LOW 3-9-16

Liberal Opinion Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Vol. 27 NO. 10 March 9, 2016

Week

Bill Press

Back To The Days Of The Smoke-Filled Room So you thought the smoke-filled room was dead? No way. It still exists, but only in the Democratic Party. And under a new name: “superdelegates.”

Early evidence of a smoke-filled room, one of the most colorful pages in America’s political history, first appeared in a report about a 1763 meeting of the Boston Caucus: “Selectmen, assessors, collectors, firewards and representatives are regularly chosen there before they are chosen in the town. ... There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the garret to the other.”

But the term itself dates from the Republican National Convention in 1920. After convention delegates deadlocked on a nominee, a small group of Republican senators met secretly in a suite in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel -- in a “smoke-filled room,” reported the Associated Press -- and engineered the nomination of Warren G. Harding as the Republican Party candidate for president. The phrase has been used ever since to mean any gathering where cigar-smoking party bosses meet secretly to choose candidates.

In today’s Democratic Party, superdelegates may not smoke, but they still serve the same function and possess the same power: to overrule the vote of the people and dictate who the party’s candidate for president will be. It is, in other words, about as un-democratic as you can possibly get.

The position of superdelegate, in fact, was created by the Democratic National Committee in 1982 to safeguard against the possibility that voters might choose someone party elites consider crazy and unelectable

For DNC Chair Debbie WassermanSchultz, that’s just fine.

“Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Which is fine, if you really want party elites to rule, but most people thought the Democratic Party had more democratic aims.

(like Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders?), in which case party poohbahs would step in and override the popular vote. Democratic members of the United States Congress, Democratic governors, members of the Democratic National Committee and other present and former party officials are automatically recognized as superdelegates. Their numbers vary, according to the number of Democratic officeholders. But in 2016, there are 712 superdelegates, or 30 percent of the 2,382 delegates needed to win the nomination.

Their power resides in the fact that superdelegates are free to vote for any candidate they want -- unlike delegates elected in each state, who are legally bound to support the candidate they backed in their state primary. And superdelegates have used that power effectively. In 1984, when Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were very close in pledged delegates, superdelegates threw their votes to Mondale. In 2008, Hillary Clinton’s chance to win the nomination sank

But don’t despair. There is an answer, as put forth in a petition by Moveon.org: For all superdelegates to pledge to support whichever candidate, Clinton or Sanders, gets the most votes in the primaries -- in order to respect the will of the people. Clinton supporter Christine Pelosi and Sanders supporter Anna Galland have already committed, and they are urging all superdelegates to do the same.

Republicans, meanwhile, have no such party-boss rule. Each state is assigned three superdelegates -the state chair, plus two more party officials -- and they must vote for the winner of their state primary.

Such sweet irony. This primary campaign has, indeed, taken many strange twists and turns. But whoever thought the Republican Party would end up being more democratic?

Bill Press is host of a nationallysyndicated radio show, CNN political analyst and the author of a new book, “Buyer’s Remorse,” 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. Readers may also follow him on Twitter at @bpshow.

when her superdelegates switched to candidate Barack Obama.

Many Democrats now fear that superdelegates could step in and dictate the party’s 2016 nominee -and this year, the superdelegate deck is clearly stacked in Clinton’s favor.

In New Hampshire, for example, Bernie Sanders won 60 percent of the vote and 15 of the state’s pledged delegates. Clinton won only nine delegates. But she still walks away with 15 delegates, the same as Sanders, because six of the state’s eight superdelegates endorsed her.

The big picture’s even more lopsided. The tally of elected delegates won so far in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada -- and before the South Carolina primary -- is 52 for Clinton, 51 for Sanders.

But when you add Clinton’s 445 superdelegates and Sanders’ 18, the picture looks far different: Clinton, 497; Sanders, 69 -- raising the fear among Sanders supporters that their man could win the popular vote, yet have the nomination legally stolen (c) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. 2-25-16 from him by superdelegates.

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Charles Blow

‘I’m Not a Super Predator’ Days before Hillary Clinton thundered to an overwhelming victory over rival Bernie Sanders in South Carolina — largely on the strength of black voters who supported her by an even higher percentage than they supported Barack Obama with in 2008 — a young, proudly queer, black activist, Ashley Williams, was in Charlotte, North Carolina, plotting an action that would make a statement of its own.

She was planning to attend a private Clinton fundraiser in Charleston, South Carolina, and confront the candidate about her support of policies — specifically the 1994 crime bill — that contributed to the explosion of racially tilted mass incarceration in this country.

Williams and her friends decided to make a sign — but what to put on it? They toyed with phrases from a now infamous speech Clinton gave in 1996 — when the 23-year-old Williams was a toddler — in which Clinton said: “We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators: no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

They settled on a phrase and over

a couple of hours they blocked out the letters on a pillowcase. Williams practiced in a bathroom mirror folding the banner into her bra and whipping it out. (She figured that she’d have to hide it on her body so that it wouldn’t be confiscated before she revealed it at the fundraiser.)

But it was too thick. So she cut away the back half that had no writing.

Perfect.

The night of the event, she nervously made her way through security with her secret banner hidden away, and took up position near where she assumed Clinton was to speak. As soon as Clinton descended the stairs of the mansion, took the microphone and began her remarks, Williams turned to the crowd and unfurled her banner.

Then she turned to Clinton, who was confronted with her own worst words: “We have to bring them to heel.”

On the video of the encounter, recorded by a friend of Williams who accompanied her to the event (After all, in this age, an action without a video is like a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it), an exchange follows: Williams: “We want you to apologize for mass incarceration.”

Clinton: “OK, we’ll talk about…”

Williams: “I’m not a super

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predator, Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton, obviously caught off guard, struggles to find an appropriate response as Williams continues to pressure her and the crowd begins to grumble, “That’s inappropriate,” and the Secret Service closes in on Williams.

Williams forced a reckoning.

For it, Williams has been viciously, and I believe, unfairly attacked as a political operative on a hit mission, all of which she denied to me in detail during our phone interview on Saturday. She also said that Sanders was wrong for actually voting for the bill.

Perhaps most stinging was Bill Maher, who used an expletive to call protesters like Williams “idiots,” and said: “People need to learn the difference between an imperfect friend and a deadly enemy. You want to tear Hillary Clinton down? Great.

Then enjoy President Trump.”

But this is a false choice, one too often posed to young activists who insist on holding power accountable.

It’s the same argument they hear from the police: Allow us to operate in your communities with impunity and abandon or the criminals will do so to even more devastating effect.

Following this line of reasoning, silent absorption of pain and suffering is the only option. I wholly reject that.

After the encounter, Clinton said in a statement published by The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”

The statement isn’t really an

Then Clinton says something about answering for her statement and mass incarceration in general that left me flabbergasted: “You know what, nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to ask me, and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me, dear.”

Could this be true? How was this possible? How is it that of all the black audiences she has been before in the interceding two decades, and all the black relationships she has cultivated, no one person ever asked her what this young graduate student was asking?

In that movement, I knew that the people of my generation had failed the people of Williams’. Her whole life has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when I was the age she is now.

She said she has grown up knowing families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage. That night, Blow continued on page 3

Reference Guide Government Hillary Clinton 1 Press 2 Blow 3 Capehart

Bernie Sanders 4 Blow 4 Thiessen 5 Smith

Republicans 6 Dvorak 7 Bruni 8 Brasch 8 Krugman 9 Petri

Government

Government

National

10 Young 10 Robinson 11 Collins 12 Wilkinson 12 Witcover 13 Kagan 14 Dionne 14 Witcover 15 Maddow

18 Kristof 18 Feldman 19 Witcover

24 Balko 25 Carter

Republicans

16-17 Liberal Delineations

Supreme Court

National Economy

20 Bernstein & Spielberg 21 Fox

First Amendment Gun Control

26 Wilkinson 26 Bershidsky 27 Klebold

Technology

22 Lyons

28 Feldman 28 Page 29 Flam

22 Minter 23 Krugman

30 Ritholtz 30 Gadebusch

Cliven Bundy Environment

Women Race

31 King

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Jonathan Capehart

Why Black Voters are in Clinton’s Corner With the Democratic primary in South Carolina upon us, the question isn’t whether the presumed firewall of African American voters for Hillary Clinton will hold. I firmly believe that it will. The question is why. Yes, a lot of it has to do with fealty to President Obama. But it also has to do with what Clinton is saying to African Americans and how she says it.

“Any discussion of the Democratic base must include the acknowledgment that that base is heavily Black,” explains Steve Phillips in his insightful new book “Brown is the New White.” Phillips argues that a “New American Majority” has formed within the voting-age population in the United States: “Progressive people of color now comprise 23 percent of all the eligible voters in America, and progressive Whites account for 28 percent of all eligible voters,” he writes. “The New American Majority electoral equation requires securing the support of 81 percent of people of color and 39 percent of Whites.”

This demographic reality brings the Democratic campaigns for president into clearer focus. Income inequality and Wall Street excess animate both halves of that “New American Majority,” so it’s no surprise that both Clinton and her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), talk a lot about them. Same goes for criminal justice reform and immigration. But not every issue is of equal importance to people of color and progressive whites, and this is the key to Clinton’s advantage. There are three reasons Clinton’s firewall of black voters won’t #feelthebern in South Carolina and beyond.

tracking poll. This explains why Clinton has left no daylight between herself and the man who bested her in 2008 and for whom she worked as secretary of state. And it explains why she highlights the many times that Sanders argued for a primary challenge to Obama in 2012.

Second, Clinton doesn’t shy away from race. Sanders talks about race, too, of course. But he seems to do so at a remove, and his attempts to make a convincing link between his economic message and race continue to fall short.

“We have to begin by facing up to the reality of systemic racism, because these are not only problems of economic inequality,” Clinton First, Obama. His approval said at Harlem’s Schomburg Center rating among African Americans for Research in Black Culture last is 89 percent in the latest Gallup week. “These are problems of racial inequality. And we have got Blow continued from page 2 to say that loudly and clearly.” And apology for championing the bill Clinton’s pitch to black voters is itself, and as such, I find it wanting. part and parcel of her larger pitch But at least Williams’ action to all voters. She was asked to provoked a response that many of “look beyond diversity to wealth us who came before her failed to creation”during an interview with demand.

BET recently. “The fastest-growing For that, Ashley Williams, group of small-business owners are and activists like her, should be black women,” she said. “We need celebrated for shaming silence. to do more to help them get access c.2016 New York Times News Service to the credit that they need.”

2-28-16 The third reason is perhaps the

most important, because of how deeply it resonates with African Americans: Clinton openly talks about the necessary role that whites must play in healing and bridging the racial divide.

“Ending systemic racism requires contributions from all of us, especially those of us who haven’t experienced it ourselves,” she said in Harlem. “White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers that you face every day. We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility, rather than assume that our experiences are everyone’s experiences.”

refreshing this is to African American ears. For generations, blacks have chafed at the notion that unpacking our nation’s racial baggage is a chore solely for them. That the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow are only their burdens to bear. That today’s whites are absolved from responsibility for helping to address the continuing consequences of yesterday’s offenses. For a potential president of the United States to acknowledge this and to do so from a knowing place - to demonstrate that she’s thought deeply about it and gets it - will elicit a ready chorus of “amen.”

For months, Sanders and his supporters have said that black voters will grow to like him once they get to know him. But the Democratic caucuses in Nevada last Saturday were a sign that the true base of the Democratic Party isn’t being moved by his message. By getting the substance right, Clinton has set the bar too high with African American voters for Sanders to clear it.

Jonathan Capehart is a member of the Post editorial board and writes about politics and social issues for the PostPartisan blog.

To BET, she said: “I’m trying to lead a conversation that doesn’t just address African Americans, but also goes right at talking with white Americans about the perspective they need to have in hearing about the barriers that African Americans face, not only in the criminal justice system, not only in the rates of incarceration, as devastating as those are, but in employment, in education, in housing.” This is similar to what she said at the CNN (c) 2016, The Washington Post town hall on Tuesday.

2-25-16 Do not underestimate how

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Charles Blow

Sanders Hits A Roadblock Bernie Sanders’ loss in the Nevada caucuses, 47 percent to 53 percent, reveals a very real weakness of his insurgent challenge to Hillary Clinton.

According to entrance polls — which may have had some problems of their own, problems that we’ll discuss shortly — Sanders’ appeal is not broad enough among key groups that traditionally make up the base of the Democratic Party.

He lost among women, blacks, nonwhites, and self-described Democrats. But the loss was even more troubling for his camp than that. He also lost highly educated caucusgoers with postgraduate degrees, both the poorest and wealthiest groups, and moderates. He lost those who saw health care and the economy as the most important issues of the election, even though those are key parts of Sanders’ platform and issues on which he is most eloquent and persuasive.

And perhaps most interestingly, he lost overwhelmingly among people who wanted a candidate who could win in November. Good for him though, only 18 percent of those polled thought electability was the top quality a candidate needed to possess. You only have to look at the Republican winner in South Carolina to understand that this is not an electability cycle, this is an anti-establishment, point-making cycle.

resonance with Hispanic voters than with other who “comprise a disproportionate segment of the nonwhite groups, because Hispanic voters skew black electorate.” younger.

As the Post pointed out in no uncertain terms: “A Democratic victory in the general election According to a Pew Research Center report requires enthusiastic support from black women, published in January: and black women are significantly more enthusiastic “Hispanic millennials will account for nearly half about Clinton than Sanders.”

(44 percent) of the record 27.3 million Hispanic It is very hard to see how Sanders wins the eligible voters projected for 2016 — a share greater nomination without winning the black and Hispanic than any other racial or ethnic group of voters, vote in the Southern and Western states, not to according to a new Pew Research Center analysis mention New York and Michigan. of U.S. Census Bureau data.”

Lastly, the political revolution on which Sanders But young black voters are not yet “feeling the has hinged his ability to accomplish his ambitious Bern” to the same degree that other millennials are, plan keeps failing to materialize. This year’s as a poll published last week in The Washington Democratic caucus participation was down nearly Post pointed out. According to the accompanying a third from 2008, and in Iowa and New Hampshire article: there were more voters — or caucusgoers — “Much has been made of Sanders’ popularity making choices in the Republican contest than in with younger voters, and Clinton’s struggles to the Democratic one. connect with millennials. Among black voters age As Sanders told “Meet the Press” about the 18-29, the gap between Sanders and Clinton is Nevada loss: “We did not do as good a job as I had indeed narrower. But younger black voters still rate wanted to bring out a large turnout.”

Clinton more favorably than Sanders.”

That doesn’t sound like a political revolution to But the poll points out an even bigger problem me. for Sanders among black voters than millennials, c.2016 New York Times News Service and that’s his lack of support among black women 2-21-16

The map going forward has states that look a lot more like Nevada than those that look like Iowa and New Hampshire, where Sanders performed well. Indeed, there are many states like South Carolina, which will hold its Democratic primary Saturday, that look even worse for Sanders than Nevada.

That is because of the narrowness of Sanders’ winning demographics, as demonstrated in Nevada.

Let’s explore some of the positives for Sanders, the groups among which he won. He won liberals, of which there were many, and independents, of which there were few. He won people under 40, particularly those under 24, and whites with no college degree. He also won people who said their most important issue was income inequality and believed that the most important quality was having a candidate who cares about people like them or who was honest and trustworthy.

According to the entrance poll, Sanders also won the Hispanic vote, but this is where some prominent poll watchers took exception to the poll’s accuracy.

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn tweeted: “Based on the results in Clark, the precincts in ELV, and the overall entrance poll error, I do not believe Sanders won the Hispanic vote.”

ELV, or East Las Vegas, is the largely Hispanic part of Clark County, by far the most populous county in the state, where actual results showed Clinton winning handily.

Nate Silver tweeted support for Cohn’s analysis: “We share @nate cohn skepticism about entrance poll finding that Clinton lost Hispanics in Nevada.”

It is true that Sanders’ message may have more

Sanders Is Blowing It By Refusing To Attack Clinton Over Her Scandals

Mark Thiessen

Conservatives have always argued that the left believes in unilateral disarmament, but now we have proof: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., faces a primary opponent whose use of a private email server is under investigation by the FBI, but he refuses to attack her on the issue.

His failure to do so cost him victory in Iowa. It cost him victory in Nevada. And ultimately, it could cost him the Democratic nomination.

In the one state where Sanders has won - New Hampshire - exit polls showed 34 percent of Democratic voters said that honesty was the most important factor in their decision about whom to support. These voters chose Sanders by a stunning margin of 92 percent to 6 percent, helping put him over the top in the Granite State. By contrast, Clinton won by a wide margin among those who said the ability to win in November was the most important factor. But these voters made up just 12 percent of the electorate, not enough to make up for Clinton’s gaping honesty gap.

In Iowa and Nevada, however, a larger segment of Democratic voters put electability ahead of honesty.

In Iowa, 20 percent said electability was their top priority and they chose Clinton by a margin of 77 percent to 17 percent. In Nevada, an even more Democrats - 25 percent - said electability was most important, and Clinton won them by a whopping 82 percent to 12 percent. She still lost to Sanders among Democrats who put a premium on honesty,

but there were not enough of these voters to give Sanders a victory.

The lesson of the first three Democratic contests, therefore, should be clear: Clinton’s weakness is honesty, but her strength is her perceived advantage in electability. Knowing this, what must Sanders do to wrest the nomination from Clinton? Simple. He needs to exploit her weakness and undermine her strength - by putting a dent in Clinton’s perceived electability. The only way to do that is by raising the specter that Clinton’s legal woes could cost Democrats the White House in November.

Fox News recently reported that the FBI is investigating not just Clinton’s use of a private email server, but also “whether the possible ‘intersection’ of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws.”

And The Post has reported that the State Department inspector general had issued a subpoena “seeking documents about the charity’s projects that may have required approval from the federal government during Hillary Clinton’s term as secretary of state,” including records related to Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, who “was employed simultaneously by the State Department, the foundation, Clinton’s personal office, and a private consulting firm with ties to the Clintons.”

Sanders should make this an issue. The very

Thiessen continued on page 5

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Noah Smith

The Sanders Case For More Spending and Faster Growth

The standard case for fiscal stimulus goes like this. In a recession, aggregate demand falls -- everyone is afraid to spend and instead just hoards cash. If the government spends it can prompt people to buy more things with the money they get from the government, which raises demand and gets the economy working again.

Of course, this costs money, but the government can borrow the money and pay it back the next time the economy is running on all cylinders.

Stimulus, in other words, is part of a short-term strategy to fill in the gaps in the economy caused by the business cycle. That’s the basic idea promoted by the inventor of the concept, John Maynard Keynes. It is also the story embraced by most modern proponents of stimulus, such as Paul Krugman. However, in the recent debate surrounding the economic proposals of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a small number of economists have started suggesting a very different justification for stimulus.

Their idea: Stimulus does something more fundamental to the economy by raising long-term productivity.

It started with a paper by economist Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, which analyzed Sanders’ economic plans. Sanders wants a lot more

Thiessen continued from page 4

raison d’être of Sanders’ campaign is to challenge the Wall Street special interests and the pay-to-play culture in Washington.

Sanders does not have to join the Republican critics and say Clinton did anything illegal. He simply has to explain to voters that she has a major legal problem that could come back to haunt Democrats in November.

All he has to say is: “If Clinton is the Democratic nominee and she ends up under indictment, the result will be a right-wing extremist in the White House.”

Sanders has won the hearts of the Democratic base, but he has to win their minds, too. Democrats already believe that he shares their values and would be a more reliable liberal in office. But they think that Clinton has a better chance of winning. He needs to disabuse them of this notion, by raising the very real possibility

government spending; Friedman says that this spending will raise growth so much that the proposals will pay for themselves. Though Paul Krugman, Austan Goolsbee and other economists have ridiculed this plan as being implausible -- the mirror image of failed Republican promises that tax cuts would be self-financing -there have been a number of defenses as well, including some from very unlikely sources. If Friedman and others are right, it would upend most of mainstream macro, and would force a dramatic reconsideration of economic policy.

But Friedman’s paper seems farfetched because the normal action of stimulus -- putting unemployed people back to work -- wouldn’t be nearly enough to create the kind of growth Friedman projects. In addition, we would need a huge boost to the growth rate of productivity. Usually we think of productivity gains as coming mainly from technological advancements, something that is very hard for government policy to affect.

Verdoorn’s law, all you have to do is boost gross domestic product growth -- for example, by fiscal stimulus -and productivity will soar as well.

Friedman explicitly assumes in his paper that you can do this. John Jay College professor J.W. Mason has long entertained the possibility.

The idea has even garnered support from Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Kocherlakota - a famously open-minded economist who changed his view about monetary policy in recent years -- writes that there is “an empirical basis” for Verdoorn’s Law: The most striking evidence [for Verdoorn’s law] comes from the Great Depression in the US. Total factor productivity fell dramatically at the beginning of the Depression...

Over the following three years, in conjunction with the various forms of demand stimulus undertaken by the Roosevelt administration, TFP grew more than 5% per year faster than normal. This super-normal growth rate of TFP was a key contributing The notion that fiscal stimulus, factor to the near double-digit annual in addition to raising employment, growth in real GDP from 1933-37. also boosts productivity growth was first suggested in 1949 by a Dutch This seems to be illustrative of a economist, Petrus Johannes Verdoorn. more general and systematic pattern...

According to what’s known as a fall in the unemployment rate of 1 percentage point is empirically that voting for Clinton might lead to associated with a 0.9 percentage point a Democratic disaster in November. increase in TFP growth.

Thus far, Sanders has refused to do Economists have long noted the so. Amazingly, the issue of Clinton’s rapid productivity growth during possible wrongdoing did not even the Depression. This is usually come up in the last Democratic considered to be coincidental -- the presidential debate. Can anyone standard story is that humanity just imagine that if Donald Trump, Sen. happened to invent a bunch of useful Ted Cruz, R-Texas, or Sen. Marco stuff during the ‘30s. But Verdoorn’s Rubio, R-Fla., were having their law says that no, it was Roosevelt and actions investigated by the FBI they his stimulus that raised productivity. If could get through a two-hour debate that’s correct, then stimulus becomes without either the moderators or their a much more important tool, since opponents raising the subject? its growth-boosting power would be Sanders has said that he will not much larger than commonly assumed “politicize” the investigations. That is even by stimulus proponents like a mistake. If a majority of Democrats Krugman. believe that Clinton is dishonest but But there are a couple of big problems electable, she will win. But if they can with Verdoorn’s law. First, correlation be convinced she is both dishonest doesn’t equal causation; as we found and unelectable, she is toast. in the ‘70 with the Phillips curve, Thiessen is a fellow at the American which said that as unemployment Enterprise Institute and former rose inflation would fall, trying to speechwriter for George W. Bush. treat statistical correlations as laws of Special to The Washington Post economics often fails. It’s obviously 2-22-16 possible for fast productivity growth

to cause fast economic growth, rather than the other way around; if a lot of new technology gets invented, business will want to invest and use it to take advantage of the business opportunities that result.

Maybe there are really are reasons Verdoorn’s law might represent true causation -- for example, a shortage of labor, caused by low unemployment, might give businesses incentives to invest in more labor-saving innovations. But we’d probably want to look at the data more closely before jumping to that conclusion.

But the proponents of Verdoorn’s law might just have their data wrong.

In a 2013 working paper, International Monetary Fund economists Andrea De Michelis, Marcello Estevão, and Beth Anne Wilson looked at evidence since 1950, across a wide range of developed countries. What they found was the opposite of Verdoorn’s law - the more you raise employment, the slower productivity grows. From their abstract: We present robust cross-country evidence of a strong negative correlation between growth in TFP and labor inputs over the medium to long run...These results have important policy implications, including that low productivity growth in some countries may partly be a side effect of strong labor market performance.

So if you look at the slightly longer term, and focus on the postwar period, you find that putting more people to work actually holds back productivity.

That makes intuitive sense, since the least productive workers are often the last to be hired as growth picks up.

In any case, Verdoorn’s law is an interesting idea. But it needs a lot more investigation before we rely on it. Perhaps a large-scale policy experiment -- for example, spending a lot of money on infrastructure -- is in order. I’d be in favor of that.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg. net. To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at jgreiff@ bloomberg.net. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-24-16

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Petula Dvorak

Donald Trump’s Bigotry Has Inspired Muslim American Voters Like No Candidate Before

Through the driving rain, past the flood watch, the stalled cars and the tornado warnings, they pushed onward Wednesday night to get to the mosque in Northern Virginia. They had a Super Tuesday mission, and time was running out.

“Abstaining from voting is also a vote,” read one of the talking points in their action plan.

“If Muslims do not vote, openly Islamaphobic leaders do not pay a price,” said another one.

Even the kids who just finished Arabic class -like the girl whose pink hijab matched her Hello Kitty backpack -- knew that something big was happening in Virginia next week, and the adults at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, better known as ADAMS, were talking about it.

“My dad said he don’t know who he’s voting for yet, but he said he’s going to vote against Trump no matter what,” one of the girls declared.

Guess what, Donald Trump? Your bigotry has inspired Muslim American voters like no presidential candidate has done before.

“We’re organizing phone banks, we are getting people registered to vote, we’re telling them how important their voices are,” said Abdul Rashid Abdullah, who was helping run the civic engagement meeting at the mosque in Sterling that rainy night.

The mosque does not take an official position on candidates or political parties or make any endorsements. Their civic engagement committee and get-out-the-vote efforts are nonpartisan.

But Abdullah, 43, who works in IT and lives in Herndon, said there’s no doubt why Muslim voters are especially energized this election cycle and why election folks are seeing more interest from Muslims in participating in next week’s Super Tuesday primary than they’ve ever seen before.

It’s called Islamaphobia. And it’s real.

Reports of hate attacks against American mosques tripled last year compared to previous years, according to the Council on American Islamic Relations.

And in Northern Virginia, where one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Muslims have lived with few incidents for decades, the shift in attitude is palpable.

In Fredericksburg, a mosque that has been in the city for almost three decades was met with threatening shouts and open hate at a meeting about its expansion.

Another mosque received a fake bomb. And yet another got threatening calls.

One Virginia school system shut down for an entire day when parents mounted a fierce and menacing backlash when they learned their kids practiced a few lines of Arabic calligraphy as part of a world geography lesson.

I talked to women who have walked in their believed it was improper to vote for a noncommunities for decades wearing hijabs who Islamic government. And so the first generation are now threatened and harassed in public. was largely silent. Even their children weren’t noticeably political active, especially after the It’s tempting to blame all this on ISIS and Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when most frightening terrorism attacks in Paris and San Muslims wanted to blend in and avoid calling Bernardino, Calif. But it wasn’t like this, even attention to themselves.

Sept. 11, Muslims say.

And then Trump began his anti-Muslim In fact, hate attacks against American rampage, suggesting that all Muslims in the Muslims spike during election cycles. Wonder United States be placed on a special registry why? and prohibiting newcomers from joining them.

This round of Islamaphobia has been fueled Suddenly, American Muslims were paying

by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric calling for a attention and speaking out. “total” ban on Muslims entering the United States - hate speech that has helped make him There are parallels to the LGBT movement, the front-runner for the Republican presidential said Sarah Cochran, “which is funny for me to nomination. But it’s also been bolstered by say, being a Republican.” leaders who have remained silent.

Cochran is the Virginia state director for “This rise of Islamaphobia? It has inspired Emerge USA, a group working to bring Muslims our activism,” said Remaz Abdelgader, a 22- and Arabs into the political process. year-old George Mason University student and For too many years, a majority of LGBT Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer. folks countered discrimination and hate by Abdelgader, who lives in Alexandria, said living quiet, closeted lives. Now the attitude is, she got weird looks here and there for her hijab, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” but never experienced outright discrimination. This awakening is little bit of where the But she was in a crosswalk recently, and a Muslim population is headed. man took a sharp turn toward her in his car, Cochran said it’s been a tough road, getting nearly running her over, she said. He rolled politicians to come meet with mosques and the down his window and told her to go back to Islamic community. “Sometimes, they’re still where she came from and that next time, he’ll worried about backlash,” she said. get her.

This may be the year that Muslims are done “And I was like, ‘Oh. It’s real. And it’s with that. on’,” she said. And she threw herself into “I’m American first, then I am Muslim,” political activism, campaigning and doing voter Cochran said. registration drives.

And more leaders need to see that.

The Muslim population is relatively small in “Sometimes, we see America treating us like the United States - about 3.3 million, according we’re a cancer,” said Ibrahim Moiz, a Fairfax to a report last month by the Pew Research lawyer who is outspoken in his Northern Center.

Virginia Muslim community about adapting But American Muslims have the potential to Islam to modern U.S. living. be a powerful influence at the ballot box because Moiz was quoting a recent Ted Talk by one of their major population concentrations Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the happens to be in one of the country’s battleground Institute for Social Policy and Understanding states - Virginia. in Washington.

“Today we hear people actually saying things About 2 percent of the state’s population like: ‘There’s a problem in this country, and it’s is Muslim, one of the higher concentrations in called Muslims. When are we going to get rid the country, according to the Public Religion of them?’ “ Mogahed said. “So, some people Research Institute. want to ban Muslims and close down mosques.

“I tell people, some of these wins in the They talk about my community kind of like primaries are won by a small margin,” Abdullah we’re a tumor in the body of America. And the said. “And if all of us Muslims vote, we can be only question is, are we malignant or benign? the ones to make that difference.”

You know, a malignant tumor you extract In the past, Muslims haven’t been a dominant altogether, and a benign tumor you just keep force in U.S. politics. under surveillance.”

“Our community is in its political infancy,” Wrong. American Muslims are part of the said Saif Inam, a policy analyst at the Muslim lifeblood of this country, and this election year Public Affairs Council. they are going to insist that Americans get used Like many immigrant populations, the first to it. wave of people were hard-workers, more Dvorak is a Washington Post columnist. focused on survival, Inam said. (c) 2016, The Washington Post In old-world thinking, some Muslims 2-25-16

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Frank Bruni

Five Big Questions After A GOP Debate That Targeted Trump

Were Brakes Just Put on the Trump Juggernaut?

Something profound happened on the stage in Houston on Thursday night. Both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz stopped focusing on each other long enough to turn toward the person who is actually beating them and is favored to win the Republican nomination: Donald Trump.

Cruz dismissed Trump as someone who’d discovered certain concerns — who’d discovered conservatism, really — only when he became a candidate. Cruz said that while he was working to combat the illegal immigration that so inflames Trump now, Trump was firing Dennis Rodman on “Celebrity Apprentice.”

But Rubio turned in Trump’s direction with particular force. With ferociousness, in fact. He recited a meticulously memorized litany of Trump’s transgressions, especially those that contradict Trump’s words now: the illegal immigrants that Trump reportedly hired for his construction projects, the litigation against a college bearing his name, multiple bankruptcies associated with him.

Referring to Trump’s promised barrier along the Mexican border, Rubio sniped: “If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Towers, he’ll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it.”

He went after the notion that Trump is a good businessman. He went after the idea that Trump is a straight talker. He called Trump a liar — repeatedly.

In other words, he finally hit Trump where Trump lives: imagewise. This had to happen, because one explanation for Trump’s success is how reluctant his adversaries have been to confront him as they quarreled with one another instead.

And this had to hurt Trump, because he was shown in a harsher light than he’d been shown in at any previous debate, and his face reddened in the glare.

But Thursday night may well have been too late, and Trump has been made to mimic a ripe tomato before — with minimal political damage to him.

Besides which, Trump at times

pushed back as effectively as possible, brushing off charges of hypocrisy and painting Rubio as a pipsqueak with no knowledge of business, and Cruz as an obnoxious scold despised by his Senate colleagues. Those were the smart colors to apply to them.

— Did Rubio Go Too Far? Almost each of his attacks on Trump made sense. All were entirely fair. But as they piled up higher than even the most majestic Trump-envisioned border wall could reach, Rubio came across as strident, mocking, condescending, bratty.

And it was impossible not to wonder if he was doing precisely what Chris Christie had when he tried to take Rubio down in the debate just before the New Hampshire primary: bloodying his adversary at a cost of seriously wounding himself.

He talked over Trump. Trump talked over him. He talked louder over Trump. Trump talked even louder over him. There was one extended exchange, with each of them accusing the other of being more robotic and programmed, that will live on in highlight reels forevermore.

“Now he’s repeating himself,” Rubio pointed out, referring to Trump.

“I don’t repeat myself,” said Trump.

“You don’t repeat yourself,” Rubio responded — disbelievingly, facetiously.

And so it went. Rubio’s hectoring melody overlapped Trump’s exasperated harmony.

But when music gets that ugly, everyone involved can wind up sounding equally bad. And the flip side of Rubio’s — and Cruz’s — assertiveness was desperation.

They were both on the offensive Thursday night because they were both on the ropes. Some viewers undoubtedly perceived it that way.

What’s more, Rubio undercut his considerable efforts so far to be — and to label himself as — the candidate of optimism, uplift, positivity. He took another risk as well. He incurred Trump’s wrath, and while Trump has savaged Cruz

and Jeb Bush during this campaign, he hasn’t vilified Rubio to the same extent.

Today and the next day and the day after that, he will.

— How Much Does the Vagueness of Trump’s Proposals Matter?

It was predictable that Rubio and Cruz would portray Trump as someone whose campaign contributions over time, comments from yesteryear and herky-jerky swerves in the present call into question how committed and trustworthy a conservative he is.

But they lavished nearly as much energy on revealing Trump as an empty suit — as someone who cannot provide any policy details because he doesn’t have any detailed policies. They asked for those details. Again and again. He responded with insults and boasts.

The moderators pressed him for those details. He responded with boasts and insults. And at one cringe-inducing moment, he batted away a question from Hugh Hewitt by saying: “Very few people listen to your radio show.”

Trump never got around to explaining how his health care plan would keep people from dying in the streets without committing the government to significantly increased spending. He never got around to explaining much of anything.

And in the context of that void — and of Rubio’s imitation of a typical Trump answer — his most shopworn, banal phrases stood out.

“We’re going to win a lot,” Trump said, for the millionth time.

“Believe me,” he said, for the trillionth. Those two evasive words sounded smaller and sillier than ever.

— Should Someone Have Organized a Search Party for Ben Carson and John Kasich?

The lack of time given to these two was absolutely criminal.

Granted, Kasich has only a prayer of winning the Republican nomination. And Carson doesn’t even have that much.

But they showed up. There were five candidates on that stage, not

three. And fair is fair.

Besides which, Kasich, when he did get to speak, was a typically welcome relief from the fractiousness and the “I-lovedAntonin-Scalia-even-more-thanyou-did” happening to his side.

In his oratory and proposals, he’s the least divisive of the remaining Republican presidential aspirants.

He is also the closest to the center and, because of that, might be the fiercest adversary for any Democratic nominee.

But he was elbowed out of a debate format that gave extra time to anyone who was attacked, meaning more and more words for and from Trump, Rubio and Cruz.

Carson perfectly captured this dynamic by blurting out: “Can somebody attack me please?”

— Do Trump, Rubio and Cruz Have a Future as 1960s-Style Girl Group?

I mentioned the interweaving voices of Trump and Rubio.

Toward the end of the debate, these candidates did a reprise, and Cruz also stormed into the song, so that all three of them spoke at the same time and formed a clangorous chorus.

As that chorus continued and its volume rose, CNN’s camera pulled back far enough to show the men standing there side by side, in almost identical dress. I couldn’t help thinking that they were performing an audition or a concert — that they were some modern, male, unendurable antonym to Diana Ross and the Supremes.

In Houston for one night only, ladies and gentlemen! Donald Trump and the Extremes. c.2016 New York Times News Service 2-26-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Walter Brasch

The Trump Tower of Egotistical Exaggeration and Lies in Kenya, and has challenged Cruz’s citizenship, speeches are accepted and applauded by voters which has been constitutionality affirmed by having who believe bar-room profanity laced into ignorant an American mother. chatter is just the kind of speaking that they do, and see the billionaire as one of their own.

Among his more outrageous proposals, he By Super Tuesday, most of the Republican has repeatedly stated he said he would deport all candidates and all of the moderate Republicans will 11 million undocumented foreigners in the U.S., have dropped out of the race, run over by the Trump and build a wall along the entire U.S.–Mexican express, fueled almost entirely by Trump’s own border. But, Trump doesn’t address the issue of money and more media coverage than any other cost—and how a conservative could justify that candidate. With the moderate Republicans out of the cost for building and then monitoring it—or the race, it appears the most conservative ones—Sens. more realistic probability there will be innumerable Cruz from Texas and Marco Rubio from Florida problems to round up even a fourth of the illegal have the best chance to defeat Trump. Trump has immigrants and separate them from their parents, or shown enough strength to capture the delegates in ways to tunnel under, climb over, or just go around the conservative south and southeastern states on that wall by entering the U.S. by boat on two coasts Super Tuesday, possibly making his nomination or by planeloads of immigrants and refugees who inevitable. would land in desolate air strips with no control Trump’s message appeals to those who see him towers. This, of course, is the same Trump who favorably as an outsider to Washington politics and used about 150 illegal immigrants to help build the to those whom Trump has managed to play to their Trump Tower. fears and paranoia.

He has played to the fears of a radical terrorist But none of that matters because he spews out Muslim invasion by arguing for a moratorium on what a traditional base of conservatives want to any Muslim trying to enter the country, an inane hear, and his rhetoric supersedes how he plans to proposal that would require several million dollars carry out any of his proposals, but gets him the votes to enlarge the number of Immigration and Customs he needs to be the Republican nominee.

Enforcement agents and support staff, already at Far more important, his rhetoric sounds as scary 20,000, and would ultimately be shot down in the as anyone who began as a small voice of the people federal courts. and then became their dictator.

Among all his boasts and braggadocio, with his Dr. Brasch’s latest book is Fracking America: name in giant letters on office buildings, hotels, Sacrificing Health and the Environment for Short Sanders is helped by the Republicans who casinos, and a questionable failure at Trump College, Term Economic Benefit. have hammered Clinton’s failure to separate her he has defaulted into bankruptcy four times. Trump’s 2-28-16 personal and federal emails during the entire time Paul Krugman she was secretary of state. The problem got traction from Clinton’s weakness early in her campaign to adequately defend the use of personal emails and not using an encoded federal system. Since that time, she has faced a Congressional hearing and had not Lack of self-awareness can be fatal. The Here’s an example: Last summer, back when only explained her reasoning for using one phone haplessness of the Republican establishment in the Trump was just beginning his rise, he promised not to cut Social Security, and insiders like William but managed to erase any doubt of her violation of face of Trumpism is a case in point.

As many have noted, it’s remarkable how Kristol gleefully declared that he was “willing federal laws. But the Republicans continued their attack, spreading distortion and half-truths, using shocked — shocked! — that establishment has been to lose the primary to win the general.” In reality, the media to channel their message. A couple of at the success of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic however, Republican voters don’t at all share the dozen emails were classified confidential or secret, campaign. Who knew that this kind of thing would elite’s enthusiasm for entitlement cuts — remember, appeal to the party’s base? Isn’t the GOP the party of George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social but only after Clinton left office.

On the Republican side, the race has evolved from Ronald Reagan, who sold conservatism with high- Security ran aground in the face of disapproval from Bush as the leader in early polling to the presence minded philosophical messages, like talking about Republicans as well as Democrats. of 15 candidates, all more political sounding than a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy Yet the Republican establishment still seems presidential. By the end of 2015, the candidates T-bone steaks? were shown in editorial cartoons as clowns clustered Seriously, Republican political strategy has been unable to understand that hardly any of its own in cars. Donald Trump was portrayed by almost exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class voters, let alone the voters it would need to win in every stand-up comedian and in the media as just whites to despise government because it dares to the general election, are committed to free-market, your average ordinary boisterous and egotistical help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s small-government ideology. Indeed, although billionaire with a hilarious hair-do to being the chief amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished Marco Rubio — the establishment’s last hope — has by the success of a candidate who is just saying finally started to go after the front-runner, so far his clown to being the possible Republican nominee.

The nine Republican debates were mostly random outright what they have consistently tried to convey attack seems to rest almost entirely on questioning the coiffed one’s ideological purity. Why does he acts of personal attacks rather than true debates. with dog whistles.

Several times Trump called out “liar” to Sen. Ted What I find even more amazing, however, are the imagine that voters care?

Cruz, but several political fact checkers point out Republican establishment’s delusions about what Oh, and the Republican establishment was that about three-fourths of Trump’s statements are its own voters are for. You see, all indications are also sure that Trump would pay a heavy price for half-truth, exaggerations, and outright lies. This that the party elite imagines that base voters share its asserting that we were misled into Iraq — evidently would be the same Trump who numerous times said own faith in conservative principles, when that not unaware just how widespread that (correct) belief that President Obama is a Muslim who was born only isn’t true, it never has been.

Krugman continued on page 9

When the presidential primaries began more than a year ago, the two leading candidates were Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democrats and Jeb Bush for the Republicans. It seemed at that time that there would be another Clinton–Bush race in the general election.

That, as any voter knows, has changed drastically.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, officially an independent but running as a Democrat, has shuffled off his onedigital support to being about equal to Clinton among Democrats, tying with Clinton in Iowa, beating her in New Hampshire, but losing in Nevada. Sanders’ supporters tend to be younger and are energized by his presence and persistence in pushing a liberal agenda that focuses upon individuals and how government can assist a broad spectrum of the population. His campaign is similar to the support for Sens. Gene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and Sen. George McGovern four years later, both of whom energized those in their 20s and 30s and older voters who identified themselves as liberals. Sanders could still win substantial support from Super Tuesday, March 1, when voters of 11 states cast their ballots.

However, several states are in the south and southeast, which lean heavily conservative, even among Democratic voters. Although Sanders has pushed Clinton more to the left, she might be able to go into the Democratic convention with a substantial lead and the nomination.

Twilight of the Apparatchiks

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Alexandra Petri

But Seriously, How Do We Turn This Donald Trump Thing Off?

Hello? Is this customer support?

Oh, thank God. This is the Republican Party. We purchased a “Donald” a few months ago.

Complaints? No, no. It entertained the voters, just like you said. The debates -- we’ve never seen such viewing numbers. Turnout has been through the roof! It was everything you promised when we signed the contract at midnight and poured a little of our blood into the vial.

It’s been huge and great, just like you said.

Only I - listen - you have to tell me how to make it stop.

It won’t go away. I keep clicking “X” on the little box to make it leave but it doesn’t do anything.

Yes, I tried turning the whole thing off and on again. That was the first thing I tried. But it didn’t work. It was still there. On the TV. But also on my phone. Also the Internet. Also everywhere. (sound of worried footsteps) (muffled, away from the phone) No, don’t worry, Dave. We’re safe in here.

This is where we keep the nomination.

It’s totally secure. There are no vulnerabilities. He’d have to defeat the Old Guard and fight the Establishment Lane Dragon and there’s the Media Lame Stream to cross where all his deficiencies will be reflected -- there’s

Krugman continued from page 8

is among Americans of all political persuasions.

So what’s the source of this obliviousness? The answer, I’d suggest, is that in recent years — and, in fact, for the past couple of decades — becoming a conservative activist has actually been a low-risk, comfortable career choice. Most Republican officeholders hold safe seats, which they can count on keeping if they are sufficiently orthodox. Moreover, if they should stumble, they can fall back on “wingnut welfare,” the array of positions at right-wing media organizations, think tanks and so on that are always there for loyal spear carriers.

And loyalty is almost the only thing that matters. Does an economist at a right-wing think tank have a remarkable record of embarrassing mistakes? Does a pundit have an almost surreal history of bad calls?

no way he gets through. We’re fine.

Go back downstairs, Dave. (into the phone) Just, like, how do we stop him?

We had fun. We had so much fun.

But we would not have had fun if we had not thought, somehow, all along, that there was an end in sight. It’s like a cruise. It is only enjoyable if you know there is a point when it will be over. You can endure or even enjoy things like clubbing or listening to your toddler recount a long dream she had or being tickled with a feather by a beautiful shirtless man -- if there’s going to be a stop.

WHERE’S THE OFF-SWITCH? YOU MUST TELL US!

Is it under the hair? We had an elaborate plan set up to grab at the hair right as he was about to go out onto the debate stage before Iowa, but that was the one debate where he didn’t show up.

Are there magic words? “Tax returns”? We have Ben Carson there at the debates just saying RANDOM WORDS AND PHRASES, like “fruit salad of their life,” just in case one of them turns out to be the phrase that shuts him down. But so far, nothing.

We have a young inspirational person in the race who doesn’t look like something that just emerged from a microwave. Nothing.

No matter, as long as they hew to the orthodox line.

There is, by the way, nothing comparable on the Democratic side.

Of course there’s an establishment, but it’s much more diffuse, much less lavishly funded, much less insistent on orthodoxy and forgiving of loyal incompetence.

But back to the hermetic world of the Republican elite: This world has, as I said, existed for decades. The result is an establishment comprising apparatchiks, men (mainly) who have spent their entire professional lives in an environment where repeating approved orthodoxy guarantees an easy life, while any deviation from that orthodoxy means excommunication.

They know that people outside their party disagree, but that doesn’t matter much for their careers.

Now, however, they face the reality that most voters inside their party don’t agree with the orthodoxy, either.

We’ve tried everything. We’ve tried pointing out he’s not a real conservative. We’ve tried pointing out that he doesn’t actually seem to understand policy. But people seem genuinely excited by the prospect of a candidate who won’t bore them with details of policy. We’ve tried looping him six times in a silver chain and exposing him to the light of the morning. Nothing.

We’ve tried saying that the voters he excites are sad and disenfranchised and poorly educated and racist. That doesn’t seem to endear them to us at all.

He even said “I love the poorly educated” and -- people CHEERED. (loud thumping) Dave, what was that?

We’ve tried having Mitt Romney denounce him. We’ve tried having David Duke endorse him. We’ve And all signs are that they still can’t wrap their minds around that fact.

They just keep waiting for Donald Trump to suffer the fall from grace that, in their world, always happens to anyone who questions the eternal truth of supply-side economics or the gospel of 9/11. Even now, when it’s almost too late to stop the Trump Express, they still imagine that “But he’s not a true conservative!” is an effective attack.

Things would be very different, obviously, if Trump were in fact to lock in the Republican nomination (which could happen in a few weeks).

Would his raw appeal to white Americans’ baser instincts continue to work? I don’t think so. But given the ineffectuality of his party’s elite, my guess is that we will get a chance to find out. c.2016 New York Times News Service 2-25-16

tried having Sarah Palin endorse him.

Nothing has stuck.

Journalists and Opinionators are now suggesting the time-honored strategy of What If We Don’t Cover The Guy, Do You Think That Could Do It?, which is always what they suggest when they are out of all other options. That will work about as well as it did when we tried it for Palin: which is to say, not.

(There is an ominous rumbling sound.) (muffled) Dave? (thumping, rumbling, a muffled scream) CUSTOMER SERVICE, PLEASE, I think it ate Dave. It called him “low energy” and then it roared and then when I turned around I didn’t see him any more.

I don’t care what I have to do. I will give you my firstborn son. I will give you my thirdborn Bush. You have to make it stop. (away from phone) Send Chris Christie after him! He knows how to attack!

What do you mean “Governor Christie just endorsed him”?

Oh my God. We’re going to die here. We’re (loud crashes) No! No, Donald!

I -- I shot it with a spear but it just broke the spear in half and growled at me. TELL ME HOW TO MAKE IT STOP! MOCK IT? PRAISE IT? WILL IT STOP DURING THE GENERAL? Oh no, it’s smiling. It’s opening its mouth and it’s smiling and (static) Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog, offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences”. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-26-16

10

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

John Young

The Pope Said What About Whom?

Before discussing what Pope Francis said the other day, let’s discuss one of the most Christlike things a U.S. president has done lately.

That was when President Obama brought soothing words to an American mosque, words like, “You’re not Muslim or American. You’re Muslim and American.”

Marco Rubio, the junior robot from Florida, said the visit was meant to “divide the country.”

Within the next 30 seconds, we can be certain, he repeated it.

In the event of a Rubio presidency, I’m curious which Americans he would seek to represent — which Americans he’d soothe with a visit, and which ones he would shun.

Traveling through Africa recently, Pope Francis said, “Christians and Muslims are brothers and sisters.” He can say that because he is not on the Republican primary ballot.

It’s the same reason that he could say the other day: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian.”

This was framed by the media as an attack on Donald Trump. True?

Amid the expected tumult, the pope appeared to say, “If the sandals fit, wear them.” However, he said he meant not to single out any one person.

Of course, just as rapidly as the press made the assumption, Trump jumped to affirm it. Yes, just like him.

The comedy in Trump knows no bounds. Most comically, in his furious response to the pontiff, he referred to Christianity’s being “consistently attacked.” Christianity attacked by whom? The pope?

Well, not to disappoint anyone, but I’m here to take Trump off the hook. As Pope Francis said, he didn’t single out anyone. He was talking of a whole mess of wall-builders and their deafening bellicosity. That means you, Ted Cruz. That means you, Marco Rubio.

That means demonizing Mexicans or Muslims, or desperate Central Americans or Syrians. That means never considering quantum shifts in relations with Cuba and Iran that would make this a more tolerant and amiable planet. A wall is a wall.

It could be said that the hottest seat in hell is reserved for those beneficiaries of great fortune who would deny the same to others. Cruz and Rubio were both born to refugees but now refuse to see the very same life-or-death circumstances bearing down on others.

Trump rides the wave of anti-immigrant hysteria while an immigrant bride rides his arm down the escalator.

Once again, Pope Francis didn’t mean Trump in particular when saying what he said. He meant everyone who would be inspired by Trump’s words: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.

They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The “they” of course, means Mexicans.

The pope didn’t mean anyone in particular, except anyone who would gobble up such words and pooh-pooh a papal proposition called brotherhood.

What does it mean to be Christian? We all should know what it means. By and large nothing in the political process bears any resemblance.

That said, it is mystifying that Cruz, who stands out in the GOP field for what the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank calls “utter nastiness,” could be considered the supposed choice of America’s evangelical Christians. How so?

When President Obama shed tears on the dais after one more mass murder, commentator John Pavlovitz wrote something sure to send

Cruz supporters into conniptions. He wrote that Obama’s presidency has been “more Christian than his critics will ever admit.”

Obama, like few other American leaders, has “championed justice, equality and the inherent dignity of all people in a way that closely mirrors the stated mission of Christ, certainly as much as any politician on either side can claim,” wrote Pavlovitz.

I know: Trump, Cruz and Rubio would prefer that Pavovlitz, like the pope, would stop being so literal, particularly about that brotherhood stuff.

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

2-23-16

Eugene Robinson

To Beat Trump, Stoop To His Level

Is Hillary Clinton ready to rumble against Donald Trump? The nation and the world had better hope so.

The question is premature but not unreasonably so. Perhaps Bernie Sanders will stun Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary this weekend and then pick off a couple of delegate-rich Super Tuesday states. Maybe Trump’s main challengers, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, will start training heavy fire on the guy who’s running away with the Republican nomination.

Such things are possible but do not seem very likely. The Democratic Party’s process of selecting convention delegates is less democratic than the GOP’s; elected officials who serve as “superdelegates” -- and who constitute the party establishment -- give Clinton a substantial built-in advantage. Sanders’ big victory in New Hampshire, sandwiched between defeats in Iowa and Nevada, hasn’t been enough to start any kind of Obamastyle stampede.

If Clinton does as well as pollsters expect in the next few primaries, the Democratic race could effectively be over by mid-March. Her challenge then would be to figure out why turnout in her party’s primaries has been relatively anemic -- and fix the problem.

Scaring Democrats and independents to the polls should be easy if Republicans continue on their present course, which is toward some unexplored realm that ancient mapmakers would have labeled “Here Be Monsters.”

Trump’s win in the Nevada caucuses was dominating: He finished with 46 percent, tallying more votes than Rubio and Cruz combined. Rubio and his supporters were left trying to spin a secondplace finish, with just 24 percent, into some kind of moral victory. His argument that more than half of GOP voters favored someone other than Trump does not even rise to the level of sophistry, given that more than three-quarters of voters favored someone other than Rubio.

As for Cruz, there wasn’t much he could say at all, except perhaps a quiet prayer that what happened

in Vegas would stay in Vegas. Entrance polling showed that Trump beat Cruz among evangelical Christian voters and self-identified conservatives.

If Cruz cannot win these segments of the base, what exactly is the point of his campaign?

Perhaps the most ominous sign for those who oppose Trump is that Rubio and Cruz are spending most of their time and money attacking each other rather than aiming at the front-runner.

Rubio believes that if he can make the race a one-on-one contest against Trump, he can win.

Cruz has the same strategy. But this logic is flawed.

Polls show that Trump is the second choice of substantial numbers of Cruz and Rubio voters. If one of them drops out, the other will get a boost -- but so will Trump.

Cruz might win his home state of Texas on Tuesday. Rubio and John Kasich might win their home states -- Florida and Ohio, respectively -two weeks later. But Trump seems poised to roll up delegates almost everywhere else and amass what could be an insurmountable lead.

The Republican Party doesn’t have superdelegates; officials play no special role. It is pointless to call for some kind of Trump-blocking backroom deal that nobody has the power to make.

And deus ex machina is a plot device in bad novels, not a viable strategy. If Republican primary voters want Trump, they will have him.

So a Clinton-Trump matchup is not only thinkable at this point. It looks -- and I can’t believe I’m writing this -- almost probable. See? I’m guilty of what I warn against. I wrote “almost” because it is so hard to view this campaign as it is, rather than as I might think it should be.

Clinton would be seen, at least initially, as the prohibitive favorite. But she had better not bring a knife to a gunfight. The biggest challenge for her campaign, which is nothing if not professional and by-the-book, would be to recognize what Rubio, Cruz, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and the rest of the Republicans failed to see: To beat Trump you have

Robinson continued on page 11

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

11

Gail Collins

Trump Meets the Mean Boys Chris Christie has endorsed Donald Trump! Well, really, what did you expect? He’s a sworn enemy of Marco Rubio, and we have long since established that nobody likes Ted Cruz.

Rubio was the star of the latest Republican debate, having finally learned Trump’s key to success: Avoid being distracted by discussions of actual policy and concentrate on inflicting death by insult.

But Christie, who did exactly the same thing to Rubio in New Hampshire, claimed the senator was throwing “flailing punches in the last days of a losing campaign.” We will not linger on the irony.

On Friday, Rubio was in his new Trumpian glory, strutting around a platform and telling his audience that the developer had gone into a “meltdown” backstage during the debate.

“First he had this little makeup thing applying, like, makeup around his mustache because he had one of those sweat mustaches,” Rubio gloated. “Then he asked for a fulllength mirror ... maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet.”

Meanwhile Trump was reporting that Rubio had been putting on makeup “with a trowel.” This is perhaps the first instance of a presidential campaign running on dialogue more normally overheard in a junior high bathroom when the mean girls are doing their hair.

The debate itself more closely resembled a Quentin Tarantino movie, in which a group of men are stuck together for what seems like eternity, and try to break the monotony by yelling a lot.

(People, this is just an aside, but

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to go after him just as viciously -and cleverly -- as he goes after you.

Refusing to descend to his level is a grave mistake. You have to get down and dirty, get under his skin, call him names. You have to worry less about running a campaign the nation can be proud of and more about running a campaign that wins, even if it wins ugly.

Desperate times require desperate measures.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group 2-26-16

why do you think these debates now go on for 2 1/2 hours? Do you think it’s some kind of test to make sure the final nominee is physically fit? It seems a little strange that in our Twitter-centric age — when, according to one recent study, the average attention span of an adult is shorter than that of a goldfish — we’re presuming the voting public wants longer programming.)

Ben Carson and John Kasich tried to take the high road, which meant that afterward, nobody was quoting anything they said except Carson’s explanation of his philosophy on Supreme Court nominations: “The fruit salad of their life is what I would look at.”

Ted Cruz was his lovable self — at one point, when Trump fell back on his mantra about not wanting to see people “die on the streets,” Cruz demanded to know if that meant the government had to “pay for everyone’s health care.”

But Rubio took control. He ran through stories about Trump’s worker-unfriendly business practices — like the New York Times story on the way his Mar-a-Lago Club ignores applications from Americans in favor of guest workers from places like Romania. And the illegal Polish workers who were once brought in to

do a Trump demolition job. That case goes back more than 30 years, and since they were hired by a contractor, it’s perfectly possible Trump had no idea what was going on. This is true of so many of the things Trump takes credit for.

“Yes, you’ve hired a thousand people from another country,” Rubio overstated.

“You’ve had nothing but problems with your credit cards et cetera, so don’t tell me about that,” Trump rejoined. And so it went.

You can understand why Rubio felt that getting personal was the only way to go. Trump has been breezing through the campaign without making any discernible effort to come up with coherent policies, or even to keep his stories straight. (He’s amended his old explanation for his failure to release his tax returns.

The problem apparently is no longer the complexity of the project, but a government audit that mysteriously precludes him from revealing any of the information.)

“lines.” And that was pretty much it.

The obsession with “lines” suggested either an absent-minded actor or a cocaine addict.

“That’s going to solve the problem,” he asserted.

The most optimistic analysis of Trump as a presidential candidate is that he just doesn’t believe in positions, except the ones you adopt for strategic purposes when you’re making a deal. So you obviously can’t explain how you’re going to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, because it’s going to be the first bid in some future monster negotiation session.

Or maybe he just doesn’t have the discipline to sit down and work this stuff out.

The great moment of debate night, as far as I’m concerned, came after the actual debate was over, and Trump suggested in a CNN postgame interview, that the IRS might audit him a lot “because of the fact that I’m a strong Christian ... and maybe there’s a bias.”

Then in a CNN post-postgame Trump, who spent the last interview Trump took it all back. (“I month contradicting himself about don’t think it applies.”) As only he health care plans, announced during can. the debate that he wanted to cancel c.2016 New York Times News Service Obamacare and then let insurance 2-26-16 companies compete across state borders, which he kept calling

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Francis Wilkinson

Trump’s Unambiguous Message: He Is A White Nationalist

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are running dueling ads on South Carolina’s hip-hop, R&B and gospel-themed radio stations, with each candidate asserting a history of commitment to black causes and black political power.

Clinton has also campaigned in the company of five black women who lost children to violence, including police violence. In addition to the mother of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teen who was pursued and killed by a gun-toting volunteer neighborhood watchman, The Washington Post reported: “Clinton was also joined by Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland, who was found hanged in her jail cell in Texas after a traffic stop last year; Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in New York in 2014; Maria Hamilton, mother of Dontre Hamilton, shot by a police officer in Milwaukee in 2014; and Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis, a Florida teen shot in 2012 by a man who had complained about loud music coming from the car the boy was riding in.”

Campaigns are structured to send messages.

Candidate visits to the futuristic factory, the struggling health clinic, the promising early childhood learning center are each designed to communicate what a person stands for and what she alone would accomplish in office.

There isn’t much ambiguity about the message of Clinton’s embrace of these mothers: Black people are being unjustly targeted by police and society. She’s saying that she shares their personal pain and public views and, as president, will act to end the nightmare while leveling other playing fields as well.

Now switch to Donald Trump. When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked him in August whether he considered police attacks on black men a “crisis,” Trump gave a spectacularly Trumpy reply.

“It’s a massive crisis,” Trump said before slowly pulling the rug out from under every word. “It’s a double crisis. You know, I look at things, and I see it on television. And some horrible mistakes are made.”

Trump here seems to be ceding the point.

“Horrible mistakes” sounds a lot like “crisis,” doesn’t it? But it turns out to be a false lead. The real problem is something else, and the solution would surely leave most black voters dumbfounded.

“At the same time, we have to give power back to the police because crime is rampant,” Trump concluded. “And I’m a big person that believes in very big -- you know, we need police.”

The answer to police abuse of power, it turns out, is giving more power to the police.

In a similar vein, Trump’s most salient encounter with the Black Lives Matter movement came in November, when he suggested that a protester who was removed from a campaign event “should have been roughed up.”

Trump’s message is also unambiguous: He is a white nationalist. He’s made this clear before, in his attacks on immigrants in general and Mexicans and Muslims in particular. His campaign’s implicit promise is to return white voters who, in their own estimation, were responsible for making America great, to their rightful place atop the social hierarchy. But in the long and vicious history of American racial conflict, one group has always been the prime target of racial animus. It’s not Hispanics or Muslims.

Even if Democrats in 2016 were not embracing black Americans and black causes, it’s doubtful that Trump’s racial rhetoric would be walled in, restricted to immigrants and Muslims, as his campaign continues. Once taken for a spin around the block, bigotry demands a tour of other neighborhoods.

There is appetite for what Trump is selling. A February Public Policy Polling survey of South Carolina found that Trump voters overwhelmingly believed that the Confederate flag should still be flying over the state capital. According to UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck, data from a recent Economist/YouGov national survey showed that almost 20 percent of Trump voters objected to the “executive order” freeing slaves in the South, a k a the Emancipation Proclamation.

If that sounds incredible, it may well be. The survey question followed others about Obama’s

use of executive orders, so the conservative poll respondents’ judgment may have been clouded by Obama hatred. Yet even if you’re primed to express raw animus, seizing an opportunity to oppose the emancipation of American slaves exposes a frightening racial instinct.

Trump’s campaign is loudly, famously, “politically incorrect,” which in this context means it intentionally liberates racial animus from social constraint. Meanwhile, Democrats are embracing black Americans’ narrative of racial oppression -arguably in the most explicit manner in presidential campaign history. If Trump gains the nomination, the conflicting narratives of white nationalists, championed by Trump, and black Americans, championed by the Democratic candidates, seem destined to clash -- quite possibly with a ferocity that American politics hasn’t seen in years.

Before Obama, President George W. Bush had refrained from exploiting race for political gain. Obama’s White House was a celebration of achievement, not oppression; it worked to sublimate the racial tensions activated by his success. Trump’s emergence on the political stage has released the ugly undercurrents and given them voice. They may get louder.

Francis Wilkinson writes on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-26-16

Jules Witcover

Who Will Stop The Republicans From Political Suicide?

Desperation ran rampant Thursday night in the final Republican presidential debate before Super Tuesday’s 11 state primaries. The unuttered battle cry was: Stop Donald Trump!

Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz led the onslaught, as each sought to position himself as the giant killer -- but with more volume than potency.

Rubio went after the mogul’s business record (hugely successful) and his Republican credentials (insubstantial). Cruz called Trump on not revealing his income tax returns and for contributing to Democrats. Trump stood between them, counterattacking and chiding them as ineffective.

The two other candidates, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and retired Dr. Ben Carson, provided contrasting civility to the warring trio, perhaps reminding television viewers of a sedate Grand Old Party past. Kasich strove to provide a modicum of policy substance to the catfight.

But it was clear that the order of business was for Rubio and Cruz to achieve what neither of them, nor the hapless Jeb Bush, now out of the race, had earlier been able to accomplish. Trump blithely continued to brush them aside as so many

fleas.

In all the debate, lively enough as show biz, displayed once again this year’s GOP circus of a party hijacked by a political P.T. Barnum. Only Kasich and Carson doggedly labored to salvage the Republican good name, if not their own nomination chances.

In the current climate of public anger and disaffection from establishment figures, Gov. Kasich’s plodding recitation of his impressive record of balanced budgets as a Reagan fiscal lieutenant in Congress and reduced state deficits in Ohio seems to count for little. As for Carson, his smiling piety had worn thin long ago. What is left, after a dozen of the original Republican presidential aspirants have fallen off the turnip truck, is a badly discredited party of ambitious wannabes clinging to personal dreams. They seem oblivious to the damage they collectively are inflicting on their political home, led by maverick Trump’s disruptive invasion.

Meanwhile, the supposedly official party

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Liberal Opinion Week

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13

Robert Kagan

The GOP’s Frankenstein Monster When the plague descended on Thebes, Oedipus sent his brother-inlaw to the Delphic oracle to discover the cause. Little did he realize that the crime for which Thebes was being punished was his own. Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.

Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing.

He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism - the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements, the persistent calls for nullification of Supreme Court decisions, the insistence that compromise was betrayal, the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition - that taught

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organization, the Republican National Committee, and its chairman, Reince Priebus, stand by idly waiting for fate to take its course.

He merely cites the pledge presented to all the candidates and accepted by them to support the nominee, which looks increasingly to be Trump.

One can’t help wondering if the party were in the hands of one of the old Republican establishment bosses, some way might not be found to sidetrack the current monkey wrench in the works. But the old smoke-filled-room days in Chicago of 1920, when a band of GOP senators picked one their own, Warren Harding of Ohio, for the party’s Republican nomination, are no more.

For good or ill, the choice of presidential candidates is now in the hands of the party faithful, through the elaborate process of state party primaries and caucuses whereby

Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at? Was it not Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, among others, who set this tone and thereby cleared the way for someone even more irreverent, so that now, in a most unenjoyable irony, Cruz, along with the rest of the party, must fall to the purer version of himself, a less ideologically encumbered anarchorevolutionary? This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.

Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers. Who began the attack on immigrants - legal and illegal - long before Trump arrived on the scene and made it his premier issue? Who frightened Mitt Romney into selling his soul in 2012, talking of “selfdeportation” to get himself right with the party’s anti-immigrant forces?

Who opposed any plausible means of dealing with the genuine problem of illegal immigration, forcing Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, to cower, abandon his principles - and his own immigration legislation - lest he be driven from the presidential race delegates to the national conventions are elected. And Donald Trump has discovered the path to success so far.

Right now, one extreme conservative, Cruz, one conservative striving for establishment stature, Rubio, and one legitimate establishment figure, Kasich, remain the only party barriers in Trump’s way. After that, there are only the Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, with neither a surefire giant killer in this bizarre election year.

As a result, a particularly uncommon uneasiness is gathering over American politics and a watching world abroad. Two former Mexican presidents in 2000-12, Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon, have told The Washington Post that Trump has already severely damaged Mexican-U.S. relations.

“I cannot understand why the Republican Party lets somebody come in and use it to make the Trump

before it had even begun? It was not Trump. It was not even party yahoos.

It was Republican Party pundits and intellectuals, trying to harness populist passions and perhaps deal a blow to any legislation for which President Obama might possibly claim even partial credit. What did Trump do but pick up where they left off, tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed?

Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified.

Has the president done a poor job in many respects? Have his foreign policies, in particular, contributed to the fraying of the liberal world order that the United States created after World War II? Yes, and for these failures he has deserved criticism and principled opposition.

But Republican and conservative criticism has taken an unusually dark and paranoid form. Instead of recommending plausible alternative strategies for the crisis in the Middle East, many Republicans have fallen back on mindless Islamophobia, with suspicious intimations about the president’s personal allegiances.

Thus Obama is not only wrong but also anti-American, un-American,

brand more successful,” Fox said.

“And the Republicans are silent? He is laughing at everybody....” Calderon said of Trump: “He is awakening a lot of bad feelings and bad values which are completely contrary to the values I admire among the American society.”

But neither of these outside observers has any vote in the matter.

Jeb Bush tried to rally the old establishment but failed miserably, and Rubio may seem too young and moderate to fit the bill. Is the reasonable Kasich the last resort?

Or is it fair to say, as the losing Democrat Mo Udall famously put it in the 1976 campaign, “The voters have spoken -- the bastards.”

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.

(C) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

2-26-16

non-American, and his policies though barely distinguishable from those of previous liberal Democrats such as Michael Dukakis or Mario Cuomo - are somehow representative of something subversive. How surprising was it that a man who began his recent political career by questioning Obama’s eligibility for office could leap to the front of the pack, willing and able to communicate with his followers by means of the dog-whistle disdain for “political correctness”?

We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the revolution.

There has been much secondguessing lately. Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time?

But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power. Some of those Republican leaders and pundits now calling for a counterrevolution against Trump were not so long ago welcoming his contribution to the debate. The politicians running against him and now facing oblivion were loath to attack him before because they feared alienating his supporters. Instead, they attacked one another, clawing at each other’s faces as they one by one slipped over the cliff. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got his last deadly lick in just before he plummeted - at Trump? No, at Rubio. (And now, as his final service to party and nation, he has endorsed Trump.) Jeb Bush spent millions upon millions in his hopeless race, but against whom? Not Trump.

So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-27-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Useful Side of Trump If the durability of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has taken the political world by surprise, the sources of his electoral strength are no mystery.

And the support he’s winning reflects a crisis not only for the Republican and conservative coalitions, but also for the political system as a whole.

Let it be said that Trump is not (yet) winning support from anything close to a majority of Americans. On the contrary, polling shows that a significant majority of Americans are anti-Trump.

His unfavorable ratings have reached or approached 60 percent in many surveys.

But as the results from Tuesday’s Nevada caucuses confirmed again, Trump has built a large constituency inside the Republican Party based on a set of positions that marry two streams of thought not typically brought together by liberal or conservative politicians.

On the one hand, his call to deport 11 million immigrants who are here illegally, his support for a ban on the entry of Muslims to the United States, his invocation of law-and-order themes and emphatic support for the police, his endorsement of even rougher treatment of terror suspects -- all speak to an authoritarian side of Trump’s appeal that clearly resonates with many on the Republican right.

But Trump embraces positions on economics and foreign policy anathema to most conservative politicians. He is an ardent critic of recent freetrade agreements, opposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, has been even more vocal than many Democrats in criticizing President George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and even endorses the Democrats’ long-standing call for government negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to drive down drug costs.

This mix has allowed Trump to win votes from self-described moderates and conservatives alike, but his strongest support comes from voters at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. This was true again in Nevada, as CNN reported from the entrance poll: Trump took 57 percent of the vote from caucusgoers who did not attend college but only 37 percent from those with postgraduate degrees.

No wonder that after the Nevada results were known, Trump offered one of the most memorable sound bites of the campaign: “I love the poorly educated,” he said.

The key lies in that rejection of conservative economic and fiscal orthodoxy (except in his endorsement of big tax cuts). But unlike Democrats, Trump is a sharp critic of illegal immigration, multiculturalism and “political correctness.” This is why dreams of a populist alliance between supporters of Trump and Bernie Sanders will be stillborn, as Thomas B. Edsall pointed out in The New York Times.

Trump is roiling an electoral system that has been in a kind of stasis for 16 years. Since 2000, the Democratic share of the national vote for president has ranged from a low of 48.3 percent in 2004 to a high of 52.9 percent in 2008. The Republican vote has varied from 45.7 percent in 2008 to 50.7 percent

in 2004.

to the families of coal country and Indian country.”

This unlikely juxtaposition reflected her coalitionbuilding hopes among very different groups that feel dispossessed.

“The global economy has changed more rapidly than many people’s ability to adjust to it,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said in an interview. “It’s changing so fast that many people are asking, ‘Why am I being left out of this?’”

If Trump’s campaign leaves behind one useful legacy, it will be a heightened awareness of the deep hurt among the Americans Fischer is describing.

They have been brutally battered by globalization and technological change. So far, Trump’s Republican rivals have had little to say to these voters. No wonder Trump loves the poorly educated.

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

These are narrow ranges, with a slight tilt toward the Democrats. To achieve a breakthrough, each party needs to seize support in unfamiliar territory. Republicans need more votes from Latinos and Asian-Americans or from socially moderate-toliberal middle-class white voters. Democrats need major advances in the white working class.

The Democrats’ losses over the years among downscale white voters have been dramatic, illustrated here in Kentucky in the once pro-labor coal counties. In Harlan, for example, Bill Clinton won 58 percent in 1996, but Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jack Conway took only 33.6 percent in 2015. In Perry, it was Clinton with 58.3 percent in 1996, and Conway with 35.1 percent in 2015.

Hillary Clinton, for one, is acutely aware of these losses, one reason that in her victory speech after (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group last weekend’s Nevada Democratic caucuses, she 2-25-16 spoke of the need for Democrats to “open our hearts

Jules Witcover

Jeb Bush, Donald Trump’s Unwitting Enabler

The humiliating demise of Jeb Bush’s presidential candidacy resulted from his willingness to make himself a sacrificial lamb to save the Republican Party from Donald Trump.

It remains to be seen whether anyone else will so conspicuously offer himself.

None of the other GOP candidates seemed quite as personally offended as Jeb Bush was by Trump’s effrontery, aimed as it so often was at Bush and his family.

Trump’s mockery of Jeb’s “mommy” for campaigning for him in South Carolina, and his suggestion that George W. Bush lied about the existence of weapons of mass destructions to justify his invasion of Iraq, challenged the integrity of the whole Bush family. It finally seemed to arouse Jeb’s exclamation point!

But the second Bush son’s own laid-back manner and style, unlike the swagger and cockiness of his brother, made Jeb a perfect target for the loudmouthed bully-boy from Manhattan. The label Trump slapped on Jeb -- “low energy” -- appeared to leave him figuratively gasping for breath.

For a time, though, Jeb tried his best. He spent a lot of money and spoke the truth about the outsider’s crudity. But Jeb’s own placid personality, his blueblood family line and Trump’s special talent for character assassination all brought him down, leaving him with a poor fourth-place finish in the South Carolina primary.

Early in the campaign season, Bush launched a fundraising “shock and awe” campaign designed to blow away other contenders; the intention was to sew up the nomination for Jeb before the race ever started. The campaign’s masterminds adopted as its logo “Jeb!” -- perhaps in keeping with his plan to campaign “joyfully.” But almost from the start, there was little to be joyful about.

Jeb could have anticipated that his brother’s 2003 invasion of Iraq would open the floodgates to political troubles for his candidacy. Yet when he was asked on a television show last May whether he would have followed his brother’s path, Jeb said he, too, would have invaded.

As critics and foes leaped on him, he claimed he had misunderstood the question. Had he known at the time that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction, he said would not have chosen to invade Iraq.

As a first-time campaigner for national office, Jeb proved to be halting and uncertain. He sought through most of 2015 to downplay his ties to his father and brother, arguing that he was his “own man” running on his own record as a successful two-term Florida governor. But finally he called on George W. to come to the rescue, to no avail.

Jeb’s strategists did not gauge the dynamic entry into the Republican race of hard-edged and take-noprisoners competitor Donald Trump. The celebrity candidate methodically took aim at the younger Bush, whose rather Marquis of Queensberry style offered an easy target.

Trump cuttingly and effectively portrayed Jeb as a man who was not up to the rough-and-tumble rigors of a presidential campaign. In speeches and in debate encounters, Bush came off as ineffective. When he finally undertook to be the most consistent and pointed critic of Trump’s bareknuckle tactics and verbal abuse, he was too late, suffering Trump’s most telling punishment, and his campaign collapsed.

In retrospect, the Jeb Bush strategists underestimated both the influence of Trump’s personality and his angry, brutal message, built of smidgeons of Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, George

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

15

Rachel Maddow

What Does It Say About The GOP That Trump Is The White Supremacists’ Candidate?

“Donald Trump is not a racist, but Donald Trump is not afraid. Don’t vote for a Cuban, vote for Donald Trump.” This is not the first white supremacist pro-Trump robocall by a group calling itself “American National Super PAC,” but it hits the same low notes as the last one. “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people,” said the first call, which went out to Iowa and New Hampshire voters ahead of the presidential nominating contests in those states. The group’s pre-Super Tuesday call, which has reportedly gone out in Vermont and Minnesota, says, “The white race is dying out. . . . Few schools anymore have beautiful white children as the majority.” Both calls identify the person responsible for the message as a “farmer and white nationalist,” and both end the same way: “Vote Trump . . . This call is not authorized by Donald Trump.”

Trump has no affiliation with the white supremacists making these calls on his behalf, but he’s certainly got them all excited. The racist American Freedom Party is technically running its own candidate for president on a “Stop White Genocide” ticket, but its heart is clearly with Trump. A statement from the group announcing that first round of racist robocalls in Iowa called Trump “The Great White Hope.”

Before the first votes were cast this year, Trump’s candidacy was also being hailed and welcomed by the American Nazi Party, the KKK-affiliated “Knights Party,” the skinhead and neo-Nazi online forum “The Daily Stormer” and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Duke started praising Trump on his radio show during the summer, saying that Trump’s campaign was doing “some incredibly great things,” but he stopped short of fully endorsing

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Wallace and other strands of populist, anti-elitist hostility long in the dark corners of American politics.

Jeb Bush’s attempt to confront it, in pursuit of his own political purpose, also bore elements of restoring today’s politics to the more civil and laudable standards of conduct and discourse in better days not too far distant. The nation can only hope it has not seen the

Trump’s candidacy. Now, Duke is overtly calling on his supporters to join the Trump campaign: “Voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage. . . . I am telling you that it is your job now to get active. Get off your duff. Get off your rear-end that’s getting fatter and fatter for many of you every day on your chairs. When this show’s over, go out, call the Republican Party, but call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer. They’re screaming for volunteers. Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mind-set that you have.”

headed with a stylized swastika that is the symbol of a neo-Nazi group. The profane description of who the account belongs to includes the statement, “Should have listened to the Austrian chap with the little moustache.”

The Trump campaign, again, should not be conflated with its followers, but the candidate has not exactly gone out of his way to make clear to the white nationalists and neo-Nazis among us that their love is unrequited.

After Duke started praising him last summer, Trump told interviewers who pressed him to repudiate the Klansman, “Sure, I would, if that would make you feel better.” Within the past few days, Trump said once Candidates cannot control who that he disavowed Duke’s support, endorses them, and no one should and then subsequently that he would hold candidates accountable for the not disavow it because he didn’t know views and actions of their supporters who Duke was. unless the candidates endorse them in turn. But that doesn’t mean the rest of In 1991, Duke ran for office us can’t notice who’s lining up behind as the gubernatorial nominee of whom. the Republican Party in Louisiana.

While there is no evidence that Disgusted mainstream Republicans Trump is actively courting the support were beside themselves that a of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, Klansman had become the party’s or that he welcomes it, that support standard-bearer in that state. He was also doesn’t come as a surprise after denounced by Republicans up to and the campaign that he has run. including then-President George H.W. Since he has been running for Bush. president, Trump has twice retweeted That said, the Democratic Party’s a message from the account @ candidate in that 1991 governor’s WhiteGenocideTM. The name race was no prize either. Edwin associated with the account is Edwards had already served three “Donald Trumpovitz,” and the user’s terms as Louisiana governor, but he location is listed as “Jewmerica.” The was flagrantly, even proudly, corrupt. avatar associated with the account Edwards ultimately went on to serve - which Trump has twice sent to his eight years in federal prison, but not own 6 million followers - includes the before defeating Duke in a campaign phrase, “The man who wants to be that featured two of America’s allHitler.” time great political slogans: “Vote for In November, Trump also tweeted a the Crook. It’s Important” and “Vote graphic that showed wildly inaccurate for the Lizard, Not the Wizard.” The statistics blaming African Americans point is that Duke lost that race, even for anti-white crime. The graphic against an opponent like Edwards. Of originated from a Twitter account course he lost. Characters like that are expected to lose in America, anywhere end yet of that quest, as Trump’s and everywhere. scorched-earth tactics and rhetoric Neo-Nazis, Klan members and plunge toward his undefined goal of white nationalists are a durable “making America great again.” feature of the far-right fringe in U.S. Jules Witcover’s latest book is politics. The constant reinvention and “The American Vice Presidency: reintroduction of a character such as From Irrelevance to Power,” Duke over the years shows that our published by Smithsonian Books. nation’s racist yahooism probably will You can respond to this column at never go away completely. It’s like a juleswitcover@comcast.net. latent infection that becomes mildly (C) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, llc. symptomatic again every time we’re 2-24-16 under too much stress.

What we’re not used to is it winning, and thereby getting a place in the spotlight at the center of mainstream, national politics.

Maybe the Republican Party cracked the seal on this kind of thing in 2014, when it elevated Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., to the top tier of the House Republican leadership. Scalise, as a state legislator, once addressed a white supremacist convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization. He says he had no idea that it was a racist group, but a local reporter says he also told her at the time that Louisiana voters should think of him as “David Duke without the baggage.”

That’s a quote that the White House has frequently reiterated to the press corps since Republicans decided to elevate Scalise to the No. 3 job in the House.

The White House keeps bringing up the quote because it’s supposed to be a source of shame for Scalise and for the party in choosing him as a leader.

That’s the usual interplay between the racist fringe and the mainstream political right: The overtly racist stuff is supposed to be a political loser and radioactive to mainstream Republicans. What is not usual is that same cast of racist characters and organizations feeling at home and well represented at the very apotheosis of Republican Party politics, in the campaign of the prohibitive frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination.

Again, a candidate cannot be held accountable for everything said and believed by his or her supporters. But once it’s clear that the candidate has both the attention and affection of the ugliest, most vile creatures in our political swamp, what he chooses to do about that is a leadership test not only for the candidate but also for the party of which he is becoming the standard-bearer. Now that the KKK and the white nationalists feel that the Republican Party has finally given them a candidate they can believe in, who will disabuse them of that notion?

And how?

The writer hosts MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” and is a contributing columnist for The Post. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-28-16

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March 9, 2016

LIBERAL DELINEATIONS

Liberal Opinion Week

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Nicholas Kristof

The Party of ‘No Way!’ Perhaps the most important thing Washington will do this year is decide whether to approve President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. But Republicans have already announced their decision: “No way!”

It’s rich for Republicans to declare pre-emptively that they will not even hold hearings on an Obama nominee, considering that they used to denounce (while their party held the White House) the notion that judges’ nominations shouldn’t proceed in an election year.

“That’s just plain bunk,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in 2008. “The reality is that the Senate has never stopped confirming judicial nominees during the last few months of a president’s term.”

His sense of reality has since changed.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said in 2008, “Just because it’s a presidential election year is no excuse for us to take a vacation.”

In fairness, Democrats have also been hypocritical. In 1992, when George Bush was president, then-Sen. Joe Biden said an electionyear vacancy should wait to be filled the next year.

A pox on all their houses!

the constitutional text. The Constitution gives no hint that the Senate’s “advice and consent” for nominations should operate only in three out of four years.

women with obstetric fistula, to reducing violence against women worldwide. Yet practical measures to address these issues stall in Congress.

The party of Lincoln is now the party of “No,” refusing even to invite the president’s budget director to testify on an Obama budget, as is customary. Congress is expected to accomplish next to nothing this year.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the apotheosis of this disregard for governing. Cruz’s entire congressional career has involved antagonizing colleagues and ensuring that nothing gets done.

And Trump barely bothers with policies, just provocations.

All this is ineffably sad. I expect politicians to exaggerate and bluster. But I also expect them to govern, and that is what many in the Grand Old Party now refuse to do.

In that case, should they really be paid? Just as we have work requirements for some welfare recipients, maybe it’s time to consider work requirements for senators.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

If Republicans block Obama’s nomination, Scalia’s vacancy will last more than a year, compared with a historical average of resolving nominations in 25 days. To date, the longest Supreme Court nomination in American history lasted 125 days, and it looks as if we will easily break that record this year.

The larger issue here is obstructionism. When I was growing up, the GOP was the serious, prudent, boring party, while the Democrats included a menagerie of populists, rascals and firebrands. Today it’s the GOP that embraces the George Wallace demagogues, and its aim is less to govern than to cause gridlock. That’s not true of everyone — the House speaker, Paul Ryan, seems to have genuine aspirations to legislate. But to be a Republican lawmaker today is too often to seek to block appointments, obstruct programs and shut down government. Politics becomes less about building things up than about burning them down.

Both parties are open to expanding the earned- c.2016 New York Times News Service Let’s tune out politicians’ rhetoric in both income tax credit, to early childhood programs, to 2-24-16 parties and look at the merits of the arguments. better approaches to heroin addiction, to supporting Supreme Court justices don’t die in office very Noah Feldman often, and in recent decades they have mostly chosen to step down before election years. But despite what Republican senators would have you believe, there have been a number of Supreme Court vacancies filled in election years.

In the 20th century we had six: — In 1912, the Senate confirmed Mahlon Pitney, President Barack Obama insisted that had stopped striking down New Deal legislation, nominated by William Howard Taft.

— In 1916, the Senate confirmed both Louis his post to Scotusblog on Wednesday about his the president was still angry.

Brandeis and John Clarke, nominated by Woodrow criteria for a Supreme Court nominee was “spoiler free.” But he may have been protesting a bit too He could’ve nominated a traditional Wilson.

— In 1932, the Senate confirmed Benjamin much. Obama wrote that he sought a justice candidate like Stanley Reed, his solicitor general, with “life experience outside the courtroom or whom he did subsequently put on the bench.

Cardozo, nominated by Herbert Hoover.

— In 1940, the Senate confirmed Frank Murphy, the classroom,” which possible nominees like But instead he hit on Black, who was widely Judge Sri Srinivasan of the Court of Appeals considered the most radical member of the Senate. nominated by Franklin Roosevelt.

— In 1988, the Senate confirmed Anthony for the D.C. Circuit arguably lack. Then, later in Black was broadly supportive of the New Deal, Kennedy, who had been nominated by Ronald the day, someone in the administration leaked a but he wasn’t a pure Roosevelt loyalist. He’d highly untraditional candidate, Republican Gov. voted against the National Industrial Recovery Reagan the previous November.

A counterexample is Abe Fortas, whose Brian Sandoval of Nevada, who has political life Act, and thought the answer to Depression-era nomination to be elevated from associate justice experience and was also a federal district judge unemployment was a shortened workweek.

Black had no judicial experience to speak of, to chief justice in the summer of 1968 was killed for four years. by a filibuster by Republicans and Southern It’s impossible to know whether Sandoval’s except a short stint in his 20s as a police court Democrats. But that’s a horrifying bit of history for name is being floated just to taunt Senate Majority judge in Montgomery, Alabama. When asked Republicans to rely upon, because the main reasons Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, who has privately about Black’s candidacy, then-professor for opposition to Fortas were that he favored civil vowed not to consider any Obama nominee. But Felix Frankfurter told Roosevelt’s representative rights and was Jewish. His ethical lapses mostly if Sandoval were nominated, it wouldn’t be the that unlike Reed, who would be ready from Day 1, first time a president nominated a justice mostly Black would have to “muster an immense amount emerged later. of rather technical jurisdictional learning.” (The Republicans suggest that it’s standard for a to send an “Oh, yeah?” message to the Senate.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt same is true, roughly speaking, of Sandoval.)

Supreme Court vacancy to be held over when it occurs during an election year. Since 1900, I can nominated Hugo Black to the Supreme Court Nominating the distinctly nonjudicial Black find only one example of that happening — in the when a seat came open in May 1937, in the sent a very specific message to the Senate, namely fall of 1956, after Congress had adjourned and aftermath of Congress’s narrow rejection of his that the business of the Supreme Court was court-packing plan. Roosevelt hated to lose, and politics, not just law. Roosevelt had made exactly Senate confirmation was impossible.

It’s ironic that this tumult should bedevil a even though the court’s famous “switch in time” the same point when he had pushed to pack the replacement for Antonin Scalia, who emphasized arguably created by his plan meant the justices Feldman continued on page 19

Obama Could Taunt The Senate As Roosevelt Did

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

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Jules Witcover

Biden and the Supreme Court Vacancy In a television interview the other night, Vice President Joe Biden was asked point-blank whether, if President Obama asked him to accept nomination to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, would he say yes. This was his response: “You never say to a president for certain you wouldn’t do anything, but I have no...” -- here he leaned over into the face of interviewer Rachel Maddow -- “look at me now: I have no desire to sit on the Supreme Court.

None.”

Maddow, the MSNBC liberal advocate, seemed to accept that, and then asked him: “Who do you think the president should pick?”

Biden replied: “I haven’t even had a chance to sit down with him yet to talk about the potential candidates.

When we do, as in the past, (we will) lay out all the people, go out and survey a little bit and see who we think -- who meets those criteria and we think could have a chance of being confirmed.”

He described his role as an “interlocutor” with the Senate and the House. “Because everybody up there knows I respect them ... and I have a lot of good friends on both sides of the aisle up there,” he said, adding, “Whether that’s enough to persuade them (on) who we pick is another issue.”

That somewhat garbled answer Feldman continued from page 18 court -- and been rebuffed.

Yet Roosevelt also calculated that the Senate would have no choice but to confirm Black. The reason was simple. Black was a senator, and the Senate was the ultimate gentlemen’s club. The senators wouldn’t be able to reject one of their own without losing face. Thus, Roosevelt would force the Senate to admit, through the confirmation, that the court was a political body.

He was right. The nomination went to the Senate on Friday, Aug. 12, 1937. The Senate confirmed him the following Wednesday, Aug. 17.

Only later would it come out that Black had been and conceivably still was a member of the Ku Klux Klan -- but that’s a story for another day.

Nominating Sandoval would be

suggested that the vice president intended to settle for being Obama’s personal agent in sounding out sentiment on Capitol Hill on whether his eventual choice would be acceptable by enough Republicans to be confirmed.

Notably, Biden did not flatly say he would turn down an overture to himself. Maddow observed that “under these unusual political circumstances,” he was “one person who could get through (the confirmation process), and maybe nobody else could.”

Despite the ridicule that such an offer would invite from many Republicans, the notion was not so outlandish, considering Biden’s political and judicial experience of 36 years in the Senate and 17 years as chairman or ranking minority member of its Judiciary Committee.

During that time, he presided over at least five Supreme Court confirmation hearings that produced both winners and losers.

But there is ample reason to believe Biden’s flat statement that he has “no desire” to sit on the Supreme Court. He is currently focused on Obama’s assignment to oversee a crash search for a cure for cancer, a role he’s played since last summer’s death of his son Beau at age 46. As vice president he has brought the office to a new level of importance, a similar move. If the Republican Senate blocks him, then it’s blocking a fellow Republican. Obama would appear to be showing bipartisanship, while the Senate would appear nakedly partisan.

The fact that Sandoval is Hispanic would be icing on the cake. The Democratic nominee for president will have to motivate the party’s base to win the election in November. If the Republican nominee is Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, motivating Latinos to vote the other way will be especially important.

Putting Sandoval in a position to be rejected by the Republican Senate could only help. (If Donald Trump is the nominee, one suspects no extra motivation will be needed for Latinos to vote Democratic.)

Whether Obama really wants Sandoval on the court is another

as Obama’s partner across a range of foreign and domestic assignments.

To be sure, Biden has on occasion irritated Republicans in the Senate, as in his leadership of the failed 1987 confirmation hearings for Ronald Reagan’s nominee lower court judge Robert Bork. Many Democrats, too, were dissatisfied with his conduct of the hearings that led to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas in 1991.

But it would be difficult for any of them to argue that Joe Biden was not, by his lifetime experience, uniquely qualified as a lawyer and judicial matter. Sandoval is on the record as supporting abortion rights, but as a George W. Bush judicial nominee, he hardly seems likely to espouse the liberal judicial philosophy that Obama’s supporters would like to see on the court.

The danger Obama faces if he nominates Sandoval is that the Republicans will call his bluff and confirm Sandoval. Roosevelt was willing to live with Black, even after his Klan affiliation was revealed. If Obama plans to try his own version of an “in your face” nomination, he’d better be willing to accept the consequences.

Noah Feldman, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-25-16

expert to take his place on the highest bench. At 73, he would be unusually old to do so at an age when Supreme Court justices usually are considering retirement. Agreeing to give one more for the team, though, would certainly make for a fitting coda to the saga of Joe Biden as public servant.

Biden has also suggested that he would recommend that Obama name someone distinctly moderate in political leanings and temperament, the better to encourage Republican Senate support. He specifically nixed someone akin to the late, staunchly liberal Justice William Brennan, which also would rule out himself.

RecentlyuncoveredbyRepublicans is a 1992 Biden speech in which as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman he argued that President George H.W. Bush, then seeking a second term, should “not name a nominee until after the election.” This is precisely the argument the Republicans are making now for lame-duck Obama to leave filling the Scalia vacancy to the next president to make.

Well, it’s not the first time Joe Biden has had cause to reflect on his words, and no doubt it won’t be the last.

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.

(C) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, Llc. 2-23-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Jared Bernstein & Ben Spielberg

Does One City’s Minimum-Wage Hike Kill Jobs In That State?

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the nation’s first minimum-wage law.

It set the wage at $0.25 an hour and covered only a fifth of the workforce. Speaking to the country the night before he signed the bill, Roosevelt told listeners to “not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day” tell them “that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.”

Last August, almost 80 years later, the city council of Birmingham, Ala., voted 7 to 0 (with one abstention) to become the first city in the Deep South to enact a minimum wage above today’s federal level of $7.25. The ordinance planned an increase to $8.50 per hour by July 2016, with a second increase to $10.10 set for July 2017.

In response, state lawmakers leapt from “calamity-howling” to obstructionism. The Alabama legislature this past week passed a bill designed to block Birmingham and other cities not just from raising the local wage floor but also from mandating benefits such as paid sick leave. Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, R, insists that the bill isn’t about the policies themselves but about preventing “all sorts of problems” that arise when cities are allowed to set their own minimum wages, presumably because there’s nothing preventing local businesses from relocating to avoid the higher labor costs engendered by an increase.

It’s not a crazy concern. When the national minimum wage goes up, no business is at a competitive disadvantage - they all face the same wage floor. It’s fair to wonder whether sub-national minimum wages might encourage businesses to avoid an increase by moving, a question with implications for people all over the country - from Olympia, Wash., to Lexington, Ky., to Bangor, Maine - who are trying to secure a raise. The geographical variation that has sprung up over time, however, has allowed economists to test Hubbard’s claims, and the evidence supports the actions of the Birmingham city council.

Partly because of federal inaction, 29 states, plus the District of Columbia, have set minimum wages above the federal level, with floors ranging from $7.50 in Maine and New Mexico to $10 in Massachusetts and California to $10.50 in Washington, D.C. (rising to $11.50 in July). Southern states are the least likely to be in this group. City lawmakers began to adopt higher wage floors at the local level more than a decade ago. Four counties and 19 cities have minimums above their state’s level, including Santa Fe ($10.84), San Francisco ($12.25) and SeaTac, Wash. ($15.24). Several more have either proposed or passed higher minimumwage laws that have yet to take effect.

This variation has provided opportunities for something rare in empirical economics: quasi-experimental studies. In one famous paper, economists Alan Krueger and David Card compared fast-food employment in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage in 1992, with that in Pennsylvania, which did not. “We find no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment,” they concluded.

levels. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, the real earnings of lowwage workers in Alabama are down 6 percent compared with 1979, while those of the state’s highest-paid workers are up 17 percent.

Those low-wage workers have been left behind. And now the Alabama political establishment has blocked action to help them.

This is the same political establishment that professes to support “local control” when it finds it convenient. For example, dozens of Alabama state representatives who voted to preempt Birmingham’s minimumwage ordinance were all for “necessary freedoms to address . . . issues at the local level” when voting on a school reform bill in 2013. The preemption bill’s sponsor, state Rep. David Faulkner, even acknowledged the contradiction: “While we say that we want local control of certain things, I don’t believe the minimum wage is one of those.”

No wonder Birmingham’s citizens and city council fought back. The council voted earlier this past week to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 immediately to try to preempt the preemption bill, and Raise Up Alabama, a coalition including workers, unions and clergy members, has formed to fight the state’s decision. If they lose the battle, it won’t be because the facts weren’t on their side.

Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the author of”The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity.” Spielberg works on issues related to inequality, economic opportunity and full employment at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Are sub-state localities different from states? Another important study gets at this question by looking at county-level data, comparing every contiguous county across state borders where minimum wages differed over the course of 16 years. Instead of “all sorts of problems,” the researchers found “no evidence of job losses for high impact sectors such as restaurants and retail.”

Case studies of cities with higher wage floors are less common, but those that have been done support the findings of the state and county research. Studies of San Francisco and Santa Fe, the two cities with the longest track records of higher minimums, reveal “no statistically significant negative effects on employment or hours (including in low-wage industries such as restaurants).”

Businesses don’t appear to relocate in response to local minimum-wage increases (at least not enough to create significant job losses), for several reasons. First, restaurants and other retailers, which are disproportionate employers of low-wage labor, must stay near their customers. Second, there are other ways to absorb higher wage costs than by laying off workers. Some evidence, for instance, suggests that companies raise prices, generally by less than 1 percent per every 10 percent increase in the wage. They may also become more Special To The Washington Post efficient. The prospect of higher labor costs 2-26-16 can incentivize employers to eliminate waste and to raise performance standards, while at the same time higher wages enhance workers’ motivation.

Companies end up with less turnover and shorter Please send your old mailing label and your vacancy periods when filling job slots. address three weeks prior to moving.

Finally, companies can cut profit margins or toplevel salaries to meet higher wage mandates. This last mechanism is one reason such policies get so much pushback from business, and it is particularly germane in an economy where income inequality stands at historically high

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Justin Fox

Your Driver Probably Has At Least One Other Job What is the defining characteristic of gig-economy workers? Probably that driving for Lyft or assembling Ikea furniture via Handy or selling knitted leprechaun outfits for babies on Etsy isn’t the main thing they do or the main way they make money.

I’ve been looking at three in-depth studies published recently about the much hyped but still mysterious gig or on-demand economy, enabled by Internet connections and ubiquitous smartphones, and this is perhaps the most strikingly consistent finding.

On-demand work is something that people who already have jobs or other responsibilities (going to school, taking care of family members) do on the side. For example: - Of people who had earned income from one or more online labor platforms from October 2012 to September 2015, 82 percent got less than a quarter of their overall income from such work in September 2015, the JPMorgan Chase Institute found in a study released Thursday of 260,000 (anonymized!) Chase customers who received payments from online platforms. In the months that people earned money from a labor platform, it accounted for 33 percent of that month’s income, but the study found that gig workers often had months where they received no online-platform income. For those who earned income from online capital platforms (intermediaries that enable you to sell goods or rent assets, such as eBay and Airbnb), the percentages were 96 and 20.

There was little overlap between the labor platform and capital platform income recipients.

- Among 4,622 on-demand workers surveyed in September and October for an Intuit report that came out in December, such work accounted for 22 percent of household income. Forty-three percent of those surveyed also had traditional full- or part-time jobs, 39 percent were small-business owners, 19 percent were family caretakers and 11 percent were students (respondents could give more than one answer).

- Of 701 “informal” workers identified in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations in January 2015, 74 percent of the men and

60 percent of the women also had full-time jobs, and 13 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women had part-time jobs. This survey was done on behalf of three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which published the results in October.

So the gig economy is composed not primarily of, say, Taskers (what TaskRabbit calls its runners of errands and organizers of closets) scampering from one job to the next for 10 hours a day. It is made up instead of people like the archetypal “diversified worker,” described by the Freelancer’s Union last fall as “someone who works the front desk at a dentist’s office 20 hours a week and fills out the rest of his income driving for Uber and doing freelance writing.”

These on-demand workers tend to be middle class: The average household income of the informal workers the Fed surveyed was in the $60,000 to $75,000 range for men and $40,000 to $50,000 for women (median household income nationwide is $53,657). They also skew young: In the JP Morgan Chase Institute study, 36 percent of the participants in online labor platforms were in the 25-34 age range (as opposed to about 22 percent

of the labor force). Moreover, while their numbers are growing fast, ondemand workers still pretty small as a share of the overall population.

The on-demand economy, then, is so far mainly a way for youngish middle-income Americans to supplement their incomes. That’s great -- their incomes have needed supplementing! It also seems wrong to label all gig work exploitative when so much of it is being done by people who have other jobs and, presumably, other choices.

lessons, or painting a house on Thumbtack.”

That’ll be great for all those former tennis pros and opera singers on welfare, that’s for sure! And more generally, on-demand work seems geared toward people who already know their way around the workplace and the Internet. Which is likely true of most work these days.

One other takeaway from these surveys is that more people are probably working multiple jobs, even though the official count of multiple jobholders doesn’t really show it. If you earned $500 one month delivering groceries, then did no more deliveries for the next few months because you were busy with your main job, would you put down on a government survey that you have multiple jobs? Probably not. But you really kind of do. We’re still a long way from becoming a nation of Hedleys -- the West Indian immigrant family from “In Living Color” in which every member had at least five (or was it six, or seven?) jobs. Something is changing about the way we work, though.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist writing about business.

On the other hand, online gig work doesn’t seem poised to take over the labor market, and it may have only limited potential to pull some of the millions of people who have fallen out of the labor force in recent years back in. Last month a couple of conservative thinkers proposed what they (or a Politico headline writer) called “Uber for Welfare.” The idea was that the government could require benefit recipients to, for example, “deliver goods and groceries for Postmates and Instacart, assemble furniture on TaskRabbit or mow lawns and plow driveways with PLOWZ & MOWZ. Or if they have the knowhow they could offer photo shoots, (c) 2016, Bloomberg View voice lessons, mural painting, tennis 2-22-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Gene Lyons

In This Western, The Bundys Are Bumbling Villains Looks like that epic cowboy movie Cliven Bundy and his boys dreamed of playing starring roles in will never get made. Thankfully, their own epic stupidity ended the fantasy less in tragedy than in farce -- definitely more “Blazing Saddles” than “The Wild Bunch.”

Or was it “Cliven Bundy and the Sundance Kid” they were going for? No matter. That one ended badly for the romantic outlaws, too.

Apart from the needless death of one True Believer in a cowboy hat who committed what city folks call “suicide by cop” -- announcing his determination never to be taken alive and then reaching for his pistol -- the rest of Bundy’s sagebrush revolutionaries eventually surrendered without incident. Most are headed to federal prison.

The ignominious end of their occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in remote eastern Oregon should serve as an object lesson to crackpot insurrectionists across the west. No, the public won’t come rushing to your support.

Local ranchers wanted nothing to do with the uprising. A bird sanctuary was a badly chosen place to make a stand. Put it this way: Millions of Americans enjoy hiking, hunting and birdwatching.

Cow-watching, not so much.

Nor have you intimidated the U.S. government. “Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance wanted to know. But any two-bit drug dealer in Baltimore or New York could have told them that you can’t go around pointing guns at federal agents and start traveling the countryside holding press conferences.

How foolish would you have to be to imagine you could? The Bundy sons vowed a bloody standoff at the Malheur refuge, and then announced a public meeting in the next county 100 miles away. Only one highway links the two places. FBI agents and Oregon state cops set up a roadblock at a remote spot and bagged the lot.

Family patriarch Cliven Bundy next announced his intention to show up in Oregon to support the remaining occupiers. But you can’t take a shooting iron on a commercial airline flight.

Secure in the knowledge that he and his posse would be unarmed, agents met him at the gate.

They’d been waiting almost two years for the old fool to set himself a trap.

The rebel rancher may never again be seen outside a courtroom. According to a press release distributed by the U.S. Attorney in Las Vegas: “Cliven Bundy and four others were indicted by the federal grand jury today on 16 felony charges related to the armed assault against federal law enforcement officers that occurred in the Bunkerville, Nev. area on April 12, 2014.” A U.S. District Judge in Oregon denied his bail request on the grounds that the 69-year-old rancher is clearly a flight risk.

The FBI grinds slow, but fine. Among the offenses Bundy’s charged with are “Assault

on a Federal “Threatening Officer.” The and $250,000 $250,000.

Law Enforcement Officer” and a Federal Law Enforcement first carries a 20-year sentence penalty; the second 10 years and

The indictment stipulates that he and his sons Ryan and Ammon “planned, organized, and led the assault in order to extort (government) officers into abandoning approximately 400 head of cattle that were in their lawful care and custody. In addition to conspiring among themselves to plan and execute these crimes, the defendants recruited, organized and led hundreds of other followers in using armed force against law enforcement officers in order to thwart the seizure and removal of Cliven Bundy’s cattle from federal public lands. Bundy had trespassed on the public lands for over 20 years, refusing to obtain the legally required permits or pay the required fees to keep and graze his cattle on the land.”

We all saw the whole thing on national TV. Back in Nevada, federal officials who found themselves outnumbered four to one made a tactical decision not to risk a bloodbath over a herd of scrawny cows. At the expense of being criticized by people spoiling for a showdown, authorities apparently saw limited harm in letting Bundy declare victory while holing up at his

remote desert ranch with his posse. Capturing him wasn’t worth a single agent’s life.

Which is why it’s so important that the feds’ patience paid off. Also crucial was the Oregon community’s near-unanimous rejection of the Bundy cause.

Cattle ranchers can certainly grow frustrated with government bureaucracy, but they also tend to be extremely practical people. The Bundy acolytes struck them as crackpots -- their theories of constitutional law as zany as their tactics.

University of Oregon geography professor Peter Walker spent weeks documenting the local response. “At one community meeting,” he wrote, “when almost the entire leadership of the Bundy group arrived unexpectedly, citizens of Harney County stood on their feet, pointed fingers at the Bundys and chanted, ‘Go home! Go home! Go home!’”

Real cowboys, see, can’t just go gallivanting off and leave their herds.

Particularly not in winter.

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

Copyright 2016, Gene Lyons 2-24-16

Adam Minter

No, Your Coffee Capsules Aren’t Killing The Planet

Drowsy German bureaucrats in Hamburg will soon have one less option for a midafternoon caffeine jolt, after the city banned single-serve coffee machines such as Nespresso from government buildings. The new regulations have a worthy purpose. They hope to defend the environment, under the assumption that the use and disposal of thousands of tiny coffee capsules or pods leads to “unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation.”

A backlash against coffee pods has been, ahem, brewing for awhile. According to a statistic cited by everyone from the Atlantic magazine to National Public Radio, Green Mountain spit out 8.5 billion of its K-cup coffee pods in 2013 -enough to circle the Earth 10.5 times. Campaigns, petitions, and high-minded op-eds have attacked such profligacy, turning the humble coffee pod into an environmental bogeyman on par with bottled water.

But lost amid this fervor is any perspective about how to measure the environmental impact of the stuff we consume. There’s a real question whether high-profile product bans -- of water bottles, plastic bags or coffee capsules -- risk causing more damage than they prevent.

First of all, we should understand the true scale of the problem. According to the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy, the average coffee pod weighs three grams (Nespresso’s popular 1.2-gram pods and others weigh less). Using that figure, all those Green Mountain K-Cups would cumulatively weigh 25,500 metric tons. That adds up to around 0.05 percent of the more than 49 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in Germany in 2012, and just 0.01 percent of the 251 million tons of solid waste generated in the U.S. (For comparison’s sake, Americans tossed out 860,000 tons of books that year.) Even adding the 27 billion pods that Nespresso claims to have sold worldwide between 1986 and 2012, the associated waste still wouldn’t amount to 1 percent of the total waste generated in the U.S. or Germany in 2012.

Of course, just because coffee pods are a minuscule part of the waste stream doesn’t mean that they don’t have an environmental impact.

But the Hamburg ban seems to assume that other forms of making coffee are less damaging. At best, that’s a questionable assumption.

Minter continued on page 23

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

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Paul Krugman

Planet on the Ballot We now have a pretty good idea who will be on the ballot in November: Hillary Clinton, almost surely (after the South Carolina blowout, prediction markets give her a 96 percent probability of securing her party’s nomination), and Donald Trump, with high likelihood (currently 80 percent probability on the markets.) But even if there’s a stunning upset in what’s left of the primaries, we already know very well what will be at stake — namely, the fate of the planet.

Why do I say this?

Obviously, the partisan divide on environmental policy has been growing ever wider. Just eight years ago the GOP nominated John McCain, whose platform included a call for a “cap and trade” system — that is, a system that restricts emissions, but allows pollution permits to be bought and sold — to limit greenhouse gases. Since then, however, denial of climate science and opposition to anything that might avert catastrophe have become essential pillars of Republican identity. So the choice in 2016 is starker than ever before.

Yet that partisan divide would not, in itself, be enough to make this a truly crucial year. After all, electing a pro-environment president wouldn’t make much difference if he or (much more likely) she weren’t in a position to steer us away from the precipice. And the truth is that given Republican retrogression and the GOP’s near-lock on the House of Representatives, even a blowout Democratic victory this year probably wouldn’t create a political

Minter continued from page 22

To judge coffee’s environmental costs properly, one needs to consider the entire life cycle from cultivation of the beans, to brewing -- which requires energy and water -- to disposal. Over the last decade there have been several attempts to do just that. Though they differ in important respects, on one point there’s near-universal agreement: The brewing process and its associated carbon emissions have the biggest impact on the environment.

Predictably, those emissions vary quite a bit depending on the coffeemaker and how it’s used. For

environment in which anything like McCain’s 2008 proposal could pass Congress.

But here’s the thing: the next president won’t need to pass comprehensive legislation, or indeed any legislation, to take a big step toward saving the planet. Dramatic progress in energy technology has put us in a position where executive action — action that relies on existing law — can achieve great things. All we need is an executive willing to take that action, and a Supreme Court that won’t stand in its way.

And this year’s election will determine whether those conditions hold.

Many people, including some who should know better, still seem oddly oblivious to the ongoing revolution in renewable energy.

Recently Bill Gates declared, as he has a number of times over the past few years, that we need an “energy miracle” — some kind of amazing technological breakthrough — to contain climate change. But we’ve already had that miracle: the cost of electricity generated by wind and sun has dropped dramatically, while costs of storage, crucial to making renewables fully competitive with conventional energy, are plunging as we speak.

The result is that we’re only a few years from a world in which carbonneutral sources of energy could replace much of our consumption of fossil fuels at quite modest cost. True, Republicans still robotically repeat that any attempt to limit emissions would “destroy the economy.” But at example, pod-based machines that power down when not in use are relatively energy-efficient, especially compared to drip coffeemakers that often remain on for hours. If Hamburg officials replace the former with the latter, they could be undercutting their own well-meaning efforts.

Also, because single-serve machines generally use only as much coffee and water as is precisely necessary to brew a cup, they waste less of both than the competition.

Indeed, they’re so efficient that farmers and roasters are blaming coffee capsules for a dropoff in coffee demand, according to Bloomberg. Or, in the words of one analyst: “The coffee market has lost

this point such assertions are absurd.

As both a technical matter and an economic one, drastic reductions in emissions would, in fact, be quite easy to achieve. All it would take to push us across the line would be moderately pro-environment policies.

As a card-carrying economist, I am obliged to say that it would be best if these policies took the form of a comprehensive system like cap and trade or carbon taxes, which would provide incentives to reduce emissions all across the economy.

But something like the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would use flexible regulations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency on major emitters, should be enough to get us a long way toward the goal.

And as I said, no new legislation would be needed, just a president its best consumer: the kitchen sink.”

(According to two studies, the most environmentally friendly option of all is soluble instant coffee, anathema to most coffee snobs.)

This doesn’t mean Hamburg’s ban is entirely misguided. Waste and disposal are critical environmental issues, especially in countries such as Germany with high landfill costs.

But they’re not the only priorities, and they shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum.

Adam Minter is based in Asia, where he covers politics, culture, business and junk. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-25-16

willing to act and a Supreme Court that won’t stand in that president’s way, sacrificing the planet in the name of conservative ideology.

What’s more, the Paris agreement from last year means that if the U.S. moves forward on climate action, much of the world will follow our lead.

I don’t know about you, but this situation makes me very nervous.

As long as the prospect of effective action on climate seemed remote, sheer despair kept me, and I’m sure many others, comfortably numb — you knew nothing was going to happen, so you just soldiered on.

Now, however, salvation is clearly within our grasp, but it remains all too possible that we’ll manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this is by far the most important issue there is; it, er, trumps even such things as health care, financial reform, and inequality.

So I’m going to be hanging on by my fingernails all through this election. No doubt there will be plenty of entertainment along the way, given the freak show taking place on one side of the aisle. But I won’t forget that the stakes this time around are deadly serious. And neither should you. c.2016 New York Times News Service 2-28-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Radley Balko

Federal Judge: Recording Cops Isn’t Necessarily Protected By The First Amendment

and therefore aren’t protected by the First Amendment.

To support his position, Kearney unconvincingly compares the act of recording the police without some clear articulation that you’re doing so for the purpose of protest or expression to refusing to move along when a police officer is trying to clear a sidewalk or roadway.

-- Judge Yohn’s cogent and exhaustive analysis in Montgomery v. Killingsworth applies a similar test for assessing conduct protected by the First Amendment. As Judge Yohn observed last year, “Peaceful criticism of a police officer performing his duties in a public place is a protected activity under the First Amendment.” Judge Yohn noted, “this protection, however, is not absolute.” Quoting the Supreme Court in Colten v. Kentucky, and as it relates to Fields, Judge Yohn found “conduct in refusing to move on after being directed to do so was not, without more, protected by the First Amendment. “ -- But merely standing still without giving any indication that you’re expressing yourself is quite a bit different than recording police officers. The very act of pushing record on a video camera or the very act of engaging the shutter on a still camera these are expressive actions in and of themselves.

You’re creating a record of what you see around you. When you start and stop recording, the angle and distance at which you put the camera, how you compose the frame - these are all artistic decisions. And artistic expression is protected by Kearney’s opinion goes off the rails when he the First Amendment. Fields even said he chose tries to distinguish these cases from those other to take a snap of about 20 cops gathered outside rulings. First, in citing other 3rd Circuit cases in a house party because, “It was pretty cool, it which courts did find a right to record the police, was like a mob of them, so I was, like, just take he writes: a picture.” It’s hard to see how that isn’t artistic --expression.

Because Fields and Geraci do not adduce evidence their conduct may be construed as But Kearney wants more. In order to find expression of a belief or criticism of police that recording or photographing cops is protected activity, under governing Supreme Court or by the First Amendment, he needs “some other Third Circuit precedent we do not find they expressive conduct” in conjunction with the act exercised a constitutionally protected right for of recording. But he has that. Geraci, the other which they suffered retaliation. This is fatal to plaintiff, was attending a protest. Not only that, their First Amendment retaliation claim.53 We she had been legally trained to observe police for find the citizens videotaping and picture-taking in signs of misconduct. So her decision to record Montgomery, Gaymon, Fleck and even Robinson the police clearly had a purpose, one that even all contained some element of expressive conduct Kearney seems to admit would be protected. His or criticism of police officers and are patently problem seems to be that she didn’t tell the police distinguishable from Fields’ and Geraci’s officers as much. That’s absurd. The whole point activities. of training observers to attend protests or to watch --cops in areas where there have been allegations He makes the same point to distinguish these of abuse is to catch bad cops in the act. Loudly two cases from the rulings by courts in other announcing yourself and your intentions would states and federal circuits. The issue for Kearney defeat the purpose. is that in the two cases before him, the people Kearney does note court opinions finding that arrested were recording the police “without any recordings of police by journalists are protected challenge or criticism.” Therefore, he finds that under the freedom of the press provision of the their recordings weren’t expressive conduct, First Amendment because the recordings are In a bizarre ruling issued last week, federal District Court Judge Mark Kearney ruled that the First Amendment rights of two people were not violated when they were apprehended for attempting to photograph or record police officers.

As far as I know, this is the first time a federal court has not found that recording cops while on duty and in a public setting is protected by the First Amendment. Two federal appeals courts, at least two state supreme courts and a few other federal circuit court judges have all determined otherwise. Some of those decisions found that the right hasn’t been clearly established long enough for those wrongly arrested to overcome the qualified immunity afforded to police officers, but they did find that the right to record exists.

Kearney in this decision rules that no such right exists.

There are two plaintiffs in these cases. One, Richard Fields, is a man arrested for taking a photo of a group of police officers who had gathered outside a private house during a party.

The other, Amanda Geraci, is a woman who was apprehended by an officer in retaliation for recording him. This happened while she was attending a protest as a legal observer.

This was a case of first impression for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, so Kearney wasn’t bound by rulings from state courts or other federal circuits. But he still notes them in his opinion. The 3rd Circuit has found that recording police may be protected by the First Amendment.

part of news-gathering. Kearney dismisses those rulings by noting that neither Geraci or Fields is a member of the press. But what does that mean?

Does one have to work for a newspaper to get First Amendment protection to record the police?

A TV station? Do you have to at least have a blog?

A Twitter account? Geraci was observing police practices at a protest. Why isn’t that considered journalism? Lots of activists have produced important journalism.

The other troubling thing here is that Kearney’s ruling seems to imply that whether of not the First Amendment applies depends on what the police officers see and know - that you must announce that you’re engaging in constitutionally protected conduct in order for them to refrain from violating your rights I don’t know of any other court ruling that requires journalists to announce their intentions while engaging in journalism. To do so would kill off a lot of investigative journalism.

The same goes for most other protected conduct.

But more broadly, it’s a pretty dangerous thing to say that you must explicitly declare your rights in order to have them respected. In both these cases, the plaintiffs were not physically interfering with the police as they photographed or recorded them. It’s difficult to see what public interest is served by allowing the police to apprehend them or to order them to stop. Could an officer demand that you stop looking at him from afar? Could he order you to turn your head as he’s arresting someone? How and why is that any different than demanding that you stop recording him?

Under Kearney’s standard, most of the citizen-shot videos of police abuse and shootings we’ve seen over the past several years would not have been protected by the First Amendment.

In the overwhelming majority of these videos, there’s none of the “expressive conduct” Kearney apparently wants to see from the camera-wielder.

In many of them, the police officers are never made aware that they’re being recorded. That’s how some of these videos were able to catch the officers lying about the incident in subsequent police reports.

I suppose you could argue that recording something as noteworthy as a police shooting or an incident of clear brutality would be self-evidently an act of either expression or news-gathering.

But judging from his opinion, it’s far from clear that Kearney would make this distinction. It’s also hard to see how he could. It would mean that whether or not your decision to record the police is covered by the First Amendment would be dependent on whether the recording itself captures the police violating someone’s rights or doing something newsworthy. Even the courts often disagree over what is and isn’t a violation of someone’s constitutional rights (this ruling itself is as good an example as any). And

Balko continued on page 25

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March 9, 2016

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Stephen Carter

Word Bans At Harvard Won’t Help Racial Justice “The term house master is and will remain a part of the college’s long and proud history,” wrote Michael D. Smith, Harvard University’s dean of arts and sciences, in explaining Wednesday why the proud term was being abolished. Harvard’s houses will henceforth be led by “faculty deans,” a deliciously absurd coinage that I suppose will soon be coming to dormitories at other old colleges. To be fair, Harvard announced late last year that it was searching for alternatives to “master.” Evidently the alumni fought a rearguard action hoping to have the term retained. I imagine that the alumni at Yale University, where I teach, are fighting the same action as they await the university’s decision.

The term “master” has been under fire because it is said to have connotations of the era of slavery.

One can understand this objection without agreeing that it’s time to throw the word overboard. It seems to me to be eminently sensible to purge from our everyday vocabulary actual terms of derogation of various groups, a point that everyone except my beloved Washington professional football team seems to accept.

The same is true for symbols of oppression, which is why most of us cheered when the Confederate flags came down.

Balko continued from page 24

“newsworthiness” is of course a highly subjective standard. You could make a strong argument that both of the events in these two cases - an anti-fracking protest and a 20+ officer police response to a house party - are plenty newsworthy.

The plaintiffs in these cases are represented by the ACLU, so I suspect we’ll see an appeal.

So maybe Kearney’s ruling is a blessing in disguise. In overruling him, the 3rd Circuit would have the opportunity to join the 4th, 9th and 11th circuits in explicitly recognizing a First Amendment right to record on-duty law enforcement officers.

Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.” (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-24-16

often as the term “master” to refer It’s something else again to start to the individual in whom property tossing words overboard because of rights were vested. their potential connotations. “Master” Perhaps more often. is an enormously useful word, whose history, as Smith concedes, has I tested this hypothesis with nothing to do with slavery. Under Google’s Ngram Viewer, which maritime law, vessels have masters. allows searches for text strings in the Chess masters aspire to become millions of books the company has grandmasters. And if bond traders digitized. I limited the search to the collectively are no longer quite the years 1800 to 1865, the end of the “masters of the universe” they once Civil War. Of course we couldn’t get were, the phrase isn’t about to go any useful information by directly away. comparing “master” and “owner,” This is not to say that I am because we would pick up many unsympathetic to students who feel other uses of both words. But we can wounded. Slavery is the original directly compare “slave master” and sin in which the United States was “slave owner.” At almost every point, birthed, and the nation is a very “slave owner” is a more common long way from overcoming either its usage than “slave master.” Around lingering effects or the mythology 1800, the gap between the two was that undergirded it. Human beings small. By 1835, “slave owner” were chattel. Those who were was used more than seven times as enslaved were most certainly owned often as “slave master.” In 1865, by people called their masters. So I the ratio was 3-to-1. Only during a understand the argument against the very brief period around 1806 and word. What I don’t understand is 1807 did “slave master” occur more why the same logic does not apply to frequently. the word “owner.”

This isn’t proof of the hypothesis, but it is evidence. At the very least, Seriously.

As a matter of law, the enslaved there’s enough here to suggest were owned. Ownership was the that anyone who thinks “master” very definition of slavery. And as any was more associated with slavery student of the history will attest, the than “owner” should adduce some term “owner” was used at least as evidence for the proposition.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Harvard has made some horrible mistake, or that colleges that follow suit will somehow have turned their backs on a noble tradition that must be preserved if the academy is to remain a citadel of knowledge. But I worry about our growing tendency to meet protest by leaping for the nearest cosmetic change, rather than asking more fundamental questions whose answers might prove more costly.

These quick and easy acts of verbal substitution allow us to pat ourselves on the back without actually making progress.

As for me, I’ll continue to appreciate the repeated wordplay over the word “master” in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” and I will expect my students to master the law of evidence and contracts. And I’m sure I will get used to pronouncing “faculty dean.”

But I won’t be cheering for making a mangle of the language in the cause of cheap and easy racial justice -- not until somebody explains me how discarding the term “house master” will save a single black life.

Stephen Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a law professor at Yale. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-26-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Francis Wilkinson

When Gun Massacres Are Chalked Up To Bad Luck Writing of the “ethical confusion which overtook American society in the Industrial Age,” Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager wrote of deadly social consequences for which no individuals felt in any way responsible: “These men were caught in the meshes of a business system which had not yet developed a moral code of its own and to which the old codes were irrelevant. The manufacture and sale of impure foods, dangerous drugs, infected milk, poisonous toys, might produce disease or death, but none of those involved in the process -retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, advertisers, corporations, directors or stockholders -- realized that they were guilty of murder.”

A similar confusion -- mystery, really -- hovered over a Connecticut courtroom this week, where parents of children massacred in their classrooms wondered how 20 children and six adults could be murdered in their school without anyone being in any way responsible for the deaths.

Families of victims are suing Freedom Group, the parent company of the manufacturer of the Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle that was used in the assault. The New York Times described the gun as “similar to weapons used by troops in Afghanistan.”

The families’ rough legal theory is that if you design, market and sell a military-style weapon intended to kill many people as swiftly as possible, you bear some responsibility if someone uses the weapon precisely as intended. Adam Lanza, the murderer, fired 154 shots in a handful of minutes before taking his own life.

“This is an instrument of war designed for the battlefield that is marketed and sold to the general public,” said Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was murdered. “We’re just asking for accountability.”

In the U.S., that’s an extravagant request, bordering on ridiculous.

Gun manufacturers are uniquely free of liability for their products due to a 2005 act of Congress, so the families seem unlikely to prevail in court.

The Bushmaster was only one of the tools Lanza used that day. Before murdering Barden’s son and others, an official state report said, “the shooter used a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle to shoot and kill his mother in her bed.” The manufacturer of the evocatively named “Savage Mark” likewise bears no responsibility for savage consequences.

Neither do retailers. According to federal law, anyone who can pass a background check has a right to buy a gun. It doesn’t matter if you’re psychotic yourself or merely enabling a psychotic offspring. The retailers who sold the guns did nothing wrong; they can’t be blamed.

Nancy Lanza, the murderer’s mother, isn’t around to take the rap. But by the standards of American law and gun culture she might be judged similarly blameless. She legally purchased her arsenal of rifles, handguns and ammunition.

Likewise, she broke no law when she left all that firepower readily accessible to her deranged son,

whom she had encouraged to familiarize himself any case, he, too, is dead. He can offer no apology, with firearms by joining her at shooting ranges. and society can exact no penalty, for the lives he stole.

Indeed, by some lights, Nancy Lanza was the So the manufacturers are not to blame. The very picture of responsibility. “Both the mother retailers are not to blame. The murdered parent and the shooter took National Rifle Association is not responsible. And, ultimately, even the (NRA) safety courses,” the state report says. “The deceased killer himself cannot be held to account. mother thought it was good to learn responsibility As the mournful parents are likely to learn in that for guns.”

Connecticut courtroom, according to American That leaves only the killer. Surely we can all law and custom there’s simply nothing to be done agree that this troubled 20-year-old man deserves about a vicious massacre of children. It happens in blame for his crime. But, of course, the killer was a flash, like lightning. And like lighting, it issues also obviously, egregiously insane. With no moral from a dark, mysterious place beyond the reach of compass to guide him and no capacity to restrain human agency. the raging demons in his mind, how can Adam (c) 2016, Bloomberg View Lanza be held accountable for grabbing hold of the 2-23-16 arsenal placed so tantalizingly within his reach? In

Leonid Bershidsky

In Pro-Gun Texas, A Candidate Needs Firepower

As Alfonso Sanchez, an instructor at 360 Tactical Training in Houston, gave me my first handgun shooting lesson with a Glock 17, talk turned to the candidates in the 2016 elections.

Texas votes on Super Tuesday, and guns are going to be an important issue in the state that will provide the Republican winner with the most delegates on March 1.

Sanchez, 28, who hadn’t voted in 2008 or 2012 since he’d been deployed in U.S. Navy operations against drug smugglers, dismissed the Democrats out of hand. Hillary Clinton, he says, ought not to be allowed even to run given how she handled classified information; if Sanchez voted this time around, he says it would be to keep Clinton out.

As for the Republicans, Ted Cruz seems to have a decent stance on firearms from Sanchez’s point of view, but he isn’t sure about Marco Rubio.

“He owns a Taurus,” Sanchez’s colleague contributed to the conversation through the open door of the shooting range’s office. “Ah well, that’s a crap gun,” the instructor shook his head.

“Brazilian. It’ll go bang, of course, but it’s just a bad design.”

So much for Rubio.

Texas, where big urban areas lack a strong gun culture, doesn’t have the nation’s highest gun ownership rate -- Alaska does, followed by some other sparsely populated rural states. Yet 35.7 percent of Texans own firearms, more than the national average of 29.1 percent. Also, it’s a conservative state, and even people who don’t own guns often feel strongly about their right to do so.

A gun dealer in the Houston area, to whom I will refer simply as David since he asked me not to mention his last name or his store, recounts how the store saw a spike in demand for assault rifles while the Democrats still controlled the Senate, soon after President Barack Obama’s election

in 2008: “People thought this might be their last chance to buy one.”

“Second Amendment issues will play an important part in this election in Texas,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate professor at the University of Houston. “Candidates will say similar things, and it’ll matter how vehemently they say them.”

The candidates are already at it. Cruz, expected to do well in Texas since he’s local, tells his audiences that a liberal president will pick a Supreme Court judge who will reverse the court’s decision in favor of individual gun ownership and only make it possible for members of a militia.

Donald Trump says if Parisians had been allowed to buy guns freely, fewer people would have died in the Nov. 13 terror attacks. Rubio, the owner of the wrong gun, is less vehement than the others; but he too says gun control laws have proven ineffective.

Both Cruz and Trump overstate their case.

According to D. Theodore Rave of the University of Houston Law Center, it is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will overturn the relatively recent District of Columbia vs. Heller ruling that affirmed individual gun ownership even if a liberal jurist takes the place of Antonin Scalia. And though Texas has some of the mildest gun laws in the U.S. -- the Brady Campaign gave it the lowest possible grade in 2013 -- people entering a concert venue like le Bataclan in Paris, where 89 people were killed, wouldn’t have been allowed to carry guns here.

Yet David the gun dealer sees allies in Trump and Cruz. To him, gun freedoms are the most divisive issue in the U.S. since slavery. He swears by law-abiding citizens’ ability to carry weapons.

“Criminals are looking for victims, and they

Bershidsky continued on page 27

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

27

Sue Klebold

It Was Far Too Easy For My Son To Buy Guns I am not an expert on guns.

I have never owned one, and my husband and I never kept one in the house. So when it comes to gun safety and reducing the number of mass shootings that take place in our country, I would be the last person to suggest there are easy answers. But I do have a tragically personal vantage point on the issue.

Nearly 17 years ago, my son Dylan, and his friend Eric Harris, walked into Columbine High School carrying an array of firearms and explosives.

They killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others.

It was an incomprehensible tragedy that I have lived with every day of my life since. Why did Dylan do it? How could this have happened?

These questions have consumed my every waking moment.

Gun rights advocates, and many legislators, say that the solution to stopping horrific shooting tragedies such as Columbine or Sandy Hook

Bershidsky continued from page 26

don’t go where people may be armed, “ he says. “That’s why they shoot up schools and not police stations.”

In his line of work, David says, he meets a growing number of worried people. His shop has a hunting specialization, but more and more people are coming in to buy handguns for self-defense, worried about incidents such as the San Bernardino shooting. David sounds mildly paranoid himself.

“I went into this army and navy supply store in my area,” he said.

“There’s a picture of an imam on the wall, and the owner wears what I would describe as Pakistani dress.

And all the prices are so high that I have to wonder, is this really a business or a front for something?”

As someone living in Germany, with its tough gun laws, I find it hard to see eye-to-eye with him. In our part of the world, people don’t get shot up as often as in the U.S. I can’t even buy the argument that where one can’t go into a store and buy a handgun for less than $300, murderers use other means.

In Germany only 24 percent of homicides are committed with firearms, and in neighboring Austria only 10 percent, compared with 60 percent in the U.S., according to the United Nations Office on Drugs

or Charleston or Santa Barbara or San Bernardino or Roseburg is not to restrict or regulate our access to firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but to focus more attention on mental health. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, they claim. In the tragic instance of a mass shooting, guns are merely the instruments of a disturbed mind. And in fact, the overwhelming majority of gun owners act responsibly and safely. They would never fire on an innocent person, much less a child in a school. By focusing on guns, gun rights activists say, we miss the real challenge we need to address: identifying and getting help for those at risk because they are not brainhealthy.

And that is the approach I have taken in thinking about Columbine and my son. A number of factors brought Dylan to Columbine High School that morning to hurt his and Crime. More importantly, the German homicide rate is just 0.8 percent per 100,000 residents, less than one-fifth of the Texan rate. It’s much harder to stick someone with a knife or hit them with a brick than to fire a gun in anger. Countries with comparable per capita economic output have fewer murders if they have fewer guns.

It’s harder to argue with pro-gun Texans about U.S. gun laws, though.

Since the Second Amendment is sacred like the rest of the U.S. constitution, and it’s politically impossible to attack it, especially in conservative states, authorities are constantly coming up with nuisance measures that are hard to square with common sense.

“Limits on the magazine size don’t solve the problem of violence,” David says. “It doesn’t take 32 bullets to kill someone; one will do it.”

Much has been made out of the difference between concealed carry and open carry. Texas allowed the latter on Jan. 1, 2016. I asked Alfonso Sanchez, who carries a gun on his belt, to demonstrate the difference.

He pulled his T-shirt over the gun: That’s concealed carry. Then he pushed it back: open carry. I couldn’t help laughing: It was as silly a the “open container” regulations that make it acceptable to drink alcohol in public from a bottle wrapped in a

fellow classmates. There were the deep depression and suicidal thoughts that he had been living with and that I was unaware of. There was his distorted belief that he was unloved and unlovable. There was the bullying that made him feel like an outsider at Columbine to an extent I will never know. There was his friendship with Eric and the ways each reinforced the anger and pain of the other.

After spending the past decade interviewing experts, analyzing Dylan’s journals, talking with my family members, revisiting the days and years leading up to Columbine and working with others in suicide prevention, I realize there were signs, however unclear, that I might have recognized, knowing what I know now. But it was only after my son took part in what at the time was the worst school shooting in history that I - or anyone else close to Dylan -

paper bag.

Both Sanchez and David proudly told me that they don’t know anyone who carries a gun openly. “Texans are polite people,” David says.

“They don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.” I feel equally uncomfortable, though, knowing the guy whose parking space I’ve just stolen may pack a gun under his jacket.

had any idea that there was anything wrong with him. Before Columbine, I would have told you with absolute certainty that I would know if there were anything amiss with my son, and even more so if anything were seriously wrong. But that raises an important question with regard to gun violence: If there are no flashing neon signs to alert us when someone needs help, how can we know who is and who is not mentally stable enough to be responsibly armed?

I’m convinced that by recognizing the signs that a child is struggling early on, we can get our children the help they need - before another Columbine takes place. So I am firmly in the camp of those who say we must focus more attention and resources on those who suffer from mental-health issues. I applaud the fact that since Columbine, a growing number of schools are making strides in identifying when kids are in crisis.

Klebold continued on page 31

As in other areas important in the current election, such as health care and education, the only solution might be to start from scratch, disarming the population and imposing big fines on gun makers for every crime committed using their products -- the same treatment tobacco companies have received.

Like other radical reforms, however, this one lies beyond the realm of the politically possible.

Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the Emanuel church in Charleston, shot last year at his church along with eight other people by a white supremacist, pushed for tougher gun control as a South Carolina legislator.

His successor, Betty Deas Clark, told me last week: “Since it was a gunman who killed our people, I am, of course, worried about guns.

But I feel it is my priority to provide healing for the congregation.”

That may well be the right approach: Campaigning for an extra obstacle to gun ownership here and there is not going to eliminate the danger that forces Clark to have an ex-Marine shadowing her every step.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.

I’m not sure the kind of random restrictions that are often proposed and sometimes enacted in the U.S. can help reduce the country’s high murder rates. According to the FBI, Texas has 4.4 homicides per 100,000 residents, and so does California with the toughest gun laws in the land and an A-rating from the Brady Campaign. Waiting periods and additional background checks are unlikely to make much of a difference: The U.S. is so saturated with guns that anyone who wants one will get one.

The palliative gun control practiced and preached in the U.S. today is an example of the kind of government dysfunction that gives populists such a wide opening. No wonder Trump and Cruz, who promise to leave gun owners alone, are scoring points: People feel they are better able to (c) 2016, Bloomberg View sort out their security issues without 2-24-16 help from the government.

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Noah Feldman

Congress Is Best To Decide The Apple-FBI Case The fight over whether Apple should write new software to unlock the iPhone used by the San Bernardino, California, killer may be poised to go to Congress -- and that’s the first good news I’ve heard about the confrontation.

The case raises profound matters of public policy with constitutional, domestic and international ramifications. A magistrate judge working for the federal district court isn’t the right person to decide these issues, nor would higher courts be in a good position to make wise judgments on appeal. What we need here is a law -- one that reflects, to the extent possible, the legitimate competing values in play.

The reason the magistrate is even involved derives from the misleadingly simple nature of the problem. When a federal criminal investigation is under way, magistrates are deputed by federal district judges to issue warrants. In this instance, the Department of Justice asked the magistrate to issue an order to Apple to enable it to unlock Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone.

The magistrate, Sheri Pym, complied, ordering Apple to offer “reasonable technical assistance” in the form of a workaround that would “bypass or disable the auto-erase function”; allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to submit passcodes to the phone electronically; and “ensure that … software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts.”

Then the magistrate got technical about the technical assistance. She specified that Apple could give the FBI “a signed iPhone Software file, recovery bundle, or other Software Image File (‘SIF’) … that will load and run from Random Access Memory and will not modify the iOS on the actual phone.” The SIF would be “coded by Apple with a unique identifier of the phone” and “loaded via Device Firmware Upgrade (‘DFU’) mode.”

You don’t need to know what SIF or DFU mean to understand that the magistrate was directing Apple to code, if necessary, and provide the software to achieve the government’s goal of opening the iPhone.

Apple is thus correct when it says that it isn’t being ordered to use some existing, proprietary mechanism to open the phone. It’s being required to code a new system that could then be used in the future to open other iPhones subject to court order.

And there’s no reason to think that only American court orders would apply. Every other country where Apple phones are used -- which is to say, everywhere on earth -- could then require Apple to comply and open phones under its own laws.

The standards for government access to secrets are pretty different in different countries. By complying, Apple would be assuring that it will be in the business of helping governments, including autocratic ones, access users’ phones and the data that’s kept on them.

There’s also the risk that Apple’s new code

could leak. No matter how closely that secret might be guarded, it’s very possible that it could be stolen by others, including foreign governments interested in espionage.

weighing major domestic and international public policy consequences. At stake is not only the FBI’s interest in justice but also users’ privacy interests and, yes, Apple’s business interests, which despite a denial from Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook are a legitimate concern.

In the U.S. system, Congress is supposed to make difficult public policy decisions. Before you laugh and dismiss Congress as incompetent, remember that it doesn’t have to be great at deciding contested policy questions. It just has to be better than the executive branch or the courts.

Yes, lobbying Congress is easier than lobbying a court. But that’s part of the structure of democracy, or at least it’s supposed to be.

Congress should do more than hold hearings on this particular iPhone. It should take action to clarify the law and decide once and for all whether the American people want courts to be able to order private companies to code workarounds to give law enforcement access to private material. If our democracy can’t decide that, we’re in serious trouble.

Given these significant domestic and international implications, why didn’t the magistrate think twice? The answer is that magistrates are used to following standard legal protocols. When the government lawfully asks for a warrant with probable cause, the magistrate grants it. The government’s request was lawful here, measured by the ordinary yardstick of suspicion. So the magistrate gave the government what it wanted.

As written, the laws governing the granting of warrants don’t provide sufficient latitude for a court to weigh the dangers of requiring Apple to write new code against the corresponding gains for policing and national security. Sure, the federal district court or the court of appeals could construct such a balancing test and work through it. Even the U.S. Supreme Court might be capable of such an analysis.

However, courts that are pretty good at (c) 2016, Bloomberg View interpreting statutes or applying the Constitution 2-23-16 generally aren’t very good at identifying and

Clarence Page

Should FBI Force Apple To Hack Its Own Phones?

In the final Republican presidential primary debate before Super Tuesday, all five of the candidates took the FBI’s side in the bureau’s dispute with Apple over a terrorist’s cellphone that the feds want to decrypt. But do the candidates really know what they’re supporting?

The comments they gave, crackling with applause lines, caused me to agree with my millennial son’s observation, “If you want to know how iPhones work, don’t turn to a politician.”

At issue is an Apple iPhone that was used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.

The FBI, which is investigating the case, has a warrant for the information on this phone, but they can’t read it.

Its data is locked and encrypted behind a password that Apple says is designed to be too complex even for Apple to crack.

Apple has cooperated with the FBI in providing all the phone’s data that was on a cloud server.

But Apple can’t crack the encryption on the phone itself without inventing a new operating system, they say.

So, guess what? The FBI obtained a court order that goes where no court order ever has gone before. It orders Apple to invent that new system.

And that’s just fine with the Grand Old Party’s presidential candidates.

“Apple initially came out saying we’re being ordered to create a backdoor to an encryption

device,” Sen. Marco Rubio said. “That is not accurate.”

No, said Rubio, they only want Apple to “disable the self-destruct mode on one iPhone” in the entire world.

“Apple doesn’t want to do it,” he said, “because they think it hurts their brand. Well, let me tell you, their brand is not superior to the national security of the United States of America.”

The other candidates agreed and polls show, so do most other Americans. “I think allowing terrorists to get way with things is bad for America,” said Ben Carson, showing a keen grasp of the obvious.

But on closer examination, the ambitions of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies reach far beyond one cellphone.

Apple’s attorney has released details of a dozen instances in recent months in which the federal government sought data from Apple devices by invoking the All Writs Act of 1789, the same law the feds are citing in the San Bernardino cellphone case.

An Apple spokesman told Chicago Tribune reporter Meg Graham that the company has received some 10,000 requests within the past year and has complied with 80 percent of them.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance says his office has 175 phones linked to various

Page continued on page 29

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

29

Faye Flam

Why Apple’s Fight With The FBI Is So Hard To Referee The fight between Apple and the U.S. government comes down to a technical enigma wrapped in layers of emotional debate.

On the surface, people seem to be drawn to opposing sides depending on feelings: fear of terrorism, or suspicion of government, distrust of corporations.

But the crux of the disagreement comes down to a technical question, not a gut feeling: whether it’s possible for Apple to disable its own security system to break into a deceased terrorist’s iPhone without jeopardizing the security of all iPhones.

Since Apple software is proprietary, the answer to the technical question remains shrouded in uncertainty. Still, decisions need to be made, and good policy can be formulated in uncertain situations, just as health authorities had to respond to the Zika outbreak though little was known about its potential health consequences.

In the Apple case, decisions will affect the way we balance the fight against terrorism with concerns over the erosion of privacy in a world increasingly dependent on smart phones to track and guide people’s lives.

The phone in question belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook, who, along with his wife, shot 14 people in San Bernardino last December.

Unlocking it may not sound like a hard problem for the technical wizards at Apple, but computer scientists and cryptography experts say it may indeed be impossible,

Page continued from page 28

cases that it cannot open because of encryption.

Calling cellphones “the only warrant-proof consumer products in American history,” Vance said the choice of whether to keep something encrypted should not be left up to Apple.

In other words, don’t expect law enforcement to back away after cracking “only one phone.” Lawenforcement requests for access to phones are already common.

Whether you call the technology a “backdoor” or not, once the precedent is set in court, there is no end to the number of phones that

information over the Internet with reasonable safety, said Indrajit Ray, a computer scientist from Colorado State University.

In a simple example, he said, imagine the formula A + B = C. A is your secret number. B is a number only known to a colleague you want to receive your secret message. Your colleague sees C and subtracts to discover A, but a hacker, picking up just C, would have to guess every possible value of B to get to your secret. If C is If not for such a limit, the FBI, 1,000, that might not be so hard, or hackers for that matter, could but if it’s 20 billion or trillion, it use what’s been called a brute force gets unwieldy. approach to try every combination of six numerals until they hit on In the real world, encryption the right one. There are a total of systems are more complicated 1,000,000 such combinations, and but the idea is the same - some on average it should take about half operation shuffles your secret a million guesses before the system numbers and only those holding a is cracked. key can unshuffle them. To keep That’s a lot of tapping for a the key safe from brute force, it has person who steals a phone, but not to be big. for a fast computer, said Cornell Apple can’t rely on large numbers University computer scientist to keep passcodes safe, because it Steven Wicker. Most computer would mean using more than 40 science grad students could create digits. “It’s a human factor”, said such a system to enter perhaps Cornell’s Wicker. People would 1,000 possible passwords per refuse to do it or would choose second, he said. That would hit strings of a single digit, thus upon to the right one in 15 minutes defeating the purpose. or less, depending on luck.

So instead, iPhones include a Code makers stay ahead of code security option to erase data after breakers by making strings of 10 incorrect attempts to guess a characters so long that it would take password. To disable it will mean an eternity to try even a fraction of writing new operating system the possibilities. software. This is what the experts The fact that codes can be made are calling a back door. to withstand brute force attacks, at “A back door is an intentional least for the next few million years, weakness in the system that allows allows people to send credit card a group that’s in the know to get in,”

which is what the company claimed in a letter to customers issued Feb. 16. Apple set up the security system so even its creators can’t break into a customer’s phone without creating new software to make it possible.

The hard part is bypassing a feature that deletes sensitive data if someone types in an incorrect password more than 10 times. That’s important because it’s surprisingly easy to guess a six-digit password.

could be decrypted in coming years.

No wonder Apple CEO Tim Cook calls the creation of a program for the FBI to unlock an iPhone the “software equivalent of cancer.”

Once it is created, it is virtually impossible in this world of hackers and malware to keep it out of the hands of crooks and tyrants -- such as China and other regimes where one’s political views and other cellphone secrets can lead to prison or worse.

And, besides, once the government has permission to order a private company to invent a new product, one wonders what else can the government order a private company to do?

A growing consensus of hightech executives, law enforcement officials and politicians prefers to see solutions through legislation, not the courts. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, are proposing a digital security commission for that purpose.

Good idea. With the future of digital communications, as well as personal liberties, at stake, turning to laws as ancient as the All Writs Act of 1789 for guidance makes as much sense as a horse and buggy on the Indianapolis 500 track.

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

(C) 2013 Clarence Page 2-28-16

said Wicker. Apple doesn’t already have a back door into iPhones, and so, the company claims, one would have to be created. “They’re being asked to create a tool that could potentially break into any iPhone,” Wicker said.

Ray, the computer scientist from Colorado State, compared it to a situation in which there’s a secure storage facility with no master key.

Imagine that the FBI wanted to get into one of the lockers, he said, but only the owner knows how the locks work. Can the owner create a crowbar that can only open one locker but is useless for all the others?

It’s hard for anyone outside Apple to know whether it’s possible to make such a specialized singlelocker crowbar, said Ray, since the company’s software codes are secret. And yet, people on both sides of the debate tend to be sure, either that it is or is not possible.

Good decision-making in cases like this rests on understanding the boundaries of current knowledge and resisting the temptation to fill in the gaps with assumptions.

There’s a lot at stake, with the explosion of smart phones now tracking our whereabouts, our interests, health data, contacts and appointments. “It’s a permanent record of our daily lives,” said Wicker, and it’s potentially available to both commercial interests and the federal government. “A lot has gone on without public debate,” he said.

The experts laud Apple for prompting that long-needed public discussion.

Court documents unsealed this week revealed that the FBI has made similar requests of Apple in nine other cases.

This is a good test case to start considering where we want to draw the line between the need to helping crime fighters and the risk of a future in which we can’t keep much of anything secret.

Faye Flam writes about science, mathematics and medicine. She has been a staff writer for Science magazine and a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is author of “The Score: How the Quest for Sex has Shaped the Modern Man.” (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-26-16

30

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

Barry Ritholtz

Why Don’t More Women Hold Top Jobs In Finance?

Today I’m going to pose a simple question that has been asked any number of times: Why are there so few women in senior positions in finance?

This question has come my way a lot. People have asked why we don’t have more women as guests on the Masters in Business podcast on Bloomberg. We have had Sheila Bair, Liz Ann Sonders, Michelle Meyers and Dambisa Moyo and this weekend is Saru Jayaramen. But there are far more males than female guests, and even though more women are scheduled in the coming months, it’s still nowhere close to 50-50.

That sort of underrepresentation is common in senior positions at financial firms small and large alike. Some of this may be a legacy of what has not only been a male dominated society, but it probably also reflects an industry that is particularly resistant to change. (Disclosure: At my firm, two of the 13 employees are women, though neither is on our investment committee.)

Why is this so?

The rough answer is obvious -- there are simply not a lot of women in senior positions in all of business, and finance to a great extent mirrors that reality. There are, however, signs of change for the better, which we will get to later.

Some data first.

A Morningstar study last year found that: “Less than 10% of all U.S. fund managers are women; women exclusively run about 2% of the industry’s assets and open-end funds. By contrast, men exclusively run about 74% of the industry’s assets and 78% of funds, with mixedgender teams accounting for the balance.”

The numbers are similarly lopsided for various niches of the financial industry: Harvard Business School research on private-equity, real-estate and venture-capital firms shows the percentage of female senior investment professionals is “stuck in the single digits.” But it’s much more than just the senior executives -- women make up only 17 percent to 23 percent of all employees.

That’s true across the universe of investing firms, as well as the broad array of companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

According to Catalyst, there are now only 20 women chief executives of S&P 500 companies, down from 24 in 2015. CNN/Money notes “only 14.2% of the top five leadership positions” were held by women at these companies. Last year, women made up 17.9 percent of the directors of Fortune 1,000 companies. The number of female certified financial planners appears to have plateaued at about 23 percent.

Meanwhile, studies by Credit Suisse Research Institute have shown that increasing women on corporate boards is associated with better financial performance. McKinsey & Co. and Catalyst have reached similar conclusions.

While there is a potential correlation issue

here -- do well-managed firms have more women on their boards, or do women on boards make firms better managed? -- the data nonetheless are striking. CSRI reviewed 2,360 companies globally during the course of six years; their analysis found that it was “on average better to have invested in corporates with women on their management boards than in those without . . . companies with one or more women on the board have delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing, better average growth and higher price/book value multiples.”

testosterone led to more frequent trading and an increased risk of losses.”

There are some encouraging signs: According to recent data, women now hold 20 percent of the board seats at the largest companies, up from 15 percent a decade ago. QuickTake Women on Boards And there is a strengthening movement to increase female board representation: 20/20 WOB seeks to have females make up of 20 percent of directors of all companies by 2020.

Perhaps even more ambitious is girlswhoinvest. org, which aims to have “30% of the world’s investable capital managed by women by 2030.”

The true, though unsatisfying, answer to my original question is: There are so few women in senior positions in finance because there have always been few women in finance. I know, because I’ve tried so hard to hire more of them.

But the numbers are changing, and that’s all for the better.

Barry Ritholtz, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management.

He is a consultant at and former chief executive officer for FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm.

And it’s more than just public companies -- in the actively-managed fund business, female managers tend to outperform their male peers. Several academic studies conclude that women have better performance -- on both an absolute and a risk-adjusted basis -- than their male counterparts do . (Note that some studies in Europe haven’t found a gender performance difference.)

Men also trade more frequently, according to this study from the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, and as we all know excessive trading racks up fees that eat away at returns. Another study by a former Goldman Sachs trader reached a similar (c) 2016, Bloomberg View conclusion and found that “higher levels of 2-24-16

Ruth Gadebusch

Sybil Ludington? Betty Zane?

Do you know these women? Of course not, because this nation has not been nearly so zealous recording women’s history as that of men.

Every American school child knows about Paul Revere and his midnight ride. But few ever hear of Sybil Ludington and even fewer know of Betty Zane. Sybil Ludington’s horseback ride in the dark of night--that same night--served the same purpose as that of Paul Revere and was nearly twice as long as his. Furthermore, she was only sixteen!

When natives attacked a frontier fort in Virginia, it was teenager Betty Zane who saved the day by making a daring sprint to obtain essential gunpowder for the settlers. Somehow she has been overlooked in our history books.

It is such voids that the National Women’s History Museum seeks to fill. The museum is currently working to get he blessings of Congress to build a museum on the one remaining site on the National Mall. In the meantime materials are being gathered. Videos are available (nwhm. org/online-exhibits/stem/index.html)telling the story of these women and many others such as Maria Mitchell’s discovery of a comet in 1847, the first in American science.

Almost everyone knows of Susan B. Anthony and associate her with the women’s vote; however, she was not even at that famous

Seneca Falls, New York, conference in 1848 that kicked off the seventy two year fight for that vote. Almost as well known for their efforts are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Carrie Chapman Catt, but it is the thousands and thousands of unsung heroines who brought the quest to fruition.

Victoria Woodhull addressed the House Judiciary Committee in 1871 arguing that the 14th amendment included women. She also offered her services at a candidate for the Presidency.

In 1853 Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis edited the first newspaper of the women’s rights movement. She declared it to be “A paper Devoted to the Elevation of Women.” Ida Wells Barnett is better known to us as a journalist. In a later era Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman had to write under the name of “Nellie Bly” because it was unseemly for a female journalist to use her own name.

Born and raised in the slave-holding South, sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke were among the first to speak for the abolition of slavery.

Such speaking was acceptable so long as the audience was comprised of women but became controversial when men began to attend.

It is women such as these being ignored in

Gadebusch continued on page 31

Liberal Opinion Week

March 9, 2016

31

Colbert King

Why We Celebrate Black History Month We are in the waning hours of African American History Month the time set aside each year to reflect on black struggles and sacrifices to achieve America’s promise.

My recognition of African American contributions began in the 1940s with annual celebrations of Negro History Week at Stevens Elementary School in my West End/Foggy Bottom community.

Our nation’s capital is also where I experienced firsthand America’s shame.

Liberty Baptist Sunday school taught me the Ten Commandments.

Civil authority in the city taught me the others.

Among them: Thou shalt not attend Grant Elementary School on G Street NW, which was for white children only. Thou shalt not attempt to enter the Circle Theater at 21st and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, where only whites were allowed.

Thou shalt never think about dining downtown.

Thou can purchase sodas and sandwiches at the drugstore at the corner of 25th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, but thou shalt not sit and eat. Thou must stand at the end of the counter and wait patiently to be recognized.

Ah, Washington of my youth a place and time when skin color

Gadebusch continued from page 30 our history books that inspired the designation of March as Women’s History Month. The 8th has also been named International Women’s Day. At the very least it is a time to focus on the role women have played in the development of our nation.

Obviously, all that can be done in one column is to cite a few that hopefully will generate an interest in readers to research the contributions of the many others. We await the time when that National Women’s History Museum stands on the National Mall in the shadows of the many that tell the history of the various groups that make up our society.

Even more hopeful is that by the time March 2017 roles around we shall be celebrating our first woman President of the United States of America. That would be history making!

2-27-16

determined where you lived, attended school, worshiped and worked and how much you got paid.

I learned that lesson as a teenager looking for part-time work. Pick up the Jan. 3, 1960, edition of The Post and what do you see?: “BOYS-WHITE Age 14 to 18. To assist Route manager full or parttime. Must be neat in appearance.

Apply 1346 Conn. Ave. NW.” “DRIVERS (TRUCK) Colored, for trash routes, over 25 years of age; paid vacation, year-around work; must have excellent driving record. Apply . . . 1601 W St., N.E.” “STUDENTS Boys, white, 14 yrs. and over, jobs immediately available. Apply . . . 724 9th St., N.W.” Simply stated: If you’re black, git back.

In our anger and humiliation, we turned to Negro History Week to celebrate black achievers such as Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Charles R. Drew, Matthew Henson, Ralph Bunche and Joe Louis.

Even as we annually paid homage to our black champions and their victories, we remained in the vise grip of segregation.

From a 1948 “Segregation in Washington” report: “Only 30

Klebold continued from page 27

But much more needs to be done.

percent of the residents of the District of Columbia are Negroes,” the report said. “But Negroes have 70 percent of the slum residents.”

It was no accident, said Wendell E. Pritchett of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who explained in a 2005 paper how the system functioned.

“This system of segregation was imposed by powerful interests, particularly those in the real estate sector,” he wrote. “The 1948 Washington Real Estate Board Code of Ethics stated that ‘no property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised or offered to colored people.’ “ “Segregation was maintained by residents’ associations, which had organized into the powerful Federation of Citizens’ Associations that policed the city’s racial borders,” Pritchett noted, adding: “The result was that blacks were forced to pay higher rents in the limited areas to which they had access, and in these areas housing was significantly inferior.”

Pritchett continued: “The damage caused by segregation was exacerbated, the [1948] report concluded, by the on-going urban renewal program that was clearing many formerly poor black areas for middle-class housing restricted to whites. Of the 30,000 new units built during the 1940s, just 200 were available to blacks.” decision-making? Is our right to bear arms so vital to what it means to be an American that there can be no limit on those rights whatsoever, whether raising the legal age at which one can purchase a gun, as we did with the drinking age or conducting more extensive background checks or restricting access to assault weapons designed for the battlefield?

Again, the issues are challenging, and both gun rights advocates and gun-control advocates have valid points of view. I only know that every night as I go to bed, I can’t help but see the face of my son and the faces of the 13 people he and Eric killed and wonder what might have been.

Sue Klebold is author of “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.”

Having said that, I still cannot help but believe that Dylan and Eric would not have been able to take the lives of so many if they had not had such easy access to guns. As I later learned, Dylan and Eric - both of whom were minors - secretly attended a gun show where they bought the shotguns they would use in the massacre and met a young man who sold them a TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol.

Is our right to gun ownership under the Second Amendment so absolute that we cannot, at the very least, restrict access to certain kinds of weapons to protect the most vulnerable among us - especially teenagers, whose judgment at the best of times is compromised by (c) 2016, The Washington Post hormones, impulsivity and immature 2-27-16

Today’s millennials are not pioneers. Gentrification of the District of Columbia got underway decades ago.

Why do some of us celebrate African American History Month with moist eyes?

Return in time to the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Third Street NW in the 1830s. See that brick federal building with its hipped roof, dormer windows and stone keystones? It’s called the St. Charles Hotel.

It has a special feature.

In the basement are six 30-footlong arched cells, with heavy iron doors and iron rings embedded in the walls. It’s a slave pen.

Look down at the sidewalk. See the recessed grilles to provide light and ventilation for the confined slaves.

St. Charles is where the Southern planters stayed when they came to Washington to sell their slave property.

A few blocks away, at the southwestern corner of Fourth and G streets NW, stands the Washington jail. That’s where runaway slaves were confined. Until emancipation, all slaves were required to obey the curfew law. Getting found on the streets of Washington after sundown without written permission from the master was a one-way ticket to jail. The owner had to be notified to appear before the warden to identify his slaves and pay a fine to reclaim them.

From being chained in the basement to abolition, marches, legal assaults against injustice, the White House, the mayor’s suite, the halls of Congress, the faculty lounge, the judge’s chambers, the corporate boardroom, the pulpit, the Officers Club and the editor’s desk.

That’s what and why we celebrate today. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-26-16

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