PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

Look, I'm not going to express skepticism about the George Zimmerman story being reported right now -- namely, that he helped rescue four people from an SUV crash in Sanford, Florida, over the weekend -- because I don't want to be accused of being a "Zimmerman SUV-rescue truther" by National Review. Nothing about it changes my feelings about the death of Trayvon Martin, because no one except idiot and right-wingers -- but I repeat myself -- thinks any human being is pure, unadulterated evil. So he rescued some people. He also killed an unarmed youth, and walked.

But I'm wondering what the hell is wrong with our press corps when we don't have the names of the victims or even an anonymous interview with any of them, we don't have the name of the witness to the accident identified by Breitbart's Kerry Picket (who offers no direct quotes from the witness), nor do we have names or interviews of the "people on the scene" who, Picket says, "recognized Zimmerman," nor do we have the names of anyone in the Sanford PD who relayed all of this to us.

And no one took photos or got cellphone video? Has any newsworthy event taken place anywhere in the developed world in recent years without amateur video or snapshots? Come on, media, where the hell are they?

More from Breitbart:

"Zimmerman was not a witness to the crash, which was why he was not referenced in the police report," a Sanford Police spokeswoman told Breitbart News.

Oh.

The Breitbart story tells us that the vehicle later caught fire, and Zimmerman helped put the fire out with an extinguisher he had on hand -- but Hot Air's Allapundit notes that an NBC story, which initially reported the fire, now no longer includes a reference to a fire. So what's the truth?

I just want some journalists wearing out some shoe leather on this. Rebut the skeptics' suspicions or confirm them. What's the point of having such a low-class press in America if we can't get to the bottom of a story like this?

****

UPDATE: OK, we have a name now. Thank you.

Two parents identified as Mark and Dana Gerstle, along with their two children, were riding in the truck when it flipped near the intersection of I-4 and Route 46, authorities said.

No fire, apparently:

After spotting the wreck and pulling over, the 29-year-old volunteer watchman grabbed a fire extinguisher from his car and checked for signs of a blaze before freeing the Gerstle family, Sean Vincent, a spokesman for his legal team, told the Daily News.

I was in a bad car accident about 15 years ago. Cars explode into a ball of flame about 100% of the time in movies and on TV, but not routinely in real life, I'm told. My car didn't. Well, bully for Zimmerman, and no, life was not a movie.

ALLEN WEST INSULTS BLACK PARENTS SO YOU'LL FORGET HE WAS INITIALLY UPSET ABOUT TRAYVON MARTIN'S DEATH

Over the weekend, full-time rabble-rouser Allen West insulted the parents of every current and former young black male in America, with the exception of his own parents, by posting this at his homepage:

"I am a black male who grew up in the inner city of Atlanta and no one ever followed me in a mall. I don't recall any doors clicking when I crossed the street. And I never had anyone clutching their handbag when I got on an elevator. I guess having two awesome parents who taught me to be a respectful young man paid dividends." -- Allen West

No, I don't believe that. Yes, I think white people do this all over America without knowing anything about the parentage of the young black men they fear.

But West hasn't always tried to use the death of Trayvon Martin to lob Fox-worthy verbal hand grenades. Shortly after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, West posted the following on his Facebook page:

I have sat back and allowed myself time to assess the current episode revealing itself in Sanford, Florida involving the shooting of 17-year-old Treyvon Martin. First of all, if all that has been reported is accurate, the Sanford Police Chief should be relieved of his duties due to what appears to be a mishandling of this shooting in its early stages. The US Navy SEALS identified Osama Bin Laden within hours, while this young man laid on a morgue slab for three days. The shooter, Mr Zimmerman, should have been held in custody and certainly should not be walking free, still having a concealed weapons carry permit. From my reading, it seems this young man was pursued and there was no probable cause to engage him, certainly not pursue and shoot him....against the direction of the 911 responder. Let’s all be appalled at this instance not because of race, but because a young American man has lost his life, seemingly, for no reason. I have signed a letter supporting a DOJ investigation. I am not heading to Sanford to shout and scream, because we need the responsible entities and agencies to handle this situation from this point without media bias or undue political influences. This is an outrage.

This, of course, was West probably speaking from a genuine sense of his own life experiences, rather than conforming his statements to the strictures of conservative dogma.

There was also this:

George Zimmerman, in his role as neighborhood watch of a gated suburban community in Florida, had "no authorization" to take action against 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) told TPM Friday. "This is a self-made head of a community neighborhood watch. That's where my concern is."

... West said the Florida law "does not apply whatsoever" to the Martin case, because Zimmerman was not being pursued by Martin.

Now, West couldn't keep that up if he wanted to retain his wingnut cred. So last week he told us on Facebook that the "Trayvon Martin shooting was a tragedy which the usual suspect race baiters and progressive media are using for political gain," and said he was "tired of white liberals invoking the heinous memory of lynchings." And now he's claiming that there's no white fear of young black males if those males are raised right, which is nonsense.

But I guess he had to say something, because for a while he forgot the strict limits on right-wing political discourse. In his world, that's all but unforgivable.

(Via Wonkette.)

IS THE TEA PARTY A PAPER TIGER LIKE THE NRA?

This AP story tells us that voters have become more ideological, but to a much greater extent on the GOP side, but it also says that House Republicans' fear of primary challenges is largely unwarranted:

... many House Republicans [have] only one prerequisite to assure their re-election: Never give a hard-charging conservative enough room on the right to mount a viable challenge in the primary.

In practice, the task doesn't seem so hard. Only six House Republicans lost their re-election primaries last year. Half of them fell to fellow incumbents in redrawn districts that forced two colleagues to oppose each other. The other three lost to challengers with strong tea party support.

So every Republican in the House is afraid of a primary challenge from the right, but primary challenges hardly ever work? Reminds me of the way everyone in Congress is afraid of the NRA, even though statistics show that NRA spending doesn't actually win races.

Of course, maybe there aren't very many successful primary challenges in the House because House members have simply given up on moderation, and are meekly doing as they're told by the far right -- it's hard to know how many of these people would survive if they dared to deviate from conservatively correct thinking. And it's certainly more of a risk for Republican senators, as Bob Bennett and Richard Lugar learned -- if you're running statewide, even in a deep red state, you have to be mindful of at least some moderates, so you might deviate from the dogma once in a while and pay a price, whereas many House districts are so red that you'll nevereven consider straying.

But in any case, in the House it seems as if the primary threat is overrated, and teabagger rage, like NRA rage, might appear more dangerous than it actually is. But this is D.C. we're talking about, where conventional wisdom is always truth, so I don't expect anyone ever to reality-test this premise.

TELL ME AGAIN HOW MSNBC IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS FOX, ONLY ON THE LEFT

Here's the cover of Joe Scarborough's forthcoming book, via Amazon:





Please buy a copy of this book in hardcover, so you can use it to smack pundits upside the head when they decry polarization generated by "Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left."

I GUESS IT DEPENDS ON WHERE THE JACKBOOT LANDS

The Breitbarniks found a member of the Illinois state legislature from the South Side of Chicago making an inflammatory accusation: that cops are killing kids and covering it up.

Illinois State Representative Monique Davis is blaming the Chicago Police Department for the high number of killings in the Windy City. She is not just blaming the CPD for bad policing, though. She wonders if the police are doing some of the killing.

Davis, a House member from Chicago's South Side district, uttered the accusation on Detroit's WCHB-AM radio on July 16.

"I'm going to tell you what some suspicions have been, and people have whispered to me: they’re not sure that black people are shooting all of these children," Davis told the Detroit radio audience....

I don't really want to discuss this accusation, for which Davis seems to have offered no evidence. What I'm really struck by is the photo Fox Nation chose to accompany its retransmission of the Breitbart piece:





Fox Nation is obviously posting this story because it reinforces the Fox audience's stereotype of Those Crazy Black People and Their Complete Unwilling to Recognize That Urban Violence Is All Their Fault. But isn't that photo of the cops rather ... menacing? Accompanying this story, doesn't it convey the impression that residents of Chicago's more dangerous neighborhoods really do live in a police state? In fact, doesn't it look like precisely the kind of photo Fox Nation might use to accompany suggestion that President Obama is running a police state, with the jackboots aimed at the kinds of people who watch Fox?

Well, in fact, it took me about ten seconds of searching to find this Fox Nation post from 2010, which excerpted a Washington Times editorial about TSA airport security practices:





I guess when Fox fans see a photo of a militarized police force accompanying a story about people like themselves, they think, "Fascism!" But when they see the same kind of photo accompanying a story about people who are not like themselves, they think, "These are the heroes standing saving True Patriots from a race riot."

So I guess it all makes sense.

SALON'S RICH BENJAMIN REINFORCES RIGHT-WING MEMES

I'm not going to attempt a detailed dissection of Rich Benjamin's much-discussed Salon piece criticizing the speech President Obama delivered yesterday. I just want to point out that when Benjamin -- who otherwise says he feels "extreme admiration for the president" -- speculates that Eric Holder is Obama's "Dark Doppelganger," "repressed Black Id," and "Inner N***er," someone willing to talk frankly about race in ways the president isn't, he's reinforcing right-wing depictions of Obama as a person concealing his true nature in a sinister attempt to deceive America.

It's a short leap from saying what Benjamin said to saying that Obama is hiding an intent to impose socialism on America, or impose second-class national status or the complete disarmament of private citizens or "reparations" meant to punish white people. The majority of right-wingers, including people regarded as respectable conservatives, now believe Obama is furtively pursuing one, several, or all of those goals with all his might, and lying to America about this goal. When an Obama supporter reinforces this belief -- and downplays the possibility that Obama's response to the Trayvon Martin case is exactly as nuanced as his speech would suggest -- he's telling the right what the right wants to hear: you're not crazy, Obama is a sneaky SOB who's been pulling the wool over America's eyes for years now. That's not helpful.

NO, A WARM, FUZZY TED CRUZ IS NOT GOING TO BEAT HILLARY CLINTON IN 2016

At Salon, Jonathan Bernstein goes all #Slatepitchy with a piece titled "Ted Cruz Could Beat Hillary." I would never say never, but Bernstein's arguments are unconvincing:

Some liberals react by actively rooting for Cruz. The theory? The nuttier the nominee, the worse the chances of Republicans retaking the White House....

Don't listen to it....

The bottom line is that candidates just don't matter all that much in presidential elections. Yes, a reputation for ideological extremism hurts, but it appears to hurt maybe 2 or 3 percentage points. Yes, George McGovern and Barry Goldwater had reputations for ideological extremism and were buried, but in both cases it was by a popular president during good times.

OK, stop right there. Nixon beat McGovern because Nixon was "a popular president during good times"? As Rick Perlstein notes in Nixonland, at the beginning of 1972 Nixon had a 49% approval rating, and the Harris poll showed him beating Ed Muskie by only 1 in a three-way race with George Wallace, who was expected to run as a third-party candidate. Unemployent and inflation had increased significantly in Nixon's first term, as had the crime rate; Perlstein notes that the movies in the theaters -- Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, The French Connection -- depicted rampant crime. Oh, and the war was still going on, and the country was still racially polarized. No, we weren't happy campers in 1972 reveling in peace and prosperity. We were just sold on the notion that Nixon was the uprightest of citizens holding the line against dirty hippies like George McGovern. That's largely why Nixon rose in the polls throughout 1972 and crushed McGovern.

But here's where Bernstein really loses me:

Now, on top of that, it's an open question whether Cruz would really wind up with a reputation as more of a fringe figure than any other plausible nominee.... it's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which Cruz wins the nomination as the hero of conservatives, which then leaves him far more free to pivot to the center in the general election race than a less trusted candidate might have.

Oh, please. Throwing verbal grenades is what Ted Cruz does; it's his brand. Speculating that he might moderate his rhetoric is like imagining that someday the Insane Clown Posse will write and record a series of cello sonatas.

In a field that's likely to include Rick Perry and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul and Scott Walker, and that may well include crazies like Rick Santorum and Allen West, how does Bernstein imagine that Ted Cruz is going to distinguish himself from the other candidates? By means of his sterling record of accomplishment in the Senate (which, as Dave Weigel recently pointed out, is nonexistent)? No -- he's going to distinguish himself by saying the most outrageous things, and proposing the most outrageous proposals. Is the record of those words suddenly going to vanish from the nation's databases once the general election starts? Is a Democratic campaign going to pass up the opportunity to hang Cruz's primary-season words around his neck? Or anything else outrageous he's said while in public life?

But the most amusing aspect of a Ted Cruz-Hillary Clinton race might be an endorsement of Hillary Clinton by John McCain -- who, of course, has feuded with Cruz and bonded with Clinton. That gives me pause regarding Hillary -- but swing voters would love it.

So, no, I'm not worried that a remade, centrist-friendly Ted Cruz is going to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, because such a creature cannot possibly exist.

THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS, AND DAVID BROOKS RETHINKS STAND YOUR GROUND

President Obama spoke at length today about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. On NPR, David Brooks praised the president's remarks -- though mostly because, in Brooks's interpretation (which isn't really accurate), the remarks spread the blame around equally. Here's part of what Brooks said:

They were strikingly personal. I thought they were Obama at his best, the Obama we saw in 2008, 2007, someone who is sympathetic to all sides. And he was sympathetic to the police, he's sympathetic to -- he gave the context especially for African-American experience and how many African-Americans are responding to this case. He gave the legal context. And so it was a broad tour d'horizon, you could say, of the whole situation, arriving at, I thought, a pretty moderate and responsible and mature position, which was the legal system did its work, it has to be respected, this really isn't a federal case in most cases. And so he arrived at a, I think, a pretty responsible position at the end of the day, at the same time giving voice to a whole range of conflicting feelings, conflicting thoughts, conflicting ideas, and I think giving all Americans a sense of what other people are feeling, why they're reacting the way they are. I thought it was a deeply unifying statement.

I shouldn't complain when Brooks is deviating from right-wing thinking, but I don't think anything Obama said was "conflicting" -- nuanced, yes, but not conflicting. For instance, Obama said this:

And the fact that a lot of African American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

I think the African American community is also not naive in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied.

There's no conflict there -- he simply thinks that the crime rate among young black males does not jutify ignoring historical and social contexts or treating young black males as suspects rather than citizens.

And frankly, it's not true that Obama was "sympathetic to all sides" in these remarks. Obama did not express sympathy to George Zimmerman, or extend a hand to his supporters. (I assume this is because, y'know, George Zimmerman killed someone who happened to be unarmed.)

Obama spoke about Stand Your Ground laws -- and, again, I don't think he was "sympathetic to all sides" (nor should he have been):

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these "stand your ground" laws, I'd just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

Hearing this made David Brooks reconsider his position on these laws:

And I have to say, the point on the Stand Your Ground law was actually clarifying for me. I had some sympathy for the laws because as, you know, as Americans, we should be independent, we should be able to defend ourselves, be strong. But the argument he made about, you know, do we really want all sorts of people, do we really want what happened here, people walking around with guns feeling free to shoot off without legal protections, without the normal legal process -- now, that's a compelling argument, which he put very well.

Yes, Brooks actually said he'd never quite thought about the possibility of extending Stand Your Ground to "all sorts of people." Yes, even those sorts. When you put it that way, Stand Your Ground is kinda scary, hunh, David?

Nice work, Professor Obama.

RAY KELLY LOOKED GOOD -- RELATIVELY SPEAKING

In The New York Times today, Ta-Nehisi Coates denounces President Obama for considering the possibility of appointing Ray Kelly as homeland security secretary:

Kelly's name has been floated by New York politicians of both parties as the ideal replacement for Janet Napolitano, who resigned last week. The president responded by calling Kelly "well-qualified" and an "outstanding leader in New York." ...

"Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is," said the president. "But if he's not, I'd want to know about it."

... It is now public knowledge that the police department, each year, stops hundreds of thousands of citizens, largely black and Latino men, for reasons as thin and subjective as "furtive movements." Very few of those stops lead to actual charges, much less arrests, and according to the commissioner that's fine.

... Last year, The Associated Press reported that the N.Y.P.D. has organized a network of agents and informants strictly for the purpose of spying on Muslim communities. The appropriately dubbed "Demographics Unit" has extended its reach along the Northeastern seaboard, sending informants to spy on Muslim rafting trips, mosques in Newark and Muslim organizations at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania....

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to "ban racial profiling" on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

Not to defend the Kelly supporters -- Coates is right that this would be a terrible pick -- but I think the police commissioner's reputation among liberals and moderates has benefited quite a bit from circumstance, specifically from the contrast between Kelly and people who seemed a lot worse.

During the Bush years, Kelly sold himself as a guy who actually knew how to keep his people safe from terrorism at a time when the Bush administration had missed the 9/11 signals, then mired us in a war in Iraq over nonexistent WMDs and specious ties to 9/11. Kelly told us he was able to take advantage of New York's diversity to reach out to various ethnic communities; he told us his officers spoke languages and dialects that allowed them access to jihadist chat rooms. People fell for it. I admit I fell for it. The underside of this has gotten through to the mainstream consciousness only gradually.

It's also taken a while for the mainstream to grasp the racial animus Kelly's police tactics are creating. You have to recall that Mike Bloomberg came into office and seemed -- at least to those of us who are white -- profoundly less racially polarizing than his race-baiting immediate predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, or the racially inflammatory Ed Koch. (In between Koch and Giuliani was David Dinkins, not a baiter but a constant target of race-baiting.) We hoped racial tension had peaked in the Giuliani years with the Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and Patrick Dorismond incidents, which culminated in the resignation of police commissioner Howard Safir.

So, in a couple of ways, Kelly looked good by contrast.

And, yeah, New York's crime rate has stayed low, though I wonder how much that has to do with the fact that our top industry -- taking everyone's money, otherwise known as high finance -- continues to thrive, thus preventing us from turning into Detroit. I also think it helps that we're a gun control city in a gun control state, and surrounded by gun control states -- you can get illegal guns into New York City, but it's just a bit harder.

In any case, Kelly benefited from not being in the Bush administration and from not being in the Giuliani administration. That doesn't excuse anyone who's overlooking his record, but it's a partial explanation.

PHOTO RELEASED TO REBUT ROLLING STONE TSARNAEV COVER ACTUALLY GLAMORIZES TSARNAEV EVEN MORE

Abby Ohlheiser of the Atlantic Wire reports:

A police officer who was there the night Dzhokar Tsarnaev was captured has decided to counter the "normalcy" of Rolling Stone's contorversial cover by releasing photos showing the bomber how many would apparently prefer to see him: bloody, covered in dirt, with the red circle of a laser target trained on his forehead. "This guy is evil," Sean Murphy, a tactical officer for the Massachusetts State Police told Boston magazine. "This is the real Boston bomber. Not someone fluffed and buffed for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine."

More, from a Boston magazine blog post (though the magazine's entire site seems to be down now):

Sgt. Sean Murphy, a tactical photographer with the Massachusetts State Police who has photographed the funerals of many officers killed in the line of duty, is furious with the magazine. Murphy, who also acts a liaison to the families of fallen officers, is so angered by the cover -- which he says is both dangerous and insulting to the victims of the bombings -- that he feels the need to counter the message that it conveys.

... Murphy wants the world to know that the Tsarnaev in the photos he took that night -- defeated and barely alive, with the red dots of sniper rifles lighting up his forehead -- is the real face of terrorism, not the handsome, confident young man shown on the magazine cover.

So what do we get from Murphy? A couple of photos of Tsarnaev, one of which is this (click to enlarge):





With all due respect to Sergeant Murphy, who's seen a lot of pain and suffering, I've got to say that this photo is more glamorous than the Rolling Stone cover photo.

You have a #FreeJahar cult that thinks Tsarnaev is a railroaded victim -- and you want to show him slumped and bloodied, brought to heel by the very people the cultists blame? The cult eroticizes Tsarnaev, and you want to show him with his shirt suggestively lifted, posed almost like a Renaissance St. Sebastian, or Jesus in a Pieta? You think that glamorizes him less?

I understand the pain of people who were upset at the Rolling Stone cover, but this isn't the remedy. Rolling Stone tried to make a point about the banality of evil and the fact that overt monstrousness is not a necessary precursor to a monstrous act, and that was lost on a lot of people. But the reality of the situation can't be willed away. A lot of people found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appealing, engaging, and attractive. For people who aren't thinking clearly, that trumps the unspeakable crime he committed. And for other people, it mustn't be acknowledged, because acknowledging it is deemed to be a way of minimizing the horror of the crime.

It isn't. Those of us who defended the cover know what he did. It's so awful that the rest of his life doesn't mitigate it. But trying to figure out how the two parts of his life fit together is a mystery we think is worth examining. It's good to be forearmed with the knowledge that a monster can be someone a lot of people think has bedroom eyes.

*****

UPDATE: I'm informed in comments that Officer Murphy has been relieved of duty.

IN A FEW DECADES, WILL THERE REALLY BE NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY?

I have mixed feelings about this:

... SoftBank, the $70 billion Japanese technology investment company ... , is setting up a joint venture with Bloom [Energy, a Silicon Valley company,] to bring what it calls "energy servers" to Japan....

The two companies said they would initially invest $10 million each in a joint venture that would sell Japanese corporations electricity generated by fuel cells, a substantially cleaner and more efficient source of energy than coal or other fossil fuels....

The venture's biggest selling point is that its fuel cells, placed within a corporation's own grounds, offer an alternative to using the national power grid....

Companies not using the national power grid? To some extent, I like the idea of decentralized power -- I think it's good when individuals buy or lease equipment that allows them to generate solar or geothermal energy and bypass local utilities, or even sell power back to those utilities. If businesses can do the same thing with fuel cells, that's an interesting development.

But in this country I worry that decentralization of energy generation could eventually reinforce the notion that there's no need for society to ensure universal access to what we now consider life's basics: electricity, telephone service, clean water, police and fire protection, primary and secondary education.

Just a couple of days ago we had Aaron Osmond, a Utah state senator, arguing that compulsory education is bad for parents and children:

"Some parents act as if the responsibility to educate, and even care for their child, is primarily the responsibility of the public school system," Osmond wrote. "As a result, our teachers and schools have been forced to become surrogate parents, expected to do everything from behavioral counseling, to providing adequate nutrition, to teaching sex education, as well as ensuring full college and career readiness." ...

"Let's let them choose it, let's not force them to do it," he said. "I think that's when you start seeing the shift."

We had Rick Santorum in 2011 denouncing the very existence of public schools ("'Just call them what they are,' Santorum said. 'Public schools? That's a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools'"). We had Ron Paul getting applause at a tea party-sponsored presidential debate for suggesting that an uninsured young man in a coma should be allowed to die rather than given medical treatment. We have communities where firefighters let your home burn to the ground if you haven't paid the firefighting fee. And on and on.

We know that all the kewl young dudebros these days dig libertarianism. Is it the future? Will a coalition of libertarian hipsters and government-hating teabaggers usher in an era when dope is legal and NSA snooping is banned but education and clean drinking water are luxury goods? I may not live to see it, but I can imagine that as a possible future.

WE WON'T GET A PATH TO CITIZENSHIP FOR UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS, BECAUSE SURVEILLANCE OF WHITE PEOPLE

I confess I'm not an expert on the details of the current immigration proposals, so I learned something yesterday from Greg Sargent's article about an immigration plan being developed by a bipartisan group in the House that might, according to Sargent, be acceptable to House Republicans. Here's one part of the plan:

* The plan would put in place a new trigger involving E-Verify that would be required to end that period of "probation." The plan would stipulate that E-Verify -- the system to allow businesses to determine eligibility to work in the U.S. -- must be fully operational after five years. If it isn't, all of those on probation would lose that status and revert to illegal status. This is significantly tougher than the Senate bill, which requires E-Verify to be operational for the path to citizenship to be set in motion, but would not revoke provisional legal status if it isn't operational.

I've never believed that Republicans (in Congress and in the rank-and-file) would ever go along with E-Verify, which requires that the residency status of everyone -- yes, rock-ribbed native-born Fox-watching white people, too! -- be checked in a national database by potential employers. Right-wingers regularly rail against surveillance -- not the anti-terrorism surveillance of the Bush years, of course, because that seemed only directed at Muslims and dirty politicized hippies, but certainly the NSA panopticon under Obama, and certainly anything that even vaguely threatens a gun registry, and, well, anything else that affects them personally. Right-wingers were furious yesterday when word of a massive license plate scanning program emerged. And, seemingly apropos of nothing, the Sage of Wasilla tweeted this yesterday:

Govt: stay out of our garage, refrigerator, church, gun safe, bookshelf, etc. America: you willing to give up freedom for more govt control?

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) July 17, 2013

So, in the Senate immigration bill, the path to citizenship is predicated on getting E-Verify fully operational in five years? And if Greg Sargent is correct, the House proposal says E-Verify must be fully operational in five years or undocumented immigrants lose their legal status?

I just don't see Republicans being at all willing to accept E-Verify directed at everyone, but even if it does become law, I don't see them allowing full implementation without throwing sand in the gears -- we know from Obamacare and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that they love to prevent or stall the implementation of laws they don't like.

So I don't think a real path to citizenship is coming anytime soon, even if the House does start coming around on immigration reform.

COMPLETELY VOLUNTARY EXERCISE: WORSE THAN HITLER

I can't exactly sat I love all of Mike Bloomberg's efforts at social engineering, but this seems pretty benign:

... City officials announced a new initiative this afternoon aimed at encouraging office workers to take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Under legislation proposed by the mayor, all new buildings and buildings undergoing major renovation would be required to give occupants access to at least one stairwell, as well as post signs near elevators pointing to nearby stairs....

"Whether you're tall or short, fat or thin, you’ll be healthier and you'll live longer if you're more active. But the problem is we've been lulled into a sedentary lifestyle," said Department of Design and Construction Commissioner David Burney at a Manhattan press conference at The New School. In too many buildings, the stairs are hard to find, kept locked, armed with alarms, or dark and windowless -- making people afraid to use them, Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said. The programs are designed to change that, he said....

Mr. Bloomberg, who said he personally almost always uses the stairs -- and doesn't stand still when he’s on an escalator -- said that part of the challenge was to make being active hipper for young people across the city....

Yeah, laugh, but no one's being forced to skip the elevator, and the construction changes apply to new and significantly renovated buildings. So where's the harm?

Meredith Jessup at Glenn Beck's Blaze inadvertently or deliberately misreads this:

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG NOW INSISTS THAT YOU TO TAKE THE STAIRS

This whole Nanny State utopia Bloomberg’s setting up in New York has crossed the line.

Take away my freedom to drink large sodas? Fine, but I'll be damned if you think you can take away my right to be lazy....

Um, no. Once this takes effect, buildings will have accessible elevators and stairs. Freedom! Including the freedom to be lazy! (Which I think was going to be one of FDR's Five Freedoms, but Harry Hopkins told the president that four sounded better. But I'll have to confirm that.)

Allahpundit at Hot Air thinks New York is headed down a slippery slope to fascism, especially if Anthony Weiner succeeds Bloomberg:

The cumulative effect (and, I'd say, design) of Bloomberg's various initiatives is to make the public more comfortable with the idea of government micro-managing their health. These are baby steps, like San Francisco trying to ban Happy Meals. They might not stay so baby-ish. In fact, when I tweeted my point about how maybe Weiner's not so bad vis-a-vis Bloomy, James Poulos tweeted back, "I fear that Weiner will just expand to fill the enormous cavity that Bloomberg has created." Bingo. Why wouldn't he? What self-respecting liberal would cede back regulatory power grabbed by his predecessor in the name of "health," especially with the public increasingly aware of the dangers of obesity? This ratchet, like so many others, goes only one way.

Raise your hand if you really believe Anthony Weiner's focus as mayor would be, um, behavioral control.

Bloomberg is encouraging us to take the stairs because it's something he personally likes to do. Right-wingers see this as totalitarian. You know what link between a government official's personal preferences and other people's lives right-wingers didn't think was totalitarian? This:

In a December 2002 memo, Rumsfeld authorized ... the use of dogs to scare prisoners, forced removal of their clothing, marathon 20-hour interrogation sessions and forced standing for up to four hours at a time.

At the bottom of the memo approving the techniques, Rumsfeld, who works at a standing desk, wrote, "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours? D.R."

This was not offering a range of options. But wingers thought it was just fine.

DO WE HAVE MULTIPLE CRAZY ABSOLUTIST WINGNUT PARTIES NOW?

This is interesting, although I suppose it was foreseeable:

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul mocked Liz Cheney's newly announced Senate campaign Tuesday, questioning her Wyoming residency in a barbed statement.

"When I heard Liz Cheney was running for Senate I wondered if she was running in her home state of Virginia," Paul said....

Asked last week about the brewing matchup, Paul told POLITICO he viewed [incumbent senator Mike] Enzi as a solid conservative.

Paul and Cheney stand at opposite poles of the conservative national security debate, with Cheney supporting a hawkish foreign policy and Paul openly questioning the value of American military action overseas, and advocating for cuts to the defense budget....

I picked up a strain of disgruntlement last night in a couple of Free Republic threads about the Cheney announcement:

She isn't trying to oust a Democrat, she's trying to oust a Republican. Are only a few powerful families supposed to control the country?

****

yea, great, another GOP who wants ot get in all wars and others business, put our troops at risk while being libral on the homosexual agenda and cross dressing front.

Just another elitist ruling class who will take the side of Graham and MCcain and dopes will vote because of her name and the letter R

****

We can NOT afford to further extend the stranglehold these globalist/statist power elites have over the Republican Party. Already we've compromised watch too many (R)'s crossing the aisle and NOT holding the line on such a crucial issue as Amnesty.

There are several things going on here. One, obviously, is the huge gap on foreign policy between the Paulites and the neocons. But in addition to that, some in the rank-and-file have clearly started believing their own rhetoric about wanting to throw all the old guard out, regardless of party. And some are angry about compromises on social issues (Liz Cheney thinks gay marriage should be left to the states) and immigration. Basically, they don't want any Republican to compromise on anything, ever, and if you haven't compromised yet, they're looking for signs that you might (and being part of the old guard might be such a sign). In addition, it seems that some of the crazies have started to become wary of Cheneyesque neocon interventionism not because they're Paulites, but because (a) they think McCain and Graham are RINOs on other issues and McCain and Graham are among the most bellicose Republicans holding office, and (b) Obama's foreign policy is muscular in many respects, so if he's for it, they're against it.

I also think the wingers are so used to hating their enemies and finding fault that they've become insatiable -- hating liberals and Democrats isn't enough, so they're scratching their needle tracks and constantly looking for the next hate-fix. They'll hate their own if nothing else is available.

I wish this added up to a real conservative crack-up, but I think it's just a bit of a muddle, with a real schism as a possibility eventually, though probably not soon. But we can hope.

COVER OF ROLLING STONE INFURIATES PEOPLE WHO CAN'T READ

Sorry, I'm not going to join the chorus of outrage about this Rolling Stone cover:





I'm not going to join a group that includes professional rage generator Michelle Malkin:

Last wk I wrote about Tiger Beat Terrorist Syndrome. This wk, Rolling Stone editor joins the Ja-harem. http://t.co/wlcJSdI4us

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 16, 2013

The Atlantic's Dashiell Bennett writes:

The layout, which is being described as "shocking" and "offensive," resembles any number of rock star images that have graced the magazine over the years... and that's exactly the problem. Many people feel that the photo the editors chose makes Tsarnaev look like a smoldering teen heartthrob and not the accused murderer and terrorist that he is.

Yeah, maybe -- if you don't read the cover line. Which, if you haven't noticed, is as follows:

THE BOMBER
How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell into Radical Islam and Became a Monster

Note that the cover calls him "THE BOMBER" -- not "the alleged bomber" or "the guy the New World Order wants you to believe committed the bombings, which were actually the work of private security forces (or didn't actually take place because the whole thing was a drill involving actors who didn't actually lose their legs)." The cover line says he did it. The cover line says he "fell into radical Islam." The cover line says he's "a monster." And he's not called "Jahar" -- the rendering of his name favored by his conspiracy-minded fans.

Does Tsarnaev "look like a smoldering teen heartthrob" in the cover photo? Um, that's not how Rolling Stone makes cover subjects look like heartthrobs -- this is. He's not shirtless. He's not Photoshopped to within an inch of his life to emphasize cheekbones and abs. This is just what he looks like, based on every photo of him I've seen. And if you think he looks attractive, well, what are you asking for? The Matt Drudge School of Photo Selection, whereby you show your disgust for a subject by picking that person's worst possible photo?

And if Rolling Stone did pick the photo in part to appeal to the fans, well, according to The Atlantic's Bennett, they're not pleased:

Ironically, even the small community of "Free Dzhokhar" zealots, who are unabashed fans of Tsarnaev (and his looks) are against the cover too, believing the story and the use of the word "monster" in the headline will unfairly prejudice people against him.

Um, no, that's not ironic -- those fans may be ignorant with regard to Tsarnaev, but at least they can read a twenty-word cover line. It promises an article that holds Tsarnaev responsible for a brutal crime -- as it should. That upsets them. It should satisfy us.

UM, MAYBE THE GOP WON'T BE ABLE TO SUPPRESS THE CRAZY IN 2016

Liz Cheney announced today that he's challenging incumbent Republican Mike Enzi for the Wyoming Senate seat that's up in 2014. This is not making everyone on the right happy -- over at Power Line, where in 2009 you could read not one but two posts urging Liz to run for president in 2012, there is distress:

Perhaps ... she will be able to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy. But for now, this looks like exactly the kind of primary challenge that conservative Republicans should not be mounting. Cheney is neither significantly more conservative than Enzi nor significantly more electable; her real advantage as a primary candidate is that she is significantly more glamorous. That isn't enough.

Hot Air's Allahpundit is also not with the program:

I'm just not clear on why she'd necessarily be a significant upgrade over him. She's known mainly for being a super-hawk in the mold of her dad, but super-hawkishness (as distinct from hawkishness) was, I thought, momentarily out of fashion among grassroots conservatives. McCain and Graham are the two Republicans in Congress most loathed by the base, in part because of their penchant for interventionism, but Cheney presumably will be right there with them on foreign policy in the Senate. Some people seem to want Enzi out because he's a multi-term incumbent and the Senate needs "new blood," but how new is the blood when the "insurgent" is the daughter of the last Republican VP?

Or are these just the voices of ... RINOs?

We already knew from an article that ran in The New York Times earlier this month that the Wyoming GOP is not happy that Cheney is running -- but I guess this is the new GOP, a party in which you're deemed impure if you ever work with Democrats, as Townhall's Kurt Schlichter angrily explains:

The Times hailed him as "a studious, low-key legislator who worked well with Senator Edward M. Kennedy," and Enzi probably thinks that's a compliment.

For that reason alone he needs to go.

He needs to go because we can do better. It's not about Mike Enzi or any other Republican politician. It's about winning this war against progressivism, and if you aren't leading the fight then bow out and make room for someone who will.

Liz Cheney ... wants to win. Not to "compromise," not to "work together," not sit around singing "Kumbayah" with the liberals. She wants to win.

Enzi wants to be a sober, serious legislator working with his liberal friends across the aisle to make a better country. Except there are no friends across the aisle, and the liberals do not want to make this a better country. Liberals want to ruthlessly acquire and maintain power and control over every aspect of our lives, and anyone who does not see and understand that and who can't commit to destroying their hideous plans for our country needs to get out the way for a true conservative warrior.

It's interesting that this happened today, because one of the first things I read this morning was a column by Harry Enten arguing that insurgent anger won't give the GOP an extreme presidential nominee in 2016, because GOP voters want to win and GOP power brokers have a lot of control over the process. But does it seem to you as if GOP power brokers are successfully restraining the crazies these days? The apparent refusal of the House to pass real immigration reform is one sign that they're not. Liz Cheney's run is another.

What happens if party power brokers lose even more control? What happens if voters decide that, after the McCain and Romney losses, their most electable candidate is someone who's high on the crazy scale? I think we could get a Ted Cruz nomination -- and maybe he'll run with Liz Cheney. I think the old pattern could hold -- but it really may not this time.

TRYING TO IMAGINE WILLIAM SALETAN'S EMMETT TILL #SLATEPITCH

After examining the death of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman, Slate's William Saletan has concluded that the verdict was just and the real problem now is rabble-rousers, pretty much exclusively on the left.

I'm sure you're shocked.

In court, evidence and scrutiny have exposed these difficult, complicated truths. But outside the court, ideologues are ignoring them. They’re oversimplifying a tragedy that was caused by oversimplification. Martin has become Emmett Till. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is using the verdict to attack Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which wasn't invoked in this case. The grievance industrial complex is pushing the Department of Justice to prosecute Zimmerman for bias-motivated killing, based on evidence that didn't even support a conviction for unpremeditated killing. Zimmerman's lawyers have teamed up with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, inadvertently, to promote the false message that Zimmerman's acquittal means our society thinks everything he did was OK.

Well, there are plenty of people in this country who absolutely believe that everything George Zimmerman did was OK, and in fact heroic -- but they're not part of a "grievance industrial complex" (which Saletan considers a suitable description for black activists but not for, say, talk radio, Fox News, and their audience), so I guess they don't count. Oh, and, of course, Stand Your Ground was "invoked in this case," explicitly, in the charge to the jury, and was cited last night on CNN by Juror B37 as a major reason for the acquittal.

To Saletan this was a tragic case of two people making mistakes and both causing the death of one. That rainy night, Both Sides Did It:

Chief prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda ... pointed out that the wounds, blood evidence, and DNA didn't match Zimmerman's story of being thoroughly restrained and pummeled throughout the fight. But the evidence didn't fit the portrait of Martin as a sweet-tempered child, either.

How are those things equal? How do they cancel each other out? Saletan accepts the notion that Trayvon Martin didn't have George Zimmerman in a death grip, and seems to accept the notion that Zimmerman's wounds weren't as bad as he claimed, and still he wants to distribute the blame, as if the seriousness of the risk to George Zimmerman and his likelihood of escape are utterly irrelevant to his self-defense claim.

Oh, but it's because Martin was profiling Zimmerman -- and yes, those are Saletan's exact words:

Martin, meanwhile, was profiling Zimmerman. On his phone, he told a friend he was being followed by a "creepy-ass cracker." The friend -- who later testified that this phrase meant pervert -- advised Martin, "You better run." She reported, as Zimmerman did, that Martin challenged Zimmerman, demanding to know why he was being hassled. If Zimmerman's phobic misreading of Martin was the first wrong turn that led to their fatal struggle, Martin's phobic misreading of Zimmerman may have been the second.

Yes, it was "phobic" of Martin to think that Zimmerman might initiate a violent confrontation with him -- what a wacky, nutty theory, completely not borne out by the facts!

****

But I want to get back to Saletan's contempt for the notion that Trayvon Martin should be compared to Emmett Till. I'm no expert on the Till case, but when I read this account, I'm left with no doubt whatsoever that a 1950s William Saletan would have found fault with both sides.

I think he particularly would have latched on to this:

In the first few days following the discovery of Till's body, there was reason to hope that justice might follow. Mississippi Governor Hugh White telegrammed District Attorney Gerald Chatham "urging vigorous prosecution of the case." For his part, Chatham said, "Murder is murder whether it is black or white, and we are handling this case like all parties are white." Mississippi citizens expressed shock over the crime. Ben Roy, a white merchant in Money, told reporters, "Nobody here, Negro or white, approves of things like that." Local newspapers added their condemnation. The Greenwood Commonwealth editorialized, "The citizens of this area are determined that the guilty parties shall be punished to the full extent of the law."

Then everything changed. When Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, described Till's killing as a "lynching" and opined that "the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children," many Mississippians were deeply offended and angered. According to historian Hugh Whitaker, the strident remarks of Wilkins and other northern opponents of segregation caused the local power structure to dig in, and throw its support to Bryant and Milam, two men they otherwise might have been happy to see put away. All five lawyers in the town of Sumner, where the Bryant-Milam trial would be held, agreed to serve as defense counsel. One of the defense lawyers acknowledged later that he only agreed to represent Bryant and Milam after "Mississippi began to be run down."

Ideologues oversimplifying difficult, complicated truths! Surely the NAACP and other northern opponents of segregation were as morally reprehensible as the people who killed Emmett Till and mutilated his body!

And I strongly suspect Saletan would have concluded that Till deserved some punishment, if not death exactly, for what he did, or was alleged to have done (I imagine Saletan would have said the truth was somewhere midway between the conflicting accounts):

... Emmett was left alone in the store for a minute or so with Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working the store's cash register. What was done or said in those few moments is not known for certain, but whatever happened doomed Emmett. As Carolyn Bryant would later tell the story in a Tallahatchie County courthouse, Till asked her for some candy inside a candy counter. When Bryant placed the candy on top of the counter, Till grabbed her right hand tightly and asked, "How about a date, baby?" When Bryant pulled her hand free and started to walk away, Till grabbed her by the waist near the cash register and told her, "You needn’t be afraid of me, baby I’ve [slept] with white women before.” Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, writing about the incident decades later, questioned Carolyn Bryant's account. Entering the store "less than a minute" after Till was left inside alone with Bryant, Wright saw no inappropriate behavior and heard "no lecherous conversation." Wright said Till "paid for his items and we left the store together."

There is, however, general agreement about what happened next outside the store. As Carolyn Bryant left the store and headed towards a car (to retrieve, she testified, a gun), Emmett whistled at her. Till's cousin described it as "a loud wolf whistle, a big city 'whee wheeeee!'" Till's Mississippi cousins instantly knew that Till had broken a longstanding taboo relating to social conduct between blacks and whites, and that they were in grave danger.

A wolf whistle? The evidence didn't fit the portrait of Till as a sweet-tempered child, now, did it?

Yes, I'm glad Saletan wasn't around to write about Emmett Till in real time.

MSNBC, NOT EXACTLY BUILDING A BROAD PROGRESSIVE COALITION

Pew notes that African-Americans have been far more focused on the George Zimmerman trial than whites:

... the story has consistently attracted far more interest among blacks than whites – and that remained the case in the trial's final days. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to say they tracked news about the Zimmerman trial very closely (56% vs. 20%).

Moreover, fully 67% of blacks say they watched at least some live coverage of the Zimmerman trial, compared with 38% of whites. About one-in-five blacks (21%) say they watched "almost all" of the trial coverage; just 5% of whites reported watching almost all of it.

And yet MSNBC, which (at least in primetime) focused heavily on the trial and shared the widespread outrage at what Zimmerman did, had lousy ratings on the night of the verdict:

When the jury announced it had acquitted Zimmerman of all charges, MSNBC found itself in fourth place in the ratings, behind, Fox, CNN and HLN.

According to preliminary numbers, Fox News was #1 in total viewers with 3.862M. CNN came in second with 3.407M, followed by sister network HLN with 2.203M. MSNBC was fourth with only 1.298M, ... far behind their major competitors.... CNN came in first in the 25-54 demo with 1.716M viewers, while Fox was second with 1.113M. Again, HLN was third with 980K in the demo and MSNBC was last with 510K.

Fox and talk radio have made right-wing politics fun for a white but economically diverse audience that might otherwise turn to non-political media content. Fox and the radio talkers have turned politics into entertainment, with heroes and villains and morality plays.

MSNBC, besides not being ideologically consistent from day to night the way Fox is, has done a lousy job of reaching viewers beyond its target audience of well-educated people who are mostly white. So when the verdict came down, black viewers didn't tune in. MSNBC hasn't tried very hard to reach them. It doesn't have much interest in appealing to the white working class, either -- yes, I know working-class whites skew right, but they're disgruntled, yet only the right and the bland center are trying to speak to them. I always regarded Ed Schultz as a faux-working class guy, someone who plays a working-class guy on TV, but at least he was trying, and now he's been banished from MSNBC prime time, in favor of Chris Hayes, whose ratings are worse.

Well, it's the long-standing problem with progressives: an awkward, rickety coalition that comes together harmoniously mostly on Election Day. And no, I don't have an easy solution.

THEM THAT'S GOT SHALL GET, THEM THAT'S NOT SHALL LOSE, AND THE SAFETY NET IS AN ABOMINATION

Paul Krugman's column today concerns the House vote on the farm bill:

Over the years, ... [f]arm subsidies became a fraud-ridden program that mainly benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Meanwhile food stamps became a crucial part of the social safety net.

So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies -- at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed -- while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.

To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: "You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people's money" -- frequently, at this point, they add the words "at the point of a gun" --"and force them to give it to the poor."

It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people's money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

Now, some enemies of food stamps don't quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat." Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies.

Atrios says:

One does wonder whether the assholes in the House are just evil, whether they truly don't have any awareness of what it's like to be poor, especially in a recession, and whether they have any idea just how meager food stamp benefits are. This isn't quite the normal stupid or evil question, it's more a stupid or clueless/no empathy question.

I think what they really believe is that if you're poor, well, you deserve to be poor, no matter what the overall economy is like -- God and the free market (neither of which ever make a mistake) made you poor because you have poverty coming to you (because you chose to do things that made you poor, mostly having to do with laziness and sex and substance abuse). You are meant to suffer -- and those evil liberals who insist on mandating that you get a helping hand from the taxpayer are interfering with God's plan for you, and messing with the mechanisms of the marketplace, which are divinely ordained and are part of natural law.

Rich agribusiness firms, on the other hand, have clearly been favored by God -- they wouldn't be rich if God didn't think they were doing the right thing. They're rich enough to pay for lobbyists who get laws passed favorable to their interests -- just as nature (i.e., the free market, which is part of God's plan) intended. So, yes, of course it's perfectly OK to take people's money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

But as for the poor, the decision to let them suffer doesn't stem a lack of empathy -- it's a display of empathy. They've earned this suffering. It's good for them. It should teach them the error of their ways. God and the free market (which are pretty much the same thing) agree.

IS SOMEONE IN MURDOCHLAND CENSORING YESTERDAY'S ANTI-ZIMMERMAN NEW YORK POST FRONT PAGE?

Perhaps surprisingly, this was the front page of yesterday's New York Post:





Or maybe it's not surprising -- the readership of the print Post is far less white and conservative than the audience for Fox News, so this isn't the first time the paper has deviated from the right-wing line. Here are a couple of front pages from just after the shooting:

But when I go to the online Post cover archives and try to pull up that "TRAYVESTY" front page from yesterday, nothing comes up. I've tried this on a PC and a Mac, and with five different browsers -- nothing. Today's front page comes up fine, as do Saturday's and Friday's and Thursday's. But not yesterday's.

Maybe it works for you. Let me know. But if not, I think Murdoch High Command wants that deviation from right-wing Correct Thinking suppressed.