Atrios wonders how it is that Donald Rumsfeld managed to retain his social standing in view of . . . everything. Sadly, the answer is all too obvious. Remember this?
This would change over time as the war went badly, but in 2003 it was wildly popular among Republicans and enjoyed majority support even among Democrats. In all, 72% of the country was in favor of the war.
And there's this:
Fundamentally, both the Iraq War and the torture of prisoners was popular. Given that, it makes sense that Rumsfeld was popular too.
In a poll released last week, Fox News asked people who was more favored in the United States these days: whites or minorities? Here's a chart showing how various groups responded:
I wish they had included a category for Fox News viewers. I'll bet it would have been even higher than Trump voters.
This is a panoramic shot of Mono Lake from the south, with a good view of the tufa columns that dot the shore. They are basically limestone formations made possible by the high salinity of the lake.
One of the difficulties of taking pictures of birds is that the camera's autofocus often chooses to focus on the foliage surrounding the bird instead of the bird itself. It's a problem with no great solution, but once in a while you solve it by just getting lucky.
Today's photos are a lucky triptych that shows a hummingbird coming in for a landing on a nearby stem. The hummingbird was right in between two stems dead center in the viewfinder, so the autofocus did its job perfectly. The shutter was set to 1/16000th of a second, so the wings are perfectly stopped. All in all, an excellent look at the flying style of nature's cutest little bird.
Since American history is now front and center in our national, um, discourse, I thought I should share a tidbit of history about history. There's no special reason for this except that (a) it's true and (b) it's history that I'll bet a lot of progressives no longer remember if they ever knew it at all.
Back in 2014 the folks who make up curriculum guidelines for the AP history course decided to update things. This prompted dismay from conservatives and got a fair amount of press coverage at the time. Nothing like what's going on today, however, so you might have missed it. Here's a description from David Casalaspi, a mainstreamish liberal who's an education policy analyst for the National Governors Association:
The maligned 2014 framework represented a first attempt by the College Board to produce a coherent narrative of American history which would encourage teachers to stop teaching history as a collection of trivia facts and instead teach the subject more thematically. In doing so, though, it pressured teachers to adopt racial and gender conflict as the dominant paradigm of historical development.
In this way, the 2014 framework listed “Identity” — with an emphasis on racial and gender grievances — as the first of seven “organizing themes” for the teaching of American history. Additionally, the framework was littered with references to “white Americans,” “white settlers,” “white pioneers,” and their racial biases. The concept of Manifest Destiny, for instance, was described as “built on the belief in white racial superiority.” And one of the only things students had to know about World War II was that the dropping of the atomic bomb and the internment of Japanese citizens led to the questioning of American values.
....I am a liberal, but I often found myself agreeing with conservatives on this issue because I am wary of any U.S. history curriculum that both infringes upon the free speech of teachers and proffers a narrative of history which encourages identity-building through the balkanization of student populations along racial and gender lines. The long-standing purpose of social studies is to help students understand each other as citizens, not as members of competing tribes of with irreconcilable cultures.
The curriculum was changed in response to complaints, and everyone seemed to be relatively happy with the final 2015 product.
The only reason I'm bringing this up is to make it clear that the current right-wing jihad over "critical race theory" is itself rooted in history. The question of how much to emphasize the dark side of US history is a topic that's been active for decades, with plenty of participation from both liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, as you might expect, liberals have consistently pushed for a more honest reckoning with our past, which has just as consistently been met with conservative alarm at anything that intrudes on the traditional view of America as the greatest country in the world.
For various reasons, Fox News recently decided to take this long simmering controversy and turn it into the outrage of the moment. But don't let that fool you. It's been around for a while, and both liberals and conservatives have contributed to periodic fights that push things farther than many people are comfortable with. Generally speaking, however, liberals nearly always manage to eke out modest victories that push the envelope a bit. The result has been a slow but steady reform of US history pedagogy that, with each passing year, is a little bit more honest about our past.
Nothing about this has changed much in the past year aside from the temperature of the fight. Liberals really do want more emphasis on how racism and genocide have fashioned the history of the US. Conservatives really do push back against this. Now, as always, the question isn't whether the liberal view should prevail—it always has—it's how far it should prevail at any given moment. How much should Americans, just like citizens of every other country, learn about the seamier side of their culture and history? This is not an easy question to answer.
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, [Sonny] Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America....An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Remember when Donald Trump was president and stories like this were almost weekly occurrences? And Republicans didn't care even slightly? Those were the days.
Then Joe Biden took over and . . . life got boring. There was a story a few weeks ago trying to make hay out of the fact that a few sons and daughters of cabinet member had gotten government jobs, but it was pretty weak tea and went nowhere. We seem to be living once again in an era of relatively honest governance from the White House.
But at least we have Hunter Biden to kick around, eh? Ne'er-do-well offspring of presidents are practically a tradition in the United States, which means that Hunter fits right in. So far he's failed to even fail spectacularly, but I'm sure Republicans will keep up the hunt.
This is hardly a big deal, but a short piece over at National Review provides a short, snappy example of how conservatives manage to stoke the culture wars with wildly misleading accounts of wokeness sweeping the nation.
The outrage du jour is Broders' Pasta Bar, a restaurant in Minneapolis that charges a "benefits and equity" fee. The entire NR piece is copied from John Miltmore, who says, among other things:
Telling your customers you are going to begin charging them more because they are too bigoted to tip fairly might not be a winning restaurant strategy. Just sayin’.
....If Broders’ doesn’t feel restaurant workers in the back are earning enough money, there is a solution to that: pay them more. This action doesn’t require any surcharges or public lectures on systemic oppression. It only requires the restaurant to run an efficient and profitable business that allows them to pay workers a wage they believe is fair and “livable.”
But wait. The original statement from Broders' is here. Go ahead and read it yourself. They say that:
Their original intent was simply to add an automatic gratuity to all checks and then divide the tips fairly between servers and back-of-house workers. However, Minnesota law doesn't allow this.
So instead they're adding the B&E fee and then returning 100% of the money to workers, which allows them to pay back-of-house staff $18 per hour. In other words, the intent is to pay them more.
However, customers are not being charged more (except for lousy tippers, I guess). The B&E fee replaces the usual tip. There's still a tip line on checks, but it's optional for those who want to tip more than 15%.
However, the statement also says they hope to reduce unconscious bias in tipping. "In general, Black or Brown servers receive less tips than Caucasian servers. There is gender bias as well."
That's it. All that happened is that a restaurant in Minneapolis decided to implement European-style gratuities included in the bill. They hope this will allow them to pay back-of-house workers more fairly and they also hope it will overcome known bias in tipping behavior. But apparently Miltmore's polemic went viral, so Broders' has updated its statement to make all this crystal clear. The NR writer doesn't seem to have noticed this, just copying Miltmore's week-old piece verbatim.
Broders' implemented this policy more than a year ago, by the way, and I gather that no one has complained since then. But even though it isn't costing customers any more, and even though the main intent appears to be paying all employees more fairly, conservatives just can't stand it if a new policy might also reduce racial bias. Hell, they hate the idea of acknowledging that racial bias even exists. It just throws them into a tizzy. So they write angrily about it, stoke the outrage, and lie about what's going on. Gotta get a piece of that sweet Tucker/CRT/wokeness action sweeping the nation, after all.
