A Forgetful Elephant

They say an elephant never forgets, but in 1986 Congress passed a bill to sanction South Africa for the continuation of Apartheid and ongoing imprisonment of, among others, Nelson Mandela, and the GOP seems to have forgotten some important players in that episode.

Obviously, we ought to start with the GOP Hero, Ronald Reagan, who vetoed the thing in the first place.

Then, in addition to the obvious opponents like Goldwater, Strom Thermond and Jessie Helms, the veto was also opposed by:

Robert Dole

Alan Simpson

Chuck Grassley

Orrin Hatch

Dick Cheney

So, if you hear any of these folks morning the passing of Nelson Mandela, remember, when they had the chance to vote on it, they voted against pressuring South Africa to free him. Unless it comes with a heartfelt apology, any statement from these men deserves laughter and scorn.

For more detailed viewing, here are the rollcall votes from the veto override.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1blw3tti64h3kuj/congress_votes_99-1986_h829.csv

https://www.dropbox.com/s/azp9smfv93e8lhg/congress_votes_99-1986_s692.csv

Logistics post

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1coPFXvmSzkCWtR7OMRo9Um7zu1J0HDgTIcLKYsf3TZQ/edit?usp=sharing

Guaranteed Minimum Income downsides

Nohpinion has a bit of a discussion of the downsides of a guaranteed minimum income, and they basically are that people work 2-4 fewer weeks a year, and are more likely to get divorced.

I don't have a ton to say here, but my guess is the fewer working hours bit was mostly women staying home from shit jobs to care for children, and semi-disabled people choosing not to work through pain.

The higher divorce probably was just women leaving abusive relationships without fear of starving or being homeless.

Features, not bugs.

Texas and Massachusetts

I'm still processing what I think about this, but here's a few facts that are borne out by the numbers (based, arbitrarily, on the 2009 8th grade math scores, because that's what I clicked first):

1. Texas and Massachusetts are tied for best education of Black students
2. Massachusetts is 1st, and Texas 4th, for best education of White students.
3. White students in West Virginia (worst outcomes) do almost exactly as well as Black students in Texas and Massachusetts. 

I'm not sure how to reconcile this with my subjective experience of Texas as a miserable place, and Massachusetts as my civilized home.  Perhaps I'm just a classist snob.  Maybe rednecks just rub me the wrong way. Either way, Texas, the tight-fisted conservative paradise, does a better job teaching math to its black (and white) children than just about any other state in the country, and that's a fact that seriously challenges my worldview. 

At minimum, I'm going to stop blindly arguing that education is a problem that we can solve by throwing money at.

Presentation for Metrics

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZrIrbNeH4JOwxFu5nn51g8fl8t-OXj_dYSYm-FmFB1U/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

"Non-Threatening"

Not a lot to say here, partially because I'm up to my eyeballs in grading and thesis work, but it dawned on me that I'm frequently called "non-threatening" in the context of female acquaintances.

This means that it is sufficiently uncommon for women to NOT feel threatened in the presence of a man that it is worth commenting on. Probably a half dozen times in the last 10 months.

WTF.  Shouldn't not making those around you feel threatened be a kind of bare-minimum requirement for being allowed out in public?

Breaking the Deal

My blog feed is understandably full of discussion about how over the last 2 decades, 3 if you count Reagan, Republicans have been re-shaping the way we do politics, moving progressively towards a world where compromise and 'fair play' aren't part of the deal.  And they're right--the Republicans are breaking the deal by holding the appropriations bill and the full faith and credit of the American government hostage.

But, in a larger sense, we broke the deal first.  From the end of reconstruction to the civil rights act of 1964 the deal was that the northern progressives would make a better society, and they could count on the votes of southern racists. The New Deal passed because Roosevelt agreed to let it be better for Whites than Blacks, and up until the 1960s the Republicans really were the party of Lincoln.

The deal was that if they were allowed to be unmitigatedly racist in their own states, the elements that tore this country apart in 1861 would stay contained.  For White America, this worked beautifully, but almost exactly a century after Gettysburg, Kennedy broke the deal by calling for a civil rights act, and a year later Johnson signed it into law.

I don't know if this is what they expected would happen, but in hindsight its unsurprising.  The deal was tranquility in return for white control, and we broke that deal.  Couldn't be prouder of my party for that one.