The Papal Chase

Pope Francis's speech this morning greeting President Obama and members of Congress and guests was relatively short, but powerful, as he challenged America to act on climate change directly in front of members of the legislative body the least likely on Earth to do so.

Mr President, 

I am deeply grateful for your welcome in the name of all Americans. As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families. I look forward to these days of encounter and dialogue, in which I hope to listen to, and share, many of the hopes and dreams of the American people. 

During my visit I will have the honor of addressing Congress, where I hope, as a brother of this country, to offer words of encouragement to those called to guide the nation’s political future in fidelity to its founding principles. I will also travel to Philadelphia for the Eighth World Meeting of Families, to celebrate and support the institutions of marriage and the family at this, a critical moment in the history of our civilization. 

Mr. President, together with their fellow citizens, American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination. With countless other people of good will, they are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions. And, as my brothers, the United States Bishops, have reminded us, all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it. 

Mr. President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution. Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. When it comes to the care of our “common home”, we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the changes needed to bring about “a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change” (Laudato Si’, 13). Such change demands on our part a serious and responsible recognition not only of the kind of world we may be leaving to our children, but also to the millions of people living under a system which has overlooked them. Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded which cries out to heaven and which today powerfully strikes our homes, our cities and our societies. To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it. 

We know by faith that “the Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home” (Laudato Si’, 13). As Christians inspired by this certainty, we wish to commit ourselves to the conscious and responsible care of our common home. 

The efforts which were recently made to mend broken relationships and to open new doors to cooperation within our human family represent positive steps along the path of reconciliation, justice and freedom. I would like all men and women of good will in this great nation to support the efforts of the international community to protect the vulnerable in our world and to stimulate integral and inclusive models of development, so that our brothers and sisters everywhere may know the blessings of peace and prosperity which God wills for all his children. 

Mr President, once again I thank you for your welcome, and I look forward to these days in your country. God bless America!

We'll see how that goes with his address of Congress, tomorrow, but if this is any indication, Republicans are not going to like what's coming.

And that's fine with me.

So Who's Next Out Of The Clown Car?

Good question.  The Washington Post's Philip Bump crunches the numbers in the aftermath of Scott Walker's disastrous run:

Walker, like many other candidates, saw a bump in the polls shortly after he announced. But the top of that bump wasn't as high as his poll numbers had reached earlier on either nationally or in Iowa, where he was consistently the front-runner for months. He announced, he got the bump -- and then it vanished. 

The vanishing, it's worth noting, happened shortly after the first debate, in which Walker offered an unimpressive performance. 

That sort of erosion isn't as common as it seems. Rick Perry saw it in 2012. Rudy Giuliani saw it when the bottom fell out in 2008. Usually, fade-outs are less steep and more extended. Walker plummeted.

Specifically, Bump found the high point of Walker's national polling since announcing and measured the change in that number, then did that for the rest of the GOP field.

Walker and Perry had the worst drops in national polling averages since announcing.  They are both now out.

The lowest-performing candidate left is now Rand Paul, but the continual zero candidates (Gilmore, Graham, Pataki, Jindal) are still at zero too.  There's not too much pressure on people who started with nothing to leave, they can only go up (case in point, Fiorina.)  However, these guys are to the point of desperation now, needing attention and donors, and are willing to say whatever they need to in order to get both.

Also, both candidates out have been governors who couldn't catch on nationally.  That means Santorum or Christie.

I think Rand Paul will stick around.  He's already invested a lot of cash in his Kentucky GOP caucus scheme in order to be able to run for both offices, dropping out before the caucus and he loses his investment (and he's got his dad's network to fall back on.)  Besides, like the other sitting GOP senators in the race, he's still got his cards to play during the upcoming Shutdown Season, something Perry and Walker didn't have.

Santorum on the other hand, well, let's just say the guy knows what losing looks like, because he's been there before, and he's there now.

I'd keep an eye on him being the next out, if I had to venture a guess.

Going in the other direction, well, it's Trump, Fiorina, and Carson, the three candidates who haven't held office.  Seeing Kasich and Cruz be the only two politicians in office who have improved their positions since announcing is notable.

Keep an eye on them, too.

StupidiNews!

• Baseball legend Yogi Berra has died at the age of 90, best known for his 10 World Series rings as an All-Star catcher for the Yankees and his quotes as a manager.
• Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti will launch a $100 million effort to fight homelessness as the number of homeless in the city has increased by 15% in 3 years. 
• Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn faced the automaker's board on Wednesday as they try to determine his role in the company's diesel emissions cheating scandal.
• After days of criticism for raising the price of antibiotic Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a pill, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli says he will lower the price of the drug.
• A federal judge has ruled that the copyright on the song "Happy Birthday" is invalid and that the song is public domain.

Last Call For Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

Yet another reminder that Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich has a long record of being awful, and not just as the architect of Goerge W. Bush's tax cuts and Social Security privatization scheme as his budget director, but also a terrible record in Congress in the 90's.

In 1996, then-Congressman John Kasich cosponsored a welfare reform bill that, for the first time ever, put a time limit on recipients' access to food stamps. Healthy, childless adults would be able to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for no more than three months in any three-year period, unless they were employed or in a training program for at least 20 hours a week. When Congress balked at a rule that would cause an estimated 1 million people to lose food aid each month, Kasich added an exception that would allow states to seek time-limit waivers for areas with especially high unemployment. 

Twenty years later, in his second term as Ohio's governor, the GOP presidential hopeful is taking advantage of these waivers, as most governors have done. But Ohio civil rights groups and economic analysts say Kasich's administration is using the waivers unequally: It applies for waivers in some regions of the state but refuses them in others, in a pattern that has disproportionately protected white communities and hurt minority populations. 

"The Kasich administration could have addressed the racial inequity in 2016," says Wendy Patton, a senior project director at Policy Matters Ohio, an economic policy research nonprofit, who has written extensively on the state's recent food stamp waiver policy. "The Kasich administration chose not to. The state should broaden its request to encompass all places and regions where jobs are scarce and people are hungry." 

In 2014, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) had the option to waive time limits on food stamps for the entire state. Due to a struggling economy and high unemployment, Ohio had qualified for and accepted this statewide waiver from the US Department of Agriculture every year since 2007, including during most of Kasich's first term as governor. But this time, Kasich rejected the waiver for the next two years in most of the state's 88 counties. His administration did accept them for 16 counties in 2014 and for 17 counties in 2015. Most of these were rural counties with small and predominantly white populations. Urban counties and cities, most of which had high minority populations, did not get waivers.

And the results of Kasich gaming his own legislation that he wrote as a Congressman have been a disaster for Ohio's cities and especially for working poor people of color.

A USDA study released earlier this month ranked Ohio among the worst states in the nation for food security. The state has the highest rate of food insecurity in the Midwest and the sixth highest rate nationally. 

In the summer of 2014, several legal organizations, including Columbus Legal Aid, filed a civil complaintagainst Ohio with the USDA, formally alleging that the state's rejection of waivers across the state disproportionately hurt minority populations. "Without any compelling reason, this decision, and its approval by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)…has unfairly made access to nutrition assistance more difficult for many minority Ohioans," the organizations wrote in their letter. 

The ODJFS' waiver decision seemed to have little basis in math. Seventy-five percent of Ohio's minorities live in just eight of the state's 88 counties. None of those counties got a waiver, even though several of them have higher unemployment rates than counties that did get waivers, notes the civil complaint. "I've never seen the math that illustrates how they came up with these 16 to begin with," says McGarvey, one of the authors of the civil complaint. "When we looked at the data, what we saw was that if they were just cutting it off at the 16 highest unemployment counties, purely using a mathematical formula, those would not have been the 16."

In other words, Kasich kicked Ohio's poorest black and minority voters off food stamps, in urban counties that vote Democratic, and kept food stamps for rural mostly white counties with better unemployment rates that tend to vote Republican.  Counties like Hamilton, where the unemployment among black residents is 17% and one in three are on food stamps, and yet in the last two years thousands have been kicked off the rolls.

But hey, it's probably not intentional, right?

Probably won't find him bragging too much about this on his 2016 campaign website, I'm thinking. Can't imagine why not, he'd actually gain ground in the primaries if he did.  These are Republicans we're talking about, after all.

Ay, Carly Con't

As I pointed out yesterday, the Right Wing Outrage du Jour is hardcore Islamophobia, and Ben Carson and Donald Trump are sufficiently bigoted for the true GOP base.  But as Steve M. reminds me, Fiorina doesn't sufficiently hate Islam enough to be the GOP nominee.

Anyone who continues to think that the questioner at Trump's rally was a plant meant to embarrass Trump is nuts. Trump thinks this sort of talk wins him votes -- he's had a couple of days to revise and polish his message, so if he thought this was harmful to him, he'd back down, but he's not doing that. And Trump is almost certainly correct in his assessment of Republican voters. Carson also knows that Islamophobia sells to the GOP voter base, so that's what he's delivering.

I don't think Fiorina will be able to keep up.

You probably don't know this, but a lot of people on the right do: A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Fiorina made a speech that praised Islam.

It's a pretty rote speech in hindsight, filled with tech buzzwords and Silicon Valley white knight nonsense about how technology will save "emerging markets", but in the end she tells how Islam made great contributions to the sciences (which is true) and set the world stage for the era of technology we have today (which is also true).

It's possible that Fiorina is done for, certainly, but I doubt it.  If she can keep the subject on her imaginary video of Planned Parenthood dismembering live babies, then she might stay in this after all.

During last week’s Republican presidential debate, Fiorina had claimed that she saw undercover videos from a Planned Parenthood that showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

However, fact checkers like FactCheck.org and The Washington Post have said that there was no such scene included in the videos that were recently released by an anti-abortion group.

“Do you acknowledge what every fact checker has found?” Fox News host Chris Wallace asked the candidate on Sunday. “As horrific as the scene is, it was only described on the video by someone who claimed to have seen it. There is no actual footage of the incident you just mentioned.”

“No, I don’t accept that at all,” Fiorina shot back. “I’ve seen the footage. And I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist, they’re trying to attack the authenticity of the videotape, I haven’t found anyone in the mainstream media who has ever watched these things.”

“I mean, they will claim that somebody watched it for them,” she continued. “I will continue to dare anyone who wants to continue to defund Planned Parenthood, watch the videotapes.”

“And anyone who wants to challenge me first is going to have to prove to me that they watched it.”

This is a perfect argument for her, because she can't lose it.  Anyone who challenges her on this, she will say "You didn't watch the videos, I did, you're lying."  She's basically calling the media liars, and that's a winning hand every time among the GOP faithful.  No Republican is going to challenge her position on this.  No media will challenge her on this.  As long as she can ride this, she stays in the game.

As long as she gets to frame Planned Parenthood as "who do you trust, me or the lamestream media?" she cannot lose, period.  I don't know if it's good enough to get her the nomination, but it's she's going to ride this train as long as she can.  Sarah Palin showed the way 7 years ago.

Watch.

The Mountain Comes For Mohamed

Just another reminder that rampant Islamophobia isn't exclusive to Republicans, because there are some notable assholes on the left as well, you know, the kind that go after a 14-year-old kid for building a friggin' clock.

On his talk show, Real Time With Bill Maher, the host said Mohamed deserved an apology but teachers reacted reasonably in targeting the boy. 

“People at the school thought it might be a bomb … because it looks exactly like a f*cking bomb,” he said during a panel discussion with Mark Cuban, Jorge Ramos, George Pataki, and Chris Matthews. “It’s not the color of his skin. Somebody look me in the eye right now and tell me. Over the last 30 years, if so many young Muslim men … and he’s young, 14, but that’s not like it’s never happened before, hasn’t blown up a lot of sh*t around the world. And this kid deserves an apology, because he wasn’t one of them… Over the last 30 years, it’s been one culture that has been been blowing sh*t up over and over again.” 

He also pointed out that the idea that Mohamed could’ve brought a bomb to school wasn’t unfounded, as several American teenagers have joined ISIS to the shock of people who knew them well. 

Famous atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins agrees that Mohamed suffered an injustice, but the praise he received was uncalled for. 

“If the reassembled components did something more than the original clock, that’s creative. If not, it looks like hoax,” he tweeted. “Disassembling & reassembling is great. But you shouldn’t then claim it was your “invention.”

Now granted, Maher and Dawkins are pretty much the worst examples of the left's more public glibertarian atheists going after Muslims, but they're not alone I suspect, and this will happen again the next time.  Honestly, don't be surprised if Maher agrees with Ben Carson's opinion of Muslims on next week's show.

StupidiNews!

• Pope Francis arrives in Washington DC tonight to meet with President Obama and begin his six-day visit to the US.
• Pennsylvania's Supreme Court has suspended the law license of Attorney General Kathleen Kane as she faces criminal charges of leaking information from her office to reporters.
• Former Peanut Corporation of America owner Stewart Parnell has received 28 years in federal prison for his conviction in knowingly shipping peanuts tainted with salmonella in 2009.
• Chinese President Xi Jinping will arrive in Seattle today ahead of scheduled trade talks with President Obama later this week.
• Apple will reportedly be in the electric car market in four years, as the Wall Street Journal reports the company is staffing up to make earlier rumors into a reality sometime in 2019.

Last Call For The Walkering Dead (Final)

Me, Sunday before last:

Rick Perry was only the first Republican to get crushed by the Trump/Carson/Fiorina revolt of GOP primary voters against Republicans who have actually held public office and failed to annihilate America's liberals while doing so. Looks like the next domino to fall may very well be Scott Walker.

Me, last Wednesday:

Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker (currently polling around two percent in the primaries) is going all in on destroying America's unions in order to save his collapsing campaign.

Me, yesterday, as Scott Walker polled at 0.5% in the most recent post-CNN debate poll:

Walker behind Christie and Santorum, deep in the Kiddie Pool and drowning. Like Rick Perry, it's only a matter of time before he exits the race...

Schadenfreude, today:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has concluded he no longer has a path to the Republican presidential nomination and plans to drop out of the 2016 campaign, according to three Republicans familiar with his decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Mr. Walker called a news conference in Madison at 6 p.m. Eastern time. 

“The short answer is money,” said a supporter of Mr. Walker’s who was briefed on the decision. “He’s made a decision not to limp into Iowa.” 

Mr. Walker’s intended withdrawal is a humiliating climb down for a Republican governor once seen as all but politically invincible. He started the year at the top of the polls but has seen his position gradually deteriorate, amid the rise of Donald J. Trump’s populist campaign and repeated missteps by Mr. Walker himself.

By the way, all the pundits who thought Perry and Walker would be in the race longer than Trump, please put your badge in the box here on the way out the door.

And now the bad news:  Wisconsin, like Texas, doesn't have term limits, so Walker can run again for Governor in 2018.  I'm betting he will.

The Walkering Dead will almost certainly return in the future...

StupidiNews Focus: Time To Unpimp Zee Auto

Patrick George over at Jalopnik takes a closer look at today's Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal story and puts it into perspective.  The automaker is facing tremendous EPA fines, almost certain recalls of half a million vehicles, and most likely criminal lawsuits from the US Justice Department.  Volkswagen's not done or anything, but they are going to be hurting for years from this.  So how did it work? George explains it's all about the pee in your diesel gas tank:

First, we need to start by talking about urea.

In order to meet tougher emissions regulations that went into effect in 2008, most automakers started supplying their diesel cars with tanks of a urea-based solution (often referred to as “AdBlue”) that cuts down on nitrous-oxide emissions. 

Many larger diesel engines on big sedans and SUV, including some from Audi as well as competitors at BMW and Mercedes, use such a system. But VW and Audi said their 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine was able to meet the requirements without a urea injection system — although many people have wondered exactly how. (Update: Just to clarify, newer TDI models like the MK7 Golf, made from 2015 on, do include urea injection.) 

On Friday, the EPA announced they found the TDI cars contained “a sophisticated software algorithm” which detected when the car was being tested for emissions. When that happens, the software drastically reduces the emissions as compared to normal driving, indicating to testers that the car had passed. 

Basically, it’s like taking a test when you already know what the answers are. It appears the cheat device was present on all TDI cars, not just ones sent for emissions testing.

And the fines alone are going to pretty much cripple the company.

We’re talking about a maximum possible fine of $37,500 per vehicle, which could add up to as much as $18 billion for Volkswagen and Audi. That’s astronomical even for what is now the world’s biggest automaker, but then again, this appears to be a staggering violation of the law. 

In addition, the EPA is working with the U.S. Department of Justice on the case, so criminal charges could arise from the situation too. And with a self-professed renewed focus on white-collar crime, VW could be the target the Justice Department is looking for right now.

The best part?  Volkswagen was busted because an NGO wanted to prove that Volkswagen's amazing urea-free "cleaner diesel cars" sold in America would work in Europe.

The Volkswagens were spewing harmful exhaust when testers drove them on the road. In the lab, they were fine. 

Discrepancies in the European tests on the diesel models of the VW Passat, the VW Jetta and the BMW X5 last year gave Peter Mock an idea. 

Mock, European managing director of a little-known clean-air group, suggested replicating the tests in the U.S. The U.S. has higher emissions standards than the rest of the world and a history of enforcing them, so Mock and his American counterpart, John German, were sure the U.S. versions of the vehicles would pass the emissions tests, German said. That way, they reasoned, they could show Europeans it was possible for diesel cars to run clean. 

“We had no cause for suspicion,” German, U.S. co-lead of the International Council on Clean Transportation, said in an interview. “We thought the vehicles would be clean.”

Precision engineered....to cheat on emissions tests.  Nice work, Volkswagen.

Tsipras Takes The Fifth

Greece's fifth national election in six years sees the Syriza Party victorious again in a sizable win, returning the recently ousted Prime Minister to power.

Alexis Tsipras has hailed a "victory of the people" after his left-wing Syriza party won Greece's fifth election in six years.

He said Greeks faced a difficult road and that recovery from financial crisis would only come through hard work.

The conservative New Democracy party earlier conceded defeat.

With 60% of votes counted, Syriza is projected to be just short of a majority but the Independent Greeks have agreed to join a coalition.

The latest figures give Syriza 35% of the vote, compared with New Democracy's 28%. The far-right Golden Dawn is set to be the third biggest party, with 7.1% of the vote.

Golden Dawn being in the running at all is a serious problem, as these guys are neo-Nazi skinheads with slightly nicer suits and a PR campaign.  They will cause problems for Greece and soon.

Mr Tsipras said his decision to call an early election was vindicated and that he had been given a clear mandate.

He told thousands of jubilant supporters in central Athens: "In Europe today, Greece and the Greek people are synonymous with resistance and dignity, and this struggle will be continued together for another four years.

"We have difficulties ahead, but we are also on firm ground. We won't recover from the struggle by magic, but it can happen with hard work."

Mr Tsipras was joined on stage by Panos Kammenos, leader of the the nationalist Independent Greeks, who also entered a coalition with Syriza after the previous election in January.

"Together we will continue the struggle we began seven months ago," Mr Tsipras said.

We'll see how long this particular government lasts, but I'm betting it won't be very long.  None of the rest have since Greece's economy tanked, and more austerity will only make things worse, not better.

StupidiNews!

• HBO ruled last night's Emmys with "Game of Thrones" and "Veep" winning Best Drama and Comedy respectively, and Viola Davis became the first African-American Best Actress winner.
• Marvin Sharp, an award-winning USA Gymnastics coach held on child molestation charges, was found dead of an apparent suicide in an Indianapolis jail Sunday.
• Reuters is reporting that some Iraqi soldiers are abandoning their fight against ISIS and joining civilian migrants heading for Europe.
• After Volkswagen admitted last week that they cheated on US diesel emissions tests for years, the automaker's shares plummeted by nearly 25% on Germany's stock market Monday.
• Twenty years ago on Saturday the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had his manifesto published in the Washington Post, and was turned in by his brother David.

Last Call For Podcast Versus The Stupid

The latest Podcast Versus The Stupid is up, as Bon talks about her town of Springfield, MO as the front lines on the War on Women, and we take a look at Republicans who can't read the Constitution.

Check Out Blogs Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

The Walkering Dead, Con't

It looks like after the GOP Clown Car Cavalcade last week that Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker's campaign is, well, dead and buried.

The survey by CNN of 444 registered Republican voters put Donald Trump in first place with 24% support, a drop of 8 points since their last poll, and Fiorina in second place with 15%. Fiorina earned plaudits on the right for her debate performance, which included multiple clashes with Trump, although fact checkers pointed out that she vividly cited footage from a hidden camera video of Planned Parenthood that does not appear to exist. 52% of respondents said Fiorina was the winner of the debate while 31% said Trump lost.

Dr. Ben Carson, who had surged into second place in many polls after the first debate in August, stood in third at 14%. Sen. Marco Rubio leapt from single digits to fourth place with 11% of the vote, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 9%, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 6%, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at 4%, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 3%, Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 2%, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum at 1%.

Missing from the list was Walker, who earned less than half a percentage point support, putting the former frontrunner in the same category as long shots like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and former New York Gov. George Pataki.

Walker started the race strong early this year and regularly led polls of Iowa through July, where he’s still hoping to jumpstart a comeback with a strong performance in the state’s caucuses. A combination of Trump’s rise, two weak debates, and a string of inconsistent answers on policy questions slowed his momentum however and have relegated him to the bottom tier of the field in recent polls. 

Walker behind Christie and Santorum, deep in the Kiddie Pool and drowning.  Like Rick Perry, it's only a matter of time before he exits the race...

Sunday Long Read: And Justice For Few

This week's Sunday Long Read is the indispensable Ta-Nehisi Coates on the black family and criminal justice in 2015.

The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails—are a relatively recent invention. Through the middle of the 20th century, America’s imprisonment rate hovered at about 110 people per 100,000. Presently, America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for people in prisons andjails) is roughly 12 times the rate in Sweden, eight times the rate in Italy, seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia, and four times the rate in Poland. America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia—and with an autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition. China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold half a million more people. “In short,” an authoritative report issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”

What caused this? Crime would seem the obvious culprit: Between 1963 and 1993, the murder rate doubled, the robbery rate quadrupled, and the aggravated-assault rate nearly quintupled. But the relationship between crime and incarceration is more discordant than it appears. Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s, even as violent crime increased. From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates and violent-crime rates rose. Then, from the early ’90s to the present, violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment rates increased.(Robert Sampson. Data from: Bureau of Justice Statistics; Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics; Uniform Crime Reporting System.)

The incarceration rate rose independent of crime—but not of criminal-justice policy. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, has found that by the early 2000s, a suite of tough-on-crime laws had made prison sentences much more likely than in the past. Examining a sample of states, Neal found that from 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long prison sentence nearly doubled for drug possession, tripled for drug trafficking, and quintupled for non aggravated assault.

That explosion in rates and duration of imprisonment might be justified on grounds of cold pragmatism if a policy of mass incarceration actually caused crime to decline. Which is precisely what some politicians and policy makers of the tough-on-crime ’90s were claiming. “Ask many politicians, newspaper editors, or criminal justice ‘experts’ about our prisons, and you will hear that our problem is that we put too many people in prison,” a 1992 Justice Department report read. “The truth, however, is to the contrary; we are incarcerating too few criminals, and the public is suffering as a result.”

History has not been kind to this conclusion. The rise and fall in crime in the late 20th century was an international phenomenon. Crime rates rose and fell in the United States and Canada at roughly the same clip—but in Canada, imprisonment rates held steady. “If greatly increased severity of punishment and higher imprisonment rates caused American crime rates to fall after 1990,” the researchers Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington have written, then “what caused the Canadian rates to fall?” The riddle is not particular to North America. In the latter half of the 20th century, crime rose and then fell in Nordic countries as well. During the period of rising crime, incarceration rates held steady in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—but declined in Finland. “If punishment affects crime, Finland’s crime rate should have shot up,” Tonry and Farrington write, but it did not. After studying California’s tough “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law—which mandated at least a 25-year sentence for a third “strikeable offense,” such as murder or robbery—researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Sydney, in Australia, determined in 2001 that the law had reduced the rate of felony crime by no more than 2 percent. Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the leading academic experts on American incarceration, looked at the growth in state prisons in recent years and concluded that a 66 percent increase in the state prison population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. Then it went still higher.

This bloating of the prison population may not have reduced crime much, but it increased misery among the group that so concerned Moynihan. Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school, seven in 10 did. “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written. “Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.”

The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for the economic viability of black families. Employment and poverty statistics traditionally omit the incarcerated from the official numbers. When Western recalculated the jobless rates for the year 2000 to include incarcerated young black men, he found that joblessness among all young black men went from 24 to 32 percent; among those who never went to college, it went from 30 to 42 percent. The upshot is stark. Even in the booming ’90s, when nearly every American demographic group improved its economic position, black men were left out. The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.

These consequences for black men have radiated out to their families. By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up. Paternal incarceration is associated with behavior problems and delinquency, especially among boys.

The entire piece is devastating in both its scope of history and the breadth of Coates's work. What he calls "the carceral state" has decimated the black community, and will continue to do so until it is dismantled.

That will take a miracle, sadly.  We're fresh out of those.

Failing The Test

Ben Carson should probably read the Constitution once in a while, or at least the parts that aren't the Second Amendment.

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would not support a Muslim as President of the United States.

Responding to a question on "Meet the Press," the retired neurosurgeon said, "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that."

He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.

Carson, who is near the top of several early presidential polls, said a president's faith should matter depending on what that faith is. "If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter," he clarified.

Meanwhile, the three GOP candidates who have never held public office now have 53%, a pretty solid majority, of the GOP primary vote.

Carly Fiorina has rocketed into second place in the Republican presidential field on the heels another strong debate and Donald Trump has lost some support, a new national CNN/ORC poll shows.

The survey, conducted the three days after 23 million people tuned in to Wednesday night's GOP debate on CNN, shows that Trump is still the party's front-runner with 24% support. That, though, is an 8 percentage point decrease from earlier in the month when a similar poll had him at 32%.

Fiorina ranks second with 15% support -- up from 3% in early September. She's just ahead of Ben Carson's 14%, though Carson's support has also declined from 19% in the previous poll.

There's a reason none of these three have ever won an election, I'm thinking.