president from getting his way -- or, someday, hers.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@ tribune.com.

socialist” She would also close the “Charleston loophole” that allows gun sales to go through if a Coming from a liberal but rural background check is not completed state where hunting is very popular, within three days. It received its Sanders has opposed many of the gun nickname after it allowed the mass restrictions that Clinton and other killer behind this year’s massacre in Democrats tend to support. Former a Charleston, S.C., church to obtain Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, his weapon. another Clinton challenger, has Clinton would also try to repeal an even longer list of gun safety the gun industry’s congressionally proposals than she does. mandated immunity from tort law, But as frontrunner in polls, it is an exquisite example of the NRA’s Clinton’s agenda that is grabbing so clout. She also seeks more funding much attention that some supporters to inspect gun dealers. She wants are asking Obama to act on it a federal law barring domestic now without waiting for the next abusers and stalkers from firearms president. purchases, and she would revive the Besides expanding the federal so-called “assault weapons” ban on background check system, Clinton military-style semi-automatic rifles. would crack down on gun sales that Of course, critics of her proposal take place at gun shows and through will argue that none of them would the Internet, which allow buyers to have stopped the young man who (C) 2015 Clarence Page dodge background checks. perpetrated the Oregon killings. 15-10-7

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Ruth Marcus

Clinton’s Hard Choice On The TPP Hillary Clinton is facing one of the most fateful decisions of the presidential primary season: what to say about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and when to say it.

Politically, Clinton’s choice is a true Sophie’s Choice.

Whatever she does is guaranteed to generate criticism and anger key constituencies. The best case scenario for Clinton would have been to have negotiations blow up and therefore avoid having to take a position.

Now that failure is not an option, there are four possible permutations.

Clinton could embrace the agreement swiftly, or she could embrace it eventually.

Conversely, she could come out against it quickly, or come around to opposing it eventually.

The first option -- quick support - is my preferred one, substantively and even politically. The final option -- eventual opposition -- is the one that is both the most likely and, I would argue, the worst for her politically.

Indeed, timing is as important as the substance. Whichever way Clinton goes on the trade deal, this would be a good moment to channel her inner Macbeth: “when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.” Waiting would simply reinforce the perception of Clinton as a poll-tested, finger-in-

the-wind politician with few core transparent, fair trade,” Clinton convictions other than that she declared in November 2012. should be president.

Sure, Clinton can argue that Here’s my less-than-optimistic what was agreed to fell short of case for quick support. It’s not the glittering standard she once only the right outcome -- it’s the endorsed. But there is something to one that I think Clinton believes in be said for not looking like a craven, her heart is the right outcome. Yes, desperate flip-flopper. Isn’t there? she has issues with the base -- or, But Clinton’s instinct, her book more accurately, the base has issues title notwithstanding, is to evade with her. Labor would go berserk hard choices. She poked fun at if she were to support the deal. this tendency on “Saturday Night At this point, with Vermont Sen. Live,” referring to her dithering on Bernie Sanders leading in the New the Keystone pipeline and sameHampshire polls -- and already sex marriage. “Nothing wrong with having announced against the TPP taking your time,” Clinton as Val -- Clinton is not exactly operating the bartender, told Kate McKinnon from the position of dominance she as Hillary. “What’s important is once envisioned. getting it right.” You have to wonder And yet, Clinton has already whether the impending trade deal taken steps to shore up her bona fides was far from her mind. with the base. For environmentalists And Clinton’s campaign unhappy about the TPP, she came performance to date on trade out, disappointingly in my view, has been less than encouraging. against the Keystone XL pipeline. She wouldn’t take a position on For labor, she came out, even more whether Congress should approve disappointingly, against the Cadillac fast-track negotiation authority tax on overly generous health care for the president because that was plans. an obscure, inside-the-Beltway At some point, has Clinton not legislative issue, her campaign earned enough leeway and goodwill fatuously insisted. to break with the base? Supporting Until, that is, she came out the TPP would cost her, certainly against it -- kinda sorta, first saying -- but it would also demonstrate that Obama should use the moment her independence and authenticity. to negotiate a better deal, then “This TPP sets the gold standard adding that she would “probably” in trade agreements to open, free, vote against it. At least if it failed to

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include aid for displaced workers, which did eventually pass. In other words, clear as mud.

So will Clinton, facing Sanders in the Democratic debate Oct. 13, take a decisive position for or against the deal? Or will she duck, citing the need to study the as-yet-unreleased text (it won’t be public for more than a month) before reaching a final conclusion?

History suggests she will duck.

And also that, after much hemming and hawing on Clinton’s part; after pundits like me pouncing on her evasiveness and inconsistency; after incessant pounding from interest groups and activists, Clinton will end up opposing the deal.

That would be the worst of all worlds -- which is, all too often, exactly where Clinton finds herself.

Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com. (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group 15-10-7

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Reference Guide Government Hillary Clinton 1 Page 2 Marcus 3 Lyons 4 Press

Joe Biden

4 Witcover

Republicans

4 Nocera 5 Hunt 6 Bruni 6 Kristof 7 Collins 8 Robinson 8 Gadebusch 9 Bruni 10 Page 10 Crespin

Government

Government

National

11 Krugman 12 Harrop 12 Collins 13 Witcover 14 Krugman 14 Capehart 15 Dionne

18 Elmendorf

24 Smith 24 Harrop

House Speaker

16-17 Liberal Delineations 19 Thom Hartmann Blog

Social Security Elections

18 Witcover

International Syria

Business Culture

25 Postrel 26 Dvorak

Environment

20 Diehl 20 Robinson 21 Ross

26 Nocera 27 Friedman

National

Gun Control

Business

22 Nocera 22 Page 23 Carter

Gay Rights 28 Blow

28 Young 29 Harrop 30 Brasch 31 Dionne

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Gene Lyons

Trying To Take Down Hillary To hardly anybody’s surprise, it turns out that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been right in front of our eyes. Always was, actually.

Or maybe you thought a seventh Benghazi investigation lasting as long as the Pearl Harbor and JFK assassination probes combined was exactly what America needed.

And no, Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) politically disastrous admission wasn’t wrung out of him by a trick question.

“The question I think you really want to ask me,” he volunteered to Fox News lunkhead Sean Hannity, “is how am I going to be different?”

As Speaker John Boehner’s successor, that is.

McCarthy answered himself: “What you’re going to see is a conservative speaker that takes a conservative Congress that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example.

Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable.”

No, that’s not a word. But then words aren’t McCarthy’s strong

point. His meaning, however, was clear enough. The man was bragging.

The only purpose of the House Select Committee on Benghazi is to inflict political damage on the leading Democratic presidential contender.

Your tax dollars at work.

would be well advised to invest in a pair of super absorbent Depends when Hillary testifies before his committee on Oct. 22. All he’s got is a handful of long-disproved conspiracy theories and selectively edited witness transcripts leaked to the news media to create a false Never one to miss a chance, impression.

Hillary pounced on the “Today” So he’s an ex-federal prosecutor. show: “This committee was set up, as Whoop de doo. Arkansas was they have admitted, for the purpose overrun with them during the late of making a partisan, political issue Whitewater investigation. All but out of the deaths of four Americans,” one of Kenneth Starr’s leak-o-matic she said. “I would never have done staff turned out to be subpar trial that, and if I were president and there lawyers. That one was clever enough were Republicans or Democrats to give a closing argument pointing thinking about that, I would have out that Bill Clinton wasn’t on trial done everything to shut it down.” because the defendant -- his former Her campaign has already real estate partner -- had swindled released a 30-second TV ad featuring him and Hillary.

McCarthy’s boasting. She added that “The office of the Presidency of having admitted the committee’s the United States,” he thundered, partisan agenda, Congress should “can’t be besmirched by people such shut it down. Everybody knows as Jim McDougal.” that’s not going to happen.

Any chance of prosecuting either “Look,” Clinton added, “I’ve been Bill or Hillary over Whitewater around this whole ‘political situation’ pretty much ended right there in for a long time, but some things are May 1996. (The whole story’s told in just beyond the pale. I’m happy to Joe Conason’s and my e-book, “The go, if it’s still in operation, to testify. Hunting of Hillary,” available for But the real issue is what happened free at hillarybook.nationalmemo. to four brave Americans.” com.)

Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) But no, of course it wasn’t in the

newspaper, because Washington scribes were stuck to Starr like ticks to a dog’s ear. He successfully diverted attention to subsequent Whitewater trials, every one of which they lost.

Until Bill Clinton bailed them out by taking his pants down in the Oval Office, that is.

But I digress. As the Washington Post’s GOP-oriented columnist Kathleen Parker points out, Rep. McCarthy has “tried to cram the bad genie back into the bottle, but the damage has been done and can’t be undone ... any previous suspicions that Republicans were just out to get Clinton have cleared the bar of reasonable doubt.”

Meanwhile, if Gowdy doesn’t already know that Hillary Clinton’s a lot smarter and tougher than he is, he’s about to find out. Truthfully, they’d be better advised to fold the committee and file some weaselworded report.

Then there’s our esteemed national news media, repeatedly burned by inaccurate leaks from Gowdy’s committee. The New York Times has run one phony exclusive after another. First, her famous emails were illegal, except they’re not. Then they were contrary to regulations enacted, oops, 18 months after she left office. Next Hillary was the subject of an FBI criminal probe. Except, that too turned out to be false. Now they’re making a big deal out of the exact date she changed email addresses. Seriously.

And why? Because as Bill Clinton recently explained to Fareed Zakaria, they’re essentially fops and courtiers --”people who get bored talking about what’s your position on student loan relief or dealing with the shortage of mental health care or what to do with the epidemic of prescription drugs and heroin out in America, even in small towns of rural America.”

Any questions?

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@ yahoo.com.

Copyright 2015, Gene Lyons 15-10-7

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Bill Press

Hillary Makes Left Turn You must admit: This is turning out to be one of the most entertaining presidential contests we’ve ever experienced. What’s interesting about the Republican primary is the fact that three outsiders lead the pack. What’s interesting on the Democratic side is how economic populism has become the dominant theme. Everybody’s channeling Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, even Hillary Clinton.

It actually started in the official launch of her campaign on Roosevelt Island on June 13, where she embraced the issue of income inequality long championed by Sanders and Warren. In words that could have been penned by Warren herself, Clinton told her adoring supporters: “These Republicans trip over themselves promising lower taxes for the wealthy and fewer rules for the biggest corporations without any regard on how that will make income inequality worse.”

For months, however, many Democrats on the left still remained skeptical, because her promise was not met with any specifics on progressive issues. But no longer. Recently, candidate Clinton has let drop one left shoe after another, while notably, in some cases, creating distance between herself and President Obama.

Take health care, for example, an issue Clinton knows well, having drafted the health care plan her husband, President Clinton, presented to Congress in 1993, which was far tougher on insurance companies and medical providers than Obama’s plan. While she supports Obamacare, Hillary has said she would make it more consumer-friendly by capping how much a patient would have to pay for doctor visits and prescription drugs. She would also repeal the so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health care plans, which President Obama says is essential to the fiscal viability of Obamacare.

On the Keystone Pipeline. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have been against it from the beginning. Clinton understandably remained neutral on the project as secretary of state, because it was under review by her department. But she hadn’t taken any position since, either. Until this week. “I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone XL pipeline as what I believe it is -- a distraction from important work we have to do to combat climate change,” she told a campaign gathering in Des Moines.

There was radio silence from most politicians in the wake of last week’s tragic shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. But not from Hillary Clinton. She stepped up to the plate with a strong set of gun control proposals she’d pursue as president: renewing the ban on assault weapons; withholding guns from domestic abusers; allowing victims of gun violence to sue gun manufacturers; mandating universal background checks; and closing the gun show loophole by executive order, which President Obama has hesitated to do.

Recognizing that today’s NRA is nothing

more than a lobby for big gun manufacturers, and no longer represents true sportsmen, she also called on hunters and responsible gun owners, the majority of whom support common sense gun control, to quit the NRA and form their own organization.

trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade.” That flip-flop led some detractors to call her “a populist by convenience.” But so what?

Nobody will remember how long it took her to get there, only that she eventually ended up in the right place.

Sometime last summer, when I first talked to Sen. Bernie Sanders about why he was thinking about running for president, he told me his primary goal was to make sure progressive issues were front and center in the 2016 Democratic primary: issues that Hillary Clinton might otherwise not even talk about.

After this week, Bernie should mount a big sign over his campaign headquarters: “Mission Accomplished!”

Bill Press is host of a nationally-syndicated radio show, the host of “Full Court Press” on Current TV and the author of a new book, “The Obama Hate Machine,” which is available in bookstores now. You can hear “The Bill Press Show” at his website: billpressshow.com. His email address is: bill@billpress.com.

As if that weren’t enough to burnish her progressive credentials, Hillary took another giant leap this week, coming out in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, President Obama’s top legislative priority. Even though terms of the deal agreed to by the United States and 11 Asian trading partners have not yet been publicly released, Clinton said lack of controls against currency manipulation and benefits for pharmaceutical companies were two reasons she could not support it. She told Judy Woodruff on PBS’s “NewsHour”: “What I know about it, as of today, I am not in favor of what I’ve learned about it.”

For Clinton, opposition to TPP was not so much a giant leap forward as a cleverly executed U-turn. CNN, in fact, recorded 45 times as (c) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. secretary of state that she had promoted the new 15-10-8 trade agreement, calling it “the gold standard in

Jules Witcover

Should Biden Run?

When presidential nominees are asked about selecting a running mate, the answer almost always is: The choice should be the person most qualified to become president if fate or circumstance were to so dictate.

The first two vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, fit that description. But each got the job by the vote of the electoral college, with the higher vote-getter becoming president and the runner-up his standby.

In 1800, however, a tie there between Jefferson and Aaron Burr led under the Constitution to a vote in the House of Representatives. After 36 ballots, the Virginian carried the day and Burr had to settle for the vice presidency.

Through the years thereafter, that rationale of qualification was mostly honored in the breach.

A long line of running mates got the job for various reasons other than fitness for the Oval Office, and most proved to be undistinguished.

Of the nine who ascended to the presidency by death or resignation, only two -- Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Harry Truman, are generally regarded among the best chief executives.

When TR decided to take a ride in a submarine, the fictional Mr. Dooley declared: “You really shouldn’t do it--unless you take (Vice President Charles) Fairbanks with you.” And the senior George Bush’s surprise choice, the grammatically challenged Dan Quayle, became an immediate laughingstock.

But the vice presidency has evolved into

a vehicle in actual governance, thanks to enlightened presidents in choosing the likes of Walter Mondale, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and now Joe Biden. The office no longer has been, in the sanitized words of FDR’s first vice president, John Garner, “a bucket of warm spit.”

Which brings me to the former Delaware senator of 36 years, chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees and for the last nearly seven years among the most visible and relied-upon vice presidents in our history.

Since being in the job, Biden has often said he intended to be “the best vice president I can be” and let the option of a third presidential run take care of itself. With the buzz about him intensifying, he has a much stronger rationale now for running, as well as the track record to back it up.

Coincidentally, the political foibles of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton have given a Biden bid more credibility, along with the glaring contrast between Biden and Clinton in perceived authenticity and openness. Biden’s recent interview with Stephen Colbert was candid and electric, casting Joe of Scranton as the middleclass American for whom the now wealthy former first lady claims to be the champion.

As for Biden’s late start, he needs no public buildup or huge campaign bankroll once the actual voting gets underway. More troublesome

Witcover continued on page 5

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Albert Hunt

Can Republicans Regain Control Of Their Party The state of the Republican Party is summed up by a quote from the late cartoonist Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

At both the presidentialcampaign and congressional levels, the problems are self-induced.

The party fostered unrealistic expectations, and the failure to meet them emboldened a nihilistic streak in a core of House Republicans and with the likes of Donald Trump.

There is little agenda, lots of lashing out.

This is what led some Republicans in the House, encouraged by presidential candidates, to threaten to shut down the government if funding for Planned Parenthood wasn’t ended. A USA Today survey showed that almost twothirds of Americans favor federal support for the organization, which provides health care services for women. A small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s budget goes to abortions, and that fraction isn’t covered by the federal funds. In a list of a dozen organizations and political figures in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Planned Parenthood was viewed the most favorably.

A shutdown was avoided last week, but there already are threats

Witcover continued from page 4

may be overcoming his reputation as gaffe-prone, generated in the past and certain to be resurrected by Republicans.

But his accomplishments in the Senate and as Obama’s dependable sidekick have shown him to be no Dan Quayle.

to try again in December.

Much of the bluster of this minority can be traced to the Republicans’ successes in the 2010 and 2014 nonpresidential elections. These victories largely were based on running against the thenunpopular President Barack Obama and overpromising.

At the federal level, the battle cry was: Elect Republicans and we’ll defund the Affordable Care Act, slash federal spending, reform the wretched tax system and lower taxes, and restrain Obama. The party won both houses of Congress but hasn’t been able to deliver on politically unrealistic commitments.

That has alienated the rank and file. A recent Bloomberg Politics poll showed that Republicans, more than twoto-one, have an unfavorable view of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. One-third have negative views about their own party.

Reflecting these views, hard-core right-wing members in the House, many elected in those last two off-

defend him, in the course of being “the best vice president” he can be.

No doubt Biden would enter the race as a long shot, with his personal reservations on running and the pressures placed on him and his emotionally shaken family.

But along with them are the words of his late revered mother, Jean, which Biden shared with Colbert and his viewers: “As long as you are alive you have an obligation to strive, and you’re not dead until you see the face of God.” So the Democratic Party and the country wait now as Joe Biden consults with himself. Not yet 73, he still seems to have a lot left in the tank, but only he can decide.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books.

You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.

Also, there would be no dynasty narrative of the sort attached to Hillary Clinton and echoed in the Jeb Bush candidacy on the GOP side. Finally, Joe Biden’s natural optimism and solid liberal credentials would probably find some support among followers of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the surprise progressive candidate in the field.

Some Democrats have argued that Hillary Clinton has been suffering for having no establishment competitor to test her mettle. With her recent criticism of President (C) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

Obama’s policy on training Syrian 15-10-7 rebels, Biden could be expected to

year elections, forced Boehner to resign.

The favorite to replace him is Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, though Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah said Sunday that he would seek the post, too. McCarthy offers a more cheerful face than Boehner and is an exceptionally able political operative. But whoever takes job will face the same daunting demands -- no compromises with the Democrats or the White House.

The main agenda of congressional Republicans is to oppose anything Obama is for, with the exception of international trade deals.

leaders.

Some Republicans acknowledge these problems, but insist the party is in good shape. They point out that, in addition to both Houses of Congress, they hold 31 of the 50 governorships and that in most of these states, they also control the legislature. But not much of this success had to do with any Republican initiatives; it was more linked to the party’s ability to ride the anti-Obama wave.

“We look great on paper, but most of our gains have been because we weren’t the Democrats,” says former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who was the Republicans’ leading political strategist in Congress.

Moreover, as the Democrats learned a generation ago, after years of controlling everything but the presidency, agenda- setting and power flows from the White House.

Albert Hunt is a Bloomberg columnist.

The best hope is that Boehner, who now can afford to ignore the hard right, will use the next four weeks to forge a deal on extending the debt ceiling and a multiyear budget plan, leaving less lethal matters for his successor to handle.

Boehner is a skillful legislator, but this may be a reach. (c) 2015, Bloomberg View At the presidential level, the 15-10-5 same forces are on display with the three front-runners, Donald Trump, Change Of Address: Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, who, Please send your old mailing label and your new combined, have less governing address three weeks prior to moving. or political experience than any Liberal Opinion Week president of the past century.

P.O. Box 606 Waiting in the wings is Sen. Ted Hampton, IA 50441-0606 Cruz of Texas, who arouses grassOr call Toll Free roots conservatives with attacks 1-800-338-9335 against Republican congressional

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Frank Bruni

Carly Fiorina’s Shameless Promotion Carly Fiorina gives one heck of a speech.

That was my first impression, a positive one, when I caught up with her in Sacramento in 2010 to chronicle her bid for the Senate.

She had focus, urgency and a brimming arsenal of barbs, just as she does now. She liked to mention an incident in which Sen. Barbara Boxer, the incumbent Democrat, once upbraided an Army bigwig for calling her “Ma’am” rather than “Senator,” and she told Californians that if they gave her Boxer’s job: “You may call me ‘Ma’am.’

You may call me ‘Senator.’ You may call me ‘Carly.’ You may call me, ‘Hey, you, remember, you work for me.’”

She presented herself as a woman of the people, at our service.

But that wasn’t my impression of her after about a week of attending her campaign events, riding around California with her and interviewing her about her drive and her desires.

Even more so than is usually the case, the candidacy seemed to be all about the candidate.

She yearned to silence forever all of the naysaying about her stewardship of Hewlett-Packard, to be validated by voters, to have the final say.

She failed, and she failed big, losing to Boxer by 10 points.

Her response? To seek a promotion. She’s running for president.

Give her credit for dauntlessness.

be gleaned from her California campaign. They maintain that Fiorina’s corporate experience is more akin to managing a presidential campaign than a bid for office in one of the nation’s most liberal states.”

But look closely and you see its ugly sibling, shamelessness, not just in the way she treats facts but in the way she treats others.

The Washington Post just published a humiliating account of her sluggishness to pay bills from that 2010 campaign. That she stiffed several vendors until January 2015 wasn’t really the damning part: That’s sadly common in politics.

But The Post reported that one of the people stiffed was the widow of the pollster Joe Shumate, who dropped dead of a heart attack, “surrounded by sheets of polling data” for Fiorina, shortly before Election Day in 2010. Fiorina mourned him as “the heart and soul” of her operation, then neglected for years to fork over at least $30,000 that she owed him.

Martin Wilson, who managed that campaign, told The Post that he occasionally implored her to settle up. “She just wouldn’t,” he said.

It’s striking that he’d tattle like that on Fiorina.

She apparently doesn’t leave much love in her wake. Reuters interviewed about 30 people who worked for her in 2010, 12 of whom said: Never again. “I’d rather go to Iraq,” one unidentified campaign aide groused.

And The Daily Beast examined Fiorina’s recent campaign-finance filings and noticed that almost no one at Hewlett-Packard had given more than $200 — the minimum amount for which a donor must be identified — to her presidential quest.

She has her loyalists, including some glasshalf-full revisionists. Consider this from the Post story: “Her supporters cautioned that little could

The leading contenders for the Republican nomination for president tell us three interesting things about America.

First, many Republican voters are so disenchanted they’re willing to entrust the country to candidates — Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina — with zero experience in elective office or military command. Only two men without previous time in major elective office or the military have been president, Herbert Hoover and William Howard Taft, and both had held Cabinet posts. No president has ever been as inexperienced as any of these three leading Republican candidates.

Second, the public feels an odd awe for CEOs and presumes they know how to run things, even if their records suggest otherwise. This cultural reverence for CEOs perhaps also explains why pay packages have increased — and why Fiorina was allowed to take home a $21 million severance package after she was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive for incompetence.

Third, the only kind of welfare that carries no stigma in America is corporate welfare. For all Trump’s criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough.

His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.

My bet is that Trump, Fiorina and Carson will fade and that voters will eventually turn to a more conventional candidate, perhaps Sen. Marco Rubio. From the Democrats’ point of view, the scariest Republican ticket might pair Rubio with

exuberant or deft. She campaigned as a surrogate for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election but had to be sidelined after saying that neither McCain nor Sarah Palin, his running mate, could run a big corporation. It was a fascinating lapse, in that she was denying them the chops to do precisely what she had done (albeit poorly, by many measures).

In her calculus, the corporate world qualified her for governing, but government experience didn’t qualify others for the corporate world. What self-flattering, self-serving arithmetic.

It has been correctly observed that her ascent in the polls, coupled with Donald Trump’s enduringly strong showing, reflects the currency of political outsiders right now.

But it also reflects the potency of an insatiable hunger for approbation and an unshakable belief in your genius. She and Trump share that, and of course she gives one heck of a speech. She thrills to her own voice.

In other words, the Boxer contest was small potatoes — peculiar ones, too — and a leader of Fiorina’s vision and scope is suited only to a giant spud.

For someone so caustic about others’ shortcomings, she’s awfully cavalier about her own.

“It was a mistake,” she said to me in 2010 about her failure to vote in elections in New Jersey, where she’d once lived for 10 years, and in more than half of the 18 elections in California in which she could have participated.

Then she qualified that confession, explaining that she hadn’t been “running my life to seek political office,” as if such a goal were the only reason to show up at the polls. c.2015 New York Times News Service In the cause of others, she’s not so quick, 15-10-6

Nicholas Kristof

3 Peerless Republicans For President: Trump, Carson, and Fiorina

John Kasich. Rubio has natural political skills, projects youth and change, and would signal that the Republican Party is ready to expand its demographic base. Rubio and Kasich would also have a decent chance of winning their home states, Florida and Ohio — and any ticket that could win Florida and Ohio would be a strong contender.

But instead, Republican primary voters for now are pursuing a bizarre flirtation with three candidates who are the least qualified since, well, maybe since Trump put his toe in the waters before the 2000 election.

In that sense, they offer a window into the American psyche — part of which is our adulation of the CEO. There’s something to be said for CEOs’ entering politics: In theory, they have management expertise and financial savvy. Then again, it didn’t work so well with Dick Cheney.

More broadly, the United States has overdone the cult of the CEO, partly explaining why at the largest companies the ratio of CEO compensation to typical worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 303 to 1 in 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In any case, even if you were conducting a job search for a great CEO to lead the free world, you wouldn’t turn to either Trump or Fiorina.

My sense is that Trump isn’t the idiot that critics often claim (the most common words voters used to describe him in a recent poll were “idiot,” “jerk,”

Kristof continued on page 7

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Gail Collins

Too Many Bushes Spoil The Broth Happiness is being on the Jeb Bush campaign mailing list. Recent highlights: Sept. 27 — Columba Bush emailed to say she wants me to get to know the Jeb she knows, who is a person of principle. Also very tall. “But Friend, no one is going to see that side of him if he misses his critical End of Quarter fundraising goal of $200,000.”

Sept. 29 — President George H.W. Bush is in my inbox. The good Bush! He wants me to know that Jeb is ready.

Later that day ...

Barbara Bush just wrote, asking me to donate some money. She admits she’s not as big into email as her son. (Jeb brags that he spent 25 to 30 hours a week emailing when he was governor. He has a book coming out about this and a lot of the messages seem to involve thanking people for writing.) Anyhow, the former first lady mentions that — although she has no idea why — her family calls her “The Enforcer.” I am not entirely clear on why she’s bringing that up.

Is it a threat?

Sept. 30 — Oh, wow, they’re rolling out W. He feels Jeb “has what it takes to lead our nation.” Also, both he and Laura would really appreciate it if I send some money.

Later that day ...

Jeb wants to make sure I caught his brother’s note: “Really thankful to have his support on this journey.”

I think someday we should discuss

Kristof continued from page 6

“stupid” and “dumb”). This is a man who is near the top of diverse fields: real estate, book writing, television and now presidential politics. He’s a born showman, a master of branding and marketing. But he doesn’t seem a master of investing.

Back in 1976, Trump said he was worth “more than $200 million.” If he had simply put $200 million in an index fund and reinvested dividends, he would be worth $12 billion today, notes Max Ehrenfreund of The Washington Post. In fact, he’s worth $4.5 billion, according to Forbes.

In other words, Trump’s business acumen seems less than half as impressive as that of an ordinary Joe who parks his savings in an index fund.

An index fund might also have

the national tendency to describe everything as a “journey.” Journey is getting a bad name.

Oct. 4 — Big news from Jeb: He’s been talking with his parents, and they think it would be great if I could get to know them personally.

“Today we’re launching a contest to fly one lucky winner down to Texas at the end of the month to meet Mom and Dad. All you have to do is chip in $1.”

Oct. 6 — Columba wants to make sure I got Jeb’s note about the contest to meet George H.W. and Barbara. “Jeb loves meeting his biggest supporters, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than flying you to Houston to meet the whole family.” She and Jeb are going to be there, too. Although not, apparently, W. and Laura. Maybe they’re on a W. campaign for his brother in South different journey.

Carolina, where people apparently look back on the invasion of Iraq as This is far from the first time a the best of times. South Carolina was candidate for president has dragged a critical victory for W. in 2000, and the family into fundraising efforts. I remember interviewing Republican (By the end of the campaign, you’re primary voters who said they were going to see third cousins serving going to vote for him because they as honorary guests at $100-a-plate knew if he got in trouble, his parents dinners.) And eventually, we’re going would straighten him out. It seemed to have some serious conversations sort of sweet at the time. Oh well. about Bill Clinton. But right now, The longer the race goes on, the we’re starting to get so many Bushes, closer Jeb seems to snuggle up to the nation is in danger of becoming his older brother. We’ve come a one large political hedge. long way from the “my own man” This week Jonathan Martin and distancing epoch. After that, there Matt Flegenheimer reported in The was the arm’s-length era of “Well, I Times that the Bush organization is wouldn’t have expanded Medicare.” seriously considering having George And then it was on to the fabled been less ethically problematic. In the 1970s, the Justice Department accused Trump of refusing to rent to blacks. And in 2013, New York state’s attorney general sued him, alleging “persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct”; Trump denied the charges.

If Trump’s performance as a business executive was problematic, Fiorina’s was exceptional.

Exceptionally bad.

Put aside the fact that she’s the CEO who fired thousands of workers while raking in more than $100 million in compensation and pushing HP to acquire five corporate jets. Just looking at the bottom line, she earned her place on those “worst CEO” lists she appeared on.

As Steven Rattner wrote in The Times, Hewlett-Packard’s share price fell 52 percent in the nearly six

years she was at the helm. HP did worse than its peers: IBM fell 27.5 percent, and Dell, 3 percent.

Oh, and on the day she was fired, the stock market celebrated: HP shares soared 7 percent.

If I wanted a circus ringmaster, I’d hire Trump. If I wanted advice on brain surgery or hospital management, I’d turn to Carson.

Fiorina would make an articulate television pundit. But for president?

The fact that these tyros are the three leading presidential contenders for a major political party is a sad window into our political dysfunction.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/ Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018. c.2015 New York Times News Service 15-10-7

moment during the last debate when Donald Trump dissed W., and Jeb shot back: “You know what? As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe.” He then went on to mention the hugging of the firefighter at ground zero.

The World Trade Center was such a terrible, terrible tragedy that it seems unseemly to use it for political leverage in any way.

However, if you’re going to bring it up, the accurate way to describe George W. Bush in relation to 9/11 would be something like, “The man who, despite the best intentions in the world, failed to keep us safe.”

Chances are, Jeb did envision a campaign in which he was the only Bush in sight. Just last month he told voters he knew he’d never get elected “by being the third Bush running for president.” But desperate times breed desperate measures. Very hard to go around bragging that you were a terrific Florida governor at the same time Florida Republicans are saying they’d much rather vote for Trump.

Plus, the big donors are getting restless. Dissatisfaction on the part of your former constituents is one thing, but there’s nothing worse than cranky oligarchs. Dangers abound.

It’s a time when you need to see your kin flocking to the rescue. One person’s hedge is another person’s security blanket. c.2015 New York Times News Service 15-10-7

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Eugene Robinson

Chaos Is The GOP’s New Normal At this point, I worry we’re going to start finding members of the Republican establishment curled up in their beds, eyes clenched shut and ears covered with trembling hands, moaning “make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.”

Pity their suffering, but remember that they brought it on themselves.

The insurrection that propelled billionaire Donald Trump into the lead for the GOP nomination and ultimately made House Speaker John Boehner surrender his gavel in frustration rages on unabated. This was no mere summer skirmish. If anything, the rebellion is gaining strength.

It is dawning on the party grandees that their most recent predictions of Trump’s demise, like earlier ones, were wrong. He lost some ground after a lackluster performance in the second debate, to be sure. But he still has a healthy lead, with his slide halted or even reversed, and continues to enjoy -- astonishingly -- more than double the support of any Republican candidate who has held elective office.

More incredible is that in second and third place are retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, both of whom share Trump’s distinction of never having been elected even dogcatcher. According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Trump is at 23 percent, Carson at 17 percent and Fiorina at 10 percent. That adds up to fully half of GOP voters defiantly thumbing their noses at all the senators, governors and former-somebodies who are languishing down there in single-digit limbo.

Jeb Bush, for all his money and pedigree, is at 8 percent.

Imagine what assumptions the political cognoscenti would be making if it were Bush, not Trump, who had maintained such an impressive lead since July, both nationally and in the early primary states. The smart money -- which seems pretty dumb this year -- would surely anoint him the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. Yet it is taken as an article of faith by Republican wise men and women that Trump will surely lose.

Somehow.

He might, of course. Running for president is hard, and Trump has already made some rookie mistakes. But after getting where he is on bluster, charisma and personal energy, he is now putting together an organization capable of performing the nuts and bolts work of a viable campaign. He even shows new self-awareness, acknowledging to interviewers that the last debate may not have been his best performance.

And there is a reason for Trump’s success that goes beyond his skill at burnishing his personal brand: He is saying what much of the GOP base wants to hear.

The party establishment has only itself to blame.

From the moment President Obama took office, Republicans in Congress have been selling the base a bill of goods. They demonized Obamacare

and cynically swore to repeal it, knowing they could not. They balked at sensible immigration reform, deciding instead to do nothing. They engaged in Pyrrhic brinkmanship over the budget and the debt ceiling, fully aware that in the end they would have to back down.

injuring itself by shutting down the government or playing chicken with the debt ceiling. But it will only be a matter of time before the next speaker has to quell some far-right tantrum.

In the Democratic Party, the conflict is ideological -- left vs. center-left. In the GOP, the struggle looks existential.

Put another way, it’s not hard to imagine a party in which there’s room for both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and you can easily imagine one supporting the other as standardbearer. But a tent that can hold, say, both Trump’s view on undocumented immigrants -- hunt them down and kick them out -- and Bush’s support for compassionate reform? That’s not a political party, it’s a food fight.

The Republican establishment may ultimately find some way to drag one of its presidential candidates through the primaries. But chaos, Trump has shown, is the GOP’s new normal.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Promising to do the impossible was an effective short-term strategy for raising money and winning midterm elections. But if you keep firing up your supporters and letting them down, they become disillusioned. They begin to think the problem might not be Obama and the Democrats.

It might be you.

That same dynamic is happening in the House, where Boehnerâs decision to walk away has emboldened, not chastened, the ultraconservative revolutionaries in the GOP ranks. Look at the way they chased out hapless Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who on Thursday abandoned his bid to succeed Boehner because of opposition from the radical Freedom Caucus.

If he chooses, Boehner can use his remaining (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group weeks in office to keep his party from further 15-10-9

Ruth Gadebusch

Returning The Favor While the eagerness of so many of the GOP to protect women from themselves may not be the best subject for humor, sometimes it is just irresistable. So many of the proposals regarding women’s health are so outrageous that humor is the only thing that saves us from pulling our hair out.

Accordingly, female legislators and other wits around the country are striking back. These counterparts for the male of the species just might call attention to just how ridiculous, as well as unfair, some of the meansures proposed - and introduced in various legislative bodies - truly are.

To that end an Illinois legislator has introduced a bill that would require “men seeking a prescription for erectile dysfunction drugs to see a sex therapist, receive a cardiac stress test and ‘get a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming impotency.’ Sex therapists would be required to present the option of ‘celibacy as a viable lifestyle choice’”. It ain’t gonna happen but, really, it is no more absurd than some of the proposed requirements for women - all in the name of protecting women!

Illinois State Senator Turner explains, “The men in our lives, including members of the General Assembly, generously devote time to fundamental female reproductive issues—the least we can do is return the favor. It is crucial that we take the appropriate steps to shelter vulnerable men from the potential side effects of these drugs.

“When a man makes a crucial decision about his health and his body, he should be fully

aware of the alternative options and the lifetime repercussions of that decision. Men will be more easily guided through the process of obtaining treatment for impotence so they can better understand and more effectively address their condition.”

Illinois State Representative Kelly Cassidy has done her part by introducing an amendment requiring men to watch a video about the sideeffects of erectile dysfunction drugs to a bill requiring women to get an ultrasound before an abortion. In Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman’s bill would allow a man to obtain a vasectomy only when failure to do so would cause him serious injury or death. Yes, all this is funny but not so funny when one thinks about the attitude behind it all, just what prompted these proposals.

Also, just keep in mind how long it took to get the birth-control pill approved and included in insurance plans compared to the time for Viagra.

Years vs months! Or was it weeks for the latter?

It really is no laughing matter.

On the other hand throw in one of the other big issues these days and understand why some of us just can’t resist going through all that mail we love to hate on the computer. One rather clever wag has joined the NRA’s (as if you didn’t know: National Rifle Association) love for guns despite the accompanying violence with the GOP’s love of controlling women’s reproductive lives: “Gun violence problem solved. Or, ‘hey, how

Gadebusch continued on page 9

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Frank Bruni

The Republicans’ Ugly Revolt Over the last two decades, through Bob Dole and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney, it has become an article of faith that the Republican presidential nominee is a person blessed by, or acceptable to, the party’s establishment, meaning the elders, the bankers, the cool heads, the deep pockets.

There’s mess along the way — brief tantrums by restive voters, fleeting triumphs by renegade candidates — but order and obeisance in the end.

Is this the election cycle when that changes?

The twilight of the Republican elite?

Donald Trump’s stamina and the ascendance of Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina suggest as much. The three of them, who have led national polls since mid-September, aren’t just political outsiders, which is the label hung on them most frequently.

They’re instruments of protest by Republican voters unwilling to heed the prompts and protocol that they’re expected to.

For Republicans (and perhaps for Democrats, too) this is a season of rebellion, as the chaos in the House of Representatives vividly illustrates. A consequential share of the Republican majority there have made it clear that they will not bow to precedent, not follow any conventional script, not have anyone foisted on them. No, they’ll do the foisting themselves.

Glenn Thrush of Politico captured this dynamic in an article following the withdrawal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the race to be the next

speaker of the House. Enumerating the reasons no sane person would seek the job, Thrush wrote that “if you have any chance of winning, you’re automatically the ‘establishment,’” and you’re thus anathema to a group of bomb throwers in the Republican caucus who are “leery of anybody who followed the preordained lines of succession.”

Gadebusch continued from page 8

gun.”

The ingenious author then closes, “It makes more sense to do this with guns than with women and health care, right? I mean no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?”

Whether the humor is appreciated or not, it is something to think about. Why should men be any more protected from the results of their decisions than women? These witty authors are simply returning the favor of those who think they are smart enough to determine how all others should live their lives but may not understand their own need for help.

about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion’ -- mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the a__(just because). Let’s close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding pictures of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a

Those bomb throwers are mirrors of the voters who are saying no to Jeb Bush, no to Chris Christie, no to John Kasich, no to anyone who was once or could soon be the darling of the northeastern Acela corridor.

And they’re pointing the Republican primary in a genuinely unpredictable direction.

This isn’t a mere replay of four years ago, when Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum had their moments. They were middle fingers raised one at a time, in succession (even if Santorum was really more a pinkie). Trump, Carson and Fiorina are parallel, simultaneous phenomena, constituting a gesture of more profound rebuke.

I still don’t believe that any of them will be the nominee. Each has too many peculiarities and too big a potential to crash and burn. Carson seems to be on the verge of doing that right now.

But then who? If the electorate really is more defiant than ever, Bush is done. Scott Walker and Rick Perry are already gone. Voters, it appears, prefer someone brattier.

Someone like Ted Cruz.

“He’s perfectly positioned himself

15-10-9

to own that space when Trump and Carson disappear,” said a Republican operative who is among the smartest analysts I know. “He’ll be a force to be reckoned with. I think that he has a very clear path to the nomination, as much as that horrifies me.”

This is a strange season, in which old rules and truths seem to be going up in flames. It’s a bonfire of the verities.

Remember the longtime thinking that governors made the best presidential candidates, being able to cite executive experience and run on clear records? Well, Perry was and Walker is a governor, and none of the former or current governors still in the hunt is meeting expectations.

Remember how much money was supposed to matter, partly for the commercials it could buy? Well, the ads didn’t have, or aren’t having, the intended effect for Bush, Perry, Kasich, Bobby Jindal (another floundering governor) and — on the Democratic side — Hillary Clinton.

Remember the “shock and awe” of the Bush rollout, in which his speedy commandeering of wealthy donors and prominent advisers was supposed to scare off or marginalize other contenders?

the past and Florida — he governed that state from 1999 through 2007 — at the expense of tomorrow and America.

“Jeb’s talking about things he worked on more than a decade ago: ‘Let me tell you what I did in the late 1990s,’” said the operative I mentioned before, a Bush fan. “It’s a local story, and it’s so backwardlooking.”

What’s more, he, Kasich, Christie and others are selling themselves as potentially effective leaders to a Republican electorate that may be more interested in fantasists who set out on futile quests, which is the modus operandi of the troublemaking House Republicans — and of Trump, with his grand delusions.

“When pressed about how he’s going to round up 12 million immigrants, his answer is: Don’t worry!” one veteran Republican strategist marveled. “How will you get Mexico to pay for the wall?

I’ll do it! The idea that you have to compromise and eventually govern — that there’s a Constitution and we pass laws and sign treaties and have courts that can say no — is thrown out the window.”

Cruz is more like Trump, outrageous and unyielding, than like the governors. And in a radio interview on Thursday, he predicted that he’d inherit Trump’s supporters because he’d “stood up to Washington” and “taken on leaders” of his own party.

A day earlier in National Review, Eliana Johnson called Cruz “the most under-covered serious candidate in the race — and the most underestimated.” Johnson noted that he’s a good fit for voters in primaries in the South, where he’s been diligently organizing and spending time.

In Politico, the conservative soothsayer Rich Lowry recently observed that Cruz, who is not yet halfway through his first Senate term, just needs “voters to become slightly, and only slightly, more desirous of political experience” and he’s “sitting pretty,” as the headline on Lowry’s column read.

Ted Cruz sitting pretty?

This could get even uglier than I’d feared.

He’s the marginalized one, at odds with the populist zeitgeist, laboring ludicrously to present himself as the skunk at the garden party and not the one sipping a cold Tom Collins in the gazebo’s shade.

Party leaders have begun to wonder if he can overcome voters’ resistance to him, the potency of which was suggested by a private internal poll that some of them have been buzzing about. It put Trump in hypothetical head-to-head primary matchups against each of the five next most popular candidates, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polls: Carson, Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Bush and Cruz. Each beat Trump by at least 10 points — except Bush, who lost narrowly to him.

Bush finds himself in an almost impossible bind. In order to distance himself sufficiently from Washington, to dispel any notion that he’s not conservative enough and to make the case that he’s earned rather than inherited the Republican presidential nomination, he has c.2015 New York Times News Service understandably begun to emphasize 15-10-10

10

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Clarence Page

Murdoch’s ‘Real Black,’ Unreal For White House No one should be surprised that Rupert Murdoch likes Ben Carson. Both seem to think that their ingenuity in one area of life makes them experts on just about everything.

Renowned brain surgeon Carson is running for the Republican presidential nomination because he thinks he knows enough to be a dandy leader of the free world.

Media mega-mogul Murdoch similarly seems to think his business genius makes him an expert on black people.

“Ben and Candy Carson terrific,” Murdoch tweeted after watching Carson -- a former contributor to Murdoch’s Fox News Channel -- and his wife on Fox’s “The Kelly File” last Wednesday. “What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.”

Right. And if anybody should know “a real” African-American, it’s a white 84-year-old white billionaire from Australia.

The Twitter universe exploded in speculation as to what Murdoch might have meant. After years of allegations from the political right that Obama was too black to give whites -- or, at least, conservatives -- a fair shake, was Murdoch now saying Obama is not black enough?

Is Obama in Murdoch’s eyes a BINO, Black In Name Only?

Is Murdoch saying, as conservative provocateur Ann Coulter declared on his network four years ago, “Our blacks are so much better than their blacks”?

Murdoch sent a second tweet moments after his first: “Read New York magazine for minority community disappointment with POTUS.” The mogul apparently was referring to “The Paradox of the First Black President,” a thoughtful Oct. 7 article by Jennifer Senior about Obama’s racial tightrope: How to address urgent black community concerns without sparking too much backlash from white conservatives.

But reading the article makes Murdoch’s complaint sound like a humblebrag. If he thinks Obama has worsened our racial divide, as many conservatives claim, he had plenty of help from his ideological opponents.

Whatever Murdoch meant, he apparently realized after hours of backlash on Twitter and other social media that his message needed clarification. “Apologies!” his follow-up tweet exclaimed. “No offense meant. Personally find both men charming.”

That’s a relief. But since Obama’s racial tightrope apparently comes as news to Murdoch, I too have a magazine article to recommend to him: “The Return of the Middle American Radical,” a Sept. 8 analysis in the National Journal by John B. Judis. It analyzes the rise of political outsiders like Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Carson -- and the challenge their supporters present to today’s Republican Party, particularly among white voters.

The “Middle American Radicals, or MARS,” first identified as such by sociologist Donald Warren in the mid-1970s, Judis reports, are mostly white. They tend to lack college diplomas and feel shafted by political and corporate elites from above and by minorities, liberals and allegedly undeserving poor from below.

MARS can be more loyal to personalities than parties when a colorful populist like George Wallace, H. Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan or Trump comes along.

What distinguishes them is their ideology, Judis writes. They don’t trust corporate power or either party’s political establishment. But they also turn very conservative on poverty and race with “an intense conviction that the middle class (is) under siege from above and below.”

That’s probably what appeals to Murdoch about Carson. Our current black or, at least, biracial President Barack Obama apparently is not “black” or “real” enough for Rupert. A “real black president” in Murdoch’s mind would share his very conservative values -- as Carson does.

Taxes? “Simply tithe,” says Carson. Never mind that taxing everybody 10 percent would not only disproportionately burden the poor but also grew the national debt.

Obamacare? “Worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” says Carson. Never mind the millions of all colors who have health insurance for the first time.

Carson may be a brilliant brain surgeon, but Republicans could do better at supporting black conservative office holders. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, for example, the South’s first black senator since Reconstruction, won with mostly white votes. Yet he has been a leader on issues like criminal justice reform and police body cameras that his black constituents in particular care about.

That’s how you practice the politics of addition, not division. I eagerly wait for the Party of Abraham Lincoln to practice it again.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(C) 2015 Clarence Page 15-10-11

Michael Crespin

Which Republican Presidential Candidate Will Drop Out Next?

Over the past month, the crowded Republican presidential primary field saw its first two casualties: former Texas governor Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

These early exits surprised some. Walker was as an early front-runner in the polls owing to his conservative record and ability to win statewide office in a traditionally blue state. Perry was seen as a dark horse with untapped potential.

So who’s next? While it’s impossible to predict, based on previous research by me and several colleagues, I think Govs. Chris Christie and John Kasich are in danger of dropping out.

Here’s why.

My colleagues and I studied the 2000 GOP primary, which also featured a large group of candidates. There was no clear front-runner as the campaign began but Gov. George W. Bush quickly became the establishment candidate.

Although Sen. John McCain won the New Hampshire primary, Bush won in South Carolina and regained momentum. Other candidates included John Kasich, then a member of the House of Representatives, political commentator Pat Buchanan, former labor secretary Elizabeth Dole, and self-funded businessman Steve Forbes.

We looked at which factors over the course of the campaign helped candidates stay in longer or drop out of the race. We found that early in the campaign, during the “invisible primary,” positive news coverage plays an independent role above and beyond fundraising or polling. But after the primaries begin, polling relative to the

front-runner becomes more important, and media and money matter less.

Media and money also matter differently depending on the candidate. Money is important to “big shot” candidates - those doing relatively well in the polls - but news coverage is important to “long shots” early in the race. Finally, we also found that candidates running more of a policyor issue-focused campaign may stay in longer than expected.

Of course, 2016 is not 2000. In particular, the GOP has done far less to coordinate around a candidate this cycle than it did around Bush in 2000. But we can still learn some things from our previous study.

For one, Jeb Bush seems to fit our findings. He is a “big shot” with a lot of money, but not polling exceptionally well or generating a ton of positive media coverage. Bush has enough money to keep his campaign running until later when the importance of media coverage matters less and delegates start to add up.

Similarly, candidates whose campaign is more centered on a particular policy agenda - such as former governor Mike Huckabee, former senator Rick Santorum, and possibly Sen. Rand Paul, too - may prove more likely to stay in the race when other factors suggest they should drop out. They can adopt a survival strategy of specialization and continue to campaign with limited resources.

Outsider candidates, such as Donald Trump,

Crespin continued on page 11

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

11

Paul Krugman

It’s All Benghazi So Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was supposed to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the House, won’t be pursuing the job after all.

He would have faced a rough ride both winning the post and handling it under the best of circumstances, thanks to the doomsday caucus — the fairly large bloc of Republicans demanding that the party cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, or kill Obamacare, or anyway damage something liberals like, by shutting down the government and forcing it into default.

Still, he doomed his chances by admitting — boasting, actually — that the endless House hearings on Benghazi had nothing to do with national security, that they were all about inflicting political damage on Hillary Clinton.

But we all knew that, didn’t we?

I often wonder about commentators who write about things like those hearings as if there were some real issue involved, who keep going on about the Clinton email controversy as if all these months of scrutiny had produced any evidence of wrongdoing, as opposed to sloppiness.

Surely they have to know better,

Crespin continued from page 10

whether they admit it to themselves or not. And surely the long history of Clinton nonscandals and retracted allegations — remember, there never was anything to the Whitewater accusations — should serve as a cautionary tale.

Somehow, though, politicians who pretend to be concerned about issues, but are obviously just milking those issues for political gain, keep getting a free pass. And it’s not just a Clinton story.

Consider the example of an issue that might seem completely different, one that dominated much of our political discourse just a few years ago: federal debt.

Many prominent politicians made warnings about the dangers posed by U.S. debt, especially debt owned by China, a central part of their political image. Paul Ryan, when he was chairman of the House Budget Committee, portrayed himself as a heroic crusader against deficits. Mitt Romney made denunciations of borrowing from China a centerpiece of his campaign for president. And by and large, commentators treated this posturing as if it were serious.

But it wasn’t. a reason to stick it out as long as possible - waiting for something to happen so that they can move up.

Another major difference in 2016 is the prevalence of super PACs. Unlike in 2000, even one wealthy donor can help keep a candidate in the race. Given the behavior of these donors in the past - and given that super PAC support didn’t keep Walker or Perry in the race - it is difficult to predict who will benefit this time around.

Of course, we are still a few months away from an actual primary or caucus, so there is plenty of time for a new front-runner to emerge and transform the state of play.

Crespin is the associate director of the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma. For other commentary from The Monkey Cage, an independent blog anchored by a group of political scientists from universities around the country, see www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ monkey-cage.

Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, should be considered “big shots” due to their relatively strong poll numbers. This means media coverage has little influence on the chance they will drop out early, as long as they remain competitive in the polls and have sufficient funds.

But if they do fade in the polls as the primaries begin, they will be more likely to drop out, even though they can self-fund to keep their campaigns going.

So what about Christie and Kasich? Their main problem is that it has been hard to break through and get substantial positive media coverage early in the campaign.

And, similar to Perry and Walker, Christie and Kasich are career politicians who still see a future in Republican circles. Staying in too long may hurt them in the future.

On the other hand, if Christie, Kasich, and the other “career politician” candidates assume that outsiders like Trump or Carson Special To The Washington Post won’t win the nomination, then 15-10-11 perhaps it gives these candidates

I don’t mean that it was bad economics, although it was.

Remember all the dire warnings about what would happen if China stopped buying our debt, or worse yet, starting selling it? Remember how interest rates would soar and America would find itself in crisis?

Well, don’t tell anyone, but the much feared event has happened: China is no longer buying our debt, and is in fact selling tens of billions of dollars in U.S. debt every month as it tries to support its troubled currency. And what has happened is what serious economic analysis always told us would happen: nothing. It was always a false alarm.

Beyond that, however, it was a fake alarm.

If you looked at all closely at the plans and proposals released by politicians who claimed to be deeply worried about deficits, it soon became obvious that they were just pretending to care about fiscal responsibility. People who really worry about government debt don’t propose huge tax cuts for the rich, only partly offset by savage cuts in aid to the poor and middle class, and base all claims of debt reduction on unspecified savings to be announced on some future occasion.

Debt, it seems, only matters when there’s a Democrat in the White House. Or more accurately, all the talk about debt wasn’t about fiscal prudence; it was about trying to inflict political damage on President Barack Obama, and it stopped when the tactic lost effectiveness.

Again, none of this should come as news to anyone who follows politics and policy even moderately closely.

But I’m not sure that normal people, who have jobs to do and families to raise, are getting the message. After all, who will tell them?

Sometimes I have the impression that many people in the media consider it uncouth to acknowledge, even to themselves, the fraudulence of much political posturing. The done thing, it seems, is to pretend that we’re having real debates about national security or economics even when it’s both obvious and easy to show that nothing of the kind is actually taking place.

But turning our eyes away from political fakery, pretending that we’re having a serious discussion when we aren’t, is itself a kind of fraudulence. McCarthy inadvertently did the nation a big favor with his ill-advised honesty, but telling the public what’s really going on shouldn’t depend on politicians with loose lips.

Sometimes — all too often — there’s no substance under the shouting. And then we need to tell the truth, and say that it’s all Benghazi.

And once fiscal scare tactics started to lose political traction, even the pretense went away. Just look at the people seeking the Republican presidential nomination. One after another, they have been proposing c.2015 New York Times News Service giant tax cuts that would add trillions 15-10-8 to the deficit.

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October 21, 2015

Froma Harrop

Political War All The Time There is a time for war and a time for peace, according to the book of Ecclesiastes and The Byrds. In the contest to replace John Boehner as speaker of the House, the Republican candidates chose to sell themselves as full-time political warriors. Forget about the national interest.

Their job, as they have framed it, is to smite Democrats.

The security of American diplomats in dangerous places and maintaining America’s promise to pay its debts are a concern to everyone. Sadly, many ambitious Republicans distort the facts surrounding these important matters to fuel their political advancement. In their terms, that means entertaining hard-right voters not tuned in to the big picture. When that happens, governing stops.

Now we are not so naive as to think that a high wall separates governing and politics. But the House speaker needs to know how to avoid political warfare that turns the American people into collateral damage. Boehner understood that much of the time.

One of the aspirants, Jason Chaffetz, vowed to threaten default on the U.S. debt and a government shutdown as a means to yank concessions from Democrats. The Utah Republican’s martial words: “We’re just not going to unilaterally raise the debt limit.”

Huh? Fight over taxes and spending, sure, but compromise America’s reputation for honoring its debts as a negotiating tool? That treats the entire country as a hostage.

After the Republicans’ 2011 debt ceiling outrage, stock prices plunged, and consumer confidence fell through the floor. Standard & Poor’s lowered America’s previously magnificent credit rating. Even though a lastminute fix stopped the horrible from happening, the stunt cost all of us.

Just handing the powerful speaker of the House job to a man suggesting he’d do just that all over again weakens the American economy.

If that weren’t sport enough, Chaffetz also backs shutting down the government rather than funding Planned Parenthood.

In promoting his political war skills, the leading contender, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, foolishly blew the cover off Republican motives for their endless investigation into the Benghazi tragedy. You see, Hillary Clinton was secretary of state when a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed at the besieged U.S. Consulate in Libya. Now she’s a strong Democratic candidate for president.

McCarthy said this: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today?”

What clever fellows they are. So dragging America through the details again and again had little to do with reaching a truth on Benghazi

-- one of a multitude of calamities tied to the officials in Washington have duties beyond violent chaos in that part of the world. It was all obsessing about the next election. about pushing down Clinton’s poll numbers.

As a final thought, let’s note that other democracies have rules in place to temper Republicans are understandably sore at political warfare.

McCarthy for making that revealing statement. In Britain, for example, the speaker of the What’s interesting is why a practiced politician House of Commons must be nonpartisan. such as McCarthy would say such an impolitic According to Wikipedia, “the Speaker, by thing. convention, severs all ties with his or her Perhaps when everything that happens is seen political party, as it is considered essential that as politics, nothing seems impolitic. McCarthy the Speaker be seen as an impartial presiding was on Fox News Channel, where accusations officer.” concerning Benghazi (and Clinton’s use of In America, that’ll be the day. private email while secretary of state) go round Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @ and round in a mind-numbing loop.

FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@ McCarthy may have simply lost track of gmail.com. the fact that there’s a voting public outside of Copyright 2015 Creators.com the angry Republican base. He forgot that our 15-10-8

Gail Collins

House Speaker Chaos Crisis Inferno

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives can’t pick a new speaker.

It’s hell! Double-disaster! If things don’t get resolved the whole party could fragment, possibly creating an opportunity for the longawaited resurrection of the Whigs.

The current debacle began when Kevin McCarthy, who was supposed to succeed Speaker John Boehner, announced “we need a new face” and suddenly bowed out. Since no one in Washington really believes we need new faces, particularly when the physiognomy in question is their own, there are other possible reasons for McCarthy’s departure:

1) Donald Trump made him quit. We have only one source for this theory, which is Guess Who. (“They’re giving me a lot of credit for that because I said you really need somebody very, very tough and very smart.”)

Jeb Bush, for what it’s worth, expressed surprised — nay, near-astonishment — about McCarthy’s announcement. The son and brother of former presidents then added that Washington “seems so removed from everyday life. It’s just — they talk about things that — they talk in language with all the acronyms and stuff that doesn’t make any sense.” People, didn’t you think these candidates would be better by now?

Or gone?

become public.”

We will now stop to estimate what percentage of the members of Congress have done something in private that they would not like the world to know. No wonder nobody wants the job.

3) The Freedom Caucus is screwing everything up. This is a group of about 40 conservative Republicans, including some who are so stone-cold crazy that you have probably heard of them even though they are otherwise totally unproductive lawmakers from states other than your own. Their candidate for speaker is Rep. Daniel Webster. He is not the Daniel Webster who was a leader of the Whig Party in the 19th century, although I believe I speak for many in saying that Daniel Webster would be a breath of fresh air. This Daniel Webster, who has been in Congress for a whopping five years, is a former speaker of the House in Florida.

Question: Wait a minute! Wasn’t Sen. Marco Rubio speaker of the House in Florida?

Answer: Yes. Florida has a super-strict term limits law and practically everybody in the state is a former speaker of the House.

Personally, I hope that if we have to have a new leader from the Freedom Caucus, it’s Rep. Raúl Labrador of Idaho. Just because ... Speaker Labrador.

But there are other options — like Newt Gingrich! It turns out you don’t have to actually be in Congress to be elected speaker of the House. And Newt said in a radio interview that if the Republicans came and begged for his leadership, it would be like “when George Washington came out of retirement, because there are moments you can’t avoid.”

Coming soon: Gingrich Crossing the Delaware.

The speaker of the House can be anybody.

2) Conservatives threatened to blow the whistle on some kind of sex scandal. All we know for sure is that Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina — the guy who made his name by demanding that french fries in the House cafeteria be renamed “freedom fries” — sent a letter to what’s left of the party leadership, saying nobody should run for speaker “if there are any misdeeds he has committed since joining Congress that will embarrass himself ... if they Collins continued on page 13

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Jules Witcover

Republican Dysfunction Engulfs Process Of Choosing New Speaker

Fifty-three years ago, legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel famously asked of his New York Mets, who were in the process of losing 120 of its 160 contests: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

The same query is appropriate today for the Republican Party, which has been tying itself in knots in both its quest for a 2016 presidential nominee and for a new speaker of the House of Representatives.

So far, it has been unable to dispel the nightmare of Donald Trump as the leader in the polls, and now the process of choosing a replacement for resigned Speaker John Boehner is becoming a fiasco.

Choosing the Republican presidential nominee remains ultimately in the hands of state primary and caucus voters. But the House disruption has been caused by a smaller band of hardline conservative party members who want to make a clean break with the status quo, as represented by the too-accommodating Boehner.

It was the critical group that calls itself the Freedom Caucus that succeeded in getting Boehner to step down; that appeared to clear the way for his chief leadership sidekick, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to succeed him.

Collins continued from page 12

The Republicans could just pick a popular celebrity. Think how much more pleasant it would be hearing that the government had just shut down if Tom Hanks was the one breaking the news.

But a combination of that close relationship and McCarthy’s own knuckle-headedness caused him to commit the political version of hara-kiri, withdrawing from the speakership competition.

His incredible gaffe of saying that the creation of a House select committee on the Benghazi affair had succeeded in its objective of driving down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination revealed McCarthy’s political tin ear.

But more significant in terms of his qualifications to be speaker was his failure to recognize that his elevation would be a blatant nose-thumbing to the Freedom Caucus, which was demanding a much more confrontational House majority pivot toward the Obama administration.

The first Republican to challenge the McCarthy ascendancy to speaker, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, argued that the party was demanding a fresh face and clean break from the Boehner style of trying to find common ground among his flock. He called for opposing Obama more forcefully now that the House Republicans were the majority.

McCarthy in his surprise were using it to turn down a job as, say, chairman of Goldman Sachs or ambassador to France.

If the Republicans can’t find a new speaker, Boehner will probably hang around. He could make a deal with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to raise the debt ceiling and pass a budget before he leaves. The Freedom Caucus would be like maddened, bloodcrazed zombies, but Boehner wouldn’t care because he’d be on his way to Florida to play golf and get ... tan.

Good old John Boehner. Who knew? There was a time when we tended to snicker when his name came up, but no more, no more.

In this Washington, the man is a veritable Pericles of Athens.

The one person Republicans are begging to run for speaker is Rep. Paul Ryan. Everyone seems to feel he could bring the party together. It’s true he did once work out a bipartisan budget deal with Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, but that was Patty Murray. You try pulling it off with Raúl Labrador.

Ryan said he was unable to accept the most impossible and politically poisonous job in the country because he wants to spend quality time with his children. This is a c.2015 New York Times News Service commendable position, although 15-10-9 we would be more impressed if he

withdrawal agreed that the party needed “a fresh face,” but it was not clear that he could corral enough Freedom Caucus loyalists to claim the speakership without resort to Democratic support in a final vote.

So the quest for that fresh face began.

Another candidate for the job, the lightly regarded Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida, generated little interest, and the obvious attention turned to the party’s 2012 vicepresidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. But Ryan, with 17 years in the House and chairman of the important Ways and Means Committee and a tax and policy expert, immediately said he wasn’t interested.

Rayburn and Tip O’Neill.

The speaker is second in the constitutional line of succession to the president after only the vice president, though no occupant has ever reached the Oval Office under that stipulation. John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president, surrendered the speaker’s chair to be FDR’s running mate in 1933 and regretted it ever after.

He told one interviewer: “When I was elected vice president it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. As Speaker of the House I could have done more good than anywhere else.” Many House Republicans may wish Cactus Jack Garner were still around now to talk to Paul Ryan.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books.

You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.

Ryan was well aware of the challenge to any speaker to satisfy the aggressive demands of the Freedom Caucus and tea party elements on pressing their antiObama agendas, which had brought (C) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

Boehner down. But with the party 15-10-11 in a desperate search for a highvisibility replacement of stature and popularity, Ryan went into the Online Subscription weekend challenged to reconsider Beat The Postal Delay, his reluctance.

In a sense, the whole episode Subscribe Online Today! has brought about a marked devaluation of the speakership www.liberalopinion.com itself, an office widely sought after Or call Toll Free and held by giants in both parties, 1-800-338-9335 from Republicans Joe Cannon and Champ Clark to Democrats Sam

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Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Paul Krugman

The Crazies and the Con Man How will the chaos that the crazies, I mean the Freedom Caucus, have wrought in the House get resolved? I have no idea. But as this column went to press, practically the whole Republican establishment was pleading with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to become speaker. He is, everyone says, the only man who can save the day.

What makes Ryan so special? The answer, basically, is that he’s the best con man they’ve got.

His success in hoodwinking the news media and self-proclaimed centrists in general is the basis of his stature within his party. Unfortunately, at least from his point of view, it would be hard to sustain the con game from the speaker’s chair.

To understand Ryan’s role in our politicalmedia ecosystem, you need to know two things.

First, the modern Republican Party is a postpolicy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems. Second, pundits and the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.

On the first point, just look at the policy ideas coming from the presidential candidates, even establishment favorites like Marco Rubio, the most likely nominee given Jeb Bush’s fatal lack of charisma. The Times’ Josh Barro has dubbed Rubio’s tax proposal the “puppies and rainbows” plan, consisting of trillions in giveaways with not a hint of how to pay for them — just the assertion that growth would somehow make it all good.

And it’s not just taxes, it’s everything. For example, Republicans have been promising to offer an alternative to Obamacare ever since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but have yet to produce anything resembling an actual health plan.

Yet most of the news media, and most pundits, still worship at the church of “balance.” They are committed to portraying the two big parties as equally reasonable. This creates a powerful demand for serious, honest Republicans who can be held up as proof that the party does too include reasonable people making useful proposals. As Slate’s William Saletan, who enthusiastically touted Ryan but eventually became disillusioned, wrote: “I was looking for Mr. Right — a factbased, sensible fiscal conservative.”

And Paul Ryan played and in many ways still plays that role, but only on TV, not in real life. The truth is that his budget proposals have always been a ludicrous mess of magic asterisks: assertions that trillions will be saved through spending cuts to be specified later, that trillions more will be raised by closing unnamed tax loopholes. Or as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center put it, they’re full of “mystery meat.”

But Ryan has been very good at gaming the system, at producing glossy documents that look sophisticated if you don’t understand the issues, at creating the false impression that his plans have been vetted by budget experts. This has been enough to convince political writers who don’t

know much about policy, but do know what they want to see, that he’s the real deal. (A number of reporters are deeply impressed by the fact that he uses PowerPoint.) He is to fiscal policy what Carly Fiorina was to corporate management: brilliant at self-promotion, hopeless at actually doing the job. But his act has been good enough for media work.

(Who knew we had such power?)

Which brings us back to the awkward fact that Ryan isn’t actually a pillar of fiscal rectitude, or anything like the budget expert he pretends to be. And the perception that he is these things is fragile, not likely to survive long if he were to move into the center of political rough and tumble.

Indeed, his halo was visibly fraying during the few months of 2012 that he was Mitt Romney’s running mate. A few months as speaker would probably complete the process, and end up being a career-killer.

Predictions aside, however, the Ryan phenomenon tells us a lot about what’s really happening in American politics. In brief, crazies have taken over the Republican Party, but the media don’t want to recognize this reality. The combination of these two facts has created an opportunity, indeed a need, for political con men.

And Ryan has risen to the challenge.

His position within the party, in turn, rests mainly on this outside perception. Ryan is certainly a hard-line, Ayn Rand-loving and progressive-taxhating conservative, but no more so than many of his colleagues. If you look at what the people who see him as a savior are saying, they aren’t talking about his following within the party, which isn’t especially passionate. They’re talking, instead, about his perceived outside credibility, his status as someone who can stand up to smarty-pants liberals — someone who won’t, says MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, be intimidated by “negative c.2015 New York Times News Service articles in The New York Times opinions page.” 15-10-11

Jonathan Capehart

The Two Big Problems Hurting House Republicans

Discussing the chaos gripping the House Republican caucus, Joe Scarborough put his finger on one of the major problems facing House Republicans: a lack of strategic thinking. The former Republican congressman from Florida mused last week on his eponymous MSNBC morning show that when he was in Congress in the late 1990s, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich would be in his Capitol suite plotting the caucus’s next moves in the thrust-and-parry of governing with a Democrat in the White House.

Ain’t no such thing happening with the current GOP-led House.

The tea party took over the Republican Party in 2010 and elevated Rep. John Boehner , Ohio, to speaker in 2011. And from the moment on, he lived in political fear of the burn-this-motherdown members of his majority. Whatever strategy he hoped to employ, assuming he had one, was waylaid by their outsize ambitions and unrealistic expectations. Each successive election added to their ranks and their hubris.

With 247 members after the 2014 midterm elections, the Republican majority now wrecking the House is the largest since 1929 . That tea party faction metastasized into the so-called Freedom Caucus, a rump group of about 40 far-right conservative members that spooked the speaker’s gavel out of Boehner’s hands and ensured it would never warm in House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s.

As much as Boehner and his leadership team are to blame for lacking strategic thinking, there’s another equally important factor at work

in the chaos on Capitol Hill. Their members are unwilling to be led.

Part of the reason McCarthy was a terrible whip was that he could never corral the votes Boehner needed to pass legislation, which made a weak speaker inside the chamber plainly apparent to the rest of us watching outside. And things didn’t get any better once he was elevated to majority leader after the forced retirement of Eric Cantor. That McCarthy thought he could actually lead the majority as speaker was foolish.

The tea party class of 2010 was sent to Washington to block, cut and shut down the government. No amount of cajoling or pleading deterred them. None of the negative impacts of actually shutting down the government or playing chicken with the debt ceiling in 2011 humbled them. If anything, increasing their numbers in the two subsequent elections and retaking the Senate in 2014 have only convinced them that their way is best. Which brings me to Rep. Paul Ryan, RWis. Without question, the 2012 vice presidential nominee and current chairman of the powerful Ways and Means committee is speaker-of-theHouse material. You might not like his fiscal ideas or entitlement reform plans, but at least he has them and can rationally debate them with Democrats and the White House. Ryan would be the strategic thinker the Republican House majority needs and with whom Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ky., could govern.

Capehart continued on page 15

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E.J. Dionne Jr.

How Kevin McCarthy Predicted His Own Demise One group was not surprised by the collapse of Kevin McCarthy’s campaign for speaker: The ultraconservatives inside and outside the House who have made clear since the rise of the tea party that they have no use for politics as usual.

They have always been upfront: Anyone who believes that President Obama poses a grave threat to our constitutional rights -- and that Republican leaders have sold out conservative principles for decades -- has no choice but to throw sand into the gears of government. For them, governing with Obama means furthering the collapse of the republic.

Let’s go back to 2010 and see what conservative politicians were saying.

“They think if they make government so large and the debt so big it will be impossible to reverse it,” one Republican warned ominously of the Democrats. “Who would have thought America could be going the way it’s going now? With government taking over businesses?

With government taking over health care? We’ve always believed in freedom as a country but now we’re starting to understand that we have to fight for it.” The goal: “unshackling the grip that Washington has on so much of our lives.”

The GOP leadership, he said, lost

Capehart continued from page 14

But Ryan would still have to deal with a House majority that does not want to be led. And ponder this. Ryan exhibited all the strategic thinking and leadership one would want in a speaker when he negotiated the compromise bipartisan budget deal with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in December 2013. How long before the folks pining for Ryan to be Speaker Ryan turn on him because of it?

Asked “if the House is governable” during a telephone interview with Rich Lowry of the National Review, McCarthy said, “I don’t know. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom.” Knowing that, why on earth would Ryan, who has presidential ambitions, agree to be speaker? Why would anyone want to be speaker under these conditions? No one in their right mind would. (c) 2015, The Washington Post 15-10-11

its way. “The Republican base was angry about the way the party had betrayed its principles,” declared this firebrand, referring to the George W. Bush years. “Under Republican leadership in the early 2000s, spending and government got out of control. And as government grew, there were scandals and political compromises.”

The author of these words: Kevin McCarthy in a 2010 book called “Young Guns” he wrote with Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. Cantor is gone, defeated by tea partyers in 2014. Ryan has good reason to fear the consequences of trying to lead the crowd he and his colleagues helped bring to Congress.

Let’s stop blaming the Republican far right for what is happening to the party. The party leadership brought this onto itself with phony promises and incendiary but empty rhetoric.

The right wing, at least, has the courage of its convictions.

Permit me to channel the Freedom Caucus crowd that has every right to tell its leaders: You betrayed us.

You talked a good game when you recruited us. We said the harshest things about President Obama and you didn’t rebuke us. You claimed to be as alienated from the old GOP as we were.

In that book, Paul Ryan used tea party language, saying that “business in Washington these days isn’t being conducted the way our Founders envisioned.” Republicans had “lost the true path,” he said, and the Republican House in the Bush years -- the one he was part of -- was run by “machine-like people.” Any surprise that we’re still raging against the machine?

You young guns said we could get rid of Obamacare -- and then you gave us dozens of show votes that meant nothing. You, Kevin McCarthy, talked about repealing the bank bailout and unwinding “the vast amounts of government spending and mandates that distorts the innovation and free enterprise in our financial services industry, our health care system, our car companies, our energy sector.”

How’s that going, pal?

a “banana republic.” Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., has talked of coalitions with Democrats to face down his own party’s “rejectionist wing.” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., has repeatedly criticized tactics based on shutdowns and brinksmanship with no chance of success.

But they are exceptions. Again and again, McCarthy and other GOP leaders tried to pretend that two utterly incompatible views of what it means to be an opposition party in a republic that separates executive and legislative power could coexist.

They tried to avoid debate over what conservatism means and whether compromise is acceptable. They made inflammatory pronouncements to appease the right wing, a form of disrespect for conviction politicians who care about outcomes and not just words.

Republicans have a big choice to make about what kind of party they are. But they’re most likely to keep papering over their divide with psychobabble about “healing.” This won’t work. Just ask John Boehner.

Or Kevin McCarthy.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @ EJDionne.

Kevin, you’re also the guy who said that “should we regain the American people’s trust, we will insist that our feet are held to the fire.” Bet you never imagined that your toes might be toasted a little.

And now the whole house of cards has collapsed.

There are a few Republicans who have stood up to the madness. Rep. (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group Peter King, R-N.Y., is aghast that his 15-10-12 caucus has become what he called

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October 21, 2015

LIBERAL DELINEATIONS

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Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Douglas Elmendorf

A Fairer Approach To Fiscal Reform Benefits for older Americans - especially through Social Security and Medicare - account for the largest part of federal spending today and for the lion’s share of the spending growth that will occur in coming decades without changes in policies. That growth is not surprising: With baby boomers moving into retirement, the number of beneficiaries of those programs is surging. Indeed, in the Congressional Budget Office’s current-law projections, all federal spending apart from Social Security, Medicare, defense and interest on the debt will amount to about the same percentage of gross domestic product 25 years from now that it did 25 years ago. At the same time, federal debt is now larger relative to the economy than at almost any point in our history and is on an upward longterm trajectory. Therefore, cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits, or increases in the taxes used to finance those programs, will almost certainly be needed to put federal debt on a sustainable path.

In deciding what benefit cuts or tax increases would make the most sense, two developments of the past few decades are especially important: First, the incomes of people across most of the income distribution have risen quite slowly, while incomes at the high end have risen rapidly. Most people in the country have seen little increase in their earnings despite gains in total output and income.

Second, changes in labor markets are significantly reducing the role of traditional employer-provided retirement benefits. In particular, the number of workers with defined-benefit pension plans has fallen sharply.

If we narrowed the gap between federal revenue and spending through significant acrossthe-board cuts in Social Security and Medicare, we would significantly reduce total retirement income for many lower- and middle- income people. That approach would be wrong, in my view, because it would impose a large burden on the people who have been experiencing the slowest income growth. It would also be wrong because those benefits have distinctive characteristics that are even more important for people who do not have defined-benefit pensions: In contrast with most personal saving, Social Security benefits protect against longevity risk because they are annuities, they impose no financial-market risk, and they do not require long-term planning or self-control.

To avoid significant across-the-board cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits, some of the standard arrows in reformers’ quivers should be a last rather than a first resort. For example, an increase in the eligibility age for full retirement benefits in Social Security would reduce monthly benefits for everyone who chose to retire at the same age as they would under current law, and it would reduce the number of years of benefits for everyone who chose to retire later. That change would be especially harmful for lower-income people: A recent study by the National Academies of Sciences estimated that people with incomes in the bottom two quintiles will experience almost no

increase in life expectancy over a few decades, and under current law the eligibility age for full benefits is already undergoing a gradual transition from 65 to 67. At the same time, I would not increase Social Security benefits across the board, as some have advocated, because I think scarce federal resources should be used in more targeted ways.

To be clear, this approach to improving the financial outlook for Social Security and Medicare - and for the federal government as a whole - does not offer a free lunch. A substantial improvement would be achieved only if a substantial number of people with higher incomes received lower benefits or paid higher taxes, which would reduce people’s incentives to work and save. Moreover, making Social Security and Medicare more progressive would weaken the connection between an individual’s taxes and benefits, which could undermine the important earned-benefit character of the programs if taken too far.

But the key question, as is often the case in public policy, is whether there is a better alternative. It would be extremely difficult to narrow the projected gap between federal spending and revenue without changing either benefits or taxes for the largest, fastest-growing programs. Changing Social Security and Medicare through across-the-board cuts would impose much of the burden on people who have fared the worst in economic terms in recent years. Instead, we should protect people of modest means by imposing most of the burden of changes on those who are more affluent.

The writer was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015.

Instead, we should focus on reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for high-income beneficiaries and raising payroll taxes on workers with high earnings. For example, the Congressional Budget Office has analyzed options to lower Social Security benefits for workers in the top half of the lifetime earnings distribution but leave benefits for those in the bottom half unchanged. There are a variety of ways to increase tax revenue for Social Security by imposing a payroll tax on income above the current-law taxable maximum. Taken together, such targeted measures could eliminate much of the estimated 75-year shortfall in the system. In Medicare, additional tax revenue could be raised by boosting the payroll tax rate for workers with higher earnings. Also, the additional premiums paid by higher-income beneficiaries in Medicare Part B could be extended to cover a much larger share of beneficiaries than the current 6 percent (a figure that will increase in coming years under Special to The Washington Post current law but just by about half a percentage 15-10-11 point per year).

Jules Witcover

Gallup Steps Back From Horse Race Polling

The top editor of the Gallup polling organization declared the other day that the nation’s primary door-knocking operation was going to stop surveying who’s ahead and who’s behind in the course of the 2016 primary elections. That seems akin to a baseball umpire giving up calling balls and strikes.

Editor-in-chief Frank Newport informed Politico, the saturation political news and conjecture dispenser, that in the 2016 election cycle Gallup would de-emphasize the so-called horse race numbers in its daily and periodic reports.

Instead, according to the New York Times, he said it would focus on “understanding where the public stands on the issues of the day, how they are reacting to the proposals by the candidates, what it is they want the candidates to do, and what messages or image of the candidates are seeping into the public consciousness.”

Newport said the switch had nothing to do with the fact that in 2012 the final Gallup projection had Republican nominee Mitt Romney edging out President Obama by one percentage point, whereas Obama ended up winning by nearly four percentage points.

But horse race polling has become uncommonly

significant in the current cycle. A compilation of leading surveys has been used to determine which Republican candidates are invited to their prime-time debates and which are shunted to an “undercard.”

According to the Associated Press, Newport opined that such polling is “actually a very good criteria for deciding who gets into the debates.”

But those left out of the first such debate screamed bloody murder at the unfairness of it all.

One of them, former Hewlett Packard executive Carly Fiorina, managed to raise her standing in the polls afterward and gained inclusion in the second prime-time debate, where she scored verbal points that skyrocketed her to near the top of the GOP field.

The poll ratings have served one other purpose: They appeared to undercut fund-raising by the bottom-feeders, with two candidates -- former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker -- already sent to the showers.

Newport told the AP that “in the big picture, an obsessive focus on trying to be more accurate in

Witcover continued on page 19

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

19

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann Blog Why the Media isn’t Covering Citizens United Americans have always been skeptical of corporate power. In fact, this country was founded by a revolt against the biggest corporation of its day - the British East India Company.

You know how conservatives are always going on about how the Boston Tea Party was an example of America’s anti-government roots?

Well, the Boston Tea Party was actually an anti-corporate protest, not some 18th century version of an Americans for Tax Reform rally.

When the good citizens of Boston threw chest upon chest of East India tea into the freezing winter water of Boston Harbor, they were protesting a law -- the Tea Act of 1773 -- that was their era’s version of the bank bailout.

The Tea Act gave the British East India Company total control over the North American tea trade, exempted it from having to pay taxes on exported tea, and gave it a refund on any tea it was unable to sell.

It was the largest corporate tax cut in the history of the world, and set up the East India Company to pull a WalMart and put all the small, local tea shops across America out of business.

Not surprisingly, this really angered the American colonists, and so they took action, setting off a chain of events that eventually resulted in our independence from Great Britain.

So skepticism of corporate power is in our blood.

It’s what the American Revolution, or at least the event that sparked

Witcover continued from page 18

predicting the outcome doesn’t help society move forward as much as other polling would.”

But how important in the scheme of things is informing the voting public how other voters feel about the candidates’ positions on key issues of the day? Should the electoral process require a running account of what the electorate or a particular segment of it thinks along the way?

After all, the ballot tallies inform the American people soon enough on election day about what the prevailing public judgment is on the candidates and their positions.

In the long run, shouldn’t the candidates’ own peddling of their political wares, convictions and personalities be what counts,

it, was all about, which makes the latest polling about money in politics anything but surprising.

According to Bloomberg Politics, a full 78 percent of Americans think we should overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that opened up our election process to floods of corporate money.

This isn’t, by the way, a situation where a bunch of Democrats are tipping the scales.

Money in politics often gets painted in the media as “liberal” or “progressive” issue, but this new Bloomberg poll shows that all Americans of all political persuasions overwhelmingly oppose Citizens United.

Eighty-three percent of Democrats want to overturn it, as do 80 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of selfdeclared independents.

In other words, wanting to get money out of politics is about as mainstream as the Super Bowl, blue jeans, and FM radio classic rock.

Which, again, isn’t all that surprising.

This country’s changed a lot since 1776, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that the American people, regardless of their political party, really don’t like it when corporate special interests take over their government or their election process.

But one thing that has changed since 1776 is the media, which is now concentrated in the hands of a few giant transnational corporations.

And that ever-more-concentrated conveyed directly in speeches, debates and, perhaps less reliably, press reports of their words and actions?

The public opinion polling business and apparatus has often come to dominate the dialogue in political campaigns, especially at the presidential level. The emphasis on horse race polling seems sometimes pollute the process almost as much as the influence of wealthy donors in propping up particular White House wannabes.

corporate media really doesn’t want to discuss Citizens United or the public’s overwhelming desire to overturn it.

In fact, even though our TV networks have spent hours breaking down every single Donald Trump poll, they’ve so far completely ignored that amazing Bloomberg study on opposition to Citizens United.

And I mean completely ignored.

As Media Matters pointed out the other day, “[T]he major networks’ evening news programs… aired no coverage of the Bloomberg poll between September 28 and October 2.

The ABC, FOX and NBC October 4 Sunday shows also failed to report on the poll’s results.”

Maybe there’s a good justifiable, journalistic reason for this.

Maybe the fact that Americans hate Citizens United is so obvious that the mainstream media didn’t think it was worth reporting on.

But I doubt it.

The big open secret about Citizens United is that the mainstream corporate media likes it.

More money in politics means more money spent on elections ads, which, of course, means more money for the corporations that run the major news networks.

That’s why the media isn’t covering Citizens United - because doing so would cut into their bottom line.

It really is that simple.

But luckily, the American people are figuring out what’s up.

If the rise of Bernie Sanders is any indication, they’re more than ready to four years.

The old adage remains valid: The only poll that counts is the one taken in voting precincts across the country.

And even then, memories of the 2000 Florida recount, settled not in the voting booth but in the Supreme Court by a split vote, leave lingering dissatisfaction in many quarters.

Meanwhile, the polling industry will continue professing to tell us what America thinks until the actual votes are in.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@ comcast.net.

The horse race game has undoubtedly spiced political reporting, but at the price of overvaluing its reliability and constructive contribution to the quadrennial (C) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, llc. national discussion on where the 15-10-9 nation should head in the following

take part in another political revolution against corporate power - just like the one that founded this country 239 years ago.

The mainstream media ignores what the people want - at its own peril.

Tax cheats stash $2 trillion overseas!

America’s biggest companies are playing by their own set of rules.

According to a recent report from two major watchdog organizations, our nation’s Fortune 500 companies have $2.1 trillion dollars stashed in overseas tax havens.

To put that number in perspective, it’s worth noting that the entire federal budget for 2015 was only about $3.8 trillion.

This stunning report, called “Offshore Shell Games 2015,” was the result of a study conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups.

They found that about 70 percent of these massive companies have subsidiaries in low-tax nations like Bermuda, Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

In many cases, those subsidiaries are really just PO boxes used to pretend like they do business in those nations.

By stashing money away overseas, those corporations have left taxpayers footing the bill for as much as $620 billion dollars of unpaid taxes. And, that means they’re getting to benefit from our nation without contributing their share of the costs.

Michelle Surka of US PIRG said, “The American multinationals that take advantage of tax havens use our roads, benefit from our education system and large consumer market, and enjoy the security we have here, but are ultimately taking a free ride at the expense of other taxpayers.”

We give these corporations the privilege of doing business in our great nation, and they make a boatload of profits at our expense. The corporate powers have taken our pensions, reduced our wages, and destroyed our environment.

The least they could do is contribute their fair share of taxes, instead of skirting the system to make a few extra bucks for shareholders.

If corporations want to do business in the United States, it’s about time they start pulling their weight.

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Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Jackson Diehl

Putin’s Model Of Success Western officials who pronounce themselves puzzled about Vladimir Putin’s intentions in Syria are missing some big clues. There is a clear model for the campaign Russia is pursuing on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a legacy that is Putin’s pride: Chechnya.

The Muslim republic in the North Caucasus and the decade-long war that Putin launched there in September 1999 have mostly been forgotten by the outside world since the dictator installed there

by Putin, Ramzan Kadyrov, consolidated control in the late 2000s. But the Kremlin regards it as a “good, unique example in history of (the) combat of terrorism,” as Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s prime minister, put it. Chechnya, Medvedev said last year, is “one of the business cards of Russia.”

What are the components of this winning formula? First, define all opposition to the prevailing regime as terrorist, indistinguishable from the most extreme jihadists. That enables a fundamental political aim: to eliminate alternatives.

In Syria today, moderate and secular opposition forces arguably are getting harder to find. That wasn’t the case in Chechnya in 1999. The country’s nationalist president, Aslan Maskhadov, had won a democratic election, defeating an Islamist opponent by 59 to 23 percent. His predecessor, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was so secularized that he was unaware how many times a day Muslims pray.

In short, Assad’s forces and their Lebanese and Iranian allies may have to step up their already-notorious brutality to match Putin’s tactics in Chechnya. But they may have expert help: Kadyrov has asked Putin to send his 20,000member personal army, known as the “kadyrovtsy,” to Syria. The state propaganda outlet Russia Today quoted him as saying he wanted “to go there and participate in special operations.”

Kadyrov and his relationship with Putin offer another lesson to those wondering whether Putin is prepared to dispose of Assad - a prospect that Obama has repeatedly bet on. The Chechen strongman is, if anything, more sinister than the soft-spoken Assad; Kadyrov is known to do his own killing and torturing on occasion. He has solidified a cult of personality in Chechnya, extorts tribute from every business and citizen, and brazenly orders hits on his critics, from journalists and human rights activists to Russian politicians.

Many believe him responsible for the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, gunned down near Red Square last winter.

Putin’s response has been to offer Kadyrov not just tolerance but full protection. The Crisis

Russia killed them both, along with every other moderate Chechen leader it could find, both at home and abroad. One was murdered in Vienna; another in Dubai. When Western leaders pressed Putin to negotiate with Maskhadov and other secular moderates, he invariably responded angrily. “Would you invite Osama bin Laden to the White House . . . and let him dictate what he wants?” he demanded of one group of Western visitors.

It should be no surprise that Russia’s first Syria bombings have been aimed at the remnants of the moderate opposition. It’s not just that they are backed by the United States; they represent a viable alternative to the Assad regime, and so, under Chechnya rules, must be eliminated. “He doesn’t distinguish between (the Islamic State) and a moderate Sunni opposition that wants to see Mr. Assad go,” President Barack Obama said after meeting Putin at the United Nations. “From their perspective, they’re all terrorists.”

The first stages of the Russian military campaign in northern Syria have followed a familiar pattern. Heavy bombing and shelling of civilian areas preceded scorched-earth sweeps, just as in Chechnya. According to a report on Chechnya by the International Crisis Group, “war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by (Russian) troops” included “indiscriminate shelling and bombing, secret prisons, enforced disappearances, mass graves and death squads.” One common tactic, the report said, was “taking insurgents’ relatives as hostages, subjecting them to torture or summary execution and burning their homes.”

Contrary to popular belief, President Obama does have a plan for Syria. It’s just not one that promises to have much immediate impact on the course of the brutal civil war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, by contrast, has a plan that is far bolder and much more likely to produce results on the ground -- but only in the short term. I struggle to understand all the handwringing in Washington about the implications of Putin’s intervention for “American leadership.”

We’re unprepared to wade in -- for good reason, in my view -- and thus in no position to do much of anything about Russia’s foray.

From the start, Obama’s bottom-line goal has been to avoid getting dragged into a multi-sided conflict in which the lines between good guys and bad guys are faint and shifting. The president has been cautious in sending arms to the “moderate” rebels seeking to oust dictator Bashar al-Assad, fearing those weapons would fall into the hands of the Islamic State or other jihadist forces. Events have proved Obama right.

Last month, the Pentagon admitted that onefourth of a shipment of vehicles and ammunition intended for U.S.-trained “good” rebels was quickly handed over to the radical Jabhat al-Nusra, an alQaeda affiliate. This is the first time U.S. officials have acknowledged such a weapons transfer but reportedly not the first time it has happened.

The big problem is that our most important goal in Syria is different from that of the non-jihadist rebels we support. The overriding American interest, as defined by Obama, is to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State. U.S.

Group reports that senior Russian security officials tried to undermine the Chechen by arresting his gunmen for the Nemtsov murder. Putin rebuffed them, awarding Kadyrov a medal immediately after the hit. “Unless President Putin’s reputation is seriously damaged by his protégé, the rules of the game are unlikely to change,” concluded the report. The same rules will apply to Assad.

Obama’s principal response to Putin’s new offensive has been to predict that the result will be “a quagmire.” But Putin has heard that before.

For years Western leaders warned him that the war in Chechnya was unwinnable, that the only solution was political. Putin nevertheless persisted through a decade and more of bloody fighting that cost Russia at least 6,000 military casualties and Chechnya uncounted tens of thousands. The result was the pacification he now trumpets as a “calling card.” Don’t expect him to give up anytime soon on a similar result in Syria.

Diehl is deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post. (c) 2015, The Washington Post 15-10-11

Eugene Robinson

Obama Is Right To Be Cautious On Syria

airstrikes are designed to further that end, with a major focus being support of rebel forces seeking to recapture Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in the eastern part of the country.

For many of the rebels, however, the Islamic State is a secondary target. Their principal aim is deposing Assad, whose scorched-earth campaign to retain power is responsible for most of the death and destruction in the country -- and the exodus of millions of refugees who have flooded neighboring countries and created a crisis in Europe.

So, according to foreign policy hawks, we’re supposed to give substantially more weapons and air support to rebels whose goals are not the same as ours? That dog don’t hunt, and I’m glad Obama remains so cautious.

Putin, by contrast, has a single proxy in Syria and a clear goal: keeping Assad in power. Why should this be a surprise? Moscow has a decadesold relationship with the Assad family regime and a strategically valuable naval base in Syria. From Putin’s point of view, the “moderate” rebels -- who are stronger in the western part of the country, around the big cities of Aleppo and Damascus -are the more consequential threat.

That is why the first Russian airstrikes were against “good” rebels rather than “bad” ones. By no means would I ever defend Putin’s Syria policy, which is morally bankrupt. But it’s important to understand it.

Inevitably, there have already been reports of civilian casualties from the Russian bombing

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Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

21

Dennis Ross

Using Our Leverage In Syria President Obama has been consistent on Syria. Even when I was in the administration, the president made clear that he did not want to get dragged into the conflict there.

The legacy of Iraq weighed heavily on him. He was elected to get us out of Middle East wars, not into them.

He was not going to get involved in “someone else’s civil war.”

But what if that civil war produced a humanitarian catastrophe? What if it created a massive refugee crisis?

What if it threatened to destabilize neighboring states? What if it gave rise to a group like the Islamic State?

These questions were not considered because the fear of being dragged into a quagmire was so great. The costs of action always determined the administration’s approach, not the costs of inaction.

It is nothing new for Obama to challenge those who think the Iranians or Russians are gaining in Syria as they act and we do the minimum. In March 2014, he said, “I am always darkly amused by this notion that somehow Iran has won in Syria. . . . This was their one friend in the Arab world . . . and it is now in rubble. It’s bleeding them because they’re having to send in billions of dollars. . . . They’re losing as much as anyone. The Russians [too] find their one friend in the region in rubble and delegitimized.”

Eighteen months later, Obama thinks little has changed. In his news

Robinson continued from page 20

campaign. But the tragic U.S. bombing Saturday of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, gives Russian officials a convenient retort: We regret that there is always unfortunate collateral damage in war.

conference last week, he said, “An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work.” Perhaps, but the Russians and the Iranians appear to have something quite different in mind: They are not trying to pacify the population. They want to ensure that dictator Assad maintains at least a mini-state that controls Damascus and remains connected to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea and that, if at some point there is a political process to bring the conflict to an end, the facts on the ground will both preserve their interests and ensure that they will be arbiters of any outcome.

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows how to fill a vacuum.

The Iranians are masters at using proxies to preserve their hold in Syria and the conduit to Lebanon - even as they weaken central authority in Iraq. What is interesting is that Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Quds Force, traveled to Moscow shortly after the nuclear deal with Iran was finalized. No doubt, Putin and Soleimani saw the need to act militarily to shore up Assad’s weakening position and to deal a setback to the non-Islamic State opposition, which was gaining in the north and the south of Syria.

To be sure, both also saw additional utility in ratcheting up their military

action has provoked calls for Obama to do something, anything, and I’m sure the Republican presidential candidates will have lots of bellicose advice. Most will involve action the president might have taken several years ago, when the war began; only Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has a real alternative plan of action -- send tens of thousands of U.S. troops into Syria and Iraq -- and he’s barely registering 1 percent in the polls.

The simple fact is that Russia has a clear way to achieve its immediate goals in Syria while the United States does not. Obama’s continued reluctance to act for action’s sake is prudent -- and presidential. He is right to keep the national interest in mind, not the national ego.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Which brings me to the underlying lesson from the Kunduz accident: Be careful how you choose your friends. The U.S. airstrike reportedly was called in by Afghan military officers, who either made a terrible mistake or had their own reasons for wanting the hospital bombed. In Syria’s bloody crazyquilt landscape, where we have even less reliable allies on the ground, the possibilities for such deadly mistakes are myriad.

All of the above makes Syria a place (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group to tread lightly and carefully. Putin’s 15-10-6

interventions at this juncture.

For Soleimani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, such a move would validate their revolutionary, “resistance” ideology in the aftermath of agreeing to the nuclear deal with the United States.

For Putin, the Russian intervention could be planned while the Obama administration was preoccupied with selling the nuclear deal - and have the added benefit of putting the Russians back on center stage internationally.

Neither the Russians nor the Iranians think they are losing in the region, and neither do the Israelis, Egyptians, Saudis, Turks, Qataris or Emiratis. They may not all like what the Russians are doing, but they see the need to deal with them. Is it possible that they are all wrong and Obama is right?

Maybe, but if our response to what the Russians and Iranians are doing in Syria is limited to increasing our attacks on the Islamic State, which appears to be where we are headed, we will be playing the Russians’ and Iranians’ game. They will continue attacking the nonIslamic State opposition while we target the terrorist group, and we will, unfortunately, appear to be in league with them against the Sunnis. Any hope of having the Sunnis discredit the Islamic State will be lost under these circumstances.

While the president may bemoan hearing only “half-baked” ideas as an alternative, he should be leery of continuing to implement halfmeasures. So here is one idea that is premised on sharing the burden -

something important to Obama - but also guided by the logic of leverage, which is the logic that guides Putin.

Quietly go to the Turks, Saudis, Qataris and Europeans and say that it is time to create a genuine safe haven along the Turkish-Syrian border.

The Turks and the Gulf states have clamored for this, and the Europeans need it to stanch the flow of refugees.

Explain that we will do our part to enforce the “no-fly” designation, but only if Europe participates with its air forces, Turkey agrees to police the area on the ground to prevent any Islamic State infiltration, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar agree both to finance the infrastructure for the refugees and accept that all material assistance for training opposition forces in the zone will go through us. Provided they all agree and we are able to work out the terms, we would proceed and the president could tell Putin privately in the kind of language he comprehends: Don’t test the safe haven.

If we are to affect Russian and Iranian behavior in Syria, we have to begin to play by rules they understand.

Ironically, it might just get others to follow our lead and make the political solution we seek more likely.

Ross, a counselor and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was a special assistant to President Obama from 2009 to 2011.

His book “Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.- Israeli Relationship from Truman to Obama” will be published Oct. 13. (c) 2015, The Washington Post 15-10-10

22

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Joe Nocera

Of Peanuts and Prosecutions Salmonella poisoning is an awful affliction.

It is marked by diarrhea, abdominal cramps, dehydration and fever that can last as long as a week. Many people wind up in the hospital.

Others develop something called reactive arthritis. And in a small number of cases, the victims die.

A major outbreak of salmonella poisoning took place in America in 2008 and 2009, when nine people died and more than 700 others were reported ill. The outbreak was traced to a peanut processing plant in Georgia, owned by the Peanut Corporation of America, a $30 million company whose chief executive was a man named Stewart Parnell.

The plant was soon shuttered and the company liquidated. Eventually, Parnell, 61, was indicted and prosecuted. Found guilty, the former CEO received a stunning sentence this week: 28 years in prison.

A serious auto accident is also a terrible thing to endure. We know now that the faulty ignition switch installed in General Motors-made Cobalts, Saturn Ions and other cars manufactured between 2003 and 2007 resulted in at least 124 deaths. In addition, 275 people were injured badly enough to be awarded compensation — some in the millions — by Kenneth Feinberg, the well-known lawyer GM hired to run its victims’ compensation fund. At least 20 of the injured, including a young boy, will require 24hour care for the rest of their lives.

And yet, a few days before Parnell’s sentencing, Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in New York, announced a settlement with GM that included a $900 million fine and a three-year deferred prosecution agreement — but not a single indictment of a GM employee.

(Several remain under investigation.)

How can this be? How is it possible that the executive of a company whose product killed nine people gets a lengthy jail sentence yet the executives of a company whose product killed 124 people get off scot free?

Bharara’s explanation — and there is some truth to it — is that it is unusually difficult to prosecute auto industry executives. It is not a crime “to put into the stream of commerce a defective automobile that might kill people,” he said during his briefing with the media.

What’s more, thanks to auto industry lobbying, the nation’s auto safety laws generally call for punishing corporate, rather than individual, malfeasance.

Another reason is specific to the ignition issue: For years, GM executives didn’t realize that when the ignition shut down, the air bags also lost power. Thus, GM officials didn’t view the problem as a safety issue. In winning cases against individuals, prosecutors have to show criminal intent.

But here’s one of the big surprises about the Parnell case, which was brought by Mike Moore,

a federal prosecutor in Georgia. Moore relied as much or more on plain old fraud charges as he did on food safety laws, which do allow for individual prosecutions. The fact that the salmonella outbreak caused nine deaths wasn’t even part of the trial. Instead, the focus was on whether Parnell committed fraud by knowingly introducing tainted peanut butter paste into interstate commerce. The fraud conviction is what brought that eye-popping sentence.

industrial mishaps, said that in the prosecutors’ statement of fact they specifically noted GM was assuring the public that the cars were safe when people inside the company knew they weren’t.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a former state attorney general, has cowritten a bill that would make it easier to prosecute auto executives. But he also had little patience with Bharara’s explanation.

“It’s a crime to make a false statement to the government,” Blumenthal said. “18USC1001,” he added, citing the law. “If you submit a false statement to a federally insured bank in connection with a $500 loan, prosecutors can go after you. GM’s false statements are just as much a violation of the law.”

I’ve seen it written recently that the urge to prosecute corporate executives is little more than an exercise in schadenfreude. But it’s not.

It is instead the single most powerful deterrent imaginable — far more powerful than a fine, which is meaningless to a company like GM. “I guarantee you,” says Blumenthal, “one sentence like [Parnell’s] would change auto safety dramatically and enduringly.”

There are plenty of people — people who genuinely understand the law — who believe that Bharara could have done the same thing with GM executives who knew about the faulty ignition but said nothing to the government, even though they were required to do so within five days of learning about a safety problem. In their view, Bharara’s cautious reading of the law is far too narrow.

“The fraud in the peanut butter case is that it was contaminated and they knew it,” said Clarence Ditlow, who runs the Center for Auto Safety. “What did GM executives do? They knowingly sold a defective car.”

Rena Steinzor, a law professor and author of c.2015 New York Times News Service “Why Not Jail?” about the legal consequences of 15-9-25

Clarence Page

A CEO Who Gives Free Markets A Bad Name

If Martin Shkreli is not the most hated man in America, he must least be first runner-up.

If his name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. He’s probably less well known for who he is than for what he did.

Shkreli, 32, is the Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO who decided to raise the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis in cancer and AIDS patients, by more than 5,000 percent.

Although he admitted in interviews with Bloomberg TV and CNBC last Monday (Sept.

21) that the drug costs less than a dollar to make, Shkreli raised to price from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

“At this price it’s a reasonable profit,” Shkreli told CBS News. “Not excessive at all.”

Ah, that’s what they all say. Shkreli is far from the first drug company CEO to take an old drug and boost its price. But he may well be the first to brag so brazenly about it.

He spent the next 24 hours in a Twitter battle with some of his new enemies, as his name trended on the social network.

“No, you are wrong,” he responded to a user who tweeted “You have given people their death sentences,” according to an exchange captured by the Fusion news website. But complex market arguments don’t fit as easily into a tweet’s 140 characters as snark does.

To a journalist who tweeted, “I think the hole you’ve dug is deep enough,” he tweeted back, “uh f u.” Ah, what a swell guy.

But by the next day, Shkreli took his Twitter account private and said he was backing off the price hike. He would make the drug more affordable, he told ABC News and NBC News on Tuesday evening. Yet, beyond assuring us that Turing will still make “a very small profit,” he gave no indication as to what the new price would be.

Drug companies have long argued that they need to price their pharmaceutical products high in order to fund the research that brings us newer and better drugs. But how high can prices be raised before they begin to gouge? That’s a hard line to draw, but 5,000 percent seems clearly to leap right over it.

By midweek even billionaire celebrity Donald Trump, perhaps delighted to have someone more widely hated than himself to kick around, took a moment in his Republican presidential campaign to blast Shkreli.

“He looks like a spoiled brat to me,” Trump told reporters at a news conference in South Carolina. “That guy is nothing. He’s zero. He’s nothing. He ought to be ashamed of himself.”

Shkreli, Trump noted, was one of the “hedge fund guys,” the only group on whom he wants to raise taxes. They’re “getting away with murder,” he says, as they “shift paper around” and “get lucky.”

On this Trump and the Democrats’ frontrunners showed rare agreement. Hillary Clinton

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Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

23

Stephen Carter

Companies Lie. Some Get Away With It. Why is it wrong for Volkswagen to lie (if it did lie) about whether its cars meet emission standards, but uncontroversial for HBO to lie (if it is lying) about whether Jon Snow is dead?

Everyone knows what Volkswagen is accused of. If you’re puzzled by the reference to Jon Snow, we’ll get to him in a minute.

But first, let me tell a brief story.

Some years ago, at a business ethics seminar, I heard a retired businessman -- let’s call him Ed the Executive -- explain how a large corporation had once tasked him with shutting down a major division, but had also instructed him to deny that he was there for that purpose. If asked by anyone -- workers, suppliers, customers -whether the division would close, he was to say no. Not refuse to comment. Actually lie.

Ed’s tale spurred consternation among the other attendees, some of whom excoriated him, some of whom defended him. Ed insisted that he’d done the right thing. Of course the plan eventually leaked, but had it leaked sooner, he said, both upstream suppliers and downstream buyers would have fled. The employees, Ed argued, would have been hurt the most.

This memory was spurred by the Volkswagen scandal: It occurs to me that there are businesses we

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actually expect to lie to us, whose call, the announcers don’t condemn revenue is enhanced when they the obvious lie -- they applaud the don’t tell their customers the truth. heads-up play.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Let’s start with entertainment. proposing some deep conclusion You may not know or care who Jon about our society’s attitude toward Snow is, but millions of aficionados lies. Certainly I don’t want to know him as the beloved character suggest that the football player portrayed by the actor Kit Harington who fools the referee is the moral on “Game of Thrones.” (Fans: If equivalent of the engineer who you’re not caught up, the rest of the fakes the emissions test. paragraph contains spoilers you’ve probably heard about anyway.) In On the other hand, I’m last season’s final episode, Jon was not entirely persuaded that the slain. Indubitably dead. Harington difference in our visceral responses himself has repeatedly denied that to the two cases can be explained he is returning for season six. Yet entirely by an implicit ranking of viewers don’t believe it. Purported the importance of various activities. evidence of his return is posted Polluting the air may be worse than online constantly. Some critics even cheating at sports, but I don’t know speculate that Harington has been if that’s the reason we’re angry ordered to lie -- that the obligation about the first and (if it’s our team) to deny his return might be written happy about the second. into his contract --to pique fan The answer, I think, is that not interest for the upcoming season. every company’s reputational Nobody seems to think the claims, capital is dependent on whether it if true, show some ethical lapse on tells the truth -- or not in the same the part of the producers. way. We’d be furious if our favorite Then there’s sports. Lying is football team cheated us on the baked into sports, and not only tickets, but we don’t mind if the do we forgive it -- we demand it. same team cheats to win.

Consider football. Ron the Receiver A longtime colleague of mine drops the ball, but the officials used to say that we can’t tell have a bad view and rule the pass whether breaking the rules is a completion. If Ron’s team hurries wrong unless we know “the rules to run the next play before the about the rules.” Sometimes we opponent can look at the video to have to follow the rules; sometimes decide whether to challenge the we don’t. If we walk into an auto outrage borders on a disdain for showroom and Molly the Manager lies about her reserve price for the humankind.

Yet speaking before Congress, model we want, we’re not even the pope mentioned only the surprised. But if Molly lies about fruits of capitalism as he called gas mileage, we’re furious. for a “humane, just and fraternal” The philosopher Seana Valentine response to undocumented Shiffrin uses the term “epistemic immigrants in the Americas “led suspended context” to refer to a to travel north in search of a situation in which we are deprived better life for themselves and their of any expectation that the person loved ones, in search of greater speaking will tell the truth. This doesn’t mean we know the speaker opportunities.”

At that, the conservative Wall is lying - - only that we know she Street Journal editorialized might be. triumphantly, “There must be Shiffrin’s examples include something moral to free-market fiction and stage plays. But it’s easy economics.” Indeed, capitalism to see how sports would fit. And, as brings more prosperity than other she points out, such contexts are systems do, especially when CEOs not necessarily reciprocal. We don’t are encouraged to do the right expect Ron the Receiver to tell the referee the truth. We do expect the thing.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@ referee to tell Ron the truth.

called the Daraprim increase “price gouging” and said drug price reforms will be a key issue in her campaign. Fellow Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders promised to add Daraprim to ongoing congressional probes of drug pricing.

In the political sphere, it hardly helped Shkreli’s case that the controversy blew up days before Pope Francis’ historic address to a joint session of Congress.

This, after all, is the pope who called the theories that “economic growth” and “a free market” will inevitably bring “greater justice and inclusiveness” an opinion that “expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.”

He might well have been tribune.com. talking about Shkreli, whose (C) 2015 Clarence Page remarkable indifference to public 15-9-27

It’s reasonable to argue that markets for goods and services are places where we ought not to need

to suspend our expectations. The death of caveat emptor leads us to rely in a general way upon the truth of claims asserted in advertising.

(Even when we shouldn’t.) This reliance in turn reduces the costs of doing business, for companies and consumers alike.

So now we’ve successfully distinguished football players from Volkswagen. But what about Ed, who lied about plans to close the division? Putting aside legal issues, it seems to me that his defenders had the ethics of the situation inverted.

Suppliers, customers and employees all would reasonably expect him to tell the truth. They’d adjust their expectations accordingly. Ed told the seminar that he’d done the right thing. But imagine the employee who forwent another opportunity because she thought the division would stay open, and you can see how the costs of Ed’s lie were borne by those he lied to.

This leaves us with Kit Harington.

If indeed the producers of “Game of Thrones” require the actor to lie about Jon Snow’s return, is his conduct any different from the conduct of Ed the Executive? After all, in both cases the purpose of the lie would be to maximize profit.

Are the cases therefore the same?

I suppose they might be -- unless, of course, Harington’s denials don’t count as lies. Shiffrin, like many philosophers, argues that a statement can’t be a lie if nobody believes it. We believed Volkswagen. And that’s where things get eerie.

In the midst of so many contexts where we expect people sometimes to lie -- sports, entertainment, certainly politics -- the one place to which we run for truth is private corporations. I can’t be the only person who finds that disturbing.

Stephen Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a law professor at Yale. (c) 2015, Bloomberg View 15-10-12

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Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Noah Smith

Free Trade Is No Longer A No-Brainer For Economists It’s an old truism that economists can never agree on anything. But if you ask economists about this embarrassing fact, they will often point out that on one issue, the profession is in almost complete agreement. That issue is free trade. Surveys of economists show a very strong consensus that trade barriers reduce a country’s overall well-being in the long run. The old protrade arguments of economists such as David Ricardo and Adam Smith are still mainstays of introductory economics courses, and are regularly trotted out in op-ed pieces.

Interestingly, free trade is also one of the issues where economists most vehemently disagree with the general public. For example, a survey by Roger Gordon and Gordon Dahl of the University of California-San Diego found that while almost four out of five people thought the “Buy American” provisions of the 2009 fiscal stimulus would be good for U.S. manufacturing employment, only about one out of 10 economists concurred. That is a staggering difference.

Given this disagreement, you might expect that the general populace would eventually move in the direction of the expert consensus.

Instead, there are a few signs that the opposite is happening.

make this claim. But free trade and capital mobility go hand in hand -- international investment drives the creation of global supply chains. If we restrict international capital flows, we force financiers to restrict investment to their home countries, which will naturally have a damping effect on trade.

At any rate, for the first time in many decades, there are cracks in the edifice of the free-trade consensus. The reason is easy to see -- economic theory has been overtaken by macro events. The full-fledged entry of China into the global trading system since 2000 has been hugely disruptive.

The lost jobs and vanishing industries have become impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, boombust cycles in global financial markets -- the Asian Crisis of 1997, the global financial crisis of 2008, and others -- have left economists bewildered. The simple logic of free trade, so familiar from Econ 101, is either failing or ceasing to be relevant.

Some astute economists are now claiming that the old formulation was never watertight in the first place.

These whispers of dissent don’t mean that free trade is dead, or even that the consensus is a thing of the past. But it isn’t considered the no-brainer it once was. Economists are beginning to question one of their most celebrated points of agreement.

The future is a more uncertain profession, and perhaps, a more uncertain world.

Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a freelance writer for finance and business publications.

Economists are also questioning free trade from another angle. We’ve known since the time of David Ricardo that even if free trade makes a country richer overall, many of the people within that country can be left worse off. Until recently, this problem was usually waved away, but recently economists have begun to take it more seriously. A landmark 2013 study by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found that competition from China has destroyed jobs and lowered wages in many U.S. industries, especially manufacturing. Instead of being reallocated to jobs in different sectors, workers displaced by Chinese competition often went on the government dole.

As for the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- the most important trade deal in years -- support from the economics profession has been muted.

However, some of that might be because of the intellectual-property protections in the treaty, (c) 2015, Bloomberg View which many consider a trade restriction rather 15-10-7 For example, conservative-leaning than a liberalization. economists have been complaining that Froma Harrop liberal economists have not been sufficiently enthusiastic in their opposition to the renewal of the Export- Import Bank, which subsidizes U.S. exports. In an essay for Econ Journal Watch, a right-leaning publication, Veronique de Rugy, Ryan Daza and Daniel B. Klein ask why their ideological counterparts failed to join the freetrade bandwagon: If Hollywood had created Martin Shkreli parasitic infections.

Working from a list of the top 200 economics as the monster from Wall Street, we would have blogs, we examine the discourse on the Export- accused it of unfair characterization. But Shkreli Some Shkreli decoders explained that his Import Bank. We find that classical liberal -- a 32-year-old hedge fund director in T-shirts, drug company raised prices to recoup the $55 economists were very often highly vocal dabbler in the punk rock music world -- has saved million it had just spent for the rights to sell in opposition to the institution, but that left Tinseltown the trouble.

Daraprim. Thing is, the $55 million acquisition economists were mostly silent.

Shkreli has also done the American people price for a drug serving a relatively small number The post descends into uncharitable sniping, a service by showing in high def how the of patients seemed justified by the belief that one but the point it makes is an interesting one: If pharmaceutical industry gouges us. The could raise the per-pill cost more than fiftyfold economists are as pro-free- trade as many claim, pharmaceutical industry is angry with him for the overnight. You can only get away with that in the why are only a few willing to stick their necks same reason.

United States, but we’re a big, big market. out and advocate for liberalizing trade policies? Drugmakers prefer a subtler approach. Do No other industrialized country lets drugmakers Though de Rugy et al. single out left-leaning it quietly and with a touch more nuance. For pick prices out of thin air and assume patients, economists, the truth is that the vast bulk of the example, the day Valeant Pharmaceuticals insurers and taxpayers will somehow come up profession, most of which is not very ideological, acquired two heart drugs, it raised the prices for with the ransom. The U.S. setup comes courtesy was silent on the issue. them by only 525 percent and 212 percent. of our lawmakers in Washington, above all our That could be simply because Ex-Im is small That was a model of self-control next to Republican lawmakers. potatoes, not worth spending political capital Shkreli’s instant 5,455 percent price hike on a In the Valeant case, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a on. But this isn’t the only sign that the free-trade 62-year-old lifesaving drug. This wasn’t a good Vermont independent seeking the Democratic consensus among economists might not be as visual for the industry. The audio wasn’t so hot, presidential nod, demanded documents emphatic as in previous decades. For example, either. defending the price increases. Valeant said no, Jagdish Bhagwati, one of the most ardent To recap, Shkreli’s startup company recently that such information is “highly proprietary and defenders of free trade and globalization, has made bought the marketing rights to Daraprim and confidential.” Wouldn’t it just. a distinction between free trade and international proceeded to raise the price from $13.50 a pill to Governments elsewhere, however far to the capital mobility. The free flow of financing across $750 a pill. (It used to cost $1 a pill.) Daraprim left or right, see negotiating drug prices for borders, Bhagwati says, is a source of dangerous is often the last hope for cancer patients and their people as a duty of leadership. The United instability. Nor is Bhagwati the first economist to others with weak immune systems suffering from Harrop continued on page 25

Drug Price Gouging A Product Of Our Political System

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

25

Virginia Postrel

Schools Are Hurting Kids By Banning Rough Play No roughhousing. No superhero games. No turning your fingers - or your Pop-Tart-- into a makebelieve gun. No tag. And certainly no dodgeball.

Stories of zero-tolerance playpolicing by schools are a wellestablished news genre. Most recently, parents in Washington state mounted a successful campaign to force the Mercer Island School District to reverse its ban on playing tag during “unstructured playtime,” or what used to be called recess.

In his backpedaling press release, district superintendent Gary Plano puzzlingly insisted that “asking students to keep their hands and feet to themselves at all times, including recess” wasn’t a ban on tag. Perhaps he envisions tag by telepathy.

At any rate, Mercer Island isn’t the first school district to prohibit tag and it won’t be the last. Bans on physical contact and pretend violence are the norm on U.S. school playgrounds.

“The majority of school districts in the U.S. have ‘zero- tolerance’ policies on ‘any form of violence,’ “ says Jennifer Hart, who teaches early childhood education at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia and has published research on “playful aggression” among children. Kids who wrestle,

Harrop continued from page 24

States does little of that. In fact, the law establishing the Medicare prescription drug benefit specifically forbids the government to negotiate drug prices.

pretend to fight, or play superheroes face punishment, as do teachers who tolerate such old-fashioned antics.

Behind these policies is the superstitious belief that vigorous physical contact and make-believe violence will beget immediate and future real physical harms -magical thinking that fundamentally misunderstands how children play and learn. Prohibiting rough-andtumble play doesn’t make recess safer or kids less apt to hurt others.

To the contrary, the bans deprive children of the very experiences they need to master peaceful social interactions.

Roughhousing is more than good exercise. Psychological research shows that it’s essential to childhood development. Rowdy, physical play teaches kids to communicate verbally and nonverbally; to take turns; to negotiate rules; and to understand when they can use their full strength and when they need to hold back. It may sometimes look like fighting but it isn’t. Kids smile and laugh, return voluntarily to the game, take turns in dominant roles, and wear distinctive “play faces.”

In a chasing game like tag, children “learn how their bodies move, how their playmates will originally projected. But this is a shell game.

The relevant comparison is what the drug benefit costs next to what it would have cost had the government been allowed to bargain on prices. Taxpayers could save up to $16 billion a year if Medicare did the negotiating, according to a recent estimate in The Wall Street Journal.

The week Shkreli revealed the creepy reality of drug pricing, Hillary Clinton issued a proposal to curb “profiteering” by the drug industry. Biotech stocks promptly took a hit on Wall Street.

That hedge funder let the cat out, for sure, and it will be screeching right through Halloween. Some boys are so bad they do good.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

Let’s talk about markets, OK? We believe in a market system, buyers negotiating prices with sellers, right? U.S. taxpayers fund 73 percent of the Medicare drug benefit. They are the buyers.

But in our skewed political language, Republicans denounce proposals to have the federal government negotiate Medicare drug prices as an attack on our allegedly free-market system. Somehow letting the taxpayers defend their interests is “socialism.”

It is true Medicare beneficiaries obtain drug coverage through private insurers who do negotiate prices. And it is true that, as Copyright 2015 Creators.com Republicans say, the Medicare 15-10-1 drug program is costing less than

respond when a change to the game is made, how to negotiate these changes to games, what to do when one of the children falls, and how to express their thoughts to the others involved in the game,” writes Michelle Tannock in the Journal of Early Childhood Education, summarizing the developmentalpsychology literature. When she interviewed kids at two child care centers in British Columbia, Tannock found that they all said rough-and-tumble play was prohibited -- yet they engaged in it anyway.

“To simply forbid it is like telling children, ‘We’re not going to let you eat today, because the food might be contaminated,’ “ says Frances Carlson, author of Big Body Play, a guide published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “Children can’t live without it, so they do it in hiding.” Over the past three decades, as the research into its importance has mounted, the NAEYC has gone from hostile to supportive of fullbody play. Unfortunately, laws and schools haven’t kept up, hurting kids’ development.

Contrary to what squeamish authorities seem to think, it’s the kids who don’t engage in roughand-tumble play who actually tend to be more violent later on in life.

So, says Carlson, forbidding playful physical contact “stokes the fire as opposed to diminishing it.”

Some kids are indeed prone to hurt others. “If you’ve ever watched a group of 4- or 5-year-olds play Duck, Duck, Goose,” says Carlson, “there’s always one child who, when it’s his turn or her turn, will not tag. They’ll slap.” Socially and developmentally behind their peers, the offending children are those who most need the lessons bigbody play can teach. Keeping them from playing tag, says Carlson, “is not the way they learn how to tag more gently. Continuing to tag is the way they learn to tag more gently.” Good teachers will coach rather than punish kids who play rough. That may sometimes mean physically standing in for playmates to show a child when a tag is too hard or a wrestling grip too tight.

The law in Carlson’s home state of Georgia prohibits such

good pedagogy, at least in child care centers. (School districts set their own policies.) It dictates that “staff shall not engage in, or allow children or other adults to engage in, activities that could be detrimental to a child’s health or well-being, such as, but not limited to, horse play, rough play, wrestling.” This provision assumes ill effects contradicted by psychological research. And it often puts Carlson in the peculiar position of giving training seminars that start with this warning: “What I’m about to teach you to do today is illegal in the state of Georgia. However, I was asked by the state of Georgia to present this training to you.”

Educating teachers doesn’t do any good, of course, if they can’t use what they learn. The zero-tolerance approach not only hampers children’s education. It treats teachers not as educational professionals but as passive bystanders unable -- or forbidden -- to make judgment calls, even in ridiculous cases.

Take what happened to Drew Johnson, now a high school freshman, when he was a child at Cumberland Elementary School in Fishers, Indiana. One fall recess he bent over and picked some dandelions. For that offense, he served several days of lunchtime detention. When his shocked parents asked the principal what was wrong with such innocuous behavior, she explained that some kids had been throwing rocks at recess. To make things easy on recess monitors, the school had simply banned picking anything up from the ground -flowers included.

Virginia Postrel, a Bloomberg View columnist, writes about commerce and culture, innovation, economics, and public policy. (c) 2015, Bloomberg View 15-10-5

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26

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Petula Dvorak

A Small Town Freaks Out Over Bustiers and Vibrators Or there’s the tiny device that’s a $150 FitBit council. “Please do something to get rid of this for your lady nether-regions, reminding you to store as soon as possible. I wonder what else goes do your Kegel exercises with a buzz and tracking on in this building!” your progress on an app.

Um, I checked it out for you, Mary. Knitting.

So this is apparently what’s prompted letters Knitting happens in that building. to the Leesburg Town Council and spurred visits Less than a mile from the pink ruffles and pushfrom town officials. up bras is a gun shop, with window displays of “Actually, the police officer visit was because rifle butts and Sig Sauer and Glock stickers. The of a hookah,” says store owner Bo Kenney. gun shop is wedged between a soccer association A grandma was walking down the street and headquarters and a family-style Italian restaurant. her grandson saw a hookah in the store window We haven’t seen the town council flooded with display. Grandma reported to police that there complaints about this juxtaposition. was a sex toy. Right in plain sight, in the window, But so far this year, 2,478 children have been Kenney said. killed by gunfire, according to the Gun Violence So they removed it, and laughed at what, Archive. exactly, grandma envisioned are the sex acts As far as I can tell - but maybe I’m just not performed with the hookah. finding these stats in the federal reports - zero The store is among the 12 shops that Kenney kids have been killed by boobs. Or pink bustiers. and his wife own. Le Tache bills itself on its Leesburg’s attorney has told the letter writers website as “Northern Virginia’s #1 lingerie and and town leaders that they can’t do anything couples boutique since 1988. Over 1 million toys about the lingerie store. Everything being sold is for lovers sold! We offer sexy lingerie, toys for perfectly legal, even if the displays offend some lovers, aphrodisiacs, lubricants, gifts and more.” or objectify women.

“We have nothing but good customers in (Hey, Le Tache, how about some men in the Leesburg,” Kenney said. “Nothing about the window?)

Knitting. town or the people has been negative.”

Bottom line: the naughty wares in Leesburg The clerk is knitting.

Until now. aren’t going anywhere unless people stop buying “Hello,” she says, cheerfully.

Members of the town council told Leesburg them. As the spending habits of the good people I described the debauchery I saw drifting out of Today that they’ve been hit with emails from of Leesburg demonstrate, Sunday morning the bar next door, and nope, none of those people residents unhappy with having to pass the store prudishness is a lot less powerful than Monday were her customers. It had been busy earlier, but windows and explain them to their children. morning sex toy shopping. mostly older couples who came in after dinner.

“Why do we have to have such unchaste and (c) 2015, The Washington Post Friday nights aren’t their busiest times, says disgusting displays of women in a beautiful, old 15-9-28 the clerk, who doesn’t want to give her name. town as Leesburg?” Mary L. Chaney wrote to the “Monday mornings. Whoa,” she said.

Joe Nocera “Sometimes, people are waiting outside before we open at 10 a.m.”

I browse the store. The main part is fancy lingerie, nothing too different from what you’d see at a Victoria’s Secret at nearly every mall in In March, Moms Clean Air Force, a In this era, it is something of a miracle: “an America. grass-roots environmental group co-founded example of good, old-fashioned legislating,” The curtained-off sex toy part is certainly more by Dominique Browning, was tossed out of Udall told me. graphic. But it’s also the area where children aren’t a coalition called Safer Chemicals, Healthy allowed, and it can’t be seen from the street.

Families. Its heresy was supporting a Senate Browning, an old friend of mine, describes The helpful clerk admitted she often feels like bill that constituted the first serious revision in herself as an environmental pragmatist. She a therapist and is stunned with the questions, nearly 40 years of the woefully outdated Toxic concluded that whatever the flaws in the bill, myths and misperceptions that customers - often Substances Control Act. which Vitter and Udall reintroduced this year, it middle-aged couples - have when they get to this You see, the bill — officially the Frank R. was a vast improvement over the status quo — a part of the shop.

Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century status quo in which the Environmental Protection She answers all their questions patiently. And Act — is the result of (shudder!) compromise. Agency can’t even regulate formaldehyde. She their gratitude (they often return to update her Those compromises were originally hammered and her brain trust decided that their 570,000on how things went ) tells her she’s doing some out by Lautenberg, a liberal Democratic senator, member group would work to improve the bill valuable work in her community. and David Vitter, a right-wing Republican senator instead of oppose it. This is also the position She took me on a tour of her best-sellers. One is allied with the chemical industry. The two men co- taken by the ever-pragmatic Fred Krupp of the a $350 vibrator. And no, for that price, it doesn’t sponsored a bill in May 2013. Then Lautenberg Environmental Defense Fund, with which Moms also make breakfast for you in the morning. But died.

Clean Air Force is affiliated. it does look like something sleek and right out of Sen. Tom Udall, another Democrat, picked up The Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families Apple’s design shop. She explains the movement where Lautenberg left off, and over the next two- coalition, however, which includes such major and battery life that account for the price. Oh. plus years, he and Vitter continued to improve environmental groups as the National Resources She’s sold out of the real hit - a $250 wearable the bill while also making compromises to gain Defense Council and Earth Justice, opposed the sex toy that can be buzzed remotely with an app. additional Senate support. In just the last week, Senate bill. In a blog post, Andy Igrejas, who It’s really popular among Northern Virginia’s the bipartisan bill, which the Senate is expected heads the coalition, listed provisions that he power couples, who are often separated by travel, to vote on soon, has gained enough co-sponsors described, essentially, as gifts to the chemical she says. Pleasure is only an app away. to be filibuster-proof.

Nocera continued on page 27 It’s just before midnight on a Friday in downtown Leesburg, and a young couple just stumbled out of the biker bar in this historic Virginia town, past the American flags, quaint lamposts and cascading petunia pots and ducked into an alley, furiously making out.

A guy in a backwards ballcap staggered toward some port-a-potties, then whizzed on a wall just outside them.

But here’s what’s freaking out the Leesburg Town Council of late: Le Tache, a lingerie and sex toy shop that opened up across the street from the courthouse five years ago. Its very presence, Leesburg’s leaders have suddenly decided, is debasing the good people of this 250-year-old city.

Let’s check it out. Because at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday is when a sin shop should be at its most depraved, right?

So I walk past the rustic Americana biker bar, stroll past the window mannequins modeling corsets and lace undies - outfits which cover more of those plastic bodies than what plenty of women wear to the pool - and I see it.

The Case For Compromise

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

27

Thomas Friedman

Stuff Happens With both China and India having just announced major plans to curb their carbon emissions, the sound you hear is a tipping point tipping.

Heading into the United Nations climate summit meeting in Paris in December, all the world’s largest industrial economies are now taking climate change more seriously. This includes the United States — except for some of the knuckleheads running to be our next president, which is not a small problem.

When, at CNN’s GOP presidential debate, the moderator Jake Tapper read statements from Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz (who drives an electric car powered by solar panels on his home’s roof) about how Reagan urged industry to proactively address ozone depletion, and why Shultz believes we should be just as proactive today in dealing with climate change, he got the usual know-nothing responses.

Sen. Marco Rubio said, “We’re not going to destroy our economy the way the left-wing government that we are under now wants to do,” while Gov. Chris Christie opined of Shultz, “Listen, everybody makes a mistake every once in a while.”

They sure do, and it’s not Shultz, who has been wisely and courageously telling Republicans that the conservative thing to do now is to take out some insurance against climate change, because if it really gets rocking the results could

be “catastrophic.” Hurricane Sandy — likely amplified by warmer ocean waters — caused over $36 billion in damage to Christie’s own state, New Jersey, in 2012.

But hey, “stuff happens.”

warm interglacial equilibrium, which is the only state of the planet we know for sure can support the modern world as we know it.” It finally gave us “a stable equilibrium of forests, savannahs, coral reefs, grasslands, fish, mammals, bacteria, air quality, There was time when we could ice cover, temperature, fresh water tolerate this kind of dumb-as-we- availability and productive soils.” wanna-be thinking. But it’s over. The next eight years will be critical for It “is our Eden,” Rockstrom the world’s climate and ecosystems, added, and now “we are threatening and if you vote for a climate skeptic to push Earth out of this sweet spot,” for president, you’d better talk to your starting in the mid-1950s, when the kids first, because you will have to Industrial Revolution reached most of answer to them later. the rest of the globe and populations If you have time to read one book and middle classes exploded. That on this subject, I highly recommend triggered “the great acceleration” of the new “Big World, Small Planet,” industrial and farming growth, which

by Johan Rockstrom, director of has put all of Earth’s ecosystems the Stockholm Resilience Center, under stress. The impacts now are and Mattias Klum, whose stunning obvious: “climate change, chemical photographs of ecosystem disruptions pollution, air pollution, land and water reinforce the urgency of the moment. degradation … and the massive loss of Rockstrom begins his argument species and habitats.” with a reminder that for most of the The good news is that in this period Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history its many more of the world’s have-nots climate was not very hospitable to have escaped from poverty. They’ve human beings, as it oscillated between joined the party. The bad news, says “punishing ice ages and lush warm Rockstrom, is that “the old party” periods” that locked humanity into cannot go on as it did. The Earth is very seminomadic lifestyles. good at finding ways to adapt to stress: It’s only been in the last 10,000 years oceans and forest absorb the extra that we have enjoyed the stable climate CO2; ecosystems like the Amazon conditions allowing civilizations to adapt to deforestation and still provide develop based on agriculture that rain and fresh water; the Arctic ice could support towns and cities. This shrinks but does not disappear. But period, known as the Holocene, was eventually we can exhaust the planet’s an “almost miraculously stable and adaptive capacities.

We’re sitting on these planetary boundaries right now, argues Rockstrom, and if these systems flip from one stable state to another — if the Amazon tips into a savannah, if the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts absorbing them in water, if the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — nature will be fine, but we will not be.

“The planet has demonstrated an impressive capacity to maintain its balance, using every trick in its bag to stay in the current state,” explains Rockstrom. But there are more and more signs that we may have reached a saturation point. Forests show the first signs of absorbing less carbon. The oceans are rapidly acidifying as they absorb more CO2, harming fish and coral. Global average temperatures keep rising.

This is what will greet the next president — a resilient planet that could once absorb our excesses at seemingly no cost to us, suddenly tipping into a saturated planet, sending us “daily invoices” that will get bigger each year. When nature goes against you, watch out.

“For the first time, we need to be clever,” says Rockstrom, “and rise to a crisis before it happens,” before we cross nature’s tipping points. Later will be too late. We elect a president who ignores this science at our peril.

Nocera continued from page 26

were willing to roll up their sleeves and make common cause with conservative senators like Vitter and chemical industry lobbyists.

“We have always been clear that the way to get this done is to work in a bipartisan manner to support both Democrats and Republicans who were trying to solve the problem of the old law not working,” said Richard Denison, EDF’s point person on the chemical bill. “And while lending our support, we also asked for improvements.” Which they got.

prevent companies from seeking to delay EPA action as long as possible.

“I could sit in my office and write a perfect bill, but it wouldn’t be one that could become law in the United States,” said Krupp.

“The question isn’t whether it is perfect. The question is whether it is a really good bill. We think it is.”

Browning had another point: “If you live in California, then of course you don’t want pre-emption.

But what about the rest of us poor moms who aren’t protected by serious state laws?” For them, the Senate bill’s compromises would improve their lives.

Proving, I think, that the perfect really is the enemy of the good.

Blah, blah blah notwithstanding.

industry. His coalition had thrown out EDF, a founding member, over the issue in 2013; now it was Moms Clean Air Force’s turn.

“They were supporting a Senate bill everyone else opposed,” Igrejas said when I asked him why. “You couldn’t do that and stay in the coalition.” He added, “At every point along the way, Fred [Krupp] would say, ‘You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Blah, blah, blah.”

Igrejas believes that the bill, which his coalition still opposes, despite the many improvements even since March, is better only because he and others came out so strongly against it. (I should note that the coalition supports a much narrower House bill.) The EDFMoms Clean Air Force view is that the bill got better because they

either: chemicals that were once unregulated would now face the prospect of serious restrictions on their use.

The biggest issue is around something called “pre-emption” — meaning that states will not be able to write laws about certain chemicals if the EPA starts a formal review of that chemical. Because some states, like California, are much tougher on chemicals than the federal government has been, many environmentalists don’t want any federal pre-emption. But the chemical industry, tired of dealing The bill doesn’t give with different state standards, environmentalists everything insisted on it. they want. There are thousands of The Senate bill offers a reasonable unregulated chemicals, yet the bill compromise that says that if the EPA calls for the EPA to look at only 25 doesn’t act within a certain time during the first five years after the frame, states can act on their own. bill becomes law. But it hardly gives This provision, notes Denison, is the industry everything it wants, “an important backstop” that would

c.2015 New York Times News Service 15-10-6

c.2015 New York Times News Service 15-10-5

28

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Charles Blow

Million Man March, 20 Years On Saturday morning, with the crispness of fall in the air and wispy clouds overhead, an impressive throng of black bodies — and a smattering of other colored ones — gathered on the Mall, facing the steps of the Capitol.

They had gathered for the “Justice or Else” rally convened by the Nation of Islam’s controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, to mark the 20th anniversary of the group’s historic Million Man March. And that’s the rub.

The question is, as it was in 1995: Can you separate the march from the messenger, the lightning rod 82-year-old Farrakhan? The answer: Not exactly.

The rally was in a way a pageant for Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam — their power and prowess, their ability to organize and attract allies, their beliefs and customs — and it centered on Farrakhan as the celebrity father figure.

This is not unlike 1995 when the march was conceived as a “day of atonement,” focusing on personal responsibility, with black nationalist overtones. As the writer Salim Muwakkil told The Times then: “Historically, black people have always turned to black nationalism during hostile racial times.”

Although the Million Man March was undoubtedly successful as a convening, criticism of Farrakhan was blistering.

A release by the American Jewish Congress called Farrakhan “one of the country’s most prominent and unrepentant public bigots.”

A New York Times editorial at the time blasted Farrakhan and his fellow organizer Benjamin Chavis Jr., comparing them to “white racists of the previous generation” and saying “they want to prolong and exploit the nation’s racial divisions” while promoting “the twisted Farrakhan ideology.”

Men in the black gay community were conflicted about whether to come, both because of homophobic statements made by supporters of the march and by Farrakhan himself, who wrote in his 1993 book “A Torchlight for America,” “We must change homosexual behavior and get rid of the circumstances that bring it about.”

The exclusion of women was also debated.

Adolph Reed, a black professor of political science, who was then at Northwestern University and is now at the University of Pennsylvania, said then, “The message of Farrakhan’s march is fundamentally conservative and blatantly sexist.”

This time, Farrakhan seemed acutely aware of his critics and seemed to want to pre-emptively address them. But even his efforts to exalt women and include queer-identifying people while continuing to honor and affirm men was framed in tones of patriarchy.

There was the inordinate amount of time spent talking about women’s “wombs” as a rationale for honor, the presentation of how women should dress to “earn respect,” the mention that “a woman who’s beautiful and can’t cook is a killer in the

kitchen.”

Even as he said to LGBTQ people, “We are not your judges,” he framed queerness in the sinful negative, invoking the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman to whom Jesus said, “Go, and sin no more.”

Indeed, Farrakhan’s speech was more sermon and proselytization than social justice call to action.

He didn’t spend much time on the enigmatic mantra “justice or else,” which raises more questions than it answered.

Justice for what? Anything and everything, apparently.

The word justice has a broadness and blankness that any pain can be projected onto it and reflected off it. The event’s website says, “We want equal justice under the law,” but under the heading “The Demand,” there is a list of groups for whom justice is sought but not the injustices themselves. The only quasi-specific demands are “an immediate end to police brutality and mob attacks” and “We want land.”

And then, “or else” what? The answer seemed to vary with the broad coalition of speakers Saturday, but as for Farrakhan’s two-hour speech, there seemed to be a religious allusion: Grant justice, America, or be subject to the divine judgment of God.

But, during an interview on TV One, he had suggested “or else” meant the withholding of economic participation by the aggrieved.

More disturbingly, this summer, in what the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, The Final Call, called a “trip South to promote the ‘Justice or Else!’ gathering,” Farrakhan said at a Florida church: “If the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us, stalk them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling.”

Farrakhan and rally organizers took pains to include overtures to Black Lives Matter, the predominant black movement of this moment.

Some people from the movement even spoke at the rally. Many attendees were no doubt spurred by the events elevated by the movement. But this is an alliance of which that movement should be wary, specifically at a time that many conservatives are trying to paint it as a hate group.

In 1995, Ronald Walters, a political-science professor, told The Times, “For most blacks, this is about pain.” He continued, “The discussion of Farrakhan is a side issue for us.” Maybe that sensibility still stands. c.2015 New York Times News Service 15-10-11

John Young

Symbol of Surrender to the Gun Lobby

A metaphor for a nation: Terrified students hustle across a school parking lot, their hands in the air.

It happened the other day at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: hands in the air. It happened at Columbine High School. It happened at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois and Central Arkansas.

It has happened at 142 schools – yes, 142 -college, high school, elementary -- since so many children died not quite three years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary. That’s about one shooting per week.

Hands in the air. The ones still escaping, the psychological victims of another gun atrocity, know not what to think, what to do, where to go – exactly like the country that would protect them.

This is the country that, as British wit John Oliver observes in wonderment, caught one shoe bomber and now requires every air traveler to shed shoes at check-in. But do anything about the gun carnage in its midst? No way. Just count bodies and pray.

We’ve had 986 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. Add the crime-of-passion shootings, the suicides, the drive-bys, the accidental deaths.

What’s the toll?

Well, let’s put it this way: Just this year the gun carnage – 9,948 dead – is more than three 9/11s.

Where is Dick Cheney when we need audacity and overreach? Where are the spare-no-expense resources? Where’s Homeland Security?

This is the public safety issue of our time, and we are less proactive about protecting people from random shootings than we are about trans fats.

Arming more Americans? Arming teachers? It doesn’t work. It can do just the opposite. More innocents can get killed.

This happens even when police intervene in the chaos of a mass shooting. In 2012, nine bystanders were wounded by counter-terrorism-trained New York police in an armed confrontation at the Empire State Building.

So what’s the answer? Literally, it’s to treat guns as the public safety matter they are, just like automobiles. The answer is to register firearms and license their owners. The answer is to prohibit or revoke permits for those unfit to operate a killing machine.

In the absence of something that wouldn’t prevent gun ownership for the law-abiding but would change the reckless gun culture we’ve cultivated, we need to take action aimed at keeping guns out of the wrong hands.

Few Americans by now oppose the concept of background checks to prohibit gun ownership to criminals, the mentally ill, juveniles, non-citizens and more. But what happens when the background check system fails?

Democrats in the Senate have proposed a bill to close a loophole that made it possible for Dylann Roof to obtain a firearm before his shooting spree

Young continued on page 29

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

29

Froma Harrop

Twisted Social Media and Mass Murder The first details about the mass killer at the community college in Roseburg, Oregon, were that he was a young man, lonely and full of hate.

Of course he was. They all are.

Lonely young men full of hate have been with us since there were lonely young men. The modern phenomenon of their acting out their madness on a large scale started almost 50 years ago, when Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas Tower and shot to death 16 people down below. There have been similar assaults against innocents ever since, but what accounts for the current rapid pace of what used to be rare, horrific events?

One change may be the growth of social media, creating an online community to ease the loneliness of these mentally ill time bombs -and perhaps endorse their perverse fantasies. The community lets the killers know that after the deed, which usually includes their death, they will have lots of people following them.

Christopher Harper-Mercer, who slaughtered nine at Umpqua Community College, had made an online reference to Vester Lee Flanagan, who murdered two former colleagues from a Roanoke, Virginia, TV station while they were on the air. Flanagan had referenced Dylann Roof, a young white man accused of murdering nine people at an AfricanAmerican church in Charleston, South Carolina. Flanagan was enraged at Roof and then copied him.

Young continued from page 28 at a Charleston, S.C., church.

In between, there was John Russell Houser, a rare older mass shooter, 59, who posted his political ravings online before killing two and wounding nine others at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. And he may have been copying James Holmes, who killed 12 and injured 70 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

Back when all were filled with religion in the “war on terror,” the principle was that we would do everything at our disposal to prevent further terrorist attacks.

What Dylann Roof did was a terrorist attack. What the shooter in Oregon did was a terrorist attack.

For years it has been one terrorist attack after another.

We have to stop denying that we are arming home-grown terrorists.

Let’s put our hands down and put them to work. Let’s change a culture that makes the fates of helpless people secondary to pieces of metal that propel pieces of metal through the air.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Called the “default to proceed” loophole, the ambiguity in the law means that if a gun dealer doesn’t get back FBI background check authorization in 72 hours, the transaction can proceed anyway.

As with so much pertaining to guns in this country, the loophole exists because the whole of gun policy is sculpted for the convenience of gun owners and sellers, rather than any inclination to protect the public.

The problem confronted by the bill in question sounds like an obscure matter, but in 2012 alone, the loophole allowed 3,722 people who otherwise would have been ineligible – people with criminal records or mental health issues -- to 15-10-6 buy their precious guns.

The natural response after these multiple shootings is to blame lax gun control. The appalled father of Harper-Mercer went on TV and did just that. Politicians agreed or not, depending on their fear of the National Rifle Association.

Yes, bans on weapons of war and gun sales to the mentally ill are desperately needed. Looking back at these massacres, most of the weaponry was legally obtained.

But perhaps as dangerous as the flood of arms are the fumes of paranoia spread by the NRA and other peddlers of gun mania. What better audience for the instantempowerment-of-guns message than depressed, lonely men.

Ours seems to be the only culture that uses guns for psychotherapy, as was well-portrayed in the movie “American Sniper.” One creepy similarity between Harper-Mercer and Adam Lanza, who slayed 26 at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was that their mothers took them out shooting.

Certainly in Lanza’s case, the mother bizarrely thought she could channel her boy’s sick obsession with guns into a bonding thing. Both mothers had left lying around the house the guns their deranged sons

used.

In the meantime, these lonely men find companionship, however imaginary, in these online communities of gun worship, places that often validate their paranoiac thoughts. (Many also seek refuge in violent video games.) What they desperately need is real community to offer reality checks and interface with mental health professionals.

Some law enforcement is trying to withhold the perpetrators’ names to deprive the criminals of the celebrity they crave. These officers fully understand the motive, but their good efforts can’t go far. The curious public does want to know names and the killers’ grievances, however crazy, and media will provide them.

The bigger concern is the ugly public seething online, honoring killers past and certifying the most twisted worldviews. Social media have some very dark corners that encourage mass bloodshed, and what can we possibly do about it?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

Copyright 2015 Creators.com 15-10-6

30

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

Walter Brasch

Mass Murders are Good for Business Shortly after the mass murders at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Ore., President Obama predicted the extreme right wing would crank out press releases declaring the nation needs fewer gun control laws and more guns.

The pro-gun lobby didn’t disappoint him.

Shortly after the mass murders in a Charleston, S.C., church in June, NRA board member Charles Cotton, an attorney who fired his first shot when he was four years old, had claimed if the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator “had voted to allow gun owners to carry their own weapons [into churches], eight of his church members . . . might be alive.”

After the shootings in Oregon, Cotton said had the students been carrying guns, there would have been no mass murder. “How carefree do you have to be with all of the mass shootings that are going on throughout America to not have something as simple and convenient as a small knife when you go to class, let alone a gun with which to protect yourself?” Cotton asked.

The Republican presidential herd called for even more guns in a culture that has made Americans inured to violence. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush said, “Stuff happens.”

The absurdity of arming all of America is that there are no requirements that anyone with a gun needs to know how to use that gun. The possibility of any one person with a hand gun being able to react faster than the shooter, be more accurate than the shooter, or not accidentally wounding or killing others is high. Heavily armed police, better trained in weapons than most Americans, did not kill the shooter, who wore body armor; the shooter killed himself.

The shooter’s mother, who said she got all her knowledge about guns from her son, acknowledged he was autistic and a head-banger.

In their house were 20 guns, including semiautomatic assault rifles; the killer used six of those guns at the college.

Those who believe in no gun regulation say the solution is better mental health counseling. That may be a small part of the solution, but there are numerous questions. If a mother recognizes there may be a problem with her son but does nothing, who is responsible for compelling someone to see a counselor? Should the government step in to order counseling? Could this violate certain Constitutional rights? If the gun-proponents want the government to intercede, how do they reconcile their conflicting belief of limited government intervention in all matters against mandatory mental health counseling? Equally important, if they believe in more mental health counseling, why have they refused to vote for or approve funds for more mental health clinics? One fact is not accepted by the gun-rights absolutists.

“Only 3%-5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and

Human Services, and those with mental illnesses “are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.”

There are more than 310 million guns in civilians’ possession in the United States. That’s one for every person from birth to death, and the highest per capita gun ownership rate in the world. During the past decade, there have been about 301,000 Americans killed by guns; that is about 4,250 times greater than all deaths from terrorists in the United States.

In 1996, Congress blocked funding for the Centers for Disease Control to collect and analyze data about gun violence; it extended that ban this past July. In 2013, Congress had refused to pass common sense proposals to reduce gun violence. About 85 percent of all Americans want universal background checks, according to a non-partisan Pew Research poll in July. A majority of Americans want a limit on the size of ammunition magazines, and bans on assault weapons and civilians owning armor-piercing bullets. The politicians’ greed and loyalty to gun manufacturers is greater than their responsibility to their constituents and, more important, to discovering the truth

members of the board believe the president of the United States is a tyrant—some compare him to Hitler—who wants to disarm all Americans.

It is this kind of thinking that forced former president George H.W. Bush to renounce his life membership in the NRA when the leadership declared federal agents to be “jack-booted thugs.” It is this paranoid fear that allows gun manufacturers to create more guns, where every shooting spurs profits at local gun stores, and which helps the NRA and similar organizations to throw money at politicians to assure that fear, reelections, and profits are what matter, not lives.

Instilling fear into the people is what sells guns and buys politicians. Candi Kinney, owner of a gun store near Umpqua Community College, said the murders helped spur sales of guns, and ordered even more AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles. “There’s always a rush on them after a big shooting,” she told the Guardian.

As World War II was coming to an end, and as the Allies began liberating the concentration camps where the Nazis murdered and tortured more than six million Jews, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered his troops to bring the civilians from nearby villages to the camps.

He wanted the villagers to see those who lived, whose possessions and gold teeth were torn from them, and whose flesh now barely hung on their bones. He wanted the civilians—most who falsely claimed they didn’t know about the genocide—to see the crematoriums, whose smoke they had to have seen, whose odors they had to have smelled. He wanted the civilians to go to the edge of forests, where Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, and where the nearby villagers gleefully watched their soldiers and collaborators shoot pistols and automatic weapons that would end the lives of infants and grandparents, shopkeepers and mill workers, and some of the world’s most brilliant artists, writers, musicians, and scientists. Decades later, extreme right-wing militant Americans foolishly claim if the Jews had guns, the holocaust would never have occurred.

Let’s now require all politicians, and all those who believe fewer gun laws and more guns will solve the murder problem, to go to the crime scene.

Let every politician and gun-rights advocate within 25 miles of a mass murder walk where the victims once walked. Let them see the blood and bodies shredded by copper, steel, and lead. Let them witness the police and medical personnel trying to do their jobs, while doing their best to hide their own tears and rage. Let them hear the cries of the families and friends. Make them go to the morgue and watch autopsies on bodies that can talk only to medical examiners. Make them go to the funerals, to again hear the crying of the families and friends, who talk about lives lost decades too early.

The only thing most politicians want to do

The gun manufacturers, which receive about $6 billion in income each year, help fund the NRA and other pro-gun organizations. It’s simply a business decision. Nothing more.

Last year, the NRA spent $37 million on campaign donations and lobbying. In 2012, the NRA spent about $14 million trying to defeat President Obama in his successful run for a second term, according to The New York Times. Failing to stop the President from a second term led to even more gun sales. “It’s been off the chart, Gary Jessup of UT Arms in Kansas, told the Kansas City Star. About 4.7 million background checks were recorded in November and December 2012, according to the FBI, as the extreme right-wing descended into a cavern of fear, swathed by delusional paranoia.

The NRA isn’t protecting the legitimate hunters and target shooters. Several former NRA presidents and board members in a delusional descent into paranoia, have said the NRA and gun-toting Americans are what keep the federal government from invading the states and seizing authority. Former NRA president David Keene told the Daily Caller that the Second Amendment “was not written to protect squirrel hunters.”

Fred Romero, an NRA field representative, said the Second Amendment, which NRA and gunrights organizations cling to as if it was Linus’s baby blanket, “is not there to protect the interests of hunters, sports shooters and casual plinkers [but] as a balance of power. [It is] a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.” Former NRA president Sandy Froman believes, “We are at war” within America and “my fellow NRA members are at the heart of national defense.” Most of the NRA staff and Brasch continued on page 31

Liberal Opinion Week

October 21, 2015

31

E.J. Dionne Jr.

Let’s Focus On The Gun Makers It’s not just Congress that fails to respond after another massacre briefly focuses attention on the irrationality and permissiveness of our country’s firearms statutes.

Those of us seeking change also regularly fall down on the job.

We express outrage and move on, leaving the debate exactly where we found it.

Opponents of the big gun interests are often insufficiently innovative in what we propose. Let’s face it: We have been losing this fight.

The solutions we suggest are rarely big enough to deal with the problem comprehensively. This opens up advocates of change to predictable attacks. This suggested law, gun-industry apologists say, would not have prevented that shooting. More broadly: How will your little proposals ever get a handle on guns when there are already more than 300 million of them on the streets? (Part of the answer: Deal with ammunition.)

Gun reformers put ourselves at a steep disadvantage from the outset. We often get angry at rankand-file gun owners who, in turn, see us as elitist big-city folks who don’t respect the traditions of those who have had weapons in their families for generations. Pro-reform politicians often don hunting outfits and shoot deer or birds to curry favor with those who mistrust them.

Mostly, the politicians look silly.

Anybody can put on a costume.

The time has come to recast this battle as a fight to hold those who make billions of dollars from the

Brasch continued from page 30

after every mass shooting is to say their thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed and wounded. But, their words are as hollow as their logic. Let the truth ring true, that the politicians were bought and paid for by the gun industry, and that is why commonsense gun reform was voted down, and the violence continues.

Assisting on this column was Rosemary R. Brasch. Walter Brasch is an award-winning author/ journalist, whose latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, a look at the health, environmental, political, and economic issues affecting the American population.

15-10-8

sale of firearms accountable for what their products do to individuals and communities. We must call for corporate responsibility, and enforce it by law if it’s not forthcoming. And President Obama, whose outrage about guns many of us share, must be willing to go well beyond what he has done so far.

across from the White House in Lafayette Square -- “Clergy and Citizens to President Obama: Stop Whining, Start Working to Curb Gun Deaths.” But the former community organizer might appreciate this: Since his administration has been reluctant to use the taxpayers’ power in the weapons marketplace to promote accountability from the big As is their way, the community gun makers, outside pressure might organizers and activists at the make it easier for him to do the right Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) thing. are pushing the president to use the federal government’s purchasing He also faces prodding from power to promote safer guns. To his fellow Democrats. Both Hillary do business with the government, Clinton and Martin O’Malley have companies would have to be put forward comprehensive gun willing to “remove the barriers proposals that are more adventurous to getting smart guns and gun than the ideas Obama has embraced. safety technologies to market” and O’Malley deserves particular cooperate with law enforcement to credit for going far beyond the “identify and isolate dealers that highly constricted gun-policy provide large numbers of guns used conversation. His comprehensive in crimes.” plan includes a proposal that echoes Governments at all levels account the IAF in mandating that the for roughly 40 percent of gun industry federal government buy weapons revenues. The federal government only from manufacturers who alone accounts for about 25 percent. adopt basic safety measures and the Taxpayers have a right to demand microstamping of weapons. responsibility from an industry that Arnie Graf, a longtime gets so much of our money.

IAF organizer, explains that The president won’t much like microstamping can allow law the slogan of a Metro IAF news enforcement to trace guns and bullets conference scheduled for Thursday used in crimes. “Smart guns” that

could be used only by their owner would vastly reduce trafficking, prevent accidents and diminish suicides. And since a relatively small number of dealers are responsible for the sale of a large number of weapons used in crime, focusing on those dealers (and demanding that the gun companies stop selling to them) could further reduce gun violence.

So let’s talk less about the NRA and more about those whose interests the NRA serves, the big weapons sellers such as Sturm, Ruger & Co., Smith & Wesson, SIG Sauer, Beretta, Glock and Freedom Group. Let’s insist that Obama put his anger to work. And let’s use our proven capacity for technological innovation to reduce violence.

Responsible business people care about the well-being of their communities and live with all sorts of health and safety regulations. They above all should see how profoundly misguided it is that one of the least accountable industries in the United States involves enterprises selling products that kill people.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group 15-10-8

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