The polls are closing in Wisconsin as I speak, and early returns on the NYT website show Cruz winning by 51% to Drumpf’s 31%, a resounding defeat for the most ill-mannered candidate in American history. What is Drumpf going to say now? “Stop the primaries because I was winning!”
Drumpf has already demanded that Kasich drop out of the race for the nomination because he isn’t getting enough votes and he’s interfering with Drumpf’s majority search. In fact, he even claims that a near-majority is enough. He is desperate to avoid a loss on the first ballot, because after that, delegates will be free to vote for whomever they choose. Many delegates are sure to desert him after the first ballot.
Ted Cruz, too, wants Kasich to bow out, because he claims that Kasich will help Drumpf win his majority. Both Cruz and Drumpf want the race to themselves. Cruz is said to have spurned Kasich’s offer to split up the remaining primaries in order to play to their respective strengths and beat Drumpf (see this NYT story.)
Some say that Wisconsin’s tradition of humility, decency, and civility is rubbed the wrong way by Drumpf’s abrasive personality. Whether it is his personality or his lack of preparedness for the office of president, Drumpf has hit his ceiling. Whether the contests in the Northeast are more suited to Drumpf’s personality remains to be seen.
Bernie Sanders has also done extremely well in Wisconsin, beating Hillary Clinton by 54 to 46 percent. Again, Wisconsin’s tradition of left-leaning representatives has come into play, helping Sanders win a much needed primary contest.
An antiparallel story to the one yesterday about exclusion of Planned Parenthood in Texas and increased birth rates is the one from last year about Colorado’s program to provide long acting contraceptives to women. Multiple stories in the media have covered the reduction in birth rate that occurred after the program was instituted; one example is this New York Times article from July 6, 2015.
Teen birth rates have been dropping nationwide for years; there are many explanations but no single accepted story. This post from Health and Human Services states that there was a nine percent drop in birth rates among girls aged 15-19 from 2013 to 2014. In Colorado, about one-fifth of women aged 15-44 use long acting contraceptives, while nationwide only seven percent use them. This is still a dramatic increase from 2002, when the rate was only 1.5 percent.
Closer examination of teen pregnancy rates shows that the rate dropped dramatically from 1990 to 2002, but then remained stable for several years until falling again from 2009 on. Just since then, the rates have dropped from 40 per thousand in 2008 to 24 per thousand in 2014. Rates in the 2002-8 period were about 40 per thousand after falling from 60 per thousand in 1990.
For unknown reasons, the teen birth rate has dropped dramatically in the last few years; it is possible that this is related to the dramatic increase in use of long acting contraceptives by teenagers. Colorado has been particularly successful in encouraging long acting methods by providing them for free to Medicaid-eligible women, and their birth rates have dropped even faster than the nationwide rates. The New York Times article cites a drop of forty percent in teen birthrates in Colorado from 2009-13.
Unfortunately, the Colorado program was cancelled by the state legislature; fortunately, a private grant is supplying the contraceptives for at least a limited time.
Real experience shows that providing the means to teenage women allows them to choose not to have children, and they make the choice. Experience also shows that with-holding the means from women forces them to have more children. Our planet cannot support any more people with a reasonable quality of life, and whatever means necessary to reduce the birthrate is justifiable. Most justified are the simplest, most reliable, and cheapest methods like IUDs and implants. Abortion is a method of last resort, and would be unnecessary if adequate preventive measures were in place.
Denunciation of Unfair School Funding
I have previously complained about unfair funding for the country’s primary schools, those which all children are required to attend (usually at least until age sixteen.) These schools were initially funded by property taxes, an entirely local affair. Over time, however, it became obvious that some school districts would not be able to support their primary schools simply from property taxes, even if they taxed themselves at unrealistically high levels. State governments then stepped in to provide additional money to districts.
In recent years, all primary schools have received significant state support in addition to their local property taxes. In some states, districts that were particularly poor were given additional funds. In other states, all schools received the same amount of funds. But in the majority of states, poor districts receive less money from the state than do rich districts.
A large document that provides data for all the states is called “Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card” produced by the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. The most recent, fourth, edition of this document was published in the spring of last year. It is an extensive and intensive examination of state funding levels for the entire US. The result: the vast majority of primary schools are funded at a neutral or regressive level. The results are particularly bad when we see that funding from federal stimulus money was used by most states to fill holes in their budgets for schools, and that federal stimulus money ran out by 2012.
I don’t intend that you should read this report because it is fifty-six pages long. I only wish to note that there is extensive documentary evidence that primary schools in the United States are unfairly unfunded. Rich districts receive more funding than poor districts, and as a result, poor districts have bad schools. Children living in poor districts start out with a disadvantage compared to children in rich districts.
This is manifestly bad for our country because it means that our children will not be adequately educated to take on useful roles in society as contributing members. When they grow up, they will not be prepared to take jobs that require skill and patience. They will be doomed to unemployment, poverty, crime, and drug abuse. Worst of all, they will be fated to be idle, alienated, and dispossessed.
Please take a thought to vote for political leaders who will address this disparity in primary school funding and provide sufficient tax revenue by progressive taxation to develop our infrastructure. We need sensible spending on essential services to make our country a dynamic, growing place where everybody works and everybody has help to participate in society.
Comment of the Day
Those who have been following the news are aware that Kansas under Governor Brownback has dramatically cut taxes and is trying to cut spending at the same time. As a result, the economy of Kansas has grown at half the national rate over the last year. The state government is facing serious deficits because there has been an unforeseen falloff in tax receipts on the order of $53 million. The expected increase in growth from tax reductions has not been realized. As a result, funding for the state’s primary and secondary schools was cut, but the State Supreme Court over-ruled the cuts, saying the state’s constitution forbade such niggardliness. The Republicans in the state’s legislature have reacted angrily and accuse the Supreme Court of “activism” and meddling in politics. Large amounts of money have been applied to political ads in an attempt to influence the State Supreme Court’s “retention” elections.
Details for those not familiar with Kansas’ system of retaining judges: first, the Supreme Court judges are nominated by a nonpartisan committee and selected by the governor from among the nominees. Second, after six years in office, the judges are subject to elections in which they run without opposition but are removed if they don’t command a majority of the vote. Many states have similar elections, but the US federal government doesn’t have judicial elections.
As a result of these retention elections, the judges are vulnerable to the same type of money-fueled advertising that infects legislative and executive elections. Several states, Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Oklahoma among them, have had large amounts of money injected into judicial elections recently. In Pennsylvania, Democrats were able to retain judges they felt were sympathetic by winning the money-advertising war; in most other states, the Republicans have won. Spending on ads in judicial elections exceeds a million dollars in each of these small states.
This comment is in response to an article in the NYT about the situation in Kansas, a state particularly hard hit by Tea Party Republicans and their plans to reduce taxes and spending.
Tom B.
is a trusted commenter
April 1, 2016 6 AM PDT
Next-door neighbors Kansas and Colorado, both featured in the New York Times today, offer a stark illustration of the difference between moderate, pragmatic leadership of Democrats and the right-wing extremism of Tea Party Republicans.
Colorado is blossoming with good jobs, smart investments in education, and a beautiful, well protected environment — it’s one of the top destinations in the country for creative people.
Kansas, by contrast, is traveling the road to poverty and ignorance, unable to pay its bills, its economy falling apart, smart people fleeing the state in droves, its public schools in crisis. Its elected officials obsess on their right-wing Christian agenda instead of offering stewardship and leadership to the state in an economic crisis that was created by their own bad leadership.
Elections have consequences, people. Whatever you do, don’t let the wrong people get elected because elections have consequences. Please keep that in mind this November.
A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) showed an approximately 35% decrease in on-time return visits for long-acting (three months) injectable contraceptives and a 1.9% increase in births paid for by state Medicaid in the affected areas after Texas excluded Planned Parenthood (PP) from its state-paid family planning services. Both changes were significant, the first being p<0.001 and the second p<0.01 (significant enough for physicists as well as biologists.)
This study shows that Planned Parenthood was effective at reducing the birthrate for mothers dependent on Medicaid for family planning services, and that banning PP resulted in an increased birthrate in the counties where PP was providing services.
The Texas Health and Human Services (THHS) Commission was not happy with this article. One of the authors had been employed by Texas since 2001, and he was forced to retire to avoid disciplinary action after a state senator claimed that he was using at-work time to produce the article. The THHS asked NEJM to add a disclaimer to the article, which they did, since it was purely a formality, stating that the article does not represent the views of THHS. In the letter to NEJM, the THHS even claimed that the article was inaccurate, an absurdity since there was no room for inaccuracy in the numbers. See the Retraction Watch (RW) post revealing the disclaimer for a full discussion of the THHS’ behavior in regard to this article.
The letter from THHS, quoted in the RW post, claims that “The article also includes incorrect statements concerning the birth rate and number of births in Texas.” If you read the article, you will see that it does not refer to the total number of births in Texas, only those paid by Medicaid in the counties affected by the THHS purge. Numbers don’t lie, but statements like those in the letter from THHS can wrongfully cast aspersions on the integrity of a NEJM article.
The attitude of the THHS is to be expected, since everything done in Texas government is forced to toe the Tea Party line promulgated by the Republican governor. That party’s line includes outright lies as well as forged statistics, wrong reasoning, a blinkered outlook, and false moral outrage.
This Plot Has Been Used Already
OK, so I’m a little behind in my movie watching… I’m sure you’ve seen “Kingsman: The Secret Service” already, and you’ve probably forgotten all about it. I’m now going to remind you of the “existential danger” plot in that movie; this is a subset of the adventure movie plot. In order to create adequate tension, a catastrophe that the movie’s heroes must avert, the bad guys have a plan which, if it succeeds, will result in loss of lives and destruction sufficient to keep the viewer’s interest. This is the part of the plot of movies that involve “secret agents”, supermen and superwomen, demigods, and heroes with special abilities that come into play in the process of foiling the bad guy’s plans.
In “Kingsman” the villain, played by Samuel L. Jackson tells the story about half way through the movie, before the hero’s companion is killed: a group of powerful people have have decided to kill almost everyone in the world to save the Earth from global warming. They use the following reasoning:
Humanity is like a virus infecting the planet Earth. When an organism is infected by a virus, the organism starts to run a fever in an attempt to throw off the virus. In an analogous fashion, global warming is the fever that the Earth is developing when it tries to stop the infection by humans. The end result is the virus kills the host or the host kills the virus; partial solutions are also possible, in which the two coexist for a period of time.
The group of powerful people intend to cure the Earth of the human infection, in this particular movie by controlling certain people with microchips implanted in their brains who are then commanded to kill everyone around them.
I won’t reveal the end of this movie, but you can be sure the world is saved from immediate massacre, without mentioning what happens if global warming continues. The point I am making is that this is a subset of the adventure movie that involves the myth of the “secret agent” a la James Bond, and it is necessary for this type of movie that there be a gigantic evil conspiracy that has malignant intentions towards the rest of the world. It is important for the plot that the evil conspiracy have a particularly sinister goal in mind. In this case, the goal is the extinction of nearly all of the human race in order to improve living conditions for a tiny minority.
Please read that sentence again: the goal is the extinction of nearly all of the human race in order to improve living conditions for a tiny minority. I won’t accuse any Republican senators of being in on this conspiracy, but it’s really not much of a stretch.
For inte fan gör det det
I looked and looked and finally I found a “manhole cover”– at a rest stop on Highway 99…
(PS does “inte…” mean “no-one gets out of here alive”?)
Here’s a story about a white man wrongfully arrested–just to show that your skin color doesn’t immunize you from ill treatment by the police. It is also a lesson in why people are wrongfully treated by police: because they are poor.
It’s not just because they are minorities; it is also because they don’t have the money or social status to fight back. Poor people, as well as disapproved minorities, are targeted by the police.
It’s not because there is more crime among poor people (although the poor must commit crimes just to survive), but because they are easy targets. They don’t fight back, they don’t complain as much, and most importantly, they have been arrested before. The system actually creates the crime for which poor people are blamed.
The police, and the system, treat arrests the same as convictions: as prima facie evidence that the targeted individual is guilty. Although this may be statistically compelling, it is not proof, and more importantly, against the principle that everyone knows: “innocent until proven guilty.”
The system, in fact, treats everyone arrested as if they are already guilty. They are confined and abused just as if they had already been convicted. They are forced to pay large amounts of money (large, to them) to obtain their release. If they are released on bail, frequently there is no further punishment, since the case may be dismissed or never even go to court.
In a nutshell: this man was arrested– wrongfully– for “trespassing” on a city-owned housing project. He didn’t have the money to bail himself out or even to avoid the areas that the police were targeting for “stop and frisk.” When he arrived in court, the case was dismissed –no conviction–on condition that he not commit a crime for a year.
He was rearrested, four times, on warrants that would not disappear from the police’s database of warrants. In one of the four arrests, he spent several days on Riker’s Island before being released, summarily, by a judge. In another incident, he was taken to the hospital in shackles and later thrown out after being dragged forty feet by the shackles.
Finally, he filed suit, acting as his own lawyer, against the City for not erasing the warrants. It was not until he filed the suit that the warrant was removed from the database.
Though Bowen v. the City of New York is only one man’s story, the case happens to be moving through the courts as local law enforcement tries to reform the warrant system. The Police Department says there are now more than one million open criminal warrants, some dating back to the 1980’s. This month, the city started an initiative to issue summonses to — rather than arrest — offenders with warrants for quality-of-life crimes like littering, unreasonable noise and public urination. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has undertaken a similar effort called Begin Again, through which defendants can close their pending warrants simply by showing up to acknowledge them.
via Cleared of a Crime but Hounded by a Warrant – The New York Times
I’m not going to editorialize — much more– about this case because it is so obvious. This man was repeatedly arrested and spent several days in jail on several occasions for no reason except that someone failed to perform the computer entries needed to erase a warrant that was wrongful in the first place.
Two middle-aged women were arrested in New Iberia, Louisiana, after a convenience store clerk accused them of stealing two hot dogs and two drinks. They protested that the surveillance video would show that they only used the microwave in the convenience store to heat up some soup that they had bought elsewhere. They were nonetheless jailed on $1500 bail, as neither the police nor the prosecutor could be bothered to look at the surveillance video.
The incident started for them when a policeman stopped them and told them of the accusation. He gave them a summons to appear in court to answer the misdemeanor charge. Since they were visiting New Iberia from Texas, 400 miles away, they could have ignored the summons. However, they took the time and trouble to return to court on the appointed day. When their case came up, they were asked to plead guilty or not guilty and another appearance was set for two months later.
Since they were from Texas, however, despite the fact that they had never been arrested before, the judge set their bail at $1500. Naturally, they did not have nor could they raise that money, so they were thrown in jail. The bail bondsman refused to offer them a bond because they were from out of state.
It was only five days later, after the incident was publicized in a local newspaper, that a lawyer who had never seen them offered to post the entire bail himself and represent them pro bono. If it had not been for this and several other offers prompted by the news, they would have been forced to wait in jail for two months to appear for this misdemeanor charge that could have been voided if anyone had bothered to review the surveillance video from the convenience store.
Is it necessary for me to mention that these two women were black and that Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the US or any country in the world? Is it necessary for me to repeat the polemic I just published an hour ago?
The only thing to add is that Louisiana has outsourced its jails to private industry, and now imprisons people for profit. The federal government sued Louisiana for its excessive rate of incarceration of black people, so the state government sent many of its prison inmates to local jails. The local governments then contracted with private companies to run their jails. The private companies pay the government for the privilege of imprisoning people and then is paid by the inmate.
This creates an incentive to jail more people, to which the companies respond by shuffling inmates from one parish to another as surpluses and deficits of prisoners occur. Empty cells cost the companies money, so they push the local government as well as the state to give them more prisoners.
The result is people imprisoned for trivial offenses or for no reason at all, awaiting trial with excessive bail. This is a gross human rights violation and it is visited on minorities and “people of color” (blacks, Hispanics, even Asians and Arabs) excessively. This situation approaches a police state if it doesn’t meet the definition already.
The New York Times (NYT) has reported that a postman who was delivering packages in the city was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Certain facts about this arrest are undisputed: the postman had a package in his hand that he was trying to deliver when he was handcuffed, and the four plain-clothes policemen who arrested him took the package and left the postman’s delivery truck unattended on the street as they took him to the police station. It is unclear how long the postal vehicle was left unattended, but even a short period of time would be sufficient on this crowded street for anyone to help himself to the packages and mail in the truck. The postman was released after being cited, but his vehicle could have been stripped of everything it contained during the interval.
Another undisputed facet of this case is that the arrest was videotaped by a bystander and is included with the report. The video shows the policemen yelling at the postman “Stop resisting” and the mailman replying “I’m not resisting” while there is little or no movement by either the police or the postman. There are a number of bystanders in the video, some of them yelling at the policemen.
According to the postman, Glen Grays, he was backing out of his van when an unmarked car turned the corner at a high rate of speed, nearly hitting him. He reversed his course and stepped into the van, at the same time yelling at the driver. Instead of continuing on, the car reversed, backed up, and one of the four undercover policemen in the car told him, “We have the right of way because we’re policemen.” The car then stopped, all four got out, and as he tried to deliver the package he had been taking out of his van, they followed him to the doorway of the building and confronted him. This is where the video begins, as the policemen are trying to handcuff him.
What about the Mr. Gray’s conduct represents “disorderly conduct”? Is it the fact that he yelled at them for nearly hitting him? Or statements he made, or his behavior between the time of the near-collision and when the video begins? It is hard to believe that he could have done anything unlawful during that period of time. As one commenter pointed out, for a New Yorker to yell “Hey, I’m walking here” is a common and accepted verbal exchange in this city.
Another commenter, a former policeman, states that we should wait for the statements of the police involved before we “rush to judgement” about the situation shown in the video. In many cases, what has occurred before the video begins is essential to understand what is happening as the pictures unroll. However, in this case, it is hard to imagine what excuse the policemen involved could give, and easy to consider that whatever they say is likely to be a lie concocted to justify unjustifiable behavior.
The postman also stated that after he was put in the back of the unmarked car and it was driving away, without him in a seatbelt, the driver turned around, looked at him and made a “taunt”. As the driver was looking at him, he ran into the car in front of him, throwing the postman into the back of the front seat. It is difficult to imagine what excuse the policemen could give for this occurrence.
Is it necessary for me to mention that the postman was black and was delivering packages in an all-black neighborhood, while the undercover policemen were light-skinned, apparently “white”? Of course, when I say “black”, I mean African-American, dark-skinned, with Negroid facial features. I’m pointing this out because it conforms to and confirms a narrative that is played out every day all over America. The mere sight of a “black” person seems to drive some white people into a rage. Why?
I think the facts speak for themselves. This type of encounter between policemen and black Americans shows that prejudice and ill-treatment is endemic in America. How long will it take for the police and agents of the power structure to realize that their behavior is obviously inappropriate and contributes to resentment and hostility, from their victims and even by white people who reason and can perceive the true state of affairs? How long before they realize that their own behavior is driving the animosity that they so disparage?
There appears to be an attitude or state of mind among some white people that all black people are either displaying an attitude or thinking something which is unacceptable to them, to the extent that the very sight of a black person causes them to make disparaging statements and any encounter with a black person in which they fail to receive the expected deference causes them to strike out violently. This white attitude is difficult to understand or explain except as the result of conditioning from childhood by their parents and peers.
Because of the deeply ingrained nature of this white attitude, there is little chance of changing it except by exceptional, intensive experiences. In the absence of such an experience, the only recourse is laws that protect black people and other persecuted people (and there are many others who suffer) from discrimination in all its forms. Such laws are likely to be unpopular, but they are necessary, and in America, it will take action by the Supreme Court to see that they are enforced. In this regard, it is fortunate that Antonin Scalia has passed away, leaving the rest of the justices who have this same white attitude (Thomas and Roberts in particular) in the minority.
Prior to Scalia’s passing, the Supreme Court made a number of judgments which only reinforced this white attitude, including gutting the Voting Rights Act and trashing anti-discrimination laws. The situation now in the Court is similar to that after the Dred Scott decision in 1857, in which the Republican Party (no relation to today’s Republican Party) was forced to defend militarily the integrity of the federal government. Let us hope that the Supreme Court reforms, writes decisions that enforce anti-discrimination, and prevents another Civil War.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 