I know that I cannot carry a gun in public and neither can my sons, even if it is a toy. If I lay prone on an open highway and point an assault rifle at a federal agent, my next stop would be federal custody or the nearest county morgue. Open carry laws are not meant for me. The rules are different. It’s what it means to be black in this country.

— Goldie Taylor “What Would Happen if I Got in a White Cop’s Face?“

This week’s featured post: “Will Republicans Ever Have a Sister Souljah Moment?”

This week everybody was still talking about the NYPD

The NYPD’s “slowdown” or “virtual work stoppage” (or whatever you want to call it) has become one of the weirder stories in some while. The New York Post says:

NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety. … The Post obtained the numbers hours after revealing that cops were turning a blind eye to some minor crimes and making arrests only “when they have to” since the execution-style shootings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi points out the implication: NYPD has been arresting a lot of people it didn’t really have to.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

In New York, as in Ferguson and many other municipalities, police citations are a revenue source, with a sizable amount of that revenue coming from the neighborhoods that get the most policing — poor neighborhoods. The slow-down brings that hidden regressive tax into focus.

Also, the slowdown tests the controversial “broken windows” theory of policing — that you arrest people for minor offenses to establish public order, which in the long run prevents major crimes. If the slowdown doesn’t lead to a major crime wave, then what were all those minor-offense arrests about? The Atlantic‘s Matt Ford:

If the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why haven’t they done it before? The human implications of this question are immense. Fewer arrests for minor crimes logically means fewer people behind bars for minor crimes. Poorer would-be defendants benefit the most; three-quarters of those sitting in New York jails are only there because they can’t afford bail. Fewer New Yorkers will also be sent to Rikers Island, where endemic brutality against inmates has led to resignations, arrests, and an imminent federal civil-rights intervention over the past six months. A brush with the American criminal-justice system can be toxic for someone’s socioeconomic and physical health.

I don’t think NYPD intended their slow-down as a challenge to the way American police function, but it’s turning out that way.

In general, the police-and-race issue isn’t going away, no matter how much CNN would prefer to cover another lost airliner. Protests continued in various cities (including New York) on New Years Eve.

One aspect of this story is getting new attention: all the times when police confront armed and disorderly white people and somehow manage to hold their fire long enough to resolve the situation peacefully. This white woman, for example, drove around Chattanooga the day after Christmas, wearing body armor and firing a gun out the window.

Eventually, officers stopped and arrested Shields at Cloverdale Drive and Koblan Drive, near the spot where the shootings occurred and just blocks from her house. She pointed her firearm at an officer, but was taken into custody without incident or injury.

The same day in Post Falls, Idaho, two white guys in a Walmart took BB guns off the shelf and started shooting in the store. “The two suspects were taken into custody without incident.”

Contrast what happened to black males John Crawford (who was killed by police because he was casually carrying a BB gun around a Walmart, threatening no one) and Tamir Rice (a 12-year-old killed by police because they thought he was older and believed his toy gun was real). In each of those cases, video shows police firing fatal shots within seconds of sighting what they thought was a gun.

The all-time champion be-understanding-to-armed-whites police incident happened in Kalamazoo back in May.

Police reports and recordings of a sometimes tense 40-minute encounter with a belligerent, rifle-toting man offers insight into how officers tried to defuse a volatile situation without infringing on his right to openly carry the gun on a city street.

If police had spent 40 minutes — or 40 seconds — talking to Crawford or Rice or worrying about their rights, the situations could have been easily defused.

A essay making a related point appeared Tuesday in The Daily Beast. Goldie Taylor, a black woman, looks at the photo below (from a New York protest) and muses on the question: “What Would Happen If I Got In a White Cop’s Face?”

The truth is while I don’t know what she was saying, I do know this: Similar actions by a person of color, specifically a black woman like me, would likely end up with us in jail, in a hospital or who knows—like Eric Garner, on a medical examiner’s table. I know that I cannot carry a gun in public and neither can my sons, even if it is a toy. If I lay prone on an open highway and point an assault rifle at a federal agent, my next stop would be federal custody or the nearest county morgue. Open carry laws are not meant for me. The rules are different. It’s what it means to be black in this country.

Business as usual at Fox: A local Fox station edited video of a protest so that a chant against “killer cops” became “kill a cop”. When caught, the station apologized for the “error”.

and the relationship between Republicans and racists

New House Majority Whip Steve Scalise has been under fire since a blogger discovered he spoke to a white supremacist group in 2002. In “Will Republicans Ever Have a Sister Souljah Moment?” I center the conversation where I think it belongs: not on whether Scalise or Republicans in general are racists, but whether racists are too big a part of the Republican base for an aspiring politician to offend.

In particular, will Republican candidates ever face the same pressure Democrats do to distance themselves from the more extreme parts of their base? (Digby calls this hippie punching, defined as “how Democrats like to debase the left in order to appeal to so-called Real Americans”.) It seems unimaginable that someday a Scalise might go to a white-supremacist conference and intentionally piss them off (by, say, defending the civil rights of non-whites) in order to establish his centrist cred.

Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar made an excellent point on Meet the Press Sunday. Republicans are rightfully worried that the Scalise flap reinforces the stereotype that Republicans have a racial problem. But the right response isn’t to just denounce racism or David Duke, it’s to use their congressional majority to move on civil rights issues that they claim to support (like fixing the Voting Rights Act), or to just do their jobs (like confirming Loretta Lynch as the new attorney general).

But what I’m more interested in, when always this kind of thing happens, people disown it, they say, “This was wrong,” but what do we do about it? What are the actions? I’ll give you a few. The Republicans can move along on Loretta Lynch fast. She’s a U.S. attorney. The nominee for attorney general. She’s been vetted before. Get it done in a month. The Justice Department runs the civil rights enforcement in this country. Get the voting rights bill done.

Don’ t just claim you’re for civil rights. Prove it.

and recalling the best of 2014

“TPM is pleased to announce the winners of the Eighth Annual Golden Dukes recognizing the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior, The Crazy and betrayals of the public trust. The awards are named in honor of former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham, who epitomizes the iconic modern scandal.”

Salon re-published its 10 Best Personal Essays 2014: a woman waiting to have an abortion, an American who doesn’t tell anyone about being Muslim, a college guy experimenting with homosexuality, a woman saving sex for marriage, a man remembering his pederast, an ex-addict who fell in love with a death-row inmate and watched him die, a self-described “fat girl” reflecting on romance, a bomb-squad widow meeting the bomber, a card-playing foursome too poor for pop culture, and a mother who briefly left her son alone in the car.

Media Matters’ “Misinformer of the Year” is George Will, who worked hard all year to deserve this honor.

Daily Kos’ John Perr learned 14 things in 2014.

Time‘s 10 most influential photos of the year. I’ll go with this one from Ferguson:

IMDB does its best-of-movies lists. Rolling Stone picks its favorite albums.

You can watch the whole year go by in 4 minutes.

Some stuff that didn’t happen in 2014: crashing stock market, collapsing economy, unemployment stuck at 8%, gas at $5.45 a gallon. That’s what America was supposed to look like by now if we re-elected the horrible President Obama. The same people are still out there predicting things, and being taken seriously.

but I wish more people were talking about …

The new Republican majority in Congress is about to change the rules of the budgeting game. It’s technical and sounds boring, but “dynamic scoring” is actually something ordinary people should care about.

Here’s what it means. When a tax cut is proposed, the Congressional Budget Office “scores” it, to determine how much revenue the government would forgo. Naively, you might think that cutting a tax 10% would cut the revenue it generates by 10%, but actually the revenue drop is usually somewhat less, because fewer people avoid the tax. (Think about cutting the toll on a bridge. You’d collect less per car, but the number of cars crossing the bridge might go up.)

Current CBO techniques allow for that effect. But they don’t allow for an article of faith within conservative circles: that a big tax cut will increase revenue by stimulating the economy. The CBO doesn’t score that way, because there’s little evidence that such an effect really exists, and no reliable model at all about how big it might be. The CBO is trying to make accurate predictions, not affirm conservative ideology.

That’s what Republicans want to change. If they succeed, future CBO projections will show tax cuts making a much smaller hit on the deficit than will actually turn out to be the case. Worse, the change is one-sided: It would model the stimulative effect of tax cuts, but not of increased government spending. As Edward Kleinbard wrote in the NYT:

The Republicans’ interest in dynamic scoring is not the result of a million-economist march on Washington; it comes from political factions convinced that tax cuts are the panacea for all economic ills. They will use dynamic scoring to justify a tax cut that, under conventional scorekeeping, loses revenue. When revenues do in fact decline and deficits rise, those same proponents will push for steep cuts in government insurance or investment programs, because they will claim that the models demand it. That is what lies inside the Trojan horse of dynamic scoring.

While we’re on economics, Joseph Stiglitz has been talking about inequality in interviews, as well as his book The Price of Inequality (which I haven’t read). He makes a distinction similar to one I’ve sifted before: You can get rich by producing new products that create new jobs, or you can get rich by owning fixed assets whose price goes up. One way grows the economy for everyone, while the other just gets you a bigger slice of the pie.

What’s destructive in the recent bonanza for the 1% is that it’s largely the unproductive kind of wealth creation, which is why the rising tide isn’t lifting all boats. Stiglitz refers to this as “increased exploitation”.

Maybe the least productive way to get rich is to increase your power over some part of the market, which will raise the price of your stock at the expense of your customers, workers, and the general public. Stiglitz notes that “when you look at the top [of the wealth distribution], it’s monopoly power.”

and you also might be interested in …

The New Hampshire Rebellion is doing another winter walk against money in politics from January 11 to January 21, when groups coming from three directions are supposed to converge on Concord. I’m giving serious thought to doing the Nashua-to-Merrimack segment on January 18.

Vox reminds us of the minority-rule provision built into the Constitution: Because big states and small states get the same number of senators, it turns out that the 46 Democratic senators got 20 million more votes than the 54 Republican senators.

After trouncing Jameis Winston’s Florida State Seminoles 59-20 in the Rose Bowl, thus ending FSU’s winning streak and putting the defending champions out of the running for a second consecutive national championship, some Oregon players taunted FSU and Winston in a unique way: They imitated FSU’s native-American-inspired chant, but chanted “No means no”, a reference to the sexual assault charges that Winston wriggled out of. Watch:

Bad sportsmanship? Absolutely; you don’t taunt somebody you’ve just beaten. But this also looks like some kind of tipping point on the public perception of sexual assault.

And while we’re talking about women’s rights:

First Jeb Bush put a toe into the 2016 water, now Mike Huckabee. Huck was the candidate I was most afraid of in the 2012 cycle, because of his ability to sound reasonable while saying outrageous things. But I wonder if he’s missed his window. Now we’ve got years and years of video of him taking far-out-of-the-mainstream positions. They may not hurt him in GOP primaries, but I don’t think they’ll play well in a general election.

Andy Borowitz is brilliant: “Jeb Bush resigns as George W. Bush’s brother.”

Grist points out why anti-abortion folks should love Obamacare: When the larger up-front cost is covered, more women choose less error-prone methods of contraception, and have fewer unwanted pregnancies, hence fewer abortions. That’s all showing up in the statistics: The abortion rate is down, but the birth rate is not up. Fewer women are getting pregnant.

I don’t expect those facts to convince anyone on the Religious Right, for a simple reason: I believe their opposition to abortion isn’t fundamentally about “baby-killing” at all; it’s rooted in opposition to female promiscuity. Doctrines about zygotes having souls are constructed post hoc to justify a position already held; what’s really wrong with abortion is that it stops pregnancy from controlling promiscuity. So for them a plan that reduces abortions but enables female sexuality is a non-starter.

and let’s close with some animal acrobatics

as conjured up by Channel 3 of France.