The Daily Parker

Noam Scheiber writes today that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and other right-wing Republicans are fighting the most important elections in this cycle:

But consider what happens if Republicans fail to win the Senate, in which case Walker’s re-election may loom even larger. The GOP will be coming off its third disappointing election in four cycles. Some Republicans will insist it’s long past time to moderate the party’s stance on issues like immigration and gay rights, as they did after the 2012 drubbing. But those voices will almost certainly be drowned out by right-wingers who say Republicans haven’t stood firmly enough in defense of conservative principles. And Walker, the governor who managed to destroy the left and live to tell about it in a swing state, will loom as an incredibly appealing model. His brand of aggressively partisan, aggressively conservative politics will immediately vault him to the top tier of presidential candidates for 2016.

Of course, if the GOP loses the Senate and Walker loses, too, I have no illusions that the GOP’s moderate reformers will suddenly win out. The party that rallied around Ted Cruz and ousted Eric Cantor partly over his supposed liberal heresies isn’t tacking to the political center any time soon. But, in a way, that’s exactly the point. What makes Walkerism so dangerous is that it puts a moderate face on what’s actually a pretty extreme set of policies. A politician working from Walker’s playbook can always say he or she is out to save taxpayers money and make government more efficient even as they’re really out to upend a decade-olds arrangement between workers and employers. (If you think Walkerism would stop at public employees unions, I have a beautiful timeshare in Green Bay to sell you...)

But why is Walker in so much trouble, despite surviving his recall election 53-47? Possibly because people really wanted the Medicaid money he turned down:

To get a look at whether a Republican governor’s policy stances matter, I re-plotted some of the relevant polling data. This time, I used two symbols to represent a governor’s stance on Medicaid expansion (and other aspects of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act):

According to these data points, Republican governors who bucked their party’s stance and accepted the policy are faring better with voters—in these races, an average of 8.5 percentage points better.

We've got two months until the election, so a lot could happen. But this is starting to look like the pendulum swinging back to center. And wow, do I hope so, because these right-wingnuts have been so depressing for so long...

Mainly, since I'm going there soon, I should have mentioned the 6.1 earthquake in Napa yesterday morning.

Also, a few blocks from where I'm sitting, Chicago is building a new river walk for $100 million.

Anyone else looking forward to Rick Perry's next political campaign? It should be fun.

Oh, and I went with the REI duffel.

Someimes—rarely—I disconnect for a couple of days. This past weekend I basically just hung out, walked my dog, went shopping, and had a perfectly nice absence from the Web.

Unfortunately that meant I had something like 200 RSS articles to plough through, and I just couldn't bring myself to stop dealing with (most) emails. And I have a few articles to read:

• Everything you know about the British burning Washington 100 years ago yesterday is wrong.
• Why are Web-special airfares so rare in the U.S.?
• There is a major effort underway to scan and digitize millions of historical weather records for climate research.
• Burger King is in talks to buy Canada's Tim Horton brand, yet another thing we Americans will have to apologize to the Canadians for. Whenever we get around to it.
• Chicago's Jackie Robinson West All-Stars Little League team lost their game yesterday against South Korea, becoming the runners up in the Little League World Series—which is still pretty awesome.

Now back to your regularly-scheduled week, already in progress...

The Sun-Times reported last night that the Cubs organization's desire to avoid paying heath-care benefits required by Obamacare led to the tarp-rolling error Tuesday night that, in turn, almost caused a forfeit:

The staffing issues that hamstrung the grounds crew Tuesday during a mad dash with the tarp under a sudden rainstorm were created in part by a wide-ranging reorganization last winter of game-day personnel, job descriptions and work limits designed to keep the seasonal workers – including much of the grounds crew – under 130 hours per month, according to numerous sources with direct knowledge.

Sources say 10 crew members were sent home early by the bosses Tuesday night with little, if any, input from the field-level supervisors.

Tuesday's game was rained out in part because the ground crew couldn't deploy the tarp over the infield correctly. This caused water to pool on the infield dirt and grass, making the field unplayable. Since the game had gone into the 5th inning, and the Cubs were ahead, a rain out would have meant a Cubs win. The Giants successfully protested, the first time since 1986 for a Major League team.

Keep in mind, the Cubs have more revenue than 26 of the 29 other MLB teams. And they don't want to provide basic benefits to their employees?

Why do I keep going to games again?

Philip Shorer on the Atlantic's CityLab blog argues for a 4-day work week:

Beyond working more efficiently, a four-day workweek appears to improve morale and well-being. The president of the UK Faculty of Public Health told the Daily Mail that a four-day workweek could help lower blood pressure and increase mental health among employees. Jay Love of Slingshot SEO saw his employee-retention rate shoot up when he phased in three-day weekends. Following this line of thought, TreeHouse, an online education platform, implemented a four-day week to attract workers, which has contributed to the company's growth.

In this scenario, employees still work 40-hour weeks, but they do so over the course of four days rather than five. This arrangement still sounds sub-optimal, though, as working at full capacity for 10 hours is more demanding than doing so for eight. Despite that, the employees at Stephens’s company still preferred 40 hours in four days to 40 hours in five days. They might be even happier—and work even better—if they worked fewer hours in addition to fewer days.

Of course, counting travel, as a consultant I frequently do four 10-hour days followed by an 8-hour day. Cutting one of those out might be a good thing.

Writing at The Dish, Freddie deBoer argues that we made police misconduct inevitable:

But as we did with the presidency, the military, the intelligence services, and soldiers, we responded to 9/11 by buffeting our police officers with obsequious respect and endless displays of extreme gratitude. We feted them at football games and through parades in their honor. We plastered stickers celebrating them on our cars. We exhorted each other to “thank a first responder today.” We set about to create a culture of unwavering, unquestioning, credulous support for our police, and that has everything to do with today’s problems.

None of this should be surprising. In times of crisis, people often retreat to militarism, nationalism, and extreme respect for authority.

[W]hen you give any group carte blanche to do what they want, and make it clear that you will support them no matter what, how can you be surprised when they abuse that generosity? It’s human nature: people who are subject to little or no review will inevitably behave badly. No group can be expected to police itself; that’s why the foundation of our democracy is the separation of powers, the way in which different parts of government are expected to audit each other. Ultimately, though, the most important form of audit comes from the people themselves. Only the citizenry can ensure that our systems remain under our democratic control, and this function is especially important concerning the conduct of those who have the capacity to legally commit acts of violence– and to define for themselves what acts of violence are legal, whether those definitions are official or merely ad hoc. Well, we have abdicated that responsibility, and in that vacuum, misconduct, brutality, and corruption have rushed in. The problem is endemic. I don’t believe that all cops are bad, or even the majority, but I also don’t believe that this is a “few bad apples” problem. A few bad apples could not cause a problem as widespread and constant as the one we’re witnessing now.

I really hope the pendulum has started swinging back to center.

Two of my favorite authors, Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, recently had a long phone conversation (which Harris transcribed) about Israel. I haven't finished reading it, but as I respect both men, I consider this a must-read.

Also, I'm back in Chicago, possibly for two whole weeks. That said, the Cleveland Client was pretty happy with our work and may move to the next phase, so I may be going back there soon.

On Saturday, an 18-year-old black man was shot to death while running away from a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the town has imploded.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial yesterday calling on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to get involved. The governor put out a statement saying nothing of substance.

Meanwhile, the New Republic has three stories in the last 24 hours:

• drawing a straight line between 9/11 anti-terror spending and the terror facing Ferguson residents this week;
• comparing Ferguson police tactics to Russia's anti-dissent crackdowns; and
• showing photos from the last couple of nights there.

Add James Fallows to the list of people (of whom Radley Balko has done the most reporting) saying "enough with the militarization of police!"

The events in Ferguson this past week should make all Americans nervous. This isn't who we are. At least, not since the civil rights crackdowns at the end of the Jim Crow era. Enough.

Update: Josh Marshall is calling Ferguson an example of the Hollywoodization of policing, while Dilbert creator Scott Adams wants the U.S. military to disarm the Ferguson police.

It is against U.S. law for the U.S. military to enforce local or state laws. That's a job for the police, or the National Guard (but only when acting under state authority).

The law came about as part of a compromise to end reconstruction in the south. We still have it on the books because, among other things, the regular military's mission, training, and equipment makes it a really bad police force.

So why do small towns have paramilitary police units? And don't they make things worse?

Despite the fact that a Department of Homeland Security report once listed more potential terrorist targets in Indiana than New York or California, the state has never been hit by a terrorist attack, much less an assault involving IEDs. The MRAP vehicles amount to only a small fraction of the $45 million in materiel that Indiana has acquired from the Pentagon since 2010. While such detailed findings aren't available for every state, The New York Times reports that 432 MRAP vehicles have been distributed to law-enforcement agencies across the states, in addition to 435 other armored vehicles, 533 planes and helicopters, and nearly 100,000 machine guns.

In a lot of cases, these advanced armored military vehicles are only ever used for parade pieces, Bieler says. That's in stark contrast to SWAT deployments. Peter Kraska, a professor and senior research fellow at Eastern Kentucky University, reports that between 1980 and 2000, police paramilitary teams registered a 1,400 percent increase in deployments.

It is far from clear that a weapon of war is a tolerable answer to civil unrest even under the worst circumstances. Ferguson [Missouri] is hardly the only community where assemblies protected by the First Amendment have been met by paramilitary force. The police reaction following [unarmed 18-year-old Ferguson resident Michael] Brown's death—the latest in the hopeless litany of young black men killed by authorities—shows how far the militarization of law enforcement is spreading.

This is a hallmark of the right, of course. Right-wingers are essentially terrified of their own shadows. They're weak and insecure, which leads them to seek hard power, like guns and military force, in order to feel less afraid. For exactly the same reasons (weakness, insecurity) they have no tolerance of dissent or even peaceful protests. It's up to rational people to tell the irrational ones they can't have these things, because those things make everyone worse off.

Exhibit: After the events this weekend in Missouri, having a heavily-armed police force seems to have made everyone in town less safe. With emotions running this high, and with one side having military-grade weapons, how will anyone have a good outcome?

Forty years ago today, President Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford was sworn in 38th President of the United States. Nixon's speech from the previous evening:

Harry Shearer's recreation of the moments before this speech is worth seeing.

(The blog post title is from Girlyman.)