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Conservatives are right: Cory Booker’s vote against Betsy DeVos was hypocritical.

The New Jersey senator joined the rest of his Democratic colleagues—and two Republican senators—in voting against the education secretary’s confirmation Tuesday. But as National Review’s Ian Tuttle noted Wednesday, Booker’s vote meant abandoning longtime support for DeVos-style school reform policies—including vouchers—and a history of working with DeVos herself. He’s twice addressed the conservative American Federation for Children, which DeVos founded and previously chaired, making a passionate case for “school choice.”

Tuttle is suspicious of this about-face:

How it is that the woman Cory Booker viewed as an ally less than a year ago is now a threat to children’s “safety” is no particular mystery. The senator is planning a run for the presidency in 2020, and he needs to make nice with the teachers’ unions, whose outsized influence in the Democratic party is the only plausible explanation for the unprecedented anathema heaped on DeVos since her nomination was announced.

There were, of course, a host of substantive reasons to oppose DeVos, including for “school choice” supporters. She was woefully uninformed on key federal policy debates, and Booker was rightly concerned about her commitment to civil rights protections. But it certainly doesn’t look like his vote was based primarily on substance. Indeed, in a Tuesday piece on Democratic opposition to DeVos, The Weekly Standard quoted Booker saying that “with a different president, with a different leader, some of the people that I voted against I may have voted for.” Does DeVos fall into that category?

For all his charisma, stirring speeches, and genuine political gifts, Booker’s progressive track record is far from spotless. There’s no doubt he’d be a compelling candidate for the White House, but he’ll also have some explaining to do.

August 14, 2017

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Did Mark Zuckerberg just lose the presidency to the CEO of GoDaddy?

It feels natural in the aftermath of a deadly white supremacist hate march that business leaders would rethink certain practices. Kenneth Frazier, the black CEO of the pharmaceutical company Merck, resigned from the White House manufacturing council after President Donald Trump provided succor to the racist marchers. In part because Trump lashed out at Frazier on Twitter, his decision has become a dominant news story, and prompted calls for other executives on the council to abandon Trump.

But the announcement that GoDaddy will cancel domain hosting service to the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer is probably the more important story.

In the background of the Trump era, a debate has raged about whether or to what extent various hosting services should be obliged to deny platforms to hate groups and their members. Overwhelmingly, this has been posed as a question to social networking companies like Twitter and Facebook, where terms-of-service standards are loose and arbitrarily enforced. These companies have tiptoed around the debate, ostensibly to avoid being put in the position of applying standards of morality and decency to speech.

In just the same way manufacturing CEOs are now asked to follow Frazier’s lead, Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley titans ought to be asked whether they’ll follow GoDaddy, and why GoDaddy beat them to the punch. These companies have often shown, sometimes in highly questionable circumstances, that they’re capable of taking a hard line against “hate speech.” Now that a life has been lost to a hate mob that organized on social media, their position has been substantially weakened.

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Merck’s CEO is not a hero.

Kenneth Frazier has resigned from his position on Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council, citing concerns over Trump’s weak response to an act of white supremacist domestic terrorism. In a statement, he asserted that:

America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the ideal that all people are created equal.

For this, he is being lauded for his moral courage:

But Frazier deserves no credit for his decision. He has known for a long time that Donald Trump is a racist and a misogynist; that he employs white nationalists; that he is antagonistic to free speech and that his administration represents a significant threat to American democracy. He chose to serve on this council anyway.

Furthermore, the praise for Frazier obscures the fact that a CEO has class interests in common with a billionaire like Donald Trump. Trump has promised that he’ll be very good for business, and so far it’s one of the few promises he’s been able to keep; his administration has rolled back a number of regulatory functions that kept corporate America in check while protecting workers. Merck, meanwhile, fought Bernie Sanders’s bill to allow Americans to import less expensive drugs from Canada.

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All of the president’s men can’t make up for Trump’s shameful “many sides” speech.

Donald Trump still hasn’t condemned by name the neo-Nazis and white supremacists responsible for the violence in Charlottesville this weekend. On Saturday, he notoriously blamed the violence on “many sides,” then refused to take any questions from reporters, who shouted after him as he left, “Do you call that terrorism?” On Monday morning, the only reference to the attack on Trump’s Twitter feed was a condemnation of Kenneth Frazier, the African-American CEO of Merck, for stepping down from Trump’s manufacturing council.

Trump’s minions have tried to fill the void. On Sunday H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor, went on NBC’s Meet the Press to affirm that “we can confidently call” the car attack on counter-protesters “a form of terrorism.” He then tried to cover for Trump, saying, “He condemned hatred and bigotry on all sides, and that includes white supremacists and neo-Nazis.” Mike Pence took a similar line, saying that Trump “clearly and unambiguously” spoke out against white supremacists, before adding his own “many sides” spin: “The president also made clear that behavior by others of different militant perspectives are also unacceptable in our political debate and discourse.” Ivanka Trump tweeted the following on Sunday:

On Monday morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions described the car attack as an “evil attack,” and declared that it met the definition of domestic terrorism. (Sessions, who has a long history of being accused of racism, is probably one of the least credible people on this subject.)

But even if Trump were to come out today and powerfully condemn the white supremacists in Charlottesville, it still wouldn’t matter. Trump’s silence thus far isn’t complacency—it is a form of terror in and of itself. Nothing he says will make up for the racism that he has spewed over the past two years or the fact that he has appointed white supremacists (Bannon, Miller, Gorka) and complicit white supremacists (everyone else in Trump’s team) to run the country. McMaster, Sessions, Pence, Ivanka—they are all part of the problem. And that problem is Trump.

August 12, 2017

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The Republican Party bears responsibility for today’s fatal violence in Charlottesville.

In May, the North Carolina House of Representatives passed a bill that would legally protect drivers who run over protesters in the street. “I became concerned for drivers after watching the recent protests which turned into riots in Charlotte and other cities,” Republican Rep. Justin Burr told Fox News at the time.  In Tennessee, Republican State Rep. Matthew Hill introduced a similar bill, telling WJHL 11, “The legislation is, if someone’s in a car and they take due care, that’s the legal term. Meaning not doing it on purpose. No malicious intent, nothing like that and they accidentally hit someone the protester that they hit cannot come back on them and sue them in civil court. Civil court is the key.”

One wonders how Hill and Burr define malicious intent, but perhaps they should watch these disturbing videos of a car ramming into a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators today in Charlottesville, Virginia:

At least one person has died, according to the city’s mayor:

Charlottesville police have arrested a suspect in the hit-and-run. Based on the footage, in which the car flees the scene in reverse, it is difficult to believe the attack is accidental. Bystanders estimate the car’s speed at about 40 miles an hour:

Meanwhile, this was how the president of the United States responded to the clash in Charlottesville:

Note that Trump doesn’t identify the culprits here—white supremacists—because doing so would indict himself for stoking violent, racist nationalism in the U.S. Trump built this. The GOP helped him do it. This is Virginia, after all, where Republican Corey Stewart narrowly lost the GOP nomination for governor after defending the very Robert E. Lee statue that white supremacists gathered to defend today; he is now running for Senate, and he may just win. As we learn more about the Charlottesville suspect and his victims, remember who is to blame. 

August 11, 2017

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David Brooks should resign as a New York Times columnist.

In his latest column, Brooks argues that “Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O.”—not because of extreme gender inequality at the company, but because Pichai fired James Damore, the author of a now-infamous anti-diversity memo. According to Brooks, Damore was just telling the truth:

Damore was tapping into the long and contentious debate about genes and behavior. On one side are those who believe that humans come out as blank slates and are formed by social structures. On the other are the evolutionary psychologists who argue that genes interact with environment and play a large role in shaping who we are. In general the evolutionary psychologists have been winning this debate.

Damore’s memo has been enthusiastically and thoroughly debunked by scientists who are, unlike Brooks, experts on the matter. Writing in Recode, Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett—a senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and a journalist, respectively—methodically countered each of Damore’s gender-essentialist claims. An example:

He implies that stress and anxiety are personality traits inherent in females, but more likely they are due to the pressures and discrimination women face on the job that men do not. For example, A 2008 report sponsored by major companies, “The Athena Factor,” found that women in high positions in male-dominated fields, such as tech, suffer harsher penalties than men when they slip up. Women don’t get second chances. Men do.

Despite the lack of real scientific evidence for Damore’s claims, Brooks practically eulogizes Damore as some great hero of the conservative resistance, a maligned and misunderstood soul who has been “hounded,” like the great eugenicist Charles Murray was also hounded by hordes of ferocious liberals. Pichai, in Brooks’s telling, betrayed Damore:

Either Pichai is unprepared to understand the research (unlikely), is not capable of handling complex data flows (a bad trait in a C.E.O.) or was simply too afraid to stand up to a mob.

No CEO is a hero, but in this instance Pichai did the right thing: His options were to force his beleaguered female staff to work with a man who believes biology handicaps them in their field, or to fire Damore. He fired Damore. That was the correct decision.

Brooks’s latest column is far from the worst thing he has ever written. (That honor still belongs to his 2005 masterpiece, “Katrina’s Silver Lining,” which argued that a storm that killed 1,836 human beings “disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.”) But enough is enough. Brooks should resign. And if he won’t, then the Times should fire him and hire someone who’s capable of rigorous—and humane—thought.

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Trump has gotten extremely cocky about his supporters’ loyalty, which is eroding.

On Thursday, the stepbrotherly feud between Washington’s two most powerful septuagenarians, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, intensified. In a press conference, reporters asked Trump whether or not he thinks McConnell should consider stepping down. “I’ll tell you what,” Trump said. “If he doesn’t get repeal and replace done and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure—if he doesn’t get them done, then you can ask me that question.”

According to Politico, Trump is throwing McConnell under the bus so that he can distance himself from the mess of health care repeal and the fact that his administration has no legislative victories:

Increasingly, these people say, the president is prepared to cast himself as an outsider — and Congress as an “insider” Washington institution. He has reminded advisers his poll numbers are higher than Congress’ and that he ran against Washington — and wants bills to sign — and will blast his own party if he doesn’t get them. Trump believes that his supporters will largely blame Congress instead of him, two people who have spoken to him said.

But Trump shouldn’t be so confident that his base will stick with him as his failures pile up. While only 20 percent of people approve of Congress, Trump’s ratings are historically dismal. Gallup has him at 36 percent approval; Quinnipiac at 33 percent. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll shows that Trump’s base has actually diminished: Not only has his approval among registered voters dropped, but those who approve strongly of Trump (in other words, his most dedicated supporters) is at a new low of 18 percent. As Morning Consult co-founder Kyle Dropp told Politico, “Unabated by the turbulence of the last six months, there remains a core base of ardent Trump supporters. However, that base has unquestionably declined since the president took office.”

Trump is doing all he can to shift the blame to McConnell. The problem is that there’s more than enough blame to go around.

August 10, 2017

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Jason Chaffetz has no business at Harvard.

After swearing up and down that his urgent resignation from the House of Representatives, where he controlled the powerful Oversight Committee, was a simple matter of wanting to spend time with his family in Utah, Jason Chaffetz has accepted a fellowship at Harvard University, which is located in Massachusetts.

Harvard introduces its honor code by touting honesty “as the foundation of our community,” and the code itself sets forth inviolable standards, which prohibit “plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty.” It would be unfair to hold an oversight committee chair to common standards of academic honesty, but Chaffetz’s conduct was egregiously low. It culminated, hilariously, in Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, before which Chaffetz claimed to have “two years’ worth of material lined up” for Hillary Clinton investigations, and after which Chaffetz decided oversight wasn’t something that oversight committee chairmen needed to trouble themselves with.

But the clearest example of Chaffetz’s unfitness for a prestigious Ivy League fellowship came in 2015, when he plucked this extremely deceptive chart from the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life and used it (unsuccessfully) to sandbag Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards during a congressional hearing.


“That graphic is a damn lie,” Alberto Cairo, a visual communication researcher at the University of Miami, told Politifact. “Regardless of whatever people think of this issue, this distortion is ethically wrong.”

Welcoming Chaffetz won’t do anything to soften right-wing antipathy to Harvard or higher education in general, but it will introduce the kind of methodical corruption that conservatives claim already defines liberal academia.

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Jim Justice asks for a little help from big government.

West Virginia’s version of Paul LePage has asked his buddy, the president, to bail out Eastern coal to the tune of $4.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports:

“In the scope of things, that would be a drop in the bucket to protect ourselves,” Mr. Justice said. “And looking at the other side, you would put thousands and thousands and thousands of people to work, and the net-net of that is that the $4.5 billion would get eroded tremendously, so that it may end up costing almost nothing.”

But wait, you say! Isn’t Jim Justice a coal baron? He is, but rest assured: He insists that this bailout would not help him personally. (It’s also probably mere coincidence that Justice just switched parties to become a Republican once more.) Justice owns mines that produce metallurgic coal; the bailouts would assist mines that produce thermal coal. “I am not in play trying to pat myself on the butt,” as he eloquently put it.

But even if the bailouts won’t help his mines, they will help his electoral chances, which is all he really cares about. And what is good for Jim Justice is not necessarily good for West Virginia. The state needs money, but not in the form of investment in coal. These bailouts will only prolong the industry’s undignified demise, and at the expense of West Virginians, who have sacrificed land and health to coal’s grasping tentacles for centuries. If Justice really wanted to help his state, he’d ask for more money to help it transition away from a coal-dependent economy.

But he is a coal baron, and he will never put that question to his very good friend Donald Trump.

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Trump could convince Republicans to suspend American democracy.

That’s the suggestion of new polling published in The Washington Post on Thursday by Yeshiva University professor Ariel Malka and University of Pennsylvania professor Yphtach Lelkes. In their survey, the academics asked voters, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?” They then asked how voters would feel if Trump and Republicans in Congress were to make this argument.

The responses from Republicans were horrifying, if not entirely surprising: “52 percent said that they would support postponing the 2020 election, and 56 percent said they would do so if both Trump and Republicans in Congress were behind this.” Perhaps this is because, as the poll also found, nearly half of GOP voters believe Trump won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton last year (he did not) and strong majorities embrace his false claims about widespread vote fraud.

If Republican leaders ever proposed such a delay, Malka and Lelkes note, “there would be a torrent of opposition, which would most likely include prominent Republicans. Financial markets would presumably react negatively to the potential for political instability. And this is to say nothing of the various legal and constitutional complications that would immediately become clear.” Yet, they wrote, “it is also conceivable that a high-stakes and polarized debate would do the exact opposite.” Partisanship and political tribalism could cause even more Republicans to back a delay.

This is just a hypothetical, of course. A delay would be Trump’s most overt undermining of American democracy as president. But given how many democratic norms he’s already discarded, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

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Who is the bigger evil buffoon, Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell?

According to the Northern Kentucky Tribune, McConnell, appearing on Wednesday at a local branch of a rotary club back in his home state of Kentucky, told his constituents, “A Congress goes on for two years and part of the reason I think that the story line is that we haven’t done much is because, in part, the president and others have set these early time lines about things need to be done by a certain point.” He also claimed that Trump had “excessive expectations,” borrowing from Ivanka’s strategy of desperately hoping that people lower any expectations they have of him.

In response to McConnell’s remarks, Trump tweeted on Wednesday afternoon and, after having a night to cool off and refine his message, on Thursday morning:

Trump was clearly no help to Republicans’ health care repeal efforts. He couldn’t sell it to the public and he couldn’t sell it to skeptical lawmakers. But McConnell’s hands aren’t clean either—he tried to push through a horrible repeal bill on such short notice that John McCain had to return to Washington a mere week after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, whereupon he promptly hogged the spotlight and voted to kill the bill. Trump might be be an evil buffoon, but in the Republican Party it’s evil buffoons all the way down.