Today is the runoff primary between the way-too-conservative Thad Cochran and the genuinely odious bagger Chris McDaniel. Several bagger groups sent “poll watchers,” to Mississippi after Cochran attempted to appeal to Democrats to “cross over” and vote in the Republican primary. This is legal in Mississippi as long as the individual hasn’t already voted in a primary.

And it’s also the case that in Mississippi, a “Democratic voter” is likely going to be African American.

Mississippi officials say they will be watching the polls, and that outside groups have no authority to appoint themselves “poll watchers.” The NAACP is sending poll watcher watchers. It’s a wonder nobody’s been killed. The day is not yet over, of course.

Speaking of voter fraud, a Wisconsin man has broken all records:

“During 2011 and 2012, the defendant, Robert Monroe, became especially focused upon political issues and causes, including especially the recall elections,” the complaint asserts in its introduction.

WisPolitics.com reported the investigation into Monroe’s multiple voting last week after Milwaukee County Judge J.D. Watts ordered the records related to a secret John Doe investigation be made public after the investigation was closed.

According to those records, Monroe was considered by investigators to be the most prolific multiple voter in memory. He was a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker and state Sen. Alberta Darling, both Republicans, and allegedly cast five ballots in the June 2012 election in which Walker survived a recall challenge.

According to the John Doe records, Monroe claimed to have a form of temporary amnesia and did not recall the election day events when confronted by investigators.

For more gotcha news, see also:

Early last year, Wall Street traders somehow found out that the Obama administration planned to make a policy change to Medicare before the news was even announced.

The flurry of stock trades in major health care companies that followed has since caught the eye of federal law enforcement as well as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has made investigating the matter one of his pet projects on the Senate Finance and Judiciary committees. In his search, Grassley has gone as far as to cast suspicion on the Obama administration as the source of the leak.

But in a twist, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that federal regulators and law enforcement officials have now focused their attention on a Republican health policy staffer in the House. A lawsuit filed on Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, first reported by the Journal, said investigators believe the staffer “may have been” the source of the leak. It also sought to force the staffer to turn over records to investigators, something he and the committee have reportedly refused to do despite being handed subpoenas.

Now that the investigation is looking at Republicans, it has suddenly become an example of government overreach and a violation of somebody’s free speech rights.

Update: The Mississippi race is being called for Cochran. Looks like African-American voters spared us all from having that odious McDaniel in the Senate.

… Portugal v. U.S. in the World Cup. In case anyone does visit, here are some links —

Why We’re Screwed, Reason #874: We import our own fish.

Two-Parent Households Can Be Lethal. I’m bookmarking this one to share with members of the He Man Women-Hater’s Club who whine that men can’t catch a break from judges in custody hearings.

Rand Paul: Blame Dick Cheney for Iraq violence, not Obama. Make of that what you will.

The Corporate Daddy

One of the points I try to make my My Book — Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World — is that we all live in a fog of cognitive bias and we all tend to navigate the world by means of artificial models and conceptual interfaces. Genuine wisdom requires recognizing this.

Until we do recognize this, we are doomed to living life in a mental state removed from reality. It’s difficult to see that our conceptual models are not “real,” because our cognitive biases and conceptual filters “edit” reality for us so that it fits our models and interfaces. On those rare occasions we perceive that some part of the conceptual box we live is is not true, we nearly always patch up the hole with another artificially contrived bit of ideological plaster. To be able to completely step outside the box is a very rare thing. Most people live their entire lives without ever doing this even once.

I thought of this when I read this essay “Why I left libertarianism: An ethical critique of a limited ideology” by a young man named Will Moyer. The young man is in the process of re-plastering his conceptual box and is not yet ready to step out of it entirely. Give him another thirty years, though, and he may be able to do it. And I’m not saying that to put him down; I see the potential. It takes most of us until we’re well into our 40s and 50s before we can even begin to demolish the box, if we do it at all.

Moyer perceived that libertarian ideology is rigid and limited, and as an interface to reality it simply does not “work” in a lot of real-world situations. It’s like a navigation app with skimpy maps. He writes,

Granted, libertarianism? —? as a body of thought? — ?doesn’t have to comment on every social issue. It can say nothing of race and gender and class. It can be silent on nonviolent forms of hierarchy and inequality. But then it stands incomplete as a social philosophy. That’s fine, especially if that is a conscious and intentional choice on the part of libertarians. We will focus our ideological work on this area and let other systems of thought cover everything else. But it certainly wasn’t something I was aware of when I considered myself a libertarian. On the contrary, I thought libertarianism offered a robust and complete analysis of society. I suspect others do, too.

And here we are:

Within the libertarian ethical framework, choice is binary. Either something was consented to voluntarily or it was not. This conception of consent marks the line between good and evil. On one side of the line are socially acceptable behaviors and on the other side are impermissible behaviors.

Theft, rape, murder and fraud all lie on the nonconsensual side and are therefore not good. The other side includes all forms of voluntary human interaction which, again because we’re limited to a political ethic, we can’t really say much about. It’s all fine.

But there is some gray on the good side. Is a rich CEO really in the same ethical position as a poor Chinese factory worker? In the libertarian view, yes. There are plenty of differences, but if that Chinese worker voluntarily chose to work for that factory, they’re not ethical differences.

Like the starving-your-child issue, any moral objections you might have are outside the scope of the libertarian ethic. They reflect your personal morality, which has no business being used to dictate social behaviors.

But choice isn’t binary. It’s a spectrum. There’s a gradient that we can use to measure how constrained a choice really is. On one end is outright force and on the other is pure, unconstrained freedom. But in between is a fuzzy gray area where economic, psychological, cultural, biological and social forces are leaning on human decision making.

Most libertarians would admit that this spectrum exists, but there is still strong sentiment within libertarianism that any non-coercive relationship is good. And? — ?within the political ethic ?— ?even if it isn’t “good,” it’s still permissible. That’s why you see libertarians defending sweatshops.

A poor Chinese factory worker is far more constrained than a rich white businessman. His range of possible options is tiny in comparison. He is less free. The same may be true depending on your race, gender, class or sexual orientation. The way you were treated growing up? —? by your parents, teachers and peers? — ?may contribute. The way people like you are represented in media and entertainment may contribute. Social prejudices and cultural norms may contribute. These factors don’t mean people are being outright forced to do anything, but simply that they’re constrained by their environment. We all are, in different ways.

We don’t lose any ground or sacrifice any claims to a rational moral framework by admitting that. We can still say that one side of the spectrum? —? the unconstrained one ?—? is good for human beings and the other side is bad. And we can still conclude that the use of force is only a legitimate response to human behavior that falls on the far end of that bad side (theft, rape, murder). But by accepting the spectrum we can examine other relationships that, while they may not include force, can be exploitive, hierarchical and authoritarian.

As before, without admitting that this spectrum exists, libertarianism leaves an entire range of human social behavior off the table.

 

Obviously Moyer is working through the difference between libertarianism and liberalism, in the American sense of the word. Liberals see that the sweatshop worker isn’t “free” if his choices consist of remaining in the sweatshop or starving to death. A liberal can perceive that someone with a chronic, debilitating illness and no access to decent health care is not “free”; a libertarian only sees the lack of “freedom” of being mandated to buy health insurance so that the health care system works better for all of us. And, of course, some variation of single payer is even more objectionable to libertarians. This represents one of the huge blind spots of libertarian ideology that many of us have noticed. Granted Moyer is still dismissive of liberalism, but I suspect he doesn’t yet know what it is. Like I said, he’s still working through things.

Like most ideologies libertarianism and reality do match up here and there. If it didn’t match up at all no one would ever adopt it. The problem is that those who become True Believers lack the will or ability to notice when it doesn’t match. In the words of the great Eric Hoffer,

To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns. All questions have already been answered, all decisions made, all eventualities foreseen. The true believer is without wonder and hesitation. “Who knows Jesus knows the reason for all things.” The true doctrine is the master key to all the world’s problems. With it the world can be taken apart and put together. [The True Believer, p. 82]

Part of the libertarian pathology is an inability to think things through to logical consequences. Of course, if they could do that they might see (as Moyer did) that their simple binary interface is not reality but is instead an artificial order superimposed over what is really an infinitely complicated mess. Maintaining the comforting fiction that they actual understand anything requires not seeing this. So they hardly ever do.

I realized yesterday that my “David Brat in La-La Land” post had been linked in a National Review article defending Brat. The link actually did not send much traffic here, which might tell us something about NRO’s readership, or lack thereof. But the libertarians who came over here to defend Brat and call me an idiot all exhibited the same dreary inability to see outside their conceptual box to the logical implications of what they were arguing. You can read some of this if you like. I got home last night and found seven more comments repeating the same arguments, and I deleted them and closed comments because I didn’t have the energy to argue with a brick wall any further. But the blindness all boils down to an inability to perceive the implications of their “truths” or an appreciation of how badly their interface actually fits the real world.

Digby explains why the emergence of David Brat does not signal a new left-right consensus on economic issues.

There is little doubt that all these years of economic torpor, high unemployment and rising poverty and debt have opened up some potential paths to bipartisan agreement on these issues around corporate welfare and big money influence in politics.

But a closer look at Brat’s rhetoric reveals a man who is not very populist beyond that one issue. He’s a typical libertarian (albeit with a theological twist). And so along with his commitment to end corporate welfare, one would presumably need to take the bitter with the sweet. He thinks it’s unfair that people pay less into Medicare and Social Security than they take out so these programs have to be slashed or eliminated. He believes that Obamacare should be scrapped along with employer-based insurance so that people will buy their own health policies, which will (he doesn’t say how) eliminate the problem of preexisting condition exclusions. He thinks education funding should be drastically cut. He believes that if the country is rich enough it will solve the climate crisis — because rich countries always solve their problems.

In other words, he’s a knee-jerk Ayn Randbot ideologue who thinks reality must bend to fit his ideology, rather than the other way around.

What has to be understood is that people like Brat are proposing authoritarianism dressed up to look like populism. It’s a weird position that acknowledges the little guy is getting screwed but insists the answer to this is to give more power to the big guy. The plan is to “empower” the people by taking away the one self-defense tool they possess, the government — which takes its power from the consent of the governed; of the people, by the people, for the people, etc. — and placing them at the mercy of an imaginary, godlike entity called the “free market,” a phrase that amounts to a euphemism for “plutocracy.” And the Brats of the world sell this nonsense by playing on people’s fears and resentments — of Spanish-speaking immigrants; of a imaginary boogieman called the “liberal elite,” which functions as a scapegoat for what the decidedly not-liberal plutocrats are up to. And, unfortunately, they’re getting away with it.

Let us not for a moment be fooled into thinking that Brat’s populist rhetoric signals a new birth of freedom for anybody but the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Some clarifications:

They draped one officer’s body in a swastika and a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag that has been adopted as a symbol of the Tea Party. On the other, they pinned a note warning of “the beginning of the revolution,” a phrase they also shouted, the police said.

They promptly crossed the street to a Walmart, where Mr. Miller fired a single shot and continued shouting about revolution to terrified shoppers. One man at the checkout area who was carrying a handgun tried to stop Mr. Miller, but did not notice that Ms. Miller was working in concert with her husband; she shot the man dead. The couple proceeded to maraud through the store until the police trapped them at the back. There, Ms. Miller fatally shot her husband before shooting herself in the head.

So the other victim beside the cops was not a random woman shopper but a man with a concealed weapon. I am sincerely sorry he died, but all those weenies law-abiding good-guy citizens who imagine that if there only had been someone at hand with a gun, etc., might want to reflect on this.

Amid the pandemonium, Joseph Wilcox, 31, who had been in the checkout line, approached Mr. Miller brandishing a weapon, the police said. Ms. Miller pulled a pistol out of her purse and fatally shot him in the midsection, the police said.

Other tidbits — It appears the pair really did spend time with the Cliven Bundy militia. The woman shooter actually quit her job at Hobby Lobby (of course) to head toward the ranch. There’s some indication the Bundy militia found the two shooters a little fringe-y even for them, and persuaded the pair to go back to Las Vegas.

According to documents found in their apartment, the pair had planned to take over a courthouse and execute pubic officials.

They’d been talking about the evils of the government and their own desire for violence against it as fast as they could flap their lips.

In only a few months in the modest apartment building where they lived here, they made little secret of their distaste for government and their desire to foment revolution.

Their posts on Facebook sometimes threatened violence, and last month, Mr. Miller used the website to ask people to send him “a rifle to help stand against tyranny.” Neighbors said Mr. Miller talked incessantly to anyone who would listen about the evils of welfare or President Obama.

No one reported this. See also “How much does right-wing rhetoric contribute to right-wing terrorism?”

Lots of news articles are out today about the Bergdahl exchange, which boil down to —

Bergdahl did try to escape at least once, and was kept in a cage after he was re-captured. My impression is that his physical health is not too bad, considering, but it appears the captivity messed with his head. It’s still not clearly understood why he left his unit, but it’s possible he just wandered off to wander off.

The guys who were exchanged were not exactly hardened Taliban troops. They are old men, kept at Gitmo for many years. The photographs of them we’ve been seeing are several years old. Even before they were prisoners only one was all that hard core.

And finally, the hypocrisy of wingnuts knows no bounds, and Diane Feinstein is really annoying.

Articles about Bergdahl and his captivity:

[From 2010] America’s Last Prisoner of War

Bergdahl Was in Unit Known for Its Troubles

As Bowe Bergdahl Heals, Details Emerge of His Captivity

Articles about the Gitmo prisoners who were exchanged:

Most of 5 freed Taliban prisoners have less than hard-core pasts

Taliban prisoner swap makes sense

Articles about why Republicans are shameless and Diane Feinstein needs to retire:

The Bergdahl boomerang: GOP lawmakers who long urged a rescue now sour on the idea

Critics of P.O.W. Swap Question the Absence of a Wider Agreement

Commentary by Digby

Commentary by Kevin Drum.

Commentary by Prairie Weather

This may cheer you up:

On Tuesday, in competitive primaries from New Jersey to Iowa to California, voters chose bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats, handing big victories to the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic Party.

Indeed, it was Progressive Super Tuesday. And it is the latest chapter in a larger story we’ve seen play out in American politics since the Wall Street economic wreck.

There’s a rising economic populist tide in America, sweeping into office leaders like Senator Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and a growing bloc of progressives in Congress.

Ed Kilgore is more cautious. I do think that the days when a milquetoast like Evan Bayh could be taken seriously as a political contender are so over. And, seriously, I do hope a progressive/populist contender for the Dem presidential nomination emerges soon. I fear a Hillary Clinton Administration could set us back.