Saturday Reads

Good Morning!

I full admit to being out of the loop and away from the news recently. So, let’s see what I can do to catch us up!  First, you have to check out Fusion‘s Gallery of Girls at the Women’s World Cup Ticker Tape Parade.   I’ve put a few up for this post in celebration of our USA Woman!!! The Ticker Tape Parade was the first ever given for a woman’s sports team.  These kids are just plain cute and excited!!

Nick Gillespie writing for The Daily Beast has some good analysis up on why Hillary Clinton’s strategy of laying low at the moment is brilliant.

Since announcing for president, Clinton has granted exactly one televsion interview, with CNN’s Brianna Keilar, and smartly used the occasion to attack the Republican field for their weak-tea responses to Donald Trump’s muy stupido assertion that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists. Indicating that she was “disappointed” (read: elated) “in those comments,” Clinton went on to note that her Republican rivals “are all in the same general area on immigration.”

The worst part of that? She’s absolutely right. Once the party of near-open borders (watch this video from 1980 in which Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush one up each other on praising the contributions of illegal immigrants), today’s GOP, with minor exceptions, vilifies the wretched yearning to breathe free, at least when they come from Latin America.

In 2004, George Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Eight years later, Mitt Romney—who counseled that illegal immigrants should practice “self-deportation”—pulled just 27 percent. In the GOP “autopsy” of Romney’s failure in 2012, the authors wrote, “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” Given the way that the current candidates have been non-reacting to Trump, that might be the best outcome the Republican Party could hope for.

Against such a backdrop, Clinton is right to keep mum, except when making easy layups against her opponents. Let Bernie Sanders whip Democrats into a progressive frenzy and then step in withvague nods toward equality and growth for all. She knows full well that Sanders is not her real rival—that will be the GOP nominee, not a frothing-at-the-mouth socialist from a state with a population smaller than Washington, D.C.’s.

Politico says they have a sneak peak at “Hillarynomics’.

In a speech Monday at the famously progressive New School in lower Manhattan, Clinton will lay out her economic theory of the case, and her main theory is that the incomes of “everyday Americans” have remained too low for too long. At a moment when the left wing of the Democratic Party is flexing its muscles—and flocking to the rallies of her socialist challenger, Bernie Sanders—she will stick with the liberal populism that has dominated the opening months of her campaign, contrasting the good times on Wall Street and corporate boardrooms with the wage stagnation of the middle class.

But an outline of the speech provided by a campaign aide suggested that she will strike less of a rabble-rousing tone than Sanders, challenging “top-down” Republican policies without suggesting that capitalism is inherently rigged against families on the bottom.

The speech is supposed to be a vision statement, not a laundry list of agenda items, and Clinton intends to roll out a series of specific policy proposals in the coming weeks. But the aide said she will preview several of those proposals, including more generous family leave policies, additional tax increases for the wealthy, and new corporate governance rules that would discourage short-term quick-buck thinking.

President Obama has been describing his own policies as “middle-class economics,” and Clinton is walking a fine line as she tries to distinguish herself from her former rival (when she ran for president) and boss (when she served as secretary of state) without criticizing his policies, which remain broadly popular among Democrats. In her speech, she will praise Obama for dragging the economy back from the brink of a depression in 2009, and for specific actions like his recent push to expand overtime pay. But even though markets have thrived and unemployment has drooped under Obama, her primary focus will be middle-class incomes that have barely outpaced inflation over the last four decades, a problem she will describe as the defining economic challenge facing the next president.

Clinton’s aide said she will discuss some of the structural forces conspiring against sustainable wage growth, such as globalization, automation, and even consumer-friendly “sharing economy” firms like Uber and Airbnb that are creating new relationships between management and labor (and which now employ many Obama administration alumni). But she will argue that policy choices have contributed to the problem, and that she can fix it.

“There’s a commonly held view that there’s nothing to do about some of these global trends—a kind of ‘it is what it is’ thinking,” says Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a longtime Clinton confidante who advised the campaign about the speech. “Hillary has never given in to that kind of pessimism.”

The campaign provided an unmistakably left-leaning list of advisers who were consulted about the speech and the economic agenda Clinton plans to roll out in the coming weeks. They included some of Obama’s most liberal former aides, like Christina Romer, who chaired his Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, who was Vice President Biden’s chief economist. They also included progressive economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Jacob Hacker and Heather Boushey. Clinton plans to refer to the prosperity America enjoyed during her husband Bill’s presidency, but Wall Street-friendly Clintonworld centrists like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were notably absent from the list.

The Republicans are not only looking positively xenophobic. They’re looking overtly racist as the dissection of Boehner’s foray into Confederate Flag Politics continues.    This is Dana Milbank’s analysis at WAPO.

Thursday’s Confederate flag debacle is a direct consequence of House Speaker John Boehner’s leadership strategy. Calculating that compromise with the Democratic minority will cause his conservative caucus to oust him from the speakership, Boehner has essentially chosen to pass a legislative agenda with only Republican votes. Because this leaves him a thin margin for error, it empowers the most extreme conservatives in the House, who have an incentive to withhold their votes if they don’t get everything they want.

This leadership style also bestows outsize power on conservative groups such as Heritage Action, an outgrowth of the Heritage Foundation. The group gets much credit for the 2013 government shutdown, and it has been influential in keeping the Export-Import Bank from being reauthorized and in getting a committee named to probe the Benghazi, Libya, attacks. Heritage Action also had much to do with the initial defeat of trade legislation last month — and it celebrated as Boehner abandoned his attempt to punish lawmakers who voted against it.

On the education bill, Heritage demanded that the legislation effectively take the federal government out of education policy by creating no-strings-attached block grants to states. When the bill came up in February without such a provision, conservatives balked, and Boehner’s team had to retreat. This time, leaders bought conservative votes by making such an amendment in order. The amendment failed, but the concession earned just enough conservative votes for the bill to pass by a bare 218-to-213 after extensive arm-twisting.

 The flag fiasco followed a similar ideological dynamic. Republican leaders were coming up short on votes for the legislation, in part because some Southern conservatives were angry that the bill included language, adopted by the House in a voice vote, blocking the sale and display of the flag at parks and cemeteries. So the GOP leadership agreed to let these holdouts have a vote to reinstate the Confederate flag.

The result was embarrassment for a party that already has trouble with non-white America. Typical of the series of outraged speakers was Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who displayed the flag in the well of the House. “Had this Confederate battle flag prevailed in war 150 years ago,” he said. “I would be here as a slave.”

Psychologists and the CIA collaborated to commit torture.  Here’s some stunning information on the W Bush administration’s interrogation procedures from the NYT.

The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.

The association’s ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public,” the report said.

Two former presidents of the psychological association were on a C.I.A. advisory committee, the report found. One of them gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture, and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program, it said.

The association’s ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board. Mr. Behnke did not respond to a request for comment.

Norman Byrd at The Examiner reports that climate change deniers basically are conspiracy theorists.

A new study concentrating on those that deny climate change is an actual process has found that deniers are more likely as not involve themselves in conspiratorial thinking as well. The authors of the study found that many of the climate change deniers called themselves skeptics when they weren’t exhibiting actual skepticism at all — just an unhealthy dissemination of conspiracy theories through unsubstantiated allegations. Furthermore, study authors find that such contradictory maneuverings have been detrimental to the world at large, causing greater distrust in science and scientists and slowing efforts to find and implement solutions to the accumulating effects of global warming.

The Guardian reported July 8 that a recent study headed by experimental psychologist Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol concluded, after a blind test where students gauged whether comment material they read was of a conspiratorial nature or of sound scientific research (but were told all material was from an unnamed scientific paper), that as much as one-fifth of the comments contained strong conspiracy theory ideation. The study itself built upon an earlier published study wherein Lewandowsky and a team of social scientists found that some 40 percent of those writing so-called skeptical pieces concerning global warming had used some form of imagery that conjures up conspiracy theories.

Lewandowsky told The Guardian, “I do not recall ever having seen such a strong effect in 30 years of behavioural research, and I have certainly never encountered ratings that favoured the extreme end of the scale to the extent observed here.”

The study, published in Journal of Social and Political Psychology, further lays out the difference between skepticism and conspiratorial denial. He explained to The Guardian that conspiracism was not skepticism and that self-appointed skeptics were often simply conspiracy theory propagators, their arguments “lacking in scholarly incisiveness” and “detracts from scholarly critique.” He also noted that this type of thinking has become a “direct pipeline” from blogs to right-wing media to, at times, political and government officials.

What’s your reading and blogging list today?