A Gentleman’s view.

The Curse of King Martin by Kathy Shaidle 

Rich Lowry owes John Derbyshire an apology.

When Lowry fired Derbyshire from National Review for writing a “racist” column here at Taki’s, he took particular issue with Derb’s contention that whites should “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

Lowry was clearly unfamiliar with (black) comedian Chris Rock’s 1996 bit about avoiding any street in America named Martin Luther King Boulevard. As everyone (except National Review editors) knows, avenues christened in honor of that self-proclaimed champion of nonviolence usually run through black neighborhoods and tend to be among the country’s most dangerous.

The Curse of King Martin now seems to have extended beyond eponymous boulevards. In a development that’s sure to equal bad news for the Mall in DC, whites are on notice to steer clear of streets boasting monuments to MLK, too.

“Don’t leave your driveway without Derb behind the wheel and Chris Rock sitting shotgun.”

An 83-foot-tall obelisk honoring King stands over the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Church Street in Norfolk, Virginia, which is precisely where a white couple were driving last month when they were set upon by (depending on who’s doing the talking) “dozens” or “at least 100” black youths.

Sadly, such black-on-white swarms have become commonplace over the last few years, although you’d never know it unless you read the Drudge Report, which is one of the only “mainstream” news outlets that dares to report on the epidemic.

The white victims attacked in Norfolk worked four blocks away at a mainstream news outlet—the local Virginian-Pilot newspaper.

Which decided not to report this attack on its very own reporters.

(Maybe because, hey, they were short-staffed for a week—the pair having been forced to take time off work due to their injuries and all….)

It wasn’t until a Virginian-Pilot columnist wrote an opinion piece on the incident a fortnight later that residents learned about the couple’s terrifying ordeal. And boy, were they pissed: at the black teens and their online supporters (one of whom called the attack revenge for Trayvon Martin—an “excuse” that’s proving to be predictably popular with thugs of late); at their local self-appointed media gatekeepers; and at the police, whose indifferent mumblings about the crime sound like dialogue deleted from RoboCop as unrealistic. Mechanical police wouldn’t sound either this touchy or this indifferent:

An officer on the scene reportedly told one injured victim to “shut up and get in the car,” then shrugged that the attackers “were probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?” He then supposedly pointed to a nearby public housing complex and shrugged, “It’s what they do.”

Stung by charges of dereliction and incompetence, the Norfolk cops’ spokesman Chris Amos complained wearily that, when trying to establish the exact number of teen attackers, “we’re kind of at the mercy of our victims.” He didn’t ascribe any racial motives to the crime, which he characterized as “someone throwing a rock at someone’s car” and “simple assault”—because “there’s no code for mob assault” in the police department’s “system.”

Amos’s advice for motorists who find themselves in similar situations?

“Call the police,” of course.

Except the couple did call 911. It took them three tries to get through.

If only they’d had the chance to use Microsoft’s “ghetto app” instead.

It’s officially called “Pedestrian Route Production”—this still-in-development smart-phone application will be designed to help the user avoid “unsafe neighborhoods.”

Predictably, the Dallas NAACP and other black critics have denounced the as-yet-unavailable phone feature as “racist.”

But what about listening to Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain in the car? Is that “racist,” too?

The ever-helpful comic has another routine about “driving while black.” Once again, he provides simple, common-sense (and foul-mouthed) tips for avoiding a beatdown, this time at the hands of police: obey the law, turn down that loud rap music, and don’t run from the cops.

Rock also jokingly tells black drivers to “get a white friend” whose mere presence in the bitch seat could mean the difference “between a ticket and a bullet in the ass.”

In all likelihood, Microsoft will be bullied by racial shakedown artists into junking the “ghetto app” that—especially if programmed to alert users to any street (or statue) with Martin Luther King’s name on it—could’ve prevented the Norfolk attack and many others.

This leaves white drivers who’d rather risk death than accusations of racism with one utterly impractical, ultra-low-tech option when they need tips on which neighborhoods to avoid: Don’t leave your driveway without Derb behind the wheel and Chris Rock sitting shotgun.

JPMorgan Chase’s $2 Billion Loss

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, can be clear as a bell when he denounces financial reform. But on an emergency conference call with analysts on Thursday to announce the bank’s stunning $2 billion trading loss, his message was frustratingly vague.

The loss, according to Mr. Dimon, was in the bank’s “synthetic credit portfolio,” which presumably means it involved the same type of complex derivatives that played such a destructive role in the financial crisis. And Mr. Dimon said that sloppiness, bad judgment and stupidity — his own and his colleagues’ — had led to the loss.

It was a stunning admission from a man who led JPMorgan through the crisis relatively unscathed, but it doesn’t explain what actually went wrong.

What Mr. Dimon did not say is that the loss also occurred because of a continued lack, nearly four years after the crisis, of rules and regulators up to the task of protecting taxpayers and the economy from the excesses of too big to fail banks; and, yes, of protecting the banks from their executives’ and traders’ destructive risk-taking.

The fact that JPMorgan’s loss — which Mr. Dimon has warned could “easily get worse” — is not enough to topple the bank, is not the point. What matters is that JPMorgan, like the nation’s other big banks, is still engaged in activities that can provoke catastrophic losses. If policy makers do not strengthen reform, then luck is the only thing preventing another meltdown.

Bank regulators should start by adopting a forceful Volcker Rule. Proposed by Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman and included in the Dodd-Frank reform law, the rule would curtail risky and speculative trading with the banks’ own capital.

Banks hate the Volcker Rule, because less gambling means lower profits and lower bonuses for executives and traders. Mr. Dimon has been especially contemptuous, saying at one point that “Paul Volcker by his own admission has said he doesn’t understand capital markets. He has proven that to me.” Early versions of the restrictions have been ambiguous and toothless.

Dodd-Frank also calls for new rules on derivatives — including transparent trading and requirements for banks to back their trades with collateral and capital. If such rules were in place, JPMorgan’s trades could not have escaped notice by regulators and market participants. In the face of heavy lobbying, the derivatives’ rules have also been delayed or watered down.

There are now several bills in the House, with bipartisan support, to weaken the Dodd-Frank law on derivatives. One of those would let the banks avoid Dodd-Frank regulation by conducting derivatives deals through foreign subsidiaries. The JPMorgan loss was incurred in its London office, which doesn’t lessen the effect here.

Mitt Romney has called for repealing Dodd-Frank. That may win him Wall Street cash, but it is profoundly dangerous. President Obama and Congressional Democrats can take credit for Dodd-Frank, but they have not done enough to ensure that the rules are strong enough.

The force of Mr. Dimon’s critique of Dodd-Frank has rested on his personal reputation for smarts and on JPMorgan’s sheen of invincibility. His own admitted fallibility and the bank’s shocking stumble are the best argument in favor of strong regulation. Now politicians and regulators need to stand up to the banks.

S.E.C. Opens Investigation Into JPMorgan’s $2 Billion Loss

BY BEN PROTESS AND SUSANNE CRAIG

Regulators are investigating potential civil violations surrounding the $2 billion loss that JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Thursday, raising further questions about the trading activities at the nation’s biggest bank.

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently opened a preliminary investigation into JPMorgan’s accounting practices and public disclosures about the trades, according to people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is not public. Regulators learned about the activities in April, and formally opened an investigation in recent days, the people said.

The case, which is being run out of New York, will likely examine the bank’s past regulatory filings about the internal unit that placed the trades — as well as recent statements from the firm’s top executives.

In April, questions surfaced about the group, the so-called chief investment office, after reports emerged that a London-based trader was taking large bets that distorted the market. At the time, Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, dismissed the concerns about the trading activities, calling them a “complete tempest in a teapot.”

On Thursday, JPMorgan revealed that the group had suffered significant losses, which could cost the firm $2 billion or more. A more humble Mr. Dimon on Thursday said “egregious mistakes” were made.

An important avenue for the S.E.C. investigation, the people said, is the firm’s accounting methods relating to the trades. Investigators could take a close look at a measure known as value-at-risk. The company disclosed earlier this year that it changed the way it calculates the metric, which may have masked some of the risk surrounding this trade. On a conference call Thursday, Mr. Dimon said the firm had reverted to the old way of calculation value-at-risk.

The people cautioned that the investigation is at an early stage. No one at JPMorgan has been accused of any wrongdoing. JPMorgan was not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for the S.E.C. declined to comment.

Another view:

Although JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon did not pin the “egregious and self-inflicted mistakes” that led to $2 billion in losses on any one person, warning signs about the big risks last month pointed to an easygoing trader named Bruno Michel Iksil, known playfully as “the London Whale.” Iksil, also called “the White Whale” and “Voldemort” by wary counterparts, is a “low-profile” French trader working for the company’s Chief Investment Office out of London, according to The Wall Street Journal. There, he prefers to wear black jeans without a tie, and has been making about $100 million a year working with credit-default swaps. But his huge gambles recently on corporate derivatives had hedge funds betting against him, with one Bank of America trader telling clients, “Fast money has smelt blood.” Now that the bank is bleeding everywhere, it’s largely on Iksil.

Despite his reputation as bearish in the past — “sometimes criticizing colleagues as too optimistic on markets,” the Journal reported — the Whale turned way bullish lately, trading so hard that he may have single-handedly moved the index. The Whale’s “big bets illuminate the risk inherent in hedge fund-style trading,” said Senator Jeff Merkley last month, pointing to potential violations of the planned Volcker rule. At the time, Dimon insisted that chatter about the trading was a “tempest in a teapot,” and that the deals were safe and by the book. “The CIO balances our risks,” said CFO Doug Braunstein. “They hedge against downside risk, that’s the nature of protecting that balance sheet.” With his bets all over the news and his bosses well aware, the Whale was anything but a rogue trader.

Iksil reportedly stopped making trades in early April, but when the second-quarter losses were announced yesterday, all eyes went back to the Whale, who started at JPMorgan in 2005, according to the U.K. Financial Services Authority, and commutes to work from Paris. His personal Bloomberg profile noted that he is a “champion of ‘kick it’” and “walking over water,” but also “humble.” He also supposedly likes to work from home on Fridays. With all the news about him swirling today, he might do well to stay inside.

20 Historical Facts That Republicans Distort Or Just Get Plain Wrong

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

We all know at least one person that doesn’t know much about history. And we all know that there have been people who have tried to distort history. The Republican Party, however, does both. Over these last two years, Republicans have a made a real effort to distort history as much as possible, to the point where they are now seeking to rewrite school textbooks. The Republican Party has bent over backwards to present their own twisted version of history and it’s starting to look like that one requirement to be a Republican is to be ignorant of historical facts and events. Below is a list of the many historical facts that Republicans have either distorted or have just gotten plain wrong along with corrections of their errors.

1. Did Paul Revere Ride To Warn The British?) Sarah Palin made the dubious claim that Paul Revere actually warned the British instead of the American colonists. Her supporters even made attempts to edit the Paul Revere Wikipedia entry to make her claims sound correct. If she had taken the time to read Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s Ride, she would not have made this error, as the great majority of school children know that Revere made his midnight ride to warn Americans, not the enemy.

2. Was The Shot Heard ‘Round The World Fired In New Hampshire?) Did you know that Lexington and Concord are located in New Hampshire? I didn’t. And the people in New Hampshire and Massachusetts didn’t either. When Michele Bachmann exclaimed to a New Hampshire crowd that “the shot heard ’round the world” occurred in their state, I’m sure that Massachusetts let out a roar of laughter. The sad but hilarious thing is that most American children know that the first shot of the American Revolution occurred in the state of Massachusetts.

3. Was John Quincy Adams A Founding Father?) Michele Bachmann must have failed American History in school. Because she has absolutely no knowledge of early American history. She once claimed that John Quincy Adams is a Founding Father of America when in fact, JQA was just a child when the Revolution began. He was born in 1767 and was just 14 when the war ended. And like Palin’s supporters, Bachmann fans proceeded to edit the Wikipedia page of John Quincy Adams in an attempt to make her claim viable.

4. Did The Founding Fathers End Slavery?) Michelle Bachmann isn’t through yet. During a speaking event she once claimed that the Founding Fathers were the ones who ended slavery. That’s a surprise to me since George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all owned slaves. In fact, 12 of the first 16 American Presidents owned slaves. But Bachmann’s attempt to paint the Founding Fathers as saints is also a denial of past Republican Party history since early Republicans rose to prominence by fighting against slavery and the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, ended slavery altogether.

5. Was America Founded As A Christian State?) Ever heard of David Barton? He’s the guy that Glenn Beck goes to when he wants to distort history. David Barton claims that the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian state. Many Republicans have since picked up on this claim and have been shamelessly using it to court the Christian right-wing, and as a reason to end the separation of church and state that has been part of this country since its founding. His claim can be trounced with one question. If the Founding Fathers wanted America to be a Christian state why did they not say so in the Constitution? Instead, the Founders placed this in the document.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
~First Amendment, Bill of Rights of the Constitution

In other words, there is to be absolutely NO state religion.

6. Did Benjamin Franklin Reject Evolution?) We continue with the lack of knowledge of the Founding Fathers among the right-wing. Many Republicans have been making the claim that Benjamin Franklin rejected evolution. There are two problems with this claim. First, the theory of evolution wasn’t around until Charles Darwin published the theory in 1859, nearly 70 years AFTER Franklin died in 1790. And secondly, Franklin was a man of science above all else. It is unlikely that he would have rejected a scientific theory in favor of creationism. Franklin in fact, rejected the dogma and divinity of Christianity.

7. Was The American Revolution Fought To End Slavery?) Yet another claim that David Barton makes in an attempt to present the founding generation as perfect, is that the American Revolution was waged to end slavery. Once again, Barton makes a claim that is completely false. The American Revolution was fought to win American independence from Great Britain. And as I recall, the slaves were certainly not freed before, during, or after the war. They remained as slaves and would be slaves until the Civil War.

8. Was The Civil War Fought Over State’s Rights?) Republicans claim that it was all about state’s rights and not about slavery. The truth is, state’s rights only played a small role. The South feared that President Lincoln would end slavery, so they took preemptive measures by seceding from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter without any provocation. Slavery was, without a doubt, the main cause of the war between the states. Without slavery, white plantation owners would have to pick their own cotton, or, pay people to do it for them. They also believed Africans to be inferior and would not tolerate their freedom. We should all keep that in mind as the South/Republican home base continues to make claims that they aren’t racist.

9. Do States Have The Right To Secede?) After President Obama took office, many Republican legislators and governors, particularly in the South, began threatening secession. They say secession is a right but is it really? The answer is absolutely not. Not only did the Civil War settle this dispute, James Madison and Andrew Jackson (both Southerners) also rejected this claim. Nowhere in the Constitution will you find the right to secede. The Constitution was created by the people “in order to form a more perfect union” and by seceding, a state breaks up the nation, thus breaking a legally binding contract. And Andrew Jackson once threatened to march an army to South Carolina after that state threatened to secede. In fact, Jackson felt that secession was treason. The Supreme Court has also weighed in on this issue. In Texas v White, the court held that the Constitution did not permit states to secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were “absolutely null”.

10. Was D-Day All About Health Care?) Republicans have been very vocal about the Affordable Care Act and Rick Santorum is no exception. He has made the claim that Americans stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day because they opposed Obamacare. He said, “Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom … Those Americans risked everything so they could make [their own] decision on their health care plan.”

This is absurd. The men that stormed the Omaha and Utah beaches were fighting to liberate Europe from Nazi rule. They weren’t thinking about health care 67 years into the future. They were thinking of their families and whether they’d ever see them again. Santorum also fails to realize that military personnel and their dependents have government-run health care. And the soldiers aren’t complaining about it either. And as a matter of fact, many World War II veterans and their families also have Medicare which is also run by the federal government. That blows Santorum’s claim out of the water.

11. Did Ronald Reagan Only Lower Taxes?) Worshiping Ronald Reagan means you also have to believe that Reagan never raised taxes during his Presidency, but this constant right-wing claim is false. While he did cut taxes in 1981 and again in 1988, Reagan actually raised taxes every year from 1981 to 1987 including The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 which, at the time, had been the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, a higher gasoline levy, a higher payroll tax, and a 1986 tax reform deal that included the largest corporate tax increase in American history.

12. Was Joseph McCarthy A Hero?) Another idol of the Republican Party is Joseph McCarthy. Republicans are now rewriting school books to present McCarthy as a hero who did no wrong. In reality, where the rest of us live, Joseph McCarthy was nothing more than a witch hunter who accused innocent Americans of being communists. He had no real evidence that people were communists and he should have recognized that people have the right to be part of any political party they choose. He violated the Constitution and ignored the values of freedom that we hold dear.
Just like Republicans today.

13. Was Martin Luther King Jr. A Republican?) Republicans claim that Martin Luther King was a Republican. So they can explain this part of a speech by King, right? In one speech, he stated that “something is wrong with capitalism” and claimed, “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” So, by claiming King as one of their own, I’m assuming Republicans are also adopting his philosophy.

14. Who Signed The Smoot-Hawley Act?) Many Republicans still have anti–New Deal views. Michele Bachmann blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing the “Hoot-Smalley Tariff”. Except that FDR didn’t pass it. Hoover did, three years before FDR took the oath of office. Oh, and it’s Smoot-Hawley, NOT “Hoot-Smalley”.

15. Did 9/11 Happen On George Bush’s Watch?) How many times have we heard a Republican or right-wing talking head on Fox say that no terrorist attacks happened when George W. Bush was President? In July, Fox News host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008 — I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” Other Republicans such as Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino also “misremember” that period of time. I seem to recall sitting in a 20th Century History course at my high school on September 11, 2001 when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City. And as I also recall, George W. Bush was President at the time.

16. What Did The Founding Fathers Think About Corporations?) Corporations are people according to Republicans. They even believe the Founding Fathers loved corporations. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The truth is that the Founding generations distrusted corporations with a passion. That’s why corporations were regulated rather harshly compared to the pampering Republicans give them today. Corporations were limited to an existence of 20-30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense. If the Founding Fathers were still alive and reinstated these regulations, Republicans would be accusing George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of the founders of being evil, un-American socialists.

17. What Is The Constitutionality Of Federally Mandated Health Care?) Is federally mandated health care unconstitutional? According to Republicans it is. But that’s not what the Founding Fathers thought. Congress passed and John Adams signed, a mandatory health care insurance law back in 1791. The mandate required sailors to pay a tax and in the event they needed care, they could get medical care from the government. If it was unconstitutional as Republicans claim, why didn’t Thomas Jefferson or James Madison repeal it? The fact is, they didn’t, and I’d say James Madison knew more about the Constitution than any Republican does, considering he’s the primary author of that sacred document.

18. Is Social Security A ‘Ponzi Scheme’?) When Rick Perry called Social Security a “ponzi scheme” in the first GOP Debate, he not only made a political mistake of epic proportions, he was also dead wrong. Social Security was created to keep senior citizens out of poverty and it has done a wonderful job of doing just that. When people put money into a ponzi scheme, they don’t get it back. Social Security, however, gives the money back plus more to every person who puts money into the system. It’s far from being a ponzi scheme. The real ponzi scheme is the private health insurance business which takes money from you and then drops you when you need medical care.

19. Did The Founding Fathers Support A Strong Federal Government Or A Weak One?) This is an easy one. Republicans are dead wrong when they claim that the Founding Fathers wanted a weak federal government. And that is simple to prove. Before we had the Constitution, America was a loose alliance of states under the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government was weak. So weak in fact that it didn’t have the power to levy taxes, could not regulate commerce, and relied on the states to provide money for defense. The states had all the power and the federal government had virtually none. This was a chaotic system that threatened to tear apart the new nation. So the Founders wrote the Constitution which created a strong central government capable of levying taxes, regulating commerce, printing money, and forming a military. Most importantly, under the Constitution, the federal government was given the power to provide for the general welfare and the states were given far less power. Republicans will often cite the Tenth Amendment as proof of state supremacy but they’re wrong about that too. After the Constitution was ratified, some wanted to add an amendment limiting the federal government to powers “expressly” delegated, which would have denied implied powers. However, the word “expressly” ultimately did not appear in the Tenth Amendment as ratified, and therefore the Tenth Amendment did not reject the powers implied by the Necessary and Proper Clause. In other words, the federal government has the power to make laws about things that are not found in the Constitution such as health care.

20. Were The Founding Fathers A Group Of Right Wingers?) Republicans have been crisscrossing the country trying to convince Americans that the Founding Fathers were conservatives. But were they really? The answer to this question is absolutely not. If the Founding Fathers were conservatives they would never have revolted against England. One can hardly call breaking away from the most powerful nation on Earth at the time a conservative act. Plus, the Founding Fathers supported a strong federal government, believed in civil rights, supported separation of church and state, despised corporations, and believed the government had the power to provide health care and levy taxes. This is why the Supreme Court throughout American history has rarely ruled laws unconstitutional using the Tenth Amendment.

Republicans and Americans in general need to get a firm grasp of history. The Republicans understand that the lack of education is the key to controlling the electorate. All they need to do is distort and re-write history in their favor to win the votes of the ignorant. We must learn our past history so that we do not go down the backwards road that Republicans are leading us down.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~George Santayana

MSNBC Panel Lectures Conservatives On The Nature Of ‘The Republican Brain’

MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes hosted a panel discussion on Saturday about the nature of the “Republican brain” and why it seems, according to the intellectuals that populate weekend cable news programming, that conservatives reject scientific advances. What followed was a myopic, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing exercise in liberal “confirmation bias,” in a discussion on Republican’s supposed “confirmation bias.”

RELATED: Chris Hayes Asks ‘Republican Meteorologist’ To Help Convince GOP Of Climate Change

Hayes opened the panel with author of The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney, describing the findings in his book. He conceded that he found liberals have their biases, but the arch of history bends toward the truth on their side of the aisle. Conservatives, meanwhile, dig in their heels and reject new and potentially contradictory information.

Hayes was vexed by the scale of the problem, as it seemed to dawn on him that he was going to be largely unsuccessful over his career in winning conservative hearts and minds.

“How do we avoid a bleak landscape of will-to-power nihilism, in which no one can persuade anyone of anything and I come to work every day hoping to, like, you know, bring some information to the public and I completely bang my head against the wall and my life is meaningless,” Hayes asked, one would have to imagine, rhetorically. Fortunately, he went to break before his fawning panel could respond to this ego-stroking lament.

After the break, Hayes asked a leading, 47-second question about the nature of the “enlightenment project” – the magnum opus in which one presumes he believes himself to be engaging.

Author of The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, told Hayes that science is based on premises being challenged and tested and eventually confirmed or discarded. So, science and understanding evolves overtime whereas religion tends to avoid that level of critical introspection. Conservatives, they say, for the most part reject this process.

Finally, the brilliant and entertaining New York Daily News columnist John McWhorter chimed in and challenged the presumption of the theory of evolution from an atheist’s perspective. He said he had engaged the scientific community recently and asked how they would account for what he suggested were the holes in the theory that do not account for grand jumps in biological advancements. Shockingly, he found that the liberal scientific community – which perceives itself to be the pinnacle of open-mindedness – was rather unaccepting of his heretical questioning of what is presumed to be, and this is the appropriate term, gospel.

“The liberal scientists thought that I was the worst thing,” said McWhorter. “This was the kind of behavior that is associated with conservatives. There was a circling of the wagons, not reason, because I was trying to make sense – I wasn’t making a godly argument – that happened. It’s over. But, it leads me to think that this is perhaps human behavior.”

His thought provoking question was immediately shot down — Mooney told McWhorter that he was injecting god into the conversation whether he knew it or not. DailyBeast columnist Michelle Goldberg told McWhorter that he was contradicting science and that, in fact, his presumption that there are instances when the evolutionary theory is not entirely explanatory were factually incorrect.

So, McWhorter was both willfully spouting misinfromation and was buying into religious propaganda. And suddenly, there is no critical thought required. Phew! That was close.

What McWhorter admirably attempted to do was provoke actual discussion – even potentially contentious discussion. The panel’s immediate revulsion to his attempt to impose some level of objectivity on his fellow panelists confirms the findings in a much-discussed Pew Center poll from March which showed that the average liberal is twice as likely to block material online that they find politically disagreeable than conservatives. Those close-minded right-wing nuts actually seek out information and opinion that challenges their beliefs more than liberal. Who knew? Well, probably John McWhorter.

“The mistake you made was to talk to the devil,” said Haidt. “A principle in my book is to follow the sacredness, and around it you’ll find a ring of motivated ignorance.” Gosh, that does sound so enlightening.

Haidt said that the scientist in question, who McWhorter cited when asking his genuinely curious question of the scientific community, “was not a respected scientist, so you basically committed treason by even just talking to him.”

Gotcha. So, religious conservatives are ignorant and closed-minded but liberals, who are enlightened opinion leaders, suggest that even talking to people you don’t agree with amounts to “treason.”

Hayes concluded the panel saying that he drew the line at opponents of the theory of anthropogenic climate change, and would not have those heretics on his show. He said it was a dangerous philosophy to espouse… And we’re the ones who get lectured on “confirmation bias.”

Look, religious conservatives (or rather, religious people of all political stripes) take certain tenets of their faith literally. Some sects accept evolution, some do not. But the issue has become politicized and the discussion is no longer about the science on either side of the aisle. On the right, the issue serves as a coalescing force that draws like-minded individuals together. Guess what? It’s precisely the same on the other side of the aisle. And when they get together, they have the same conversation about how awful the other side is using practically the same parlance.

This is not the case for everyone, of course. Most people accept evolution as science, and the majority of conservatives and liberals who accept evolution do not see this as a sign of their moral and intellectual superiority. But many on this panel appeared to view the acceptance of this scientific theory as evidence that they are imbued with some form of higher consciousness. Hey progressives, how do you think those religious conservatives who reject evolution feel about themselves and their faith? How much you want to bet they feel the precise same way?

Meet the Former Right-Wing Blogger Who Realized Conservatives Are Crazy

Charles Johnson was among the nation’s leading “anti-jihad” bloggers until he realized that his compatriots were totally nuts.

For years, Charles Johnson was a prominent right-wing “war-blogger.” On his site, Little Green Footballs, he coined the term “anti-idiotarian,” wrote frequently of a “leftist-Islamist axis,” called Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas “a fanatical, deadly enemy of Western civilization” and inspired the hawkish Israeli journalist Gil Ronen to gush, “If anyone ever compiles a list of Internet sites that contribute to Israel’s public relations effort, Johnson’s site will probably come in first, far above the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s site.” His comments section became an infamous hotbed of xenophobia and wingnuttery.

That was then and this is now. Visit LGF today, and you’ll find posts decrying his former fellow travelers’ knee-jerk Islamophobia, debunking the Breitbrats’ steaming piles of nonsense and defending the Obama administration against scurrilous charges from Fox News. Johnson has undergone a remarkable political transformation over the past five years, but it didn’t come without a cost; he is now among the top targets of the right blogosphere – an apostate drawing an enormous amount of venom from people he once considered his allies.

This week, Charles Johnson appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript (you can listen to the whole show here).

Joshua Holland: Charles, I’ll be honest, I used to find you kind of terrifying. Not in a personal way, but as a prominent member of this group of so-called war bloggers. You were prominent in that group. You co-founded Pajamas Media and you were widely credited with helping to bring down Dan Rather after he reported on George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service. You used to be really filled with Islamophobia and xenophobia. James Wolcott of Vanity Fair once compared your site to “a disorganized Nuremberg rally.”

Charles Johnson: Yeah, I’ve heard worse. That’s a fair enough description. If you actually go back before the 9/11 attacks and read what I wrote on my blog you’ll find that I actually was never what you’d think of as a right-winger at all.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

JH: September 11th was a traumatic experience for the entire country. We all felt that way. Is it fair to say that you kind of snapped?

CJ: In a sense I guess you can say that. It hit me really hard. I grew up in New York and I was actually interested in architecture, so I followed the construction of the World Trade Center. It helped that I had a really personal connection to the area. It hit me really hard.

I don’t know if I snapped so much as I really wanted to know more about what was going on. I tend to focus real intensely on things when I get interested. That’s what happened with the blog. I focused on fundamentalist Islam and radical Islam. Over the years I began to be involved with people like Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney. If I had known some of the things I know about them now I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been associated with them, but you live and you learn, I guess.

JH: Right. You were a very early entrant into the blogging world. By the time I started reading blogs, maybe in 2002 or 2003, you were very much like Robert Spencer. You were using this method common to people who have a fear of Islam which is finding examples of Muslims doing terrible things, and then at least implying, if not stating outright, that these horrific incidents represent the Muslim community outright.

CJ: That’s a fair criticism, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve changed my focus. I’ve realized that to be true. At that point I had to say to myself that this doesn’t really make sense, knowing what I know now about some of the motivations of people like Spencer and the like. That’s one of the big reasons I’ve changed the focus of my blog.

Just to be clear, I was never really known as a right-winger until after the September 11th attacks. On my blog there were some pretty harsh criticisms of George W. Bush prior to the 2000 elections. And I didn’t vote for him.

JH: OK, so along the way you began to see things a little differently and you started to criticize your erstwhile allies. You started calling out Fox News inaccuracies. You called Jim Hoft, the dumbest person on the internet, a “borderline illiterate bigot.”

CJ: I stand by those words.

JH: They’re not even controversial, Charles. Along the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.

JH: Geller continues to dance with European far-right-wing parties like the English Defense League as well. And, as you say, she lashed out with lupine ferocity. She wrote at one point that your “campaign to destroy the most effective voices on the right from within has been completely exposed.” That you “have been outed for the mole, the plant, the dis-informationalist” that you are.

CJ: Both her and Robert Spencer question who’s paying me. They have all kinds of conspiracy theories about who bought me out, and is that even really me anymore?

JH: It’s George Soros, right?

CJ: Of course! He’s always behind it. But really what they’re doing is trying to divert attention from the very real issues I bring up about the people they associate with. That’s the bottom line with those people. All these personal attacks are really an attempt to divert attention away from the facts.

JH: On some level, blogging communities do form. It must have been kind of nerve-racking to switch sides when you’d developed these allegiances in these ongoing blog wars. Did you have second thoughts? Were you worried about whether you would be villified?

CJ: Absolutely I had feelings like that. Emotionally, it wasn’t easy to go through all this stuff, but sometimes you have to and hopefully you come out the other side better. I’ve always looked at my blog not as something I wanted to be the most popular place. Believe it or not, I try not to do things that just make my blog more popular on purpose. What I try to do is be as honest, straightforward and factual as I can. That’s kind of always been my intent, and sometimes above and sometimes below the line. Whether a whole bunch of other bloggers suddenly stop linking to me or said bad things about me, I can’t let that influence what I do. It doesn’t make any sense, otherwise I won’t be doing it anymore.

JH: Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies the relationship between cognitive styles and ideology. He says that one of the attributes — and he says it’s a positive attribute — that conservatives display more prominently than liberals is loyalty. Loyalty is a good thing, but it has a dark side, which is tribalism. They’re more likely to have these tribal inclinations. I think you experienced what going against the tribe looks like first-hand.

CJ: That’s evident in my Twitter timeline — even in the last week, it’s been really nuts out there. I think it was Gandhi who said first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win? They tried to ignore me, and now they’re going kind of in the mocking mode and graduating toward the attacking mode. Hopefully we’ll continue on with this analogy.

JH: The New York Times said you moved into a gated community because you were worried about these online threats. Is that true?

CJ: I’ve actually told other people that they kind of exaggerated that. They asked me what caused me to move into this gated community here. Really it was just that I found a nice place that happened to be in a gated community. It really wasn’t because I was worried about the threats, although I have had some threats, including one from a neo-Nazi who is a friend of blogger Stacy McCain. That was a concern, but it wasn’t the primary reason at all.

JH: Now what about the other side? From my perspective, once you shifted the focus of your writing I had no hesitation adding you to my RSS feed, and following you on Twitter. Were there people on the left who you’d tangled with in the past who had a harder time accepting you into their fold?

CJ: Absolutely. There have been one or two, but most people have been willing to just see where I’m at now and see what I’ve said about the stuff I wrote in the past. A lot of it I do regret, there’s no doubt about it. Hopefully all I can do is continue to do what I do, and be as straight and true to what I believe as possible.

JH: You say you have regrets. I wonder is there one thing that you regret more than others? Is there something that stands out in your mind?

CJ: I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. That’s one of my main regrets at this point. I really fell for a lot of the right wing propaganda, and I thought he was going to be a communist and a radical leftist and all that stuff. I believed a lot of the propaganda about him. If I could go back I would vote for him now, but we don’t have that time machine yet. That’s actually one of the main things. I should not have been so ready to accept it. That was one of the things that really woke me up, seeing the truth as opposed to all the lies that were being spread by this blizzard of propaganda.

JH: I had Eric Boehlert on the show a few weeks ago. He’s with Media Matters. He said something really interesting. He said that in the era of Obama, when things have really gone off the deep end on the right, they don’t bother debunking a lot of the right-wing media outlets that they used to track regularly because they’ve become so transparently crazy that nobody pays attention to them.

CJ: That’s a great point. Sometimes I actually stop myself from copying or covering that stuff as well, because it does seem like just another crazy or absurd thing. At this point they’re so far out there that there’s absolutely no concern for reality on these blogs. And they never back down and never correct anything.

JH: They certainly don’t. Do you think that their influence has truly waned? We saw Mitt Romney try to court right-wing bloggers this week.

CJ: I think influence is an interesting thing that’s hard to measure. The effects of the Tea Party on the Republican Party was definitely exacerbated by the right-wing blogs. I don’t really know how much of that Mitt Romney meeting was just pandering and how much of it was a genuine attempt to curry favor with the base. Some of the people they invited are weird choices if you really know their background. Some of these people have been incredibly vicious toward Romney, but that’s politics.

Breaking: Obama Endorses Same Sex-Marriage

President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC.

Today, less than 24 hours after North Carolina’s hateful passage of the discriminatory Amendment One which bans gay marriage and curbs civil unions, President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC.

Earlier in the day, the rumors began to circulate that this kind of announcement was coming. But nothing was confirmed until the 3pm publication of the attention-grabbing, much-sought-after headline: “Obama: ‘Same-Sex Marriage Should be Legal’ followed by “President says his position on marriage has evolved.”

The president’s actual words in the interview “…it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” He also credited his family for helping him move forward on the position.

Shorly therafter, Rick Jacobs, President of the Courage Campaign, emailed supporters that “this day will go down in history as the beginning of the end of legalized discrimination against LGBT people in America.” It is the first time a sitting president has come out for marriage equality.

The President’s “evolution” on the issue is not entirely linear. Back when he was a younger, more radical politician, he endorsed gay marriage on a questionnaire, then reversed course for what appeared to be political expediency.

Even now, Richard Kim at the Nation wants us to focus on the actual impact of these historic words, legal rights-wise: none.

Obama, however, stopped short of lending full support to the multi-state legal and political campaign for marriage equality. According to ABC News, the President stressed that his is a “personal position,” and he continues to think that states should decide the issue independently.

Indeed, the White House’s talking points, leaked and reported on BuzzFeed, read “We make it absolutely clear that we are talking about civil marriages and civil laws. This isn’t a federal issue.”

These reminders are sobering. And of course, they feed into another sobering point: actual policy, far more than words, has the lion’s share of impact on the civil rights for LGBTQ Americans.

Sadly, in that area our nation has so much room for improvement it’s not funny. Couples with and without state marriage rights have to jump through hurdles for adoption, hospital rights, taxes. State-level budget austerity leads to cuts in shelter programs for LGBTQ kids who are kicked out of their homes. Bullying and teen suicide remain a plague. Outright homophobia persists in and beyond ultra-religious circles. The scourge of killings and beatings of transgender individuals is abetted by the lack of encoded protections (in ENDA and elsewhere) for them. Gay couples whose love crosses international borders don’t have the benefit of being able to marry for citizenship. All of these issues and many more affect the day to day lives of LGBTQ citizens–as do the currently dire issues of poverty, reproductive rights, and civil liberties–and need desperately to be addressed.

Still, culture resonates, and activists need wind in their sails to get things done. So Obama’s position as an influencer of the zeitgeist, a rock star and celebrity in many circles, a charismatic leader and an eloquent spokesman for the causes he chooses to champion shouldn’t be entirely underestimated either. Young questioning and LGBT people watching TV or reading the web will know that the president supports them. So will their parents. There’s a dignity conferred by the President’s statement, and that’s important.

So here’s to a whole lot more “evolution” for the President, his advisors, the GOP, and the rest of the country on this issue. We’re already evolving at a rapid rate, after all, as MSNBC’s first read points out, the polls on the issue have totally reversed in a few short years:

Same-sex marriage is hardly the hot-button issue it was compared to the last decade, though. Support for it now eclipses opposition; 49 percent of Americans said that favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry, according to the March NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, while 40 percent oppose it. (In October 2009, 49 percent opposed same-sex marriages, while 41 percent supported them.)

Crucially, that shifting number includes political independents–which may have figured into the President’s calculations.

Partisan Death Jam: How the Two Parties Are Destroying Our Political System By Lucy McKeon

The new book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” explores the adversarial, winner-take-all climate we find ourselves in today that makes governing near impossible.

If you thought the debates over the debt ceiling last year – one of the most striking examples of political dysfunction and gridlock in recent memory — were over, think again. Although Republicans agreed to a small raise and to put off discussion of the issue until after the upcoming 2012 elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox, “We’ll be doing it all over” in 2013. Clearly, the partisan rupture that’s dividing Washington is not going to heal any time soon, but how did things get so dire to begin with?

When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – the title of their book – they’re being serious (subtitle: “How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What they’ve found since hasn’t been encouraging.

In their book, Mann and Ornstein trace political dysfunction to the present, illuminating the basic incompatibility they see between the U.S. constitutional system and two highly partisan, parliamentary-like parties. Mann and Ornstein argue that the adversarial, winner-take-all climate we find ourselves in today makes it extremely hard for a majority to act in our two-party governing system. Though both parties engage in corruption, they believe the current Republican Party – which they argue is unpersuaded by fact and science, and has little in common with Reagan’s GOP – tilts the political system into “asymmetric polarization” with its refusal to support anything that might help Democrats, no matter the cost to collective interest.

Meanwhile, changes in mass media, a populist distrust of non-military leaders deemed suspiciously “elite,” and the insidious connection between money and politics join to create the terrible recipe for a truly dysfunctional political system. At a time when we’re facing serious national and global problems, they write, “The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively.” But there’s hope. Mann and Ornstein dedicate the second half of the book to outlining what specific institutional restructuring won’t work and what will, as well as what the public and media can do to be part of positive change.

Salon spoke with Thomas E. Mann about how the media plays into the partisan warfare, the role of the Citizens United decision in the upcoming election, and what we can do to make American politics less dysfunctional.

I’m wondering how you chose the book’s title.

It is a rather unusual title, isn’t it? We were thinking through titles and somehow we got in our minds Mark Twain’s quip about Wagner’s music, which is “It’s better than it sounds.” And so we were thinking relative to how our dysfunctional political system looks and we said, “Well, we’ve gotta say it’s worse than it looks, but that would make no sense to people who think it looks horrible already.” So we put the “even” in it – “It’s even worse than it looks.”

We are two long-time students of American politics and Congress. We’ve really become exceedingly discouraged about developments in our politics and in thought. And we’ve become frustrated by what we think is a commentary about it that ends up not being especially accurate and, frankly, reinforces the destructive dynamics of the system by leading the public to think it’s all hopeless: They’re all the same, it’s a corrupt system, it’s an utterly incompetent system, and therefore removing, in many respects, any basis on which a public could actually change that system. Instead you get a kind of visceral reaction: “Throw the bums out!” And that usually has the effect of reinforcing whatever you have now or making it worse.

How is partisan confrontation more serious today than it has been since you began studying American politics? 

It’s the worst we’ve seen in our 40 years of observing up-close Congress and the presidency and the American political system more broadly. We’ve gone through very difficult periods in our politics: polarized times in the post-Reconstruction period; turn of the 2oth century; we’ve, of course, just had exceptionally traumatic times before the Civil War; and difficulties in the early 1800s as well. So we make no claim that this is the worst ever, but if we’re comparing ourselves now to the pre-Civil War period, that’s not such good news, is it? What we can say is that the parties are more polarized than they have been in over a century. We can say that the Republican Party is more conservative than it’s been in over a century. We can get that evidence from looking at behavior within the Congress and patterns of voting, but we can also see how, in many respects, that public aligns with those polarized parties.

Some people make an argument, which we believe is more myth than reality, that the public is overwhelmingly moderate, centrist, pragmatic, independent, and it’s only the elite, the partisan elite, that engage in their own wars and cause the problems – that they don’t properly represent the sentiments of voters. We think that’s wrong, that the public – at least, the public active enough to vote – and in those who do more than voting particularly, are very much a piece of this now. We’ve kind of sorted ourselves into two warring parties. We’ve done it by a choice of neighborhoods in which to reside, on the base of our own ideological dispositions. A whole host of factors have led us into areas of people with like-minded values and beliefs and preferences, and that actually encourages the developments in Washington and, frankly, in state legislatures around the country that many people bemoan. So that’s part of it, why we think it’s exceptionally bad now.

Another part is that we’re facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, and yet our political system is set up in a way in which it’s very hard for an opposition party to be open to participating in any solutions to that because that would legitimize the party in power, which would keep them from getting there. And so they are engaged now in an ever more permanent campaign to obstruct, defeat, discredit, repeal anything that is done by – usually defined as – the president’s party. And we’ve now seen a willingness to engage in hostage-taking and a game of dangerous threats,  which lead to the downgrading of American currency.

You explicitly dispel the media myth that both sides are equally guilty of partisan misbehavior. What’s different about the current Republican Party?

It’s a very important piece of the argument that we’re making. I’ve already indicated to you that in ideological terms, as best as we can measure, the Republican Party is the most conservative it’s been in over a century. But I think just as importantly, it’s become a party that believes it’s essential to stick to your principles and not engage in any kind of collaboration with – negotiating or compromise with – the enemy, which is defined as the other party. That’s unusual. And then you put that together with simply no respect for facts, for evidence, for science, and add to that the willingness to simply reject the legitimacy of the other side. It’s as if we were replaying the election of 1800 and the party that eventually won wouldn’t take office because they were deemed illegitimate or vice versa. The peaceful transfer of power, the respect for the office of the presidency, the willingness to say, “We have our differences, it’s important to discuss those but in the end we’re all Americans,” and so on, that’s rejected by a whole lot of Republicans right now.

Our politics and governing system just doesn’t work very well when one of our parties has strayed – in both policy and process terms – far from the mainstream, because we have a system of separated powers, we have numerous veto points, and it really does require willingness at some point to work across the aisle. If we had a parliamentary system of government, then these parliamentary-like parties would be OK, because you would, through an election, create a majority and that majority (the government) could put its program into place and then be judged accordingly for five years later. But we don’t have that. We have a system in which a minority can frustrate the efforts of the majority, not to simply get a better negotiating position, which is the way in the past it has worked, but to literally stop the new president’s or new majority’s program dead in the water. And that together is what created our dysfunctional politics.

And how does the media contribute to all of this?

I think the “mainstream media,” that is the non-partisan or ideological press, is utterly helpless in the face of the reality that we have right now. That is, the strong journalistic norms of fairness, of balance, of getting the full story, which tends to be interpreted as both sides out, has in effect created a distorted view of what’s happening in the world, and the irony is many individual members of the press know it. So I guess the biggest problem with the press and, again, by that I’m talking about the sort of press that aspires to practice good journalism, and not simply to be a partisan or ideological participant in the political wars, that they have basically assumed that getting both sides, letting the warring parties and individuals speak, is the best way to cover the story and also provide a little safety from charges of political bias. And in so doing, they’ve actually helped to perpetuate the very problems that we have. And I say that as a friend and admirer and regular reader of many, many, many members of that press.

How do you think Obama’s election affected the dysfunctional atmosphere back in 2008?

Let me say, it’s worth looking back to the Clinton presidency, especially the first couple of years and last couple of years. Because he ran on a tax cut, but then was persuaded that he had to do something to deal with deficits and he spent most of his first year trying to do it. He never got a single Republican vote in the House or Senate for this. And he was attacked, subject to dozens of corruption investigations, most of which ended up being bogus, and in the end he was impeached! In 1998, by a Republican House that had just been dealt a setback in the election because of its talk about impeachment. So this has been in the works for some time. But I think Obama has intensified and accelerated it. Certainly his race is a consideration. But so too was the threat of a Democratic president mobilizing constituencies that are growing and potentially putting the Democratic Party in a dominant position. So all of that conspired to convince the Republicans in Congress, who’d just taken a shellacking, to develop a strategy – which is now well-documented – before Obama was inaugurated, to sit together to oppose everything.

In part two of the book, you outline many major institutional changes that you think definitely will, or definitely won’t, work. Can you speak to some of the solutions you do support? 

As you say, we devote one chapter to saying what not to do. We try to pare down some horrible ideas that get great credence in the public discussion. We say we need to change our electoral system in ways to increase public participation because that would have diminished some of the intense ideological views expressed by the public as a whole. We need to change the institutional arrangements so that the routinization of the filibuster can be destroyed – it is a modern phenomenon and we have some ideas about that. But in the end, we say it’s the electorate that has to rein in the insurgent outlier, and that’s very problematic just because of the confusion of what would make for a better, more workable system. And so, the odds are, depending on what happens with the economy, that Obama will win. But Republicans could easily hold the House and take the Senate. And therefore, Republicans might be encouraged to basically have the same strategy of opposition as they have now. We argue in the book that it’s the public that produces divided government, but in times of highly polarized parties, that’s a formula for gridlock, inaction and government dysfunction.

And the individual citizens of a democracy must have a role in this change as well.

What the public could do is what democratic theory tells us they would do, which is that if one party goes too far from the mainstream of public thinking, public preferences, accepted democratic processes, they’ll be reined in by the electorate. So an overwhelming across-the-board Democratic vote would probably so shake the Republican Party that those who have been distressed within the party by recent developments would have an opportunity to come forward as a new kind of leadership with alternative programs and platforms. But that seems very unlikely to happen, so what we’re probably going to have is Obama figuring out a way to use the expiration of all of the tax cuts in the beginning of the sequestration of defense and other things as a way to force a compromise with the Republicans because, in this case, the status quo is unacceptable to them.

It’s going to be a tricky bit of maneuvering but I think that the thrust of our argument is all these so-called bipartisan or nonpartisan efforts to sort of bring the parties together and find a bipartisan solution: It’s a pipe dream. It’s ridiculous. It can’t happen. So we’re going to have to figure out, voters and politicians, how to operate in a hyper-partisan system, and hopefully get leverage at times to force action that is actually responsive to the country’s problems.

Looking ahead to the coming election, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, what sort of alternative to corrupt campaign funding do you see?

We argue that efforts on the left for full public financing of elections right now is simply impossible given the interpretations the Supreme Court has made about the First Amendment as applied to money and politics. Such systems have to be voluntary; they get overwhelmed by the independent spending group like, in its latest manifestation, the super PACs, and it’s sort of a pipe dream. There are individuals out there writing books, making the case that money is the root of all evil and if we just get it out of the system our politics will return to a healthy equilibrium. We think there are a lot of problems with money in politics, and we need to deal with them, but the problems go well beyond that. Given the composition of the court, there are only incremental things one can do: increasing transparency, trying to generate more small donations, and looking for ways to improve the process that way. The others are as much pipe dreams as those on the right calling for a balanced budget amendment.