Month: December 2013

Frank Schaeffer is shrill, but I take his main point. I have often felt the same way. Yet, I have two problems with his diatribe. First, when you present the way the president has been treated as a figurative lynching, you disallow people to disagree with his decisions and policies in almost any way. It’s as if criticizing how he handled the first debt ceiling fiasco is the equivalent of criticizing a man’s diction while his neck is being fitted in a noose. What you really ought to be doing is racing to his defense before he gets killed.

The second problem I have is that it puts too much emphasis on race. Personally, I remember the 1990’s, and I remember how Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of murder when one of their closest friends couldn’t hack life in the White House and the mean editorials in the Wall Street Journal, and he decided to take his own life. That’s some cold stuff right there. I remember how Kenneth Starr pursued the president, like Clinton was Moby Dick and he was Captain Ahab, until he nailed him on less than Al Capone’s tax evasion charge. I remember when the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, actually impeached the president over something many of them were doing themselves.

No doubt, race plays a big part in the way people feel about and treat the president, but you need to subtract everything the Republicans did to Clinton and see what’s left over before you can determine what’s racism and what’s just Republicans freaking out about a Democrat being in their White House. Unless you want to argue that the GOP lynched Bill Clinton, too, “lynching” is probably not the best descriptor of the opposition Obama has faced.

As for white liberals and liberal commentators, no doubt there has been quite a bit of inappropriate idealism and myopia and silly white privilege and expressions of first world problems and lack of realism and misplacing of blame. But being stupid or wrong doesn’t equate to being part of a lynch mob.

It’s better to keep it simple and recognize two things.

First, the country could elect Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia president and the Republicans would treat the Democrats’ most conservative senator as though he were advocating a communist revolution. This seems to be an essential tool in the GOP’s political tool-kit and it will be used completely irrespectively of how the Democrat actually behaves.

Second, that people blame the president when there is gridlock much more than they blame the people who won’t compromise. This is because most people do not properly understand the limitations on the office of the president’s power. And, so, you will get even somewhat savvy political commentators saying stupid things like the president could get more cooperation if he just invited more of his opponents over for dinner.

The lesson is, the GOP will go crazy anytime a Democrat is in the Oval Office, and they will not be properly punished for it by the electorate. This is a seemingly immutable law of American politics, somewhat akin to the law that says that Republican presidents will run up huge deficits and then the party will turn into deficit scolds the moment they are out of the White House.

Dan Balz has a nice article up at the Washington Post that takes a look at the difference between states that are governed by a Republican governor and legislature, and states that are governed by a Democratic governor and legislature. One-party rule is very high by historical standards, with “37 of the 50 states…under unified party control.” This creates a bit of a laboratory for comparing and contrasting the results of two radically different governing philosophies. In Democratic states, budget cuts are mixed with revenue increases, women’s rights are protected, unions are not assaulted, gay marriage is legalized, and some gun control measures are possible. In Republican states, taxes are slashed along with services, women’s rights are restricted, unions are under attack, gay marriage is not legalized, and gun rights are bolstered rather than brought into any kind of sane balance.

So, if this phenomenon of “high unified party control” governance offers us the chance to run an experiment that tells us which political philosophy works better, what are the metrics we will use to decide the winner?

The debate over which approach works better is being fought with claims and counter claims, all buttressed with batteries of statistics: the number of jobs created, the rate of job creation, changes in median income, poverty rates or the percentage of the population without health insurance.

Here we run into the same problem. The Democrats have one definition of success and the Republicans have another one.

But I’d argue that one fair measure is to see if the policies do what they are supposed to do. Does making abortion more inconvenient make it less frequent? Does slashing taxes lead to higher job creation? Does complying with the Medicaid expansion in ObamaCare reduce the ranks of the uninsured and help the states’ overall balance sheets? Does resisting the Medicaid expansion wind up benefiting the people in those states in any tangible way?

In other words, we can see if the policies actually work the way they were intended to, but that won’t change that the two parties want, for the most part, very different things.

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Another protest from freedom fighters in the Caucuses?

Suspected female suicide bomber kills 14 in Russia’s south (VIDEO)

MOSCOW (RT News) – At least 14 people were killed in a blast at a railway station in the city of Volgograd, southern Russia. A female suicide bomber is suspected to have carried out the attack, says the National Anti-terrorism Committee.

Follow RT’s Live Updates on the blast

“According to preliminary reports, this was a terrorist act. Fourteen people have lost their lives, 34 were injured, 30 of them more critically than others. An Emergencies plane is waiting to be dispatched from Moscow,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said.

However, the Health Ministry confirms that 27 people have been taken to hospital. According to the Investigative Committee, a child of 9 was among the injured.

The incident is being treated as an act of terrorism, the committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said.

The blast took place at 12.45 local time inside the building of the railway. It is “thought to have been carried out by a female suicide bomber,” according to the anti-terrorism committee’s statement.

Watch RT’s Egor Piskunov report

President Vladimir Putin has ordered that all the necessary measures be taken to assist survivors and provide security in Volgograd, the Kremlin reported.

 « click to enlarge
Etnic groups in the Caucasus region (Wikipedia)

Volgograd is a city of around 1 million people, about 690 km northeast of Sochi and close to Russia’s volatile region of North Caucasus. The city saw a terrorist attack just in October, when a suicide bomber blew herself up in a bus, killing six people and injuring more than 30 others.

On Friday, a car bomb killed three people, all passerbys, in the southern Russian city of Pyatigorsk as a homemade explosive device went off outside the Road Traffic Safety Department. Funerals are scheduled for December 30.

○ Olympic city of Sochi hermetically sealed for tight security
○ U.S. designates Chechen group ‘Caucasus Emirate’ with Umarov a terrorist entity – May 2011
○ Russian Laws, Policies Restrict Religious Freedom – US Report in 2012
○ Caucasus Emirate Leader Calls On Insurgents To Thwart Sochi Winter Olympics – July 2013

Distractify has a cool article up on the 38 most haunting abandoned places on Earth. They’ve found some spooky and strange stuff.

For an above-ground bunker, this is pretty good, but I wouldn’t go with grey. Who wants to live in a grey house?

Remember, Facebook in now a publicly-traded stock:

Facebook is “dead and buried” to older European teenagers, who’ve all been fleeing the Facebook galleon for Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. Since European teens are ahead of the curve on everything, it’s only a matter of time before their parochial, arithmetic-challenged American counterparts also set fire to the desiccated corpse of Facebook and perform a ritual dance around it (metaphorically).

Less interesting than it might seem, the Guardian does a piece on (OMG!) Muslims living near Las Vegas.

…a couple of miles in the opposite direction lies what one would imagine to be the worst place in the world for an even halfway-strict Muslim – something, indeed, not unlike hell.

Masjid-e-Tawheed [mosque] is a 10-minute drive from Las Vegas Boulevard, the famous Strip – undisputed world capital of gambling, fornication, adultery, prostitution, immodesty, licentiousness, drinking, gluttony, vanity, ostentation and not a little taking God’s name in vain when visitors’ luck runs out in the gambling halls. The sheer amount of sin, as measured by any religion, is unfeasibly high in Las Vegas; for Muslims, it is off the scale.

One wonders if the author has been to “the famous Strip” in the last 20 years, because it’s a lot more like DisneyWorld these days than Dodge City, Kansas in Wyatt Earp’s day. Suburban Vegas doesn’t seem to present any problem for Mormons, so this article is stupid. It is interesting, however, to learn that the suburban Muslim population is 10,000-strong. In a normal world, they would take their conservative beliefs about family, marriage, child-rearing, etc., and (along with most Mormons) side with the Republican Party. But, for now, the Democrats are the only welcoming and tolerant party, so the GOP loses a lot of votes in Nevada that they cannot afford to lose. It’s a trend with them, see: evangelical blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays, women.

Remember those bumper stickers that said, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”? Well, now it seems that “If you’re outraged, you must be mentally ill.”

Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the newest addition of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), it certainly is. The manual identifies a new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. Defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

Yes, you’re “odd” if you argue and demonstrate defiance against authority. Nice. Half the people I know are argumentative and easily annoyed. It’s called “being from Jersey.”

Want to see 100 year old long-lost Antarctic photographs? Go here.

Lastly, after having a night to reflect on the difference between the truth about the Benghazi attacks and what the Republicans have said about them, I am left to wonder whether our political discourse is so idiotic that we should just give up on discourse and conduct our politics strictly by voting. After all, trying to correct the Republicans on Benghazi is the equivalent of howling into a hurricane (of stupid).

What do you think?

A New York Times article on advances in neuromorphic processors piqued my interest and I wound up wanting to learn more about them. I found some very interesting articles in Go Parallel, the Technology Review, and Gizmag. The latter two are the best for computer science laymen. I used to work in a semiconductor fabrication laboratory, so it’s a subject I know enough about to understand a little bit. Yet, I’m still a novice when it comes to the underlying science involved.

What intrigued me the most are the immense potential savings in energy costs associated with computing. Paul Krugman thinks Bitcoin is evil because he doesn’t think it is a stable store of value, but I think it is evil because of the energy it consumes. For example:

Established in the Kwai Chung industrial building in Hong Kong, company Asicminer has created not just a Bitcoin mining rig, but an entire facility. The actual mining equipment is so large that it resembles some kind of supercomputer — large black rack filled with green boards — called blades — and cooling tanks aligning the walls of a long corridor.

Due to the massive amount of power the facility is consistently churning out, an equally massive amount of heat is being generated, so the boards need a special kind of cooling. The blades are submerged in 3M cooling liquid inside the tanks, which can hold up to 92 blades each. The heat generated by the rig is enough to cause the cooling liquid to bubble, but the system — a combination of that liquid air pumps that reach through the roof — manages to keep the temperature below 98.6 degrees.

If you need the near-equivalent of a nuclear plant’s pressurized water reactor to cool your Bitcoin computers, I consider that a wee problem with the currency. However, some of the neuromorphic chips scientists are designing are big energy-savers.

“The neurons implemented with our approach have programmable time constants,” Prof. Giacomo Indiveri, who led the research efforts, told Gizmag. “They can go as slow as real neurons or they can go significantly faster (e.g. >1000 times), but we slow them down to realistic time scales to be able to have systems that can interact with the environment and the user efficiently.”

The silicon neurons, Indiveri told us, are comparable in size to actual neurons and they consume very little power. Compared to the supercomputer approach, their system consumes approximately 200,000 times less energy – only a few picojoules per spike.

A neuromorphic chip uses its most basic components in a radically different way than your standard CPU. Transistors, which are normally used as an on/off switch, here can also be used as an analog dial. The end result is that neuromorphic chips require far fewer transistors than the standard, all-digital approach. Neuromorphic chips also implement mechanisms that can easily modify synapses as data is processed, simulating the brain’s neuroplasticity.

The neuromorphic chips aren’t meant to replace standard semiconductors, but to aid in parallel processing and assist us in understanding how the human brain works. But, I don’t see why we can’t use spin-based neuromorphic microchips to massively reduce the energy costs of standard computing across the board.

Spin states are inherent to electrons, which are constantly spinning, imparting a momentum to their electrical charge which can be oriented “up” or “down”. Such spin-polarized electrons can be used to encode digital ones and zeros using much less energy than just piling up charge on a capacitor. Ideally, a single electron could be used to store a digital one as “up” spin and a digital zero as “down” spin, enabling the ultimate downsizing for parallel processors to one-bit-per-electron. And for intrinsically parallel applications, such as emulating the billions of neurons in the human brain, the super low power achieved by spin-polarized digital encodings could enable the ultimate parallel processing applications of the future.

One-bit-per-electron seems like a worthy goal. Where do I invest?

The mass media have a fixation upon throwing up lists.

Sports editors run innumerable lists of the “Top 10” high school and college teams.

Arts and entertainment editors run lists of the top books, movies, songs, and even video games.

Financial and business editors tell us who they believe are the “most important” moguls, and rank each on a scale that has no meaning to anyone, especially the moguls themselves.

Fashion editors love making lists of “best dressed” and “worst dressed” celebrities.

News editors love making end-of-the-year lists of the “Top 10 Headlines.” Like the other editors, they don’t tell us why their pick of the top news story was more important than the No. 2 story–or why the No. 10 story was any more important than the thousands that did not make the list.

TV Guide also loves lists. This month, it threw out a list of what some of their editors irrationally believe are the “60 Greatest Shows on Earth,” complete with a sentence describing each show. And, like most lists, it’s little more than annoying static.

The top three shows, according to TV Guide, are “The Sopranos,” “Seinfeld,” and “I Love Lucy.” Squeezing into the list at the bottom are “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “The Good Wife,” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Inbetween–and completely without any  logic, except for the editors’ over-ripe egos that they actually know something–are numerous shows, some great, some better than mediocre. For instance, “Saturday Night Live,” which believes stretching out a good one minute comedy sketch to five minutes makes it five times better, is the 18th best “greatest show on earth.” The editors, who seem to be in a time warp that left them in junior high, placed “SNL” above “The Dick VanDyke Show” (no. 20), “The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson” (no. 22), “Friends” (no. 28), “Taxi” (no. 35), “Barney Miller” (no. 46), “The Bob Newhart Show” (no. 49), and “The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart” (no. 53.) No one at TV Guide can explain how “The Daily Show” was 35 places below “SNL” or why “The Colbert Report” never made the list. The editors also didn’t explain how “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” by all accounts one of the best comedies on TV, was rated no. 7, while Sid Caesar’s ” Your Show of Shows,” a 90-minute live comedy show in the early 1950s that exposed America to the acting and writing talents of Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Howard Morris and dozens of others, was 37th on the list, 19 below “SNL,” which should have used the Sid Caesar show–or even its own first half-dozen years–as models of comedic genius. Missing from the list of the “60 Greatest” is “The Tonight Show, with Steve Allen,” which established the standard by which all other late night show operate.

“60 Minutes,” which has often been the top-rated show, made the list at no. 24. But, “See It Now,” with Edward R. Murrow, one of the nation’s most important and influential journalists, did not make the list, an oversight that could be attributed to the fact that TV Guide editors probably slept through most of their college journalism lectures, days after their after drug-induced high while watching “SNL.”

“Sesame Street” made the list, but “The Muppet Show” did not, nor did “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” “Captain Kangaroo,” “Howdy Doody Time,” “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” and the pioneering, “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie” from the 1940s.

Soupy Sales, who showed how to reach two different audiences–youth and adults with the same gags–isn’t on the list, possibly because his humor was more sophisticated than some of the mindless prattle of “SNL.”

Also missing from the “60 greatest” list–and indicative of TV Guide’s lack of understanding that America extends beyond the polluted Hudson River– is “NCIS.” TV Guide editors freely mark the best prime time shows to watch each day; they usually don’t give “NCIS” that distinction. Only in the past couple of years, exhausted by seeing “NCIS” at the top of the ratings week after week, have they published major features about “NCIS,” while constantly gushing over shows and stars that have no chance of lasting a decade in prime time.

For 10 years, the actors and crew of TV’s most-watched show have just done their jobs, and they have done it well.  Every actor is someone who could be on Broadway or handle a major film role.

The writing on “NCIS” is fast-paced and thought-provoking, wringing emotion from its 20 million viewers each week. Unlike many procedural dramas, this CBS show’s writers layer a fine coat of humor that is far better than what passes as half-hour sitcoms these days.

The production values exceed most other shows–from lighting to camera movement to even prop placement. The behind-the-scenes crew may be among the best professionals in the industry.

Behind the scenes, the cast and crew are family. They work together. They care about each other. Numerous shows claim this is true with them. But, the reality is their claims are little more than PR sludge. With “NCIS,” the claims are true.

There are no scandals and there doesn’t seem to be much ego among the actors.
In 11 seasons, Mark Harmon, who can evoke an emotion in the audience merely by a slight look and no words, has never been nominated for an Emmy. As every good actor knows, true acting is when people don’t know you’re acting.

Portraying the fine nuances of a character is a quality that sustained James Garner’s career for five decades. Like Mark Harmon, Garner never won an Emmy, and his popular show, “The Rockwood Files” never made it to TV Guide’s “60 Greatest” splash of nonsense.

Mark Harmon and James Garner, both masters of their craft, may not even care they’ve never won an Emmy. They, like millions of us already know, a spot on TV Guide’s “60 greatest shows on earth” is not the recognition they crave – but probably deserve.

[Dr. Brasch, a journalist four decades, is also a media analyst and critic. He is also the author of 18 books, most fusing history with contemporary social issues. His latest is Fracking Pennsylvania, an in-depth investigation not only of the economics, environmental, and health impact of fracking in the country, but also the collusion between the oil/gas lobby and the nation’s politicians.]

Well, lookee here:

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

Let’s go back to that infamous appearance that Susan Rice made on Meet the Press the Sunday following the Benghazi attacks:

DAVID GREGORY: The images as you well know are jarring to Americans watching all of this play out this week, and we’ll share the map of all of this turmoil with our viewers to show the scale of it across not just the Arab world, but the entire Islamic world and flashpoints as well. In Egypt, of course, the protests outside the U.S. embassy there that Egyptian officials were slow to put down. This weekend in Pakistan, protests as well there. More anti-American rage. Also protests against the drone strikes. In Yemen, you also had arrests and some deaths outside of our U.S. embassy there. How much longer can Americans expect to see these troubling images and these protests go forward?

MS. RICE: Well, David, we can’t predict with any certainty. But let’s remember what has transpired over the last several days. This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Obviously, our view is that there is absolutely no excuse for violence and that– what has happened is condemnable, but this is a– a spontaneous reaction to a video, and it’s not dissimilar but, perhaps, on a slightly larger scale than what we have seen in the past with The Satanic Verses with the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Now, the United States has made very clear and the president has been very plain that our top priority is the protection of American personnel in our facilities and bringing to justice those who…

GREGORY: All right.

MS. RICE: …attacked our facility in Benghazi.

I seem to recall that Ms. Rice received some criticism for those remarks. Yet, the New York Times reports:

Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…

…There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.

So, to recap, the attacks in Benghazi were not carried out by al-Qaeda, were not meticulously planned, and the motivation to participate in them was largely “a spontaneous reaction to a video.”

It appears that Ms. Rice’s comments weren’t all that far off the mark.

The lack of an al-Qaeda role is particularly damaging to the Republicans because their main conspiracy theory all along has been that the administration blamed the whole thing on the Innocence of Muslims movie to deflect from the fact that they had not eradicated the terrorist organization by eliminating their leader, Usama bin-Laden. Supposedly, the real problem in Benghazi wasn’t insufficient security but the actual identity of the attackers.

But it wasn’t the administration that politicized the tragedy. It was Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, behind in the polls and smelling blood, that tried everything they could think of to gain an advantage.

I wonder if they have the capacity for shame.

In The Atlantic, Sean McElwee asks, “Can Vermont’s Single-Payer System Fix What Ails American Healthcare?” I certainly hope so, because we haven’t been doing too well.

A 2012 Institute of Medicine report finds that the U.S. healthcare system wastes $750 billion each year. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found, “Among 34 OECD countries between 1990 and 2010, the U.S. rank for the age-standardized death rate changed from 18th to 27th, for the age-standardized YLL [Years of Potential Life Lost] rate from 23rd to 28th, for the age-standardized years lived with disability rate from 5th to 6th, for life expectancy at birth from 20th to 27th, and for healthy life expectancy from 14th to 26th.” OECD countries pay half of what the U.S. does, in per capita terms, for better outcomes and universal coverage.

The implementation of ObamaCare should help by making health care more affordable and accessible, and by encouraging people to get more preventative care. But we’re still going to be paying much more than other comparable nations and getting subpar results.

The wait is frustrating, but I am hoping that Vermont will succeed and shine like a beacon showing the rest of the country the way forward.

It used to be that Americans didn’t settle for being second-best. We certainly didn’t settle for being 27th out of the 34.

Well, this convinced me not to buy a ticket to Wolf of Wall Street. I had been considering seeing that movie, but I will now pick something else. I hear the one about ABSCAM is really good.

I became political aware at a young age and took a keen interest in the 1980 Republican primaries when I was only nine and ten years old. I still have cartoons I drew at the time that depicted Ronald Reagan as a warmonger intent on blowing up the world with nuclear weapons. This wasn’t something I learned from my parents. It was my own opinion. In retrospect, it was a little bit alarmist. I should have been worried about other things, like the long-term destruction of the middle class or a propensity to sell TOW missiles to Iran to pay a ransom for hostages held by Hizbollah in order to illegally transfer the proceeds to the Contras in Nicaragua. But, a nine year old’s capacity to imagine evil only goes so far.

When I see a book title like Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, I want to claw my eyeballs out. Yet, I do understand what Chris Matthews is pining for, and it isn’t the fjords. However much Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan disagreed, they were civil to each other, and they knew how to strike a deal without threatening to default on the country’s debts. For Washington insiders of a certain age, there is a keen sense of nostalgia for the old days when politicians didn’t go home to their districts every weekend but stayed in town and socialized with each other.

Perhaps no one represents this group better than Cokie Roberts, who was almost literally raised in the Capitol Building. Her father, Hale Boggs, represented Louisiana’s 2nd District in 1941-43 and then from 1947 to 1972, when his plane disappeared in Alaska. By the time of his death, he had risen to be the Majority Leader, the same position held today by Eric Cantor. By that time, Cokie Roberts was an adult, but her mother, Liddy Boggs, went on to represent the New Orleans-based district until she retired to look after her dying daughter (Cokie’s sister) in 1990. I found a set of interviews that Ms. Roberts did with the Office of the Historian of the House of Representatives in 2007 and 2008, (you can read the interviews here in .pdf form) in which she describes her life growing up in the corridors of power and how things have changed.

In the following excerpt, she laments the use of the gerrymander, which she calls “picking your own voters.” In her opinion, the increasing efficiency with which the political parties draw the congressional maps is one of the main reasons why Congress is so deadlocked. Keep in mind that she said this in 2008, before things got even worse after the 2010 census and subsequent redrawing of district maps.

ROBERTS: I think that what this business of picking your voters—first of all, is so anti-democratic—it does a few very, very bad things. It creates a far more partisan chamber because you only worry about getting attacked from the true believers of your own party in a primary rather than a general election. Look what just happened to Chris [Christopher B.] Cannon as a perfect example of that.

You do only represent people who are just like you, so that your desire or even ability to compromise is far less that it used to be. I’ll give you an example. Bob Livingston used to represent a district that was 30- percent black. So he voted for fair housing, he voted for Martin Luther King holiday, he voted for a variety of things that were not the things that people whose representative in the state legislature was David Duke expected him to do. But he could explain to the yahoos in his district that he had to do it because of the black constituency when it was actually stuff that he wanted to do. Then it was redistricted to be lily-white conservative Republicans, and, you know, it’s almost impossible for that person—it was [David] Vitter, I don’t know who it is now—to do that. You just have to be fighting your constituency all the time to do something that would be a sort of national interest thing to do. And that’s true on both sides. It just makes legislating and governing much, much harder.

The President [George W. Bush], actually, was talking to me—I don’t often get to say, “The President was talking to me about it,” {laughter}—when I went with him to meet the Pope. We were talking about immigration, and he’s, you know, he’s basically just furious about immigration, about the failure of the bill, and he said, “It’s all about the way districts are drawn.” And it is fundamentally anti-democratic because the whole idea is you get to throw these people out. In 2006, I must say I was heartened, not for partisan reasons, but I thought they had drawn the districts so cleverly that you’d never be able to register that vote of no confidence, which an off-year election is—it’s either a vote of confidence or no confidence—I was afraid that that had been taken away from the voters, which would really be different from what the Founders had in mind. So the fact that even with that, you were able to change parties and register that vote was heartening, but it’s much harder than it should be.

There has been some debate recently about whether or not Justice Ginsburg should strategically retire from the Supreme Court to prevent a Republican president from appointing her successor. Ginsburg defends her continued presence of the Court by arguing that President Obama will be succeeded by a Democrat because “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.” She’s probably right in her prediction about Obama’s successor, but she is definitely correct that the Democrats have trouble getting out their vote in midterm elections. With the districts drawn the way there are, this threatens to prevent the people from expressing their vote of confidence or no confidence.

According to the Cook Political Report, the Democrats should have won the 2012 House elections.

By Cook’s calculations, House Democrats out-earned their Republican counterparts by 1.17 million votes. Read another way, Democrats won 50.59 percent of the two-party vote. Still, they won just 46.21 percent of seats, leaving the Republicans with 234 seats and Democrats with 201.

It was the second time in 70 years that a party won the majority of the vote but didn’t win a majority of the House seats, according to the analysis.

So, there are really two things here worthy of consideration. The first is that the gerrymander has the effect of artificially polarizing the country by creating districts that are only really contestable in primary, rather than general elections. Politicians are punished for cooperating more than they should be.

The second problem is a partisan one that only hurts the left. Democrats get less seats than they should have.

Yet, the first problem hurts the left, too, because it leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to a general disdain of government in the populace, which creates distrust about the government’s ability to do big things.

For these reasons, I believe that progressives should consider redistricting reform their top priority. Unless we can solve this problem, we will never be competing on a level playing field, and our ability to do great things will continue to erode.

Unlike Chris Matthews and Cokie Roberts, I don’t want to go back to some idyllic time of bipartisan cooperation that barely existed in reality, but I do want a fair shake and a government that works again.