IS A NEW MOVIE GOING TO MAKE HEROES OF ROVE AND ATWATER (AND PUT TERRY DOLAN BACK IN THE CLOSET)?

I'm intrigued by the upcoming movie by its director, but I have some doubts about it:

Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan will be reteaming with their Kill Your Darlings director John Krokidas for another real-life inspired film, trading in their roles as Beat Generation writers for ambitious, would-be politicians.

StarStream Media announced that the company will finance and produce Krokidas’ Young Americans, based on the ... script by Wes Jones. The film is inspired by the real lives of Karl Rove, played by DeHaan, and Lee Atwater, played by Radcliffe, on a cross-country road trip as ambitious college students....

This script has been kicking around for a while -- a few years ago, it was the top-ranked film script at The Black List, a site where film professionals can assess unproduced screenplays. At that time, the title was College Republicans. The author of a site called ScriptShadow reviewed the screenplay in 2010. It sounds as if it's basically a buddy movie, with Atwater as the more interesting (and maybe anti-heroic?) of the two:

It’s August 1973 and a cocky young whippersnapper named Karl Rove decides to run for the chairman of the College Republicans (against the advice of his peers)....

After some discussion, it’s deemed that the key to winning this election is through the South. So on a plane Rove hops and upon getting to Atlanta, he meets his wily no-holds-barred campaign manager Lee Atwater, a pint-sized little bugger who’d sell out his own brother if he thought it would get him a couple of steps ahead in his career.

The straight-laced Rove despises Atwater immediately but the two have no choice but to work together. It’s been ordered by the higher-ups.

Rove’s competition is a man named Terry Dolan, a pompous chap who figures this will be a cakewalk over the relatively unknown Rove.

But Atwater is a fierce (and dirty) competitor (his motto is: “You just figure out whatever it is that gets people most riled up, and you hang it around the other guy’s neck.”) who immediately goes after Dolan’s girlfriend in order to find out his secrets. When he discovers that Dolan is secretly gay, he spreads the rumor through backchannels and within a week, Dolan’s reputation is ruined and he drops out of the race. Never mind the fact that Atwater was wrong and Dolan wasn’t gay. Whatever gets the job done.

OK -- stop right there. Dolan was a real Republican operative, and while he never came out of the closet, it was no secret that he was gay. As Frank Rich wrote in 2005:

Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.)

Is the director of Kill Your Darlings -- a very gay movie -- really going to put Terry Dolan back in the closet?

It's quite possible that that aspect of the screenplay will be changed -- but regardless, it sure seems as if we'll be expected to find Atwater and possibly Rove admirable in their roguishness. Here's more from that ScriptShadow review:

Atwater is a great role for an actor. He plays by his own set of rules. He’s dirty, he’s a liar, he’s a rogue. This character is going to pop on screen. You also have some nice conflict going on between the leads. At times it actually plays out like a buddy cop movie -- two guys with opposing views on life stuck together trying to achieve the same thing (if there’s an argument for College Republicans taking a chance – this would be the area it took a chance in). And to top it all off, you have a solid villain in Dolan.

So Dolan's the villain. That makes Rove and Atwater ... what?

And I'm also concerned that the screenplay got a favorable notice at Breitbart's old Big Hollywood site in 2010 from AWR Hawkins:

From what I’ve seen of the script, the aspects of Rove’s life highlighted in the film will not provide the left with as much red meat as they probably want. In other words, while the film casts a bad light on Rove in more than one instance, its enduring focus on Rove’s pragmatism actually seems to justify his misdeeds by showing that he stuck to his guns instead of abandoning ship when the going got tough....

... Jones’ presents Rove as man who both outsmarted and outmaneuvered those who opposed him.

Machiavelli would be proud.

Now, maybe this will have the feel of a movie like American Hustle, in which grubby, amoral, hapless characters nevertheless seem understandably human -- you feel for them, but you never admire them. Then I'm interested.

I should keep an open mind about this -- but, sorry, I'm going to pass on a movie that portrays either of these guys as no worse than a colorful rogue. They helped create the horrible political culture we live in, which means they're among the people most responsible for America's present-day dysfunction. I don't think I can sit through a movie that wants me to root for them to succeed.

HEY, JOHNNY MAC, WHAT'S WRONG WITH AN INEXPENSIVE MINE-DETECTION PROGRAM INVOLVING ELEPHANTS?

Over at FoxNews.com, John McCain lets us know that he just released a report on government spending:

Today, May 7, I am releasing the first in a new series of reports ... titled "America’s Most Wasted," exposing questionable Washington spending....

Examples of programs McCain considers wasteful? Well, there's this:

One of the programs listed in the 19-page “America’s Most Wasted” report is a $50,000 dollar grant awarded to researchers for the purpose of studying the ability of African elephants to sniff out bombs. It’s still not clear whether elephants are superior to dogs in bomb detection.

“While finding new ways to enhance our bomb detection methods is important, it is unlikely that African elephants could feasibly be used on the battlefield given their large size and sensitive status as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act,” the report states.

Hmmm -- is that the same program that was enthusiastically written up a couple of months ago in an AP story that was reprinted in that lefty rag the New York Post?

New research conducted in South Africa and involving the US military shows they excel at identifying explosives by smell, stirring speculation about whether their extraordinary ability can save lives.

“They work it out very, very quickly,” said Sean Hensman, co-owner of a game reserve where three elephants passed the smell tests by sniffing at buckets and getting a treat of marula, a tasty fruit, when they showed that they recognized samples of TNT, a common explosive, by raising a front leg.

Another plus: Elephants remember their training longer than dogs, said Stephen Lee, head scientist at the US Army Research Office, a major funder of the research.

... In ... tests, the elephants wrongly identified only 18 out of 502 buckets as containing TNT, amounting to a 3.6 percent error rate....

In a second set of tests, the elephants scored 100 percent, detecting TNT in 23 out of 23 buckets when “distractor odors” of tea, bleach, soap and gasoline were placed in the other buckets....

The point isn't for elephants to do this work in possible minefields:

Lugging around the huge mammals to mine fields wouldn’t be practical, so one idea is to bring parts of the mine fields to them.

Unmanned drones would collect scent samples from mined areas; a trained elephant would then smell them and alert handlers to any sign of explosives....

Or, as Stars & Stripes explains, scientists could learn how elephants detect odors and build what they've learned into mine- and bomb-detecting robots:

“If elephants proved to be very good at this task, then the goal was to try to determine how they do it so that understanding could be applied to the design of better electronic sensors,” said Joe Ferrare, a spokesman for the Army research command.

New and more effective bomb detection technology could be incredibly valuable to the military.

Yes, because:

Improvised explosive devices have proved a daunting threat to U.S. forces in the wars since 9/11. More than half of those wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were the victims of IEDs and the military spent billions scrambling to field mine-resistant troop vehicles as protection.

Now, remind me again how much this elephant program cost, Stars & Stripes?

The $50,000 cost of researching elephants in 2012 is part of the Army command’s total annual research budget of $5.6 billion.

Yes -- that $50,000 was less that 1/1000th of 1% of the total research budget. Or to put it another way, it's less than 2/100s of a penny for every man, woman, and child in America.

And you can read this 2009 Harvard Gazette story if you doubt that scientists really do try to replicate animals' sense of smell in robots.

So really, Johnny Mac, what's the problem here?

IN CASE YOUR RIGHT-WING UNCLE FORWARDS THIS TO YOU...

I spotted this at Newsmax:

Rush Limbaugh: Sharia Law Already Happening in US

In light of the fallout from the recent shooting in Texas, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh says Sharia law is already happening.

Limbaugh said on his radio show Thursday that on "one of the networks this morning somebody was defending Pam Geller and started saying, 'If we're not careful, Sharia law is gonna happen,'" and the co-host responded, saying that "'There isn't gonna be Sharia law in the United States of America. Just isn't gonna happen. Come on, get real, get real, it's silly.'"

But Limbaugh said that "Sharia law has already been implemented in this country."

"Are you aware that in New Jersey a judge found that an Islamic man could not be accused of the rape of his wife?" the conservative radio host asked his audience.

"A judge in New Jersey found that he could not be charged with it, much less found guilty, because there's no rape in his religion," he explained. "Well, hello. That's Sharia.

"Now, it's not Sharia that has become American law, but it's been implemented," he added. "It's been used."

Yeah, that happened -- in 2010. Jihad Watch wrote about it. So did Creeping Sharia. But they at least -- unlike Limbaugh -- pointed out that the ruling was almost immediately overturned.

Eugene Volokh had the story originally, under the headline "Cultural Defense Accepted as to Nonconsensual Sex in New Jersey Trial Court, Rejected on Appeal." A Moroccan woman had applied for a restraining order, charging her Moroccan husband with forcing her on a number of occasions to have sex. The judge accepted that this had happened, but concluded that the husband

was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited.

But the ruling was overturned on appeal, with the appeals court judge writing this about the original judge (emphasis added):

As the judge recognized, the case thus presents a conflict between the criminal law and religious precepts. In resolving this conflict, the judge determined to except defendant from the operation of the State’s statutes as the result of his religious beliefs. In doing so, the judge was mistaken.

Somehow, Limbaugh failed to mention the resolution of the case on the radio yesterday -- as, presumably, will your uncle when he forwards the Newsmax story to you.

****

On the radio, Limbaugh went on to say:

... I would even go so far as to point out that what happened in Indiana when they had their religious freedom law pass there, remember the outrage that occurred as a result of that? The media is running around going door-to-door looking for a bigot. They found this young woman and her family that owned a pizzeria. The people at the pizzeria had never said anything about whether or not they would cater a gay wedding. It had never come up. But the media goes door-to-door, starts asking, and in response a question, this young woman who thinks that the media is really interested in what she's saying, doesn't realize she's being set up, says, "No, we would not cater a gay wedding. It's against our religious principle."

And, bammo, the sewer that is Twitter blew up. Everybody in the country came descending on the state of Indiana. That's an example of what Sharia would be like.

You mean, the pizzeria that closed temporarily, then reopened with huge crowds of customers, after benefiting from an $840,000 crowdfunding campaign? Yeah, that's brutally totalitarian. If that's American sharia, wingnuts, it's going to be just fine for you.

JEB TROLLS DEMOCRATS -- INADVERTENTLY?

Jeb Bush finally said something Republican primary voters want to hear, though it's not clear he even wanted the public to know:

When asked this week at an exclusive Manhattan gathering about who advises him on U.S.-Israel policy, Jeb Bush surprised many of the 50-plus attendees by naming his brother, former president George W. Bush, as his most influential counselor.

“If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him,” Bush said Tuesday, speaking to a crowd of high-powered financiers at the Metropolitan Club, according to four people present.

The remark came as part of an answer to a question about Bush’s political advisers and their policy views. Bush was pressed for details about who he surrounds himself with and consults as he thinks through his positions, guests said.

The Republicans in the room spoke on the condition of anonymity to divulge information about the proceedings, where confidentiality was insisted upon by the event’s host, GOP mega-donor Paul Singer....

If four people "leaked" this information (to The Washington Post's Robert Costa and Matea Gold), then I have to assume Jeb wanted this out there. But with Jeb you never know.

Jeb needs to make an effort to win the primaries, so he might as well go ahead and say this proudly -- after all, a 2014 Gallup poll showed W with an 88% favorable rating among Republicans.

Republican voters want a candidate who'll say things that please conservatives and make non-conservatives furious. Jeb just did that -- furtively. If he wants to win, he needs to do it more often, and unabashedly. The more a candidate makes us howl, the better that candidate looks to GOP voters.

IF ONLY WE WERE ASHAMED

This seems like a feel-good story, but it doesn't make me feel good:

Comedian Stephen Colbert announced Thursday that he would fund every existing grant request South Carolina public school teachers have made on the education crowdfunding website DonorsChoose.org....

Colbert partnered with Share Fair Nation and ScanSource to fund nearly 1,000 projects for more than 800 teachers at over 375 schools, totaling $800,000....

This story comes from a newspaper in Greenville, South Carolina. Here are some of the local projects being funded:

This is what teachers in Greenville have asked for help with on donorschoose.org

... Amanda Wilson, special education - A trampoline and treadmill for sensory therapy: $504

Beth Bailey, media specialist - books that are good for girls: $408

Stacie Campbell, kindergarten - dodge balls for recess play: $165....

Is this a heartwarming story? Yeah, I guess -- but to me it's heartbreaking that teachers in the richest country on earth have to beg for balls to use at recess or therapeutic equipment for special-ed kids.

A few other items that will be funded:

16 new bulletin boards: $202

... A set of write and wipe pockets and write and wipe erasers: $179

... Classroom library books: $239

If we had a proper sense of values in this country, we'd never want something like this to go public, even if it really was the only way the kids could get what they need. We wouldn't want it known that we weren't doing right by the next generation.

But we're just so used to this in America. We're the greatest country on earth, we always say, even though we fall short in so many ways. We're actually proud when a generous rich person such as Colbert lets us off the hook. Instead, we should be ashamed.

For the record, the population of South Carolina as of 2014 was 4,832,482. The $800,000 in projects Colbert is funding could have been funded by an extra 16 cents in taxes per South Carolina resident. Why is that too much to ask?


(Via Daily Kos.)

BILL CLINTON'S SELF-CRITICISM ON CRIME DIDN'T BEGIN YESTERDAY

This happened yesterday, but it wasn't the first public airing of Bill Clinton's contrition regarding his 1990s anti-crime initiatives:

President Bill Clinton on Wednesday conceded that over-incarceration in the United States stems in part from policies passed under his administration.

Clinton signed into law an omnibus crime bill in 1994 that included the federal "three strikes" provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. On Wednesday, Clinton acknowledged that policy's role in over-incarceration in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

"The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison," Clinton said Wednesday. "And we wound up...putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives."

Clinton's comments come on the heels of protests in Baltimore over policing and the death of a young black man there and a week after Hillary Clinton delivered one of the first policy addressees of her presidential campaign on criminal justice reform, saying that the system focuses too much on incarceration.

But a shift on this issue by both Clintons has been in the works. As I mentioned in a previous post, The New York Times told us that on April 27:

... declared and presumed candidates for president are competing over how to reverse what they see as the policy excesses of the 1990s and the mass incarceration that has followed.

... The extent of that change is made evident in a new book [Michael] Waldman’s [Brennan Center for Justice] has compiled featuring essays by many of the major presidential candidates laying out ideas for tackling the criminal justice system.

... For Mrs. Clinton, it was time to avoid another “incarceration generation,” as she put it. “We need a true national debate about how to reduce our current prison population while keeping our communities safe,” she wrote.

Significantly, her husband added a foreword in which he implicitly agreed that some of the policies he himself embraced two decades ago were too extreme. “The drop in violence and crime in America has been an extraordinary national achievement,” Bill Clinton wrote. “But plainly, our nation has too many people in prison and for too long -- we have overshot the mark.”

You can read Bill Clinton's foreword here.

The book has contributions from both Clintons, Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb -- and also Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and even Rick Perry. It's obviously been in the works for a while. I don't know how we got to a (vague semi-)consensus on the need for criminal justice reform, but we're there, and the Clintons have clearly been laying groundwork for a shift on their part. This doesn't appear to be an opportunistic reaction to Baltimore.

OMIGOD OMIGOD SHE'S DOOMED

Hot Air's Noah Rothman looks at a New Hampshire poll's general-election matchups and thinks Hillary Clinton is in trouble:

... the results of the latest Dartmouth University survey should be a source of concern for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

... That poll found that ... Clinton continues to enjoy the support of more voters when tested against Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) and Govs. Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee. But that same survey also found Clinton struggling when voters were forced to choose between her and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and it discovered that the former secretary of state comes up short in a hypothetical matchup against both Govs. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush.

" ... Bush received 36.9 percent support while Clinton received 34.1 percent support (29.0 percent unsure),” the poll’s release read.

“The Rubio-Clinton trial heat resulted in a virtual tie -- 34.4 percent for Rubio and 34.5 percent for Clinton, with 31.1 percent unsure,” it continued. “Finally, Walker leads Clinton by a four-point margin, 38.7 percent to 34.8 percent, with 26.5 percent unsure.”

That would be the same Dartmouth survey that said this in April 2011 -- just about four years ago exactly:

President Obama is getting some ominous news out of New Hampshire Friday in a new poll that suggests he will lose the key presidential state by a sizable margin if former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee.

According to the new survey conducted by Dartmouth College, Romney beats the president in a head-to-head matchup by 8 points, 47 percent to 39 percent. Obama's poor showing against Romney is also the product of his weak approval rating in the Granite State, where only 36 percent of voters there give him positive marks....

Obama was losing to Romney by 8! He had lousy approval ratings! He was in serious trouble!

Um, Obama ultimately won New Hamoshire 52%-46% -- a 6-point victory rather than an 8-point loss.

My theory? Four years ago at this time, there were a lot of Republicans stomping around New Hampshire and talking themselves up (and talking Democrtic policies don); for obvious reasons, there wasn't anyone on the ground doing Democratic pushback. Y'know, just like now.

So, Noah, I don't think this poll is hugely worrisome. Get back to me in a year.

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA STILL WANTS YOU TO SEE PAUL RYAN AS A HEROIC FIGURE

Paul Ryan isn't running for president this year, to the likely dismay of all the mainstream media observers who have a huge mancrush on him, --but the press can still find a way to work him into campaign reporting. Today, Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin have a story in The New York Times titled "Wisconsin, Politics and Faith Bind Scott Walker and Paul Ryan." Yes, Scott Walker is fascinating because he's almost like ... Paul Ryan! (Who's so dreamy!)

Who could have guessed in the mid-1980s, at a pair of otherwise forgettable McDonald’s restaurants some 20 miles apart, that two bushy-haired teenagers working the burger grills would become Wisconsin’s most powerful Republicans?...

For Republicans who are disappointed that Mr. Ryan has decided not to run for president in 2016, Mr. Walker is offering himself as the next big thing (if not the next best thing) to come out of southern Wisconsin: a kindred spirit who talks politics and trades prayers with Mr. Ryan in phone calls and frequent text messages....

While Mr. Ryan is technically neutral in the 2016 Republican nomination contest because of his role in raising money for the Republican National Committee, he is full of praise for Mr. Walker....

For his part, Mr. Walker is already musing about putting Mr. Ryan in the cabinet of a Walker administration -- or keeping him as his best friend in Congress, where Mr. Ryan is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Well, if Scott Walker's best friend is Paul Ryan (who's so dreamy!), then Walker's all right with me!

How significant is Ryan? Well, according to Healy and Martin, this significant:

By staying on the sidelines in 2016 yet championing conservative tax and spending policies, on which he is widely considered his party’s leading voice, Mr. Ryan could end up playing a role for Mr. Walker and other Republican candidates similar to one Senator Elizabeth Warren may have with Hillary Rodham Clinton on progressive economic issues. He and Ms. Warren are both beloved by their political parties and mocked by those on the other side.

Seriously?

Here's the difference between Warren and Ryan: Warren is a member of a party that often (but far from consistently) pays lip service to liberalism, while frequently betraying liberals, sneakily or openly. Warren has worked hard to drag her party to the left, and it seems as if she's having some success. (As a presidential candidate this year, Hillary Clinton sounds a lot more progressive than she has at times in the past.) But it's still an uphill struggle for Warren.

By contrast, Paul Ryan advocates policies that virtually every Republican already agrees with, and that Republicans are more than eager to vote for in Congress. Ryan is not leading a "conservative wing" of the GOP the way Warren is leading a "progressive wing" -- in the GOP, there is no other wing. There's just a conservative Ryan wing.

I guess I should be glad that the mainstream media still plans to judge Republicans on how much their ideas are in sync with those of Paul Ryan. After all, Republicans and the media may adore Ryan, but the rest of the public doesn't seem to like him very much.

So, yes, New York Times, please keep working Ryan into stories about the GOP presidential race, and please keep saying that he might wing up as a Republican president's crucial ally.

SURVEILLANCE AND THE GARLAND SHOOTINGS: SPOT THE DISCONNECT

Dave Weigel has a story about Republican reactions to the attack on the Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas. Weigel writes (emphasis added):

Defining the Garland shooting as terrorism could affect two mounting debates in Congress: one, over whether authorizations of military force passed in 2001 and 2002 could justify the current attacks on the Islamic State, seemed to be at an impasse; the other, over surveillance, would be coming to a head as the PATRIOT Act renewal date approaches.

“It probably gives some ammunition to those of us who would like to see the kind of surveillance that would prevent any attack,” said [Senator John] McCain.

So McCain is suggesting that the reason the Garland attack wasn't prevented was a lack of surveillance? He's saying, presumably, that there's inadequate scrutiny of private electronic communications?

Because, actually, there were hints of what was about to happen right out in public, on Twitter, as The New York Times notes:

Counterterrorism officials on Tuesday were studying the electronic trails left by two men killed by a police officer as they shot at a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas, looking for any direct ties to the Islamic State extremist group in Syria....

But any secret ties that officials might find may be less important than the public exchanges of messages on Twitter by one of the gunmen, Elton Simpson, in the weeks before the attack. Mr. Simpson, a convert to Islam with a long history of extremism, regularly traded calls for violence on Twitter with Islamic State fighters and supporters, as well as avowed enemies of Pamela Geller, the organizer of the cartoon contest.

His Twitter contacts included Junaid Hussain, a British fighter with the Islamic State in Syria known as Abu Hussain al-Britani, and Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, a Somali-American now in Somalia who uses the name Mujahid Miski and frequently promotes the Islamic State. Both men called for violence, and Mr. Hassan had suggested the Texas event as a possible target....

So here's a guy who, decade ago, was brought up on charges of trying to travel to Somalia to become a jihadist fighter, and who was convicted of lying to authorities, and now he's publicly exchanging tweets with ISIS members and supporters overseas, and we miss the fact that he was planning an attack, and John McCain thinks we need to redouble our surveillance efforts involving private communications?

The Times story goes on to say that there are a lot of messages out there to track, and it's hard to know which ones to focus on:

The onslaught of recruitment propaganda has multiplied the number of online enthusiasts for the Islamic State in the United States, giving counterterrorism investigators the difficult task of deciding which are simply fantasizing in public and which might be planning violence.

“The ISIS guys are talking to these wannabes on Twitter all day long,” a senior law enforcement official said. “It’s like the devil is sitting on their shoulder saying, ‘Come on, they’re insulting the prophet, what are you going to do about it?’”

The official, who would speak about the continuing investigation only on condition of anonymity, said that although Mr. Simpson had long been under F.B.I. scrutiny, he had not appeared to be preparing for violence. “There are so many like him that you have to prioritize your investigations,” the official said.

Yeah, maybe. That was the reason given for France's failure to head off the Charlie Hebdo massacre, despite the fact that one of the assailants in that attack had a record similar to Simpson's. But are we devoting too many resources to a huge, relatively indiscriminate nationwide dragnet, and too few to people about whom there should be reasonable suspicion, because of their known past actions? Do we favor surveillance technology because it's sexy and seems powerful? Or because it makes lefties and civil libertarians howl?

If we don't have enough resources to distinguish which known ISIS and Al Qaeda wannabes are dangerous, how can we have enough resources to sort the wheat from the chaff in our mass surveillance efforts?

DO IT THE CONSERVATIVE WAY: JUST SELL THE DEBATE SLOTS

Time's Zeke Miller tells us that Republicans are now puzzling over how to conduct presidential debates when there are too many candidates to accommodate easily:

... now the national party and networks face the new challenge of arranging as many as 17 candidates on a single televised stage.

Largely out of view, executives and journalists from Fox and CNN, with input from the national party, are weighing the entrance criteria for the first two debates. Among the options being considered is using polling as a rough inclusionary test, followed by a fundraising metric -- dollars raised or the number of individual donors activated.

But, see, that's not necessarily going to work. The party really, really wants Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson in the debates because they're not white men. We're told that that shouldn't be a problem for Carson, at least:

Carson, according to a number of party insiders, is all-but-guaranteed a spot given his relatively strong polling in the GOP field.

Except that he's not really polling well -- in the four most recent national polls, all conducted last month, Carson is averaging only 5% of the vote, which puts him in eighth place. He's having trouble sustaining the level of popularity he had after his Obama-bashing speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast -- that speech now seems like his career peak as a scourge of liberalism, and he seems unlikely to repeat it. What if his numbers worsen? Do Republicans put him in the debates anyway? And if so, are we allowed to ask the GOP whether the decision was truly color-blind?

And what about Fiorina? She's never done better than 2% of the vote in any national poll -- The Real Clear Politics average has her in fourteenth place. Even Bobby Jindal beats her. Bobby Jindal! But the GOP wants her in the debates because her gender gives her free rein to bash Hillary Clinton. What to do?

Look, it's simple: You guys are Republicans. You think money is speech. You don't think billionaires' checks are corrupting -- you think free-flowing cash in politics is good for America.

So sell the debate lots outright. Billionaire donors will obviously buy slots for Bush and Walker and and Rubio. Some tech billionaire will probably buy one for Rand Paul and pay for it in Bitcoins.

And then, after that, other billionaires can shell out for the remaining places on the stage strategically. Want someone up there to bash Rand Paul on defense? Maybe Sheldon Adelson or some other hawk will pony up to buy a place on stage for Lindsey Graham, or John Bolton, or Peter King, or all three. Maybe some deficit hawk in the billionaire class will pay to let John Kasich cheerlead for the balanced budget amendment. Party-establishment donors can pay to put Fiorina and Carson up there if they want an unconvincing sense of diversity. Oh, and Donald Trump can buy his own slot.

This could be a problem for chronically underfunded candidates like Mike Huckabee. But maybe some churches can try collecting enough money to buy him a slot if they start a GoFundMe campaign.

The business of America is business, right, Republicans? So why shouldn't that extend to Republican debates?

WASHINGTON IS WIRED FOR LITMUS-TEST-OBSERVING (AND -ENFORCING) REPUBLICANS

Mike Huckabee officially joined the presidential race today. At The Hill, Niall Stanage asks, "Why isn’t Huckabee getting more respect?"

In many ways, Mike Huckabee is the Rodney Dangerfield of the 2016 election.

The former Arkansas governor won the Iowa caucus in 2008 and subsequently finished second to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in GOP delegates earned. In recent polls, Huckabee is holding his own against several big-name candidates who have already entered the race. And he certainly passes the “I’d like to have a beer with him” test -- despite being teetotal himself. But Huckabee isn’t getting much respect as a serious threat to win the nomination.

Gosh, why would that be?

The path to the nomination will be difficult for the Huckabee. The 59-year-old won’t be able to raise the money that his best-funded GOP rivals will, and his fiscal record has been questioned by the influential Club for Growth.

Oh yeah, that.

Yes, the Club for Growth hates Huckabee, as Dave Weigel notes, and the feeling is mutual:

Few rivalries in politics have lasted as long, or run as deep, as the one pitting Mike Huckabee against the Club for Growth. For 15 years, the anti-tax, anti-spending group has opposed Huckabee's candidates and Huckabee himself. The former Arkansas governor has called it the "Club for Greed," has accused it of weakening the party with an economic message that alienates less-rich Americans, has dived into races seemingly just to oppose its favorites.

But gosh, you'd think that would inspire the mainstream media to champion Huckabee. He's a plucky underdog going after entrenched, moneyed interests! He's questioning hidebound political orthodoxy!

Nahhh. Weigel has posted a new ad the Club for Growth just put out opposing Huckabee. In the ad, big-media talking heads challenge Huckabee with Club for Growth-style talking points. The first one is Chris Wallace of Fox News, quoting Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. But notice who the other three are:



That's Norah O'Donnell, then of NBC (primarily quoting The Wall Street Journal), followed by George Stephanopoulos (not citing a source, but clearly citing right-wing opposition research), followed by Tim Russert (quoting the Cato Institute). It's true that some mainstream media figures occasionally fret about right-wing absolutism on taxes -- but when faced with a guy who challenges (or used to challenge) GOP anti-tax orthodoxy, the mainstream media uses that absolutist rhetoric as a club against the challenger. Or at least that was the case when Huckabee first ran and the excerpted interviews took place.

Why? Because the anti-tax zealot groups are part of the insider system, which is the same system Stephanopoulos and O'Donnell and Wallace are a part of, and Russert used to be part of. The journalists were happy to take what these zealot groups spoon-fed to them and use it to bash Huckabee.

Huckabee has since capitulated to Norquist's group, Stanage tells us at The Hill:

... anti-tax activist Grover Norquist told The Hill he has no fundamental opposition to Huckabee.

“Huckabee signed the pledge when he ran for president last time,” Norquist said, referring to the challenge issued by his group, Americans for Tax Reform, for candidates to promise not to raise taxes. “He’s a pledge-taker, and all pledge-takers are great guys,” a jocular Norquist added.

But the plutocrat-sphere and the rest of its think-tank defenders still despise Huckabee for his past apostasies. And the mainstream media was only too happy to carry the water of those zealots.

IN WHICH I DEFEND BEN CARSON, SORT OF

I'm certainly not a Ben Carson fan, but I think this Dana Milbank column is unfair:

Ben Carson’s over-the-top ego

Ben Carson, who formally announced his run for the presidency Monday, is a brilliant surgeon, gifted storyteller and charismatic speaker. But modesty is not among his talents.

The retired Johns Hopkins professor’s launch video, nearly five minutes long, positions the aspiring Republican presidential nominee right alongside Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

“We can once again become the authors of ideas that have such profound magnitude,” proclaims the deep voice-over, while Mount Rushmore appears on-screen. “Great transformations begin from a single event.”

Such as George Washington crossing the Delaware, or Ben Carson winning the Iowa caucuses.

The video moves on -- to an American flag, the Declaration of Independence, a church, and then the seated stone figure of Lincoln, enthroned at his memorial on the Mall.

“First we must heal, and healing requires a leader with calm, unwavering resolve -- someone more concerned about the next generation than the next election.”

Someone such as Lincoln. Or Ben Carson....

Really? Carson says a lot of crazy things in his speeches and media appearances, and he doesn't seem inclined to try to master the subject areas he'd need to know to be president -- but is his ego bigger than the egos of other presidential candidates? How different is his video from the melodramatic treacle we get from other aspirants?



How are the shots of the Lincoln and King memorials in the Carson video different from the Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt invocations in this John McCain video from 2008?



Or Ted Cruz annoucing his own presidential candidacy?

I want to talk to you this morning about reigniting the promise of America: 240 years ago on this very day, a 38-year-old lawyer named Patrick Henry...

(APPLAUSE)

... stood up just a hundred miles from here in Richmond, Virginia...

(APPLAUSE)

... and said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

... imagine it’s 1775, and you and I were sitting there in Richmond listening to Patrick Henry say give me liberty or give me death.

Imagine it’s 1776 and we were watching the 54 signers of the Declaration of Independence stand together and pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to igniting the promise of America.

Imagine it was 1777 and we were watching General Washington as he lost battle, after battle, after battle in the freezing cold as his soldiers with no shoes were dying, fighting for freedom against the most powerful army in the world....

At this point, a right-winger would point to some of the more florid rhetoric in Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. John McCain made an ad about that. He ignored the obvious fact that some of this was self-mocking, and some of it was trying to build a voter base the way you build a movement -- but conservatives weren't completely off base when they said that some of this was a bit much:



Look, there's a lot of hyperbole in American political rhetoric. It seems to me that Milbank is singling out Carson's hyperbole because he's Not One Of Us. I don't mean that he's black (Obama is black) -- I mean that he's not part of the insider politics/business/media crowd.

Every politician's excesses should probably be mocked -- why limit this to Carson?

CRAZY CONSPIRATORIALIST'S ENDORSEMENT IS VALUABLE ON AT LEAST TWO CONTINENTS

Paul Krugman is aghast:

You may think that the big news story lately has been riots in Baltimore -- or, if you have different priorities, either that boxing match or Kate’s baby. But in certain circles, the big thing has been the right-wing belief that operation Jade Helm 15, a military training exercise in Texas, is a cover for Obama to seize control of the state and force its citizens to accept universal health care at gunpoint.

No, really -- and this is being taken seriously both by Ted Cruz and by the governor, who has ordered the National Guard to keep a watch on the feds and their possibly nefarious activities.

Before you pooh-pooh this, think about what would happen to a Democratic politician who gave similar credence to a left-wing conspiracy theory this far out. I can’t even think of what that conspiracy theory might be.

Well, there's an obvious example of a similarly far-out conspiracy that Democrats could have embraced: 9/11 trutherism. And, in fact, we saw Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney embracing it a decade ago. We also had onetime White House aide Van Jones being exposed as a signer of a 9/11 truther petition.

What happened then? McKinney was primaried in 2006, for this and other reasons, and after she went down to defeat, she left the Democratic Party altogether. Jones, for his part, disavowed the petition, had his name removed from it -- and was forced to leave his White House job anyway.

Neither McKinney nor Jones was a huge name in American politics. But Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott are the junior senator and governor from the second most populous state in the Union, and Cruz is a major presidential candidate -- and they think this is plausible.

As does a very famous endorser of Abbott's candidacy:

Actor Chuck Norris, who has become a prominent conservative activist, published a column on the conspiracy theory website WND that told readers not to trust what the federal government has been saying about a military training exercise known as Jade Helm 15.

Some conspiracy theorists have warned that the exercise, which is set to take place later this year in Texas and six other western states, may lead to a covert takeover of some of those states....

"The U.S. government says, 'It’s just a training exercise.' But I’m not sure the term 'just' has any reference to reality when the government uses it," Norris wrote in his column....

"If Washington wants to cool the embers of controversy, then it should quit stoking the fire, as with the posting of a map of Jade Helm 15 'just' exercises that label some areas of the country, including Texas, as 'hostile,'" Norris wrote.

Hey, Israel, I hope you're proud that you just returned to office a prime minister who welcomed this guy's endorsement:



And you Mike Huckabee fans, well, you were pretty pathetic to begin with, so I'm not sure this is any additional shame:



That Huckabee ad is from the 2008 race, so not only was it filmed before Norris declared himself a birther, it was filmed before many of Norris developed some of his other arcane conspiracy theories. My favorite is his 2010 suggestion that an Obama executive order concerning Interpol was signed so that Obama could, as the Daily Beast put it at the time, "create a 'secret vault' at Interpol's New York office to conceal important records about the war on terror from the American public."

No, that didn't make Norris so fringy that high-level right-wing politicians would no longer consort with him. Hardly anything is too fringy on the right.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON PETER KING'S ALLEGED GOTCHA

Peter King went on Fox this morning and attacked Hillary Clinton:

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) criticized Hillary Clinton for her recent comments on criminal justice reform in light of the Sunday night shooting at a Texas event holding a contest to draw the Prophet Mohammed.

"When people like Hillary Clinton say that police should not have weapons of war, the fact is, we are at war; we are at war with Islamist terrorism, and we have to have all weapons and all resources available," he said Monday morning on Fox News's "Fox and Friends."

What exactly did Clinton say in her recent speech on criminal justice? Well, it could be interpreted as a blanket condemnation of the use of military equipment by police forces:

There are police departments already deploying creative and effective strategies, demonstrating how we can protect the public without resorting to unnecessary force. We need to learn from those examples, build on what works.

We can start by making sure that federal funds for state and local law enforcement are used to bolster best practices, rather than to buy weapons of war that have no place on our streets.

But please note her next two sentences:

President Obama's task force on policing gives us a good place to start. Its recommendations offer a roadmap for reform, from training to technology, guided by more and better data.

So what exactly does the president's task force recommend regarding military equipment? This:

2.7 RECOMMENDATION: Law enforcement agencies should create policies and procedures for policing mass demonstrations that employ a continuum of managed tactical resources that are designed to minimize the appearance of a military operation and avoid using provocative tactics and equipment that undermine civilian trust.

2.7.1. ACTION ITEM: Law enforcement agency policies should address procedures for implementing a layered response to mass demonstrations that prioritize de-escalation and a guardian mindset.

2.7.2 ACTION ITEM: The Federal Government should create a mechanism for investigating complaints and issuing sanctions regarding the inappropriate use of equipment and tactics during mass demonstrations.

So Clinton pointed us to the Obama task force, and the task force doesn't say that the use of military equipment is never appropriate. Instead, it recommends "a continuum of managed tactical resources" and "a layered response to mass demonstrations."

The recommendation is is that police forces should not be provocative when confronted with mass demonstrations. The task in Garland, Texas, was to secure a deliberately provocative event at which a featured speaker from overseas, Geert Wilders, is the target of death threats in multiple countries. The appropriate security approach to an event like that is obviously different from the approach suitable for a mass demonstration, at which the attitude of the police with regard to the community could be a key factor in whether violence escalates. In Garland, the target wasn't a crowd of community members -- the target was potential terrorists.

Garland, by the way, is not really a small town -- in fact, it's the 87th-largest city in America, with a population of nearly a quarter million people. And while it did deploy its SWAT team, there's evidence that the city hasn't exactly loaded up on military surplus. This is from a Dallas Morning News story about the federal government's now-notorious 1033 program, under which a lot of police forces obtain a lot of equipment:

Other departments in the county have a hodgepodge of 1033 military goods. Much of it went to federal agencies in the Dallas area, such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Dallas County Sheriff’s office has a mine-resistant vehicle for serving warrants. Mesquite has one too, but seldom uses it in favor of newer equipment.

Grand Prairie never got military weapons but can do battle with lukewarm beverages with its military surplus ice machine.

And Garland?

Garland got some old helmets more than a decade ago, said police spokesman Joe Harn. He said the helmets aren’t used anymore, but one of them did save the life of an officer shot in the head while serving a warrant.

That hardly seems excessive. And yet the Garland cops got the job done.

NEWSFLASH: POURING GASOLINE A FIRE DOESN'T EXTINGUISH IT (updated)

In the future, if she's being honest, Pam Geller will acknowledge that yesterday was the best day of her life:

GARLAND, Texas -- Shots rang out this evening at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas during the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest. A law enforcement officer was shot and both suspects have been killed. Officers on the scene said that it is possible that explosives are in the area.

Attendees were immediately forced into lockdown by police, including three Breitbart News reporters. Sources say event organizer Pamela Geller and keynote speaker Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, are safe....

The "law enforcement officer" was, according to The Dallas Morning News, a security guard for the Garland Independent School District, who was unarmed. He was treated for an ankle injury and released.

Geller and her crew wanted to provoke and inflame:

The New York-based American Freedom Defense Initiative had organized the event to award a cash prize for the best cartoon depicting Muhammad. Caricatures of the Islamic prophet are considered offensive by many Muslims, but the show’s organizers said they were exercising their freedom of expression.

And everything worked out better than they could have possibly imagined. There was violence, but, apart from the security guard and the two assailants, Geller and her crew and everyone inside and outside the auditorium got out without a scratch. Geller has been playacting as a war fighter in her own mind for decades, and now she got her war. Oh, and:

After the shooting, authorities escorted about 75 contest attendees to another room in the conference center, where a woman held up an American flag, and the crowd sang “God Bless America.”

So the theater of this was perfect for Geller's purposes.

She went to the event a cult figure, known to wingnuts and wingnut-watchers (and possibly to also to residents of the cities where she tries to foist her Muslim-bashing ads on public transportation systems), and now these assailants have made her a household name. Good job, idiots.

Matt Drudge, of course, is cranking it up to 11:



He links to a Daily Mail story with this claim:

Isis has claimed responsibility for an attack on an anti-Islam art contest in Texas in which an unarmed security guard was blasted in the ankle by fire from automatic rifles and the suspects shot dead by police....

The SITE Intelligence Group reported that an Islamic State (IS) fighter claimed on Twitter that the shooting was carried out by two pro-Isis individuals.

In a series of tweets and links, a jihadist named as Abu Hussain AlBritani, which SITE said was British IS fighter Junaid Hussain, claimed that '2 of our brothers just opened fire' at the Prophet Muhammad exhibition in Texas.

'They Thought They Was Safe In Texas From The Soldiers of The Islamic State,' added the tweet.

Which tells us nothing except that someone believed to be from ISIS is trying to grab the glory here. But I'm sure a lot of wingers are looking at the news of this incident and at Drudge's headline and concluding that a lot of scary stuff they've been told recently is true -- that there really is an ISIS training camp in Mexico a few miles from the Texas border, and that the U.S. military's Jade Helm 15 training exercise is an effort to bring ISIS fighters into America.

The Mail story claims to have ID'd one of the assailants:

ISIS supporters claimed on Twitter that one of the gunmen was a man calling himself Shariah Is Light on the social media site, but police have yet to formally identify the culprits....

He had posted a message earlier that said 'the bro with me and myself have given bay'ah [oath] to Amirul Mu'mineen [ISIS leader Al Baghdadi]. May Allah accept us as mujahideen #texasattack'.

If you search for "atawaakul" on Twitter, you learn that the user by that name has had his account suspended, and you're told that the tweet appeared shortly before the shooting started:

This tweet was at 6:35 p.m. central time. https://t.co/RUbeuLgXHp News of the shooting broke inside the conference center around 6:50 p.m.

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 4, 2015

You also see claims that he was a convert (so perhaps not a foreign fighter allowed into the U.S. by the evil Hussein Obama administration?), and you're told that the his avatar photo is of Anwar al-Awlaki, the now deceased Al Qaeda operative. (Question: Would an ISIS fighter have an Al Qaeda avatar photo?)

.@DaveedGR and is apparently a convert https://t.co/NSGXZJfXpK

— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) May 4, 2015

Whether it was this guy and an accomplice or someone else, the shooters rose to the Geller/Wilders bait, and now, in the words of Charles Johnson (a disillusioned ex-ally of Geller):

The only people who are going to “win” from what happened in Garland are the extremists - on both sides.

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) May 4, 2015

So, on both sides, mission accomplished.

****

UPDATE: One gunman has been identified as Elton Simpson, who crossed into Texas from Mexi-- oh, sorry, no, he didn't. (He's from Arizona.) He's reported to have been "posting on social media about the Islamic State"; he's also reported to have been Twitter user atawaakul, he of the Awlaki avatar. So I guess American jihadists don't pay too much attention to the Al Qaeda/ISIS feud.

POLICE MISCONDUCT: IT'S NOT ABOUT UNIONS, IT'S ABOUT CONSERVATISM (AND GENDER)

Ross Douthat believes we wouldn't have ongoing problems with bad cops if it weren't for police unions.

Douthat doesn't like government unions at all; he believes conservatives have made

a strong argument that the rise of public sector unions represents a decadent phase in the history of the welfare state, a case study in the warping influence of self-dealing and interest-group politics.

And Douthat believes this applies to cops, even though many conservatives are reluctant to chllenge cops:

But as we’ve been reminded by the agony of Baltimore, this argument also applies to a unionized public work force that conservatives are often loath to criticize: the police.

Police unions do have critics on the right. But thanks to a mix of cultural affinity, conservative support for law-and-order policies and police union support for Republican politicians, there hasn’t been a strong right-of-center constituency for taking on their privileges. Instead, many Republican governors have deliberately exempted police unions from collective-bargaining reforms -- and one who didn’t, John Kasich of Ohio, saw those reforms defeated.

See, this is where I go from disagreement to bafflement. Douthat argues that municipal unions in general are powerful enough to squeeze too much money out of taxpayers and to protect union members who should be disciplined or fired -- but then he reminds us that quite a few states have forced "collective-bargaining reforms" on municipal unions, which suggests that municipal unions aren't all that powerful anymore in much of the country. And if states have exempted police unions from these "reforms," that's not because of the power of unions, it's because of the power of cops.

Yastreblyansky has a lot to say about Douthat's column. He tells us:

The right's pseudo-intellectual critique of public sector unions is illustrated only by the police (and to a lesser extent the staffs of correctional institutions), because they're the only ones eagerly supported by conservative politicians and placated by terrorized liberal ones afraid of being stigmatized as pro-criminal. Teachers, health inspectors, tax assessors, even firefighters don't get this kind of backing from anybody, and the teachers in particular are under constant assault from conservatives and hedge-fund liberals piling on.

He concludes:

It's the conservatism that makes the police forces abusive, and nothing less.

I think that's basically true. Teachers' unions are supposedly too powerful, but that alleged power hasn't prevented conservatives (and phony liberals) from mounting multiple assaults on unionized schools: vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, generous tax breaks for private school tuition, and so on. Where are the comparable efforts to undermine police unions? Wouldn't clever right-wing think-tankers be dreaming up all sorts of alternatives to unionized police forces if right-wingers didn't like cops as much as they do? Why aren't we talking about, say, a privatized parallel system of policing, something that would, y'know, disrupt unionized police forces? The awesome power of teachers' unions doesn't deter the right from concocting such schemes, so it can't be unionization that's deterring conservatives in the case of cops.

Why do cops go unchallenged? Let's look at a few other institutions where we utterly lack the national will to regulated or deter misconduct. Think of Wall Street -- the guys there don't have unions, yet we do nothing when their conduct is outrageous. Look at rape in the military, or among college athletes -- we don't want to punish those guys either, and they don't have unions.

All the institutions I've just named have something in common with the police: They're overwhelmingly male cultures that represent what conservatives consider the best of traditional masculinity. (And you could add that they're cultures believed to be antithetical to liberalism, which makes them even more admirable to conservatives.) We're reluctant to hold the bad actors in these cultures responsible for their crimes because we think they're real men, and only wussy metrosexual liberals are unmoved by their real maleness.

That's why we don't punish bad cops. It's not the unions.

A TERRIBLE SHOOTING -- BUT OUR SOCIETY ALREADY AGREES THAT OFFICER MOORE'S LIFE MATTERS

Whatever I may say about cops who abuse their authority is not meant to suggest that I'm happy when something like this happens:

A plainclothes city cop was shot in the face in Queens Saturday when the ex-con cousin of a former New York Giant opened fire into his unmarked patrol car, authorities said.

Officer Brian Moore and his partner were driving through Queens Village when they spotted the suspect “adjusting an object in his waistband” near the corner of 212th St. and 104th Road about 6:15 p.m, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said.

The officers pulled up behind the suspicious man -- identified as Demetrius Blackwell, the younger cousin of former Giants cornerback Kory Blackwell -- and tried to question him.

Without warning, Blackwell whipped out a gun and squeezed off at least two rounds into Moore’s car, Bratton said.

Moore is in critical condition. Things don't look good for him. I hope he pulls through.

There's no evidence that this has anything to do with recent political events, but of course it's being politicized:

What time is the protest for #NYPD officer #BrianMoore?

— John Powers (@ComicJohnPowers) May 3, 2015

Cop shot in queens village yesterday, where's the riots ? Protests ? Ohh yeah okay

— Giganti (@AnthonyGiganti) May 3, 2015

A New York City Police Department Detective Bureau hit on the head, where is the community making large protests?... http://t.co/3ANKOycg1T

— Fabrizio ® (@Fabrizio) May 3, 2015

Dear @TheRevAl, I am outraged by the shooting of #NYPD officer #BrianMoore. Please let me know where the protest & ensuing riot will be held

— Dave Cohen (@AxlRosenberg) May 3, 2015

White NYPD cop shot in head by black suspect. Outrage? None apparent. #BlueLivesMatter http://t.co/4ycTlgdunM

— Leo Knight (@primetimecrime) May 3, 2015

I'm going to make obvious points, but they seem to need making.

Society cared about this shooting. A lot of resources were mobilized to locate the suspect, and he was in custody within hours of the shooting:

Law enforcement flooded the Queens Village neighborhood following the shooting -- police helicopters flew overhead, officers searched house by house and some could be seen walking on roofs. About 90 minutes later, police arrested Demetrius Blackwell, 35, near the crime scene in a house on the block where he lives, officials said.

Freddie Gray died on April 19. It took twelve days and a huge amount of public outrage before suspects in his death were charged, and that was considered an extraordinarily swift process of bringing charges. No one's been charged in the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many other blacks killed or wounded after interactions with the police.

And no one is suggesting that Officer Moore had it coming. No one is leaking damning information about him to the press, or exculpatory information about the suspect. In fact, it's just the opposite:

Moore’s father and uncle are both retired NYPD sergeants.

One of Moore’s Massapequa neighbors, who said she has known the wounded cop his entire life, described him as “an all-around good kid.”

“My daughter went to the prom with him,” said Joan Olton, 56.

“My son is just distraught,” Olton added. “They were supposed to watch the (Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao) fight together.”

... Blackwell served several years in prison on attempted murder charges for firing into a person’s car in August 2001 during an attempted robbery, officials said. He was eventually released from the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora in June 2008.

In prison, Blackwell was found to have “poor institutional adjustment problems,” said a state Department of Corrections spokeswoman.

At the time of Saturday’s shooting, he was wanted by police on a criminal mischief charge stemming from an incident last November, sources said.

What we're seeing is how law enforcement and the media react when there's a murder attempt on someone whose life matters.

You may not like the fact that I'm making the analogy I'm making. But to the friends, neighbors, and relatives of those who are killed or assaulted by cops, the essential humanity of the dead and wounded is routinely disregarded, and the system doesn't seem to want to know whether wrongdoing occurred.

The suspect in the shooting of Officer Moore is in custody. That's good. But the life of everyone who dies as a result of criminal behavior ought to matter.

ARPAIO WANNABE SHERIFF COMPARES BALTIMORE INDICTMENTS TO DUKE LACROSSE CASE (updated)

Breitbart reports:

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (D) declared the charges brought against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray “George Zimmerman and the Duke Lacrosse case all over again” and said “these cops are political prisoners,” offered up as human sacrifices, thrown like red meat to an angry mob” on Friday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.

Goodness! This is a Democratic sheriff speaking! And an African-American one at that! Attention must be paid!

Well, no, not really. David Clarke is a garden-variety wingnut with a self-promoting streak that might remind you of another blowhard sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Don't jump to any conclusions about Clarke just because of the color of his skin or his party affiliation.

Actually, there's not much reason to believe that Clarke (shown above speaking to the NRA convention last year) is a Democrat at all -- he frequently appears at Republican fund-raisers. He runs as a Democrat because Milwaukee County is heavily Democratic.

Clarke gained national attention in 2013 for an inflammatory public service announcement:

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke is airing a new public service announcement telling residents that because of budget cuts, calling 911 for help is no longer their best option....

With officers laid off and furloughed, Clarke says, calling 911 and waiting for police is no longer your best bet. "You could beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you could fight back. But are you prepared?" he asks. "Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to protect yourself and your family."

Clarke is basically your lifetime-NRA-member uncle with darker skin and a cop's uniform. Just last month, he said that there should be a semi-automatic rifle on the Great Seal of the United States:

“You know, the one with the American bald eagle holding an olive branch in one claw and arrows in the other,” he said. “We should take those arrows out of the eagle’s claws and replace them with a semi-automatic rifle, preferably one that shoots M-855 ammunition.”

In 2013, Clarke was named Sheriff of the Year by a group called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Here's some background on the CSPOA:

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) was founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. Mack was also a lobbyist for Gun Owners of America (GOA), and he is known for his challenge to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and his role in the organization Oath Keepers....

That's a photo of Mack above. Here's more on Mack and CSPOA, from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

He’s a hard-right libertarian who believes the federal government has no authority to require drivers to wear seat belts and who once demanded the government give him back the $4,800 he paid in income taxes. He’s a self-styled “constitutional conservative” with little or no formal legal training who believes that states can ignore federal laws they don’t like, despite clear language in the U.S. Constitution that says otherwise....

Whether he’s speaking to local chapters of the JBS [John Birch Society] or appearing on far-right radio shows like James Edwards’ white nationalist program “The Political Cesspool,” Mack’s central message is that the federal government has far overstepped its constitutional bounds and that county sheriffs have the rightful authority -- and duty -- to protect citizens from what he believes are its unlawful incursions....

While Mack shakes his fist at the federal government and wants to devolve virtually all power to state and local governments, he says he does not favor violence. But his rhetoric is certainly confrontational and seems to fuel the passions of extremists as well as audiences closer to the mainstream. He once said he prayed for the day when a sheriff would be the “first one to fire the next shot around the world and arrest a couple of IRS agents.”

This guy's group admires David Clarke. Have I made it clear by now that Clarke is not a standard-issue Democrat?

Clarke is considering a run for mayor in 2016. Residents of Milwaukee, if you let him slide into the mayor's office the way you let him win reelection every four years, you're getting the government you deserve. Wake up.

HAR HAR HALF THE INDICTED COPS ARE BLACK SUCK IT LIBTARDZ!!1!1!!!

Washington Post:

The six officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray face a litany of charges that include second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.

The officers -- three white, three African American -- represent a broad spectrum of experience on Baltimore’s police force....

And now:

Fox News has a new talking point #stayclassy pic.twitter.com/hIh0X5T1T2

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 2, 2015

And not just Fox -- here's Right Wing News:

Baltimore Police Officers Identified, 3 Of 6 Are Black

This kinda erases the whole “it’s all about racism” talking point....

Really? I'm sorry, but black people been have been telling us for years that even black cops internalize the values of the system. Even your melanin-deficient correspondent remembers sitting in a theater watching Boyz N the Hood back in 1991:





Melodramatic? Yeah, but it was obvious even to me that you wouldn't create a character like that if he wasn't based on real experiences. And a generation later, not much has changed.

MIKE HUCKABEE INADVERTENTLY CLARIFIES WHY WHITE PEOPLE CAN'T USE THE N-WORD

Mike Huckabee's PAC just put out a pugnacious ad for his presidential campaign. It blames Bill and Hillary Clinton for the poor treatment of Huckabee by then-majority Arkansas Democrats when he was elected lieutenant governor in 1993 (the ad implies that the Clintons were personally responsible for the mistreatment, but Bill had been president for nearly a year by then). The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza is extremely impressed by this ad, though it's no nastier about the Clintons than every other Republican's ads will be, and it sacrifices some of what used to be one of Huckabee's natural advantages -- his nice-guy persona -- for standard-issue GOP slash-and-burn.

But that's not why I'm writing about the ad. I want to direct your attention to something Huckabee says about 36 seconds in:



In Cillizza's words:

Ask yourself who in the current 2016 Republican (or Democratic) field could say the following words without sounding like a total phony: "Any drunken redneck can walk into a bar and start a fight. A leader only starts a fight he's prepared to finish." The answer is, aside from Huckabee, no one.

The problem isn't that anyone else in the field who said that would sound like a phony -- the problem is that anyone else who said it would be offending rural Southern voters. Jeb can't say it. Marco and Scott and Rand can't say it.

So why can Huckabee say it? Because he's a genuine son of the rural South. He's eaten squirrel. It's his group. So he can use a word for members of the group that would be offensive coming from an outsider.

Which is precisely how the N-word works. Black people have a certain leeway regarding its use that we white people don't, and it's not because black people are special -- it's because in-group members always have a certain leeway regarding in-group slurs.

I've said this before here, but I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood, and when I was a child I regularly heard Italian-American adults use words like "guinea" and "greaseball" in reference to fellow Italians when talking to other Italians. Within the group it was fine. Outside the group, not so much. Whether you like the logic or not, that's how it works.

THE RIGHT HAS A NEW ERIC HOLDER

Six cops now face criminal charges in the death of Freddie Gray:

Baltimore’s chief prosecutor charged six police officers on Friday with crimes including murder and manslaughter in the arrest and fatal injury of Freddie Gray....

The state’s attorney for Baltimore, Marilyn J. Mosby, filed the charges almost as soon as she received a medical examiner’s report Friday that ruled Mr. Gray’s death a homicide, and a day after the police concluded their initial investigation and handed her their findings.

It's being argued that she should recuse herself, in part because of her ties to the Gray family's lawyer:

Her electoral victory in the Democratic primary, over former state's attorney Gregg Bernstein, was a surprise to many. After the victory, she set up a transition committee that included Baltimore attorney William H. "Billy" Murphy, who is representing Gray's family. Murphy was among Mosby's largest campaign contributors last year, according to The Baltimore Sun. He donated $5,000 to her campaign.

However:

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) also donated to her campaign, the Sun reported.

Right-wingers nationwide are echoing this. That's rich, because when you talk about any campaign finance reform in this country, right-wingers howl about money being free speech and accuse you of hating the Constitution. Also, I know of no right-wingers who thought Staten Island DA Dan Donovan should have recused himself in the Eric Garner chokehold case, even though he's been endorsed by New York police unions, including Patrick Lynch's Patrolemen's Benevolent Association. (Donovan, of course, did not obtain an indictment in the Garner case, and is now running in a special congressional election, which he's expected to win this coming Tuesday.)

The other reason the Baltimore cops don't like Mosby?

The local FOP lodge asked Mosby to appoint a special prosecutor because of her personal connection to Murphy and her marriage to Nick Mosby, the city councilman. In a letter, Gene Ryan, president of FOP Lodge 3, said he had "very deep concerns about the many conflicts of interest" in her office pursuing the case. "Most importantly, it is clear that your husband's political future will be directly impacted, for better or worse, by the outcome of your investigation."

By that logic, she shouldn't be allowed to run for a local elective office at all, because any issue of great concern to her constituents is likely to be of great concern to his. Do we want that to be a constraint on anyone who wants to run for office? What's the standard?

When Mosby ran, she ran as someone who'd deal with this issue in the way her constituents hoped she would:

People like Tawanda Jones, whose brother Tyrone West was killed after a violent scuffle with police, campaigned forcefully for her -- in part, Ms. Jones said, to get rid of her predecessor, Gregg L. Bernstein.

“I would have been a supporter of anybody to get him out of that chair,” Ms. Jones, who has been protesting police treatment of black men here since her brother died, said in an interview. “I was trying to get anybody that would take this seriously.” She said that after watching Ms. Mosby, she became convinced that she would....

“She gave us her word. I said, ‘How will you handle police brutality?’ She said, ‘If you put me in this chair, I don’t care if they are in uniform or not. I come from a family of officers. Some are good, some are bad, I will hold everybody accountable to the law.’ And thank you, Jesus, she lived it out.”

This despite the fact that, as she said, she comes from a long line of police officers:

In previous interviews, Mosby has said that five generations of family members have been police officers. Her father, mother, and grandfather were cops, The Daily Beast reported, and she grew up in what was known in her Boston neighborhood as "the police house."

So this is a democracy, and she made a campaign pledge, and she's fulfilling it. And that's bad, because this is America.

The talk about her husband, on the right, goes beyond the notion that his "political future will be directly impacted" by her investigation:

This is a textbook case for recusal for Marilyn Mosby, by the way. Here's her husband blowing off looting: https://t.co/0e3RAwU1Y2

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 1, 2015

Really? Watch the clip and notice what Nick Mosby actually says about violent protestors:

... These young guys are frustrated, they're upset, and unfortunately they're displaying it in a very destructive manner. You know, when folks are undereducated, unfortunately they don't have the same intellectual voice to express it the way other people are doing it, and that's what we see through the violence today.

... Is it right for people to loot? No. I mean -- I think you've missed everything I've tried to articulate to you.... The violence is wrong. That's never acceptable.

Mosby goes on to call this a symptom of economic and educational deprivation, and to note that there have been white riots as well. But he's not condoning violence or property damage.

On the other hand, he doesn't call the looters "thugs," or blame the families or gay marriage of the "Democrat plantation," so, to the right, he's "blowing off looting." And every right-winger "knows" that's what his real message was without listening to his words, because the right-wing tribal drum says so.

Y KANT DAVID BROOKS READ?

In today's column, David Brooks looks at troubled urban enclaves like Freddie Gray's Baltimore and, naturally, blames the residents' failures to learn self-discipline:

The problem is not lack of attention, and it’s not mainly lack of money. Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded....

Saying we should just spend more doesn’t really cut it. What’s needed is a phase shift in how we think about poverty.... the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.

That was predictable, and if that were the worst thing about the column, it would be just another day at the office for Brooks. What's worse is that Brooks drags in David Simon, creator of The Wire, as a witness on his behalf, even though Simon's words don't in any way buttress Brooks's argument, as is obvious to anyone who can read.

Brooks writes:

In a fantastic interview that David Simon of “The Wire” gave to Bill Keller for The Marshall Project, he describes that, even in poorest Baltimore, there once were informal rules of behavior governing how cops interacted with citizens -- when they’d drag them in and when they wouldn’t, what curse words you could say to a cop and what you couldn’t. But then the code dissolved. The informal guardrails of life were gone, and all was arbitrary harshness.

That’s happened across many social spheres -- in schools, families and among neighbors. Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted. It is phenomenally hard for young people in such circumstances to guide themselves.

But in the interview, Simon doesn't say that the disappearance of well-crafted "informal guardrails" has left poor Baltimoreans incapable of self-guidance. What Simon says is that the rules for interactions with cops were absurd in the past, although they were knowable:

A humble is a cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people on “failure to obey,” it’s a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things were used by police officers going back to the ‘60s in Baltimore. It’s the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way. And yet, back in the day, there was, I think, more of a code to it. If you were on a corner, you knew certain things would catch you a humble. The code was really ornate, and I’m not suggesting in any way that the code was always justifiable in any sense, but there was a code.

Brooks wants you to regard the old rules as benign and nurturing. According to Simon, the rules might have been codified and everyone might have known the code, but the code was preposterous:

In some districts, if you called a Baltimore cop a motherfucker in the 80s and even earlier, that was not generally a reason to go to jail. If the cop came up to clear your corner and you're moving off the corner, and out of the side of your mouth you call him a motherfucker, you're not necessarily going to jail if that cop knows his business and played according to code. Everyone gets called a motherfucker, that’s within the realm of general complaint. But the word “asshole” -- that’s how ornate the code was -- asshole had a personal connotation. You call a cop an asshole, you're going hard into the wagon in Baltimore.

And Simon doesn't even claim to know for certain whether these absurd rules still apply:

At least it used to be that way. Who knows if those gradations or nuances have survived the cumulative brutalities of the drug war. I actually don’t know if anything resembling a code even exists now.

(Before we proceed, let's recall how Brooks describes what's happening now: "Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted." Does the old system that Simon describes seem to you like a set of "norms that middle-class people take for granted"?)

What's happening now, according to Simon, is not a lack of guidance. What's happening is total war:

For example, you look at the people that Baltimore was beating down in that list in that story the Sun published last year about municipal payouts for police brutality, and it shows no discernable or coherent pattern. There's no code at all, it’s just, what side of the bed did I get up on this morning and who looked at me first? And that is a function of people failing to learn how to police. When you are beating on 15-year-old kids and elderly retirees -- and you aren’t even managing to put even plausible misdemeanor charges on some arrestees, you’ve lost all professional ethos.

Allow me to quote the Sun story again:

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson. Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones -- jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles -- head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement....

That's not a lack of "guardrails." It's not "harshness." It's armed occupation. It's sadism and brutality. And it wasn't benign in the past. It was just less awful. Why can't Brooks read Simon's words and grasp what they actually mean?