Month: March 2015

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas will become the first presidential candidate (in a strictly legal sense) of the 2016 campaign on Monday. He’s not going to go the whole “exploratory committee” route and intends to jump in with both feet.

Senior advisers say Cruz will run as an unabashed conservative eager to mobilize like-minded voters who cannot stomach the choice of the “mushy middle” that he has ridiculed on the stump over the past two months in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

“Ted is exactly where most Republican voters are,” said Mike Needham, who heads the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action for America. “Most people go to Washington and get co-opted. And Ted clearly is somebody that hasn’t been.”

I’ll have to look at the financial implications of Cruz’s decision, but getting an early start is important regardless of how you legally organize your campaign.

This guarantees that Cruz will get the attention he craves, and that won’t be a good thing for the Republican Party. I don’t think he plans to leave any room on his right for his competitors to maneuver in, and his schtick is going to be that everyone else is a weak-kneed conservative wannabe. I expect this to get very personal, very quickly. Because the other candidates will be more comfortable attacking Cruz than the outlandish conservative ideas he espouses, I think they will talk about his knowledge, temperament, and effectiveness rather than challenge him from an ideological point of view.

The exception will be Jeb, who will attempt to be the voice of reason. He’ll have to hope that his opponents divide up the majority into enough pieces that he can win with a small plurality.

We ought to remember that Ted Cruz isn’t a former pizza executive, backbench representative from Minnesota, or even a disgraced former Speaker of the House. He is one of two U.S. senators from the largest red state in the country, the same state that gave us Lyndon Johnson and both Bush presidents. How he behaves and what he says helps define the Republican Party to the nation and the world. This will be more true than ever now that he’ll be a presidential candidate.

That most of his Republican colleagues in the Senate despise him and disagree with his critiques means that there will be a lot of pushback. It’s not only the Republican Establishment, but a much broader segment of the Republican base that doesn’t want Cruz to speak for them. This should quickly become evident even on Fox News, and it’s going to take existing wedges on the right and pry them wide open.

I can see Jeb prevailing as a kind of champion against Cruz, but there will be a Humpty Dumpty effect even if Jeb is successful.

Kevin Carey has a piece in the Washington Post on the imminent demise of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as the main metric used in college acceptance. I know that in some parts of the country people use the American College Testing (ACT) test instead of the SAT. If Carey is right, both are doomed. The culprit is “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. They are simply better than standardized tests in predicting how people will do in college courses.

MIT, long a leader in education technology, has been one of the first universities to take steps in this direction. In 2012, a young man named Battushig Myanganbayar was one of only 340 students out of 150,000 worldwide to earn a perfect score in a rigorous online Circuits and Electronics course. At the time, he was 15 and living in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

All Battushig needed was an Internet connection and a teacher with an eye for engineering potential. After excelling in the MIT class, he took the SAT, and he’s now enrolled at MIT. Another Circuits and Electronics student, Amol Bhave from Jabalpur, India, enjoyed the class so much he created his own online follow-up course in signals and systems. He, too, was admitted into the 2013 MIT freshman class.

Here’s the key:

These are not watered-down classes. I took a genetics course through MITx, the university’s branch of edX. It was the same class taught to freshmen in Cambridge, Mass. — the same lectures, homework assignments, midterms and final exam. MOOC success is much more likely to predict success in college classes than SAT scores, because MOOC success is, in fact, success in college classes.

Now, MIT presents a pretty high barrier because the course matter is so challenging that most people need to be born with an above average aptitude to do well in their classes. But if you know what the course material is going to be and you have years to prepare, it should be possible to ace at least some of their online courses. Rather than teaching for the test, you can teach for the course, which should be both more predictable and more effective. I’d think it would be pretty easy to ace a class in Jazz Appreciation at the University of Texas, for example, which is actually one of the classes that are offered online.

This could change everything. It will change how people do college prep outside of school, and it will change how schools prepare kids for college admissions. I can imagine taking a class full of kids from a poor performing school in North Philadelphia and training them to pass classes at universities in subjects that they show aptitude for, until the whole class can do well in an online college course and give themselves a leg-up on other applicants from the suburbs who haven’t been as focused in their preparations.

But it’s bad news for the children of alumni and the rich if they aren’t willing to capitalize on their advantages. Their connections and SAT prep courses may not get them into Harvard anymore.

It’s also good news for kids like me who could never hope to have the highest scores in my school or finish near the top of my class simply because I went to a school with one of the highest-scoring student bodies in the country. But, as part of growing up in that culture, I was well-prepared to do well in rigorous college courses and proved it once I had the chance.

This will change how merit is measured, and it’s hard to argue with a metric that measures exactly what people want to know. Of course there will be losers. It won’t be possible to make up for a lack of innate aptitude with an impressive list of extracurriculars, and something will be lost in that. Doing great in class isn’t the only thing worth considering, and people who have a drive to help others can contribute a lot to a campus. But as everyone has learned to game this system, students aren’t helping out at the food bank out of some genuine desire to help the needy anymore. It’s probably best to deemphasize this kind of oneupmanship from the admissions process.

Ordinarily, I frown on cannibalism. But in this case…

I’m going to need some help from the Pond in connecting a couple of dots here.  But first a review and the latest development.

The stumbling block for observers of the Ft. Lee lane closures to the GW Bridge has been why?  We’re way past the point of knowing that it was political and a calculated and conspiratorial action.  What was the point?  Did it have any relationship to the major Ft Lee development projects?  What made that speculation difficult is that both of those projects were by then essentially done deals.  The other claim that it was payback to Ft. Lee Mayor Sokolich for not endorsing Christie’s re-election always seemed so thin or overkill that it almost failed a laugh test.

From there it wasn’t difficult for investigators in the NJ legislature and US Attorney’s  office, journalists, and mere bloggers to consider any of the hinky Christie and NY-NJ Port Authority deals.  Mostly far afield of the bridge toll lanes closure but shedding little penlights on the corruption in the Christie administration.  That is outside my self-selected beat of the GW Bridge toll lane closures and therefore, no diaries from me on this in the past nine months.  The news from a few days ago, Federal prosecutors subpoena Port Authority over claims Christie retaliated against Fulop, report says seemed to be more of that and not tied to the Ft. Lee/GW Bridge issue.  

Brian Murphy at TPM suggests that maybe it is: Neverending Story: Feds’ Bridgegate Probe Takes New Turn.

Those who studied some of the Wildstein, Baroni, and Bridget Kelly emails that were released over some period of time noted that the plan (plot) to close the Ft. Lee toll lanes appeared to have been constructed by early August but it only became operational over a month later.  In those communications there was no hint of what prompted the plan and what they hoped to accomplish.

In going back over this data more carefully, Murphy has identified possibly two smoking guns and some interesting timing “coincidences.”

The first possible “smoking gun.”  

Monday morning 9/9/13, Mayor Sokolich called and left a message for Baroni reporting the urgent matter of public safety in Ft. Lee.  Baroni forwarded this to Wildstein at 9:41 AM.  Wildstein forwarded it to Bridget Kelly.  Kelly asked if Baroni returned Sokolich’s call.  At 10:13 AM, Wildstein wrote, “Radio silence” and “His name comes right after mayor Fulop.”

Why would Wildstein have had Fulop on his mind the day the GW Bridge toll lanes were closed?

Second one.  Day two, 9/10/13, of the toll lane closures.

Mayor Sokolich texts Baroni at 8:04 AM

Presently we have four very busy traffic lanes merging into one toll booth … The bigger problem is getting the kids to school.  Please help.  It’s maddening.

Text received by Baroni at 8:05 AM.  Forwarded to Wildstein at 9:41 AM.  

At 8:05 AM, Kelly wrote, Is it wrong that I’m smiling.  No from Wildstein.
At 8:05-06, Kelly wrote, I feel badly for the kids.  I guess
At 8:11 AM, Wildstein wrote, They are the children of Buono voters.

Why would Kelly and Wildstein have been chatting about a text message from Sokolich to Baroni almost two hours before Boroni forwarded it to Wildstein?  As if Sokolich had texted Kelly and Wildstein and the two of them were instantly on it?  As if they had been monitoring Sokolich’s communications before he sent that text.

Nothing about the team Christie and Mayor Sokolich relationship fitted with planning the bridge toll lane closures in late July – early August.  Murphy documents how the timing fits perfectly with the team Christie and Mayor Fulop relationship.  Including this:

In August 2013, Fulop wrote [to Bill Baroni], “I am not sure if it is a coincidence that your office cancelled a meeting several weeks back that seemed to be simultaneous to other political conversations elsewhere that were happening…. I sincerely hope the two issues are not related as it wouldn’t be in the PA, Jersey City, or the residents of the state’s best interest.”

Any New Jersey denizens or Mafia aficionados here that can supply the correct word or term for what this looks like?  Whacking a not so important, minor irritant to send a message to more important rival?

Suddenly, this seems less coincidental

One night before local access lanes to New Jersey’s George Washington Bridge were closed last fall in an apparent act of political retribution that sparked miles-long traffic jams for four straight days, an air quality monitor run by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton abruptly ceased collecting data.

The closest state-run monitor to the bridge with its data posted online, the monitor started measuring air pollution again more than two days later – just as a key pollution indicator was starting to decline.
“They’re missing data for 2 1/2 days – that’s weird,” says Ann Marie Carlton, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who studies air quality.

More reasons why the plan was to keep those toll lanes closed for an extended period of time?  The part of the plot that was foiled by Pat Foye.

It’s not really possible to distinguish between the Iraqi army, Shiite militias, and simple Iranian proxy fighters, but they’re pathetic however you choose to describe them. And what’s irritating is that our government isn’t really sure whether or not them being pathetic is a good or a bad thing. Most of the political right in this country has no understanding of who these folks are, who they’re fighting, which of our allies are rooting for which sides, or why we might or might not want to lend our direct assistance to their battle for Tikrit or any future fight for Mosul.

I tend to know who they are, who they’re fighting, and who is rooting for whom, but that doesn’t mean I have any answers about the larger questions. I can’t say that the Obama administration does, either. It’s not their fault, or mine. There are no moderates in this fight. It’s sectarian and it’s among radicals. And if you think the Saudi(ish) version of Islam isn’t radical, it’s probably because you can’t find any Sunni alternatives on the battlefield. Maybe the junta in Cairo could conquer the whole peninsula? Would that be Sunni moderation?

Anyone who had any even a partially direct role in facilitating this mess really ought to shut up and stop acting like they still have the right to have an opinion.

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

If there’s a time and place that signals the start of the current human era, it’s the first four months of 1492 on the Iberian peninsula when in quick succession, Los Reyes Católicos (The Catholic Monarchs) Isabella of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, 1) oversaw the end of the Reconquista on Jan. 2 when the capital city of the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, Granada, capitulated; 2) issued the Edict of Expulsion on March 31, exiling all Jews from the Kingdom; and 3) signed an agreement on April 17 with Christopher Columbus authorizing him to set sail to the west on behalf of the Crown.

Fredrickson’s primary interest in this is the treatment of the conversos, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who converted to Christianity rather than leave Spain.  The rise of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and its inclusion in the laws and regulations of numerous institutions and local governments—under which only those of “pure” Christian ancestry could hold certain jobs (including the ranks of the conquistadores and missionaries settling the Americas)—is, he argues, a key moment in the development of Western racism.

“To the extent that it was enforced, the Spanish doctrine of purity of blood was undoubtedly racist.  It represented the stigmatization of an entire ethnic group on the basis of deficiencies that allegedly could not be eradicated by conversion or assimilation….  when the status of large numbers of people was depressed purely and simply because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave “race” a new and more comprehensive significance.”

In the Americas, 16th century Spaniards ultimately decided that the newly conquered peoples “possessed reason” and “therefore could be converted to Christianity and made useful subjects of the Spanish crown through peaceful persuasion“.  (p. 38) (They also could be brutally oppressed in the encomienda system, but that’s another issue.)

Fredrickson argues that “the Spanish authorization of black slavery proceeded primarily from the differing legal status of conquered peoples and those obtained as merchandise from areas outside of Spanish jurisdiction“.  In other words, because the Spaniards and Portuguese (largely because of their inability to survive there) couldn’t conquer west and central African peoples but bought them through pre-existing slave markets, Africans could be kept as slaves.  Conquered peoples in the Americas were in a different category; they could be mistreated and discriminated against, but not enslaved.

Some other points Fredrickson makes about the critical role played by 16th and 17th century Iberians in the development of Western racism:

   
• “It is paradoxical to find that Spain and Portugal were in the forefront of European racism or protoracism in their discrimination against converted Jews and Muslims,, but that the Iberian colonies manifested a greater acceptance of intermarriage and more fluidity of racial categories and identities than the colonies of other European nations.” (p. 39)

   

• “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain is critical to the history of Western racism because its attitudes and practices served as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era.” (p. 40)

   

• “One might be tempted to draw a parallel with the relation of German national identity to racial antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but such an analogy should not be pressed too far…. What we have here, therefore, is a quasi-racialized religious nationalism and not a fully racialized secular nationalism of the kind that arose in Germany.” (p. 41)

   

• “One can therefore trace the origins of the two main forms of modern racism—the color-coded white supremacist variety and the essentialist version of antisemitism—to the late medieval and early modern periods.” (p. 46)

Fredrickson ends—in a passage that’s worth quoting at length—this chapter with a pivot to the crucial role played by the Enlightenment in the rise of modern racism:

“…to achieve its full potential as an ideology, racism had to be emancipated from Christian universalism.  To become the ideological basis of a social order, it also had to be clearly disassociated from traditionalist conceptions of social hierarchy.  In a society in which inequality based on birth was the norm for everyone from king down to peasant, ethnic slavery and ghettoization were special cases of a general pattern—very special in some ways—but still not radical exceptions tot he hierarchical premise.  Paradoxical as it may seem, the rejection of hierarchy as the governing principle of social and political organization, and its replacement by the aspiration for equality in this world as well as in the eyes of God, had to occur before racism could come to full flower.” (p. 47)

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

Rick Santorum can occasionally make a lot of sense, even if he tends to do it unintentionally. Remember back in the fall of 2012 when he said this?

“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side,” Santorum said in a speech to the gathering of conservative activists at a Washington hotel.

It wasn’t entirely clear who was included in Santorum’s “we,” but it wasn’t synonymous with members of the Republican Party. Little Ricky was speaking to conservatives. And he was telling them pretty plainly that “smart” people would never agree with conservative ideas. He didn’t see this as an indication that there might be anything wanting in conservative ideas, but he did know that smart people simply don’t believe in them.

There’s a degree to which this is true, but only if you restrict yourself to certain types of right-wing ideas. There are plenty of smart people who want a strong defense, more local control of government, lower taxes, stronger punishments for crime, and have a preference for traditional religiously sanctioned family and gender roles. But these are not really conservative ideas in the modern, contemporary sense. They are just Republican ideas.

To see a conservative idea, you need to keep listening to Santorum:

And, in discussing gay issues, he compared gay people getting married to napkins, saying: “I can call this napkin a paper towel. But it is a napkin. And why? Because it is what it is.”

You see, this is taking a simple idea (marriage is traditionally between a man and a woman) and turning into something so stupid that no smart person would agree with it.

Another example of the conservativization of a basic idea is going from concern that a porous southern border could be an entry point for terrorists looking to do us harm and taking it in this direction:

Recently, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) has beens sounding the alarm about a new and insidious plot involving so called “terror babies.” Infants are sometimes known to be terrors in their own right, but this diabolical plan involves terrorists sending pregnant women into the US to birth their America-hating spawns. The mothers and their kids then return home where, the congressman says, the children “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists”— and later, “twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”

There may be smart people who oppose reproductive rights for women or support spending absurd amounts of money trying to keep every last person from entering this country illegally, but there are no smart people who believe that there are terror babies. That’s just a conservative idea, not something anyone intelligent would entertain as a serious possibility.

I know that the meaning of words change over time, and “liberal” and conservative” are not exceptions. What I’m telling you is what “conservative” means today, not what it used to mean or what it ought to mean. Today, “conservative” means “fucking insane.”

And the Republican Party has been taken over by the fucking insane.

And let me tell you something about that. There’s value in having someone run for president as a Republican who is willing to stand up to the lunatics. Jon Huntsman made a half-hearted effort at it four years ago, and we saw how far it got him.

This time, it will be Jeb Bush who makes the effort. The elite, smart people in the media will love Jeb for it, even when he takes one step forward and three steps into the fetid bog. Most members of the media do hate modern conservatives because modern conservatives are submental, but they actually like many Republican ideas, whether we’re talking about Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt.

Traditional Republican ideas have their strengths and shortcomings, as do traditional Democratic ideas. But there are no strengths in Donald Trump’s birth certificate ravings or Rudy Giuliani’s certifiable comments about the president’s love of America. Mike Huckabee isn’t saying anything with merit about U.S.-Israeli relations and Ben Carson is making no sense when he advocates the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

It goes without saying that virtually nothing that Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, or dozens of other conservative lawmakers and politicians have to say about the president, entitlements, Obamacare, Benghazi, or rape is coherent or acceptable to “smart” people.

What they have to say isn’t even supposed to make sense in any ordinary way. They aren’t engaging in a debate where facts are brought to the table, enhanced, emphasized, deemphasized, shaded, and molded to persuade. They aren’t engaged in political spin. What they’re doing is engaging in a political argument in which reality is completely cast aside. They aren’t a part of “the reality-based community” and they don’t want to be. They won’t win on that playing field so they refuse to play on that playing field.

This decision may be the only rational decision that they make.

We can call them a freak show traveling in a clown car all we want, and naturally we are never going to be “on their side.” But conservatives control our Congress right now and they aren’t too far from the White House.

Jeb is a Republican who holds many traditionally conservative positions, and he’ll pander to contemporary conservatives to try to win the nomination, and he’ll have to rely on them and put them in positions of real power if he actually becomes president. But he isn’t actually insane and he hasn’t completely abandoned reality as a playing field.

So, the media will love him. Insofar as Jeb reminds people of his father, even some liberals will see in him some hope for a restoration of national sanity. But Jeb is no savior. The patient is terminal, and Jeb’s like a last ditch pointless round of chemo.

Conservatives own the Republican Party, and their grip won’t be loosened by a Republican, any Republican, winning the White House in 2016. The only way conservatives can be defeated is by losing so consistently that being insane is no longer a short-cut to political office and power.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Cape May street scene.  The photo I am using is seen directly below.  I will be using my usual acrylics on an 8 by 8 inch gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Out in front, both cars have received some paint.  The far car has been painted a nice blue.  The closer one has had the same blue applied to its windows.  Behind them, the initial layer of green has been painted on what will be the foliage adjacent to the front steps.  Below, the street has received some additional paint.  Then there’s the house.  It has received some blue paint to simulate shadow.  This will need adjustment before this is done.  Up on top, the chimney has received a similar treatment.

 
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

I don’t read Steve M.’s blog every day, but I read it often enough that I think I recognize a mantra when I see it. Steve uses a lens to interpret the right, and it seems to have a lot of explanatory power. It basically works like this: the right revels in annoying us, and the more a right-wing mouthpiece annoys us, the more popular they will get. So, for example, if you can’t figure out why Marco Rubio isn’t more popular among wingnuts, the answer is that we think he’s a harmless, mildly corrupt, non-entity. He does nothing to raise our blood pressure and isn’t even obnoxious enough to arouse our contempt.

Besides the obvious problem (Rubio used to support immigration reform), Rubio is struggling because he “wears his ideology lightly.” He’d be doing much better if Republicans thought he scared Paul Waldman and the rest of us liberals and lefties, the way Scott Walker does.

Of course Walker impresses GOP voters: his union-busting, electoral victories, and mutually beneficial relationship with the Koch brothers drive us nuts. Republican voters love that. By contrast, when has Rubio ever left us sputtering with rage? When has he gotten the better of us?

Ben Carson is popular on the right because he launched an attack on President Obama at the ostensibly apolitical National Prayer Breakfast. Chris Christie used to be popular on the right because he fought unions and publicly dressed down teachers and other critics. That’s how you win favor on the right — and Rubio doesn’t do it.

The easiest thing for Rubio to do to remedy this is to ramp up The Stupid substantially. He made a good start of it this week by saying some painfully idiotic things about the Middle East. That got him some positive attention from the morons.

This is a good start, but he needs to start saying things that aren’t merely addled but that cause actual cramps in normally functioning brains. The bigger and more brutal the logical fallacy the better. He’ll get extra points for thinking up things that are so insane that we can’t even imagine how he came up with them in the first place. I am looking at Louie Gohmert and terror babies here. David Vitter understands.

In any case, unless and until Rubio truly embraces Steve M’s theory of wingnut politics, he’s going to be stuck at the back of the pack.

[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]

Yeah, it’s cool to combine the vernal equinox with a solar eclipse and Supermoon, but it’s snowing like hell here and we can’t see any of it.