Month: September 2016

When a 10-year-old girl brought a tuna panino to her school in Milan, Italy, staff removed her from the cafeteria and forced her to eat lunch by herself in a classroom. School district rules bar students from bringing food to school. “If you permit everyone to bring their own food, how can you be sure that something won’t happen?” said a spokeswoman for the school system.

During a 1976 presidential debate between President Gerald Ford and challenger Jimmy Carter—a dreary affair, as were both their presidencies—the audio died, leading to some of the most-embarrassing dead air in the history of American politics.

On the next morning’s Today Show, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan was invited to talk with host Tom Brokaw and NBC analyst Edwin Newman about the debate, which was the first presidential debate since Richard Nixon and John Kennedy squared off in 1960. McLuhan minced no words, calling the format “the most stupid arrangement of any debate in the history of debating.” Indeed, McLuhan even half-jokingly blamed the technical difficulties on the idea that the machines had gone on strike rather be party to such an awful display (“the medium,” he said, “had gone on revolt against the bloody message”).

About the best thing you can say about the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is that these days, the machines know their place. But McLuhan’s hair probably would have caught on fire watching this spectacle, and for good reason. Let’s leave aside for the moment the obvious point that the stage was missing at least one and probably two candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein, who should have been included.

Instead, let’s simply focus on the brutal reality that after 90 minutes of back and forth, nobody knows anything more about either candidate than he or she knew going in. The format, essentially the same as the one that angered McLuhan so much back during the Bicentennial Year, precludes any sort of meaningful, candidate-driven questioning. The moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, is a good guy and a decent journalist, but what do we really gain by letting a single journalist write the questions and try to direct traffic? Trump and Clinton talked over each other and ran up and down the alleys of topics like bored kids running up and down the aisles during a Wagner opera.

It would be far better if the two candidates were forced to interrogate one another on whatever issues or topics they want to. That way, we’d not only get a sense of what they stand for from their answers but also from the questions they felt compelled to ask of one another. Instead, tonight we simply heard rehearsed answers about stock questions, many of which are intensely inconsequential. Consider the amount of time wasted discussing Donald Trump’s tax returns. No candidate is obligated to release the documents, though most do (Gerald Ford never released his full returns, for instance, and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan stiffed the public partly on this score too). Trump immediately turned the conversation to Clinton’s deleted emails, an equally useless topic unless you are rooting for one or other candidate already. Time wasted talking about tax returns or draperies or emails or stamina means less time to discuss actually substantive issues.

In USA Today, Gary Johnson suggested three questions that he would have asked if he were on the stage tonight. Some of the issues did come up, but not in clear-cut fashion. First, the former governor of New Mexico noted that Clinton had voted for the Iraq War and pushed for action in Libya and elsewhere. “Would you renounce that advocacy, and would you be willing to issue a full pardon to Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on the civil liberties violations that resulted from our war in Iraq?” That’s a pretty straightforward and useful question. I know I’d like to hear a straightforward answer. Second, Johnson said that given Trump’s plans for building a wall between the United States and Mexico (even though net migration from Mexico peaked years ago), the billionaire should answer the following: “If you want to build a Berlin-style wall, would you also advocate for ending the exportation of America’s draconian War on Drugs to Mexico, where we have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars involving ourselves in Mexican affairs, contributing to the murder of tens of thousands of Mexicans?” Again, that’s the sort of question that calls for pretty specific answers, isn’t it? A respondent who prevaricates or starts talking about other topics would be saying plenty.

Finally, Johnson had a question for both of the candidates, about the dreadful fiscal problems facing the government. This is a topic that barely was mentioned in tonight’s debate and only in terms that allowed both Clinton and Trump to paint their own realities. The facts are pretty straightforward: Clinton would indeed raise taxes a lot and proposes spending more than Trump. Trump raises spending a bit but mostly cuts taxes in a way that, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, will vastly increase projected debt totals. The important thing, though, is that neither candidate even pretends to address budget realities. As Matt Welch has put it, both candidates are “debt denialists.” Johnson’s query for Clinton and Trump is as follows:

The most important fiscal challenge facing our government is reforming entitlements for the elderly, Social Security and Medicare. Both of you were born in the first two years of the Baby Boom, 1946 and 1947. That made you eligible for full Social Security benefits at 66, and Medicare at 65. The first birth year of the Millennial generation was 1980. Under current law, Millennials can receive full Social Security benefits at 67, just one year greater than early Baby Boomers, and they’ll also get Medicare at 65.

To preserve the Social Security safety net and to assure solvency of Medicare, would each of you pledge to raise the full benefits retirement age for Millennials and the age for Medicare benefits by just a year, or possibly two? Millennial workers paying for Boomer’s retirement today are worried there will be no Social Security or Medicare when they reach their sixties.

That’s a good set of questions, isn’t it? And wouldn’t tonight’s debate, which was full of sound and fury and unsuccessful attempts by Holt to keep things from going sideways, have been a more meaningful affair if Gary Johnson had been able to directly ask them of his rivals? Those questions tell us a lot about his priorities, and Clinton’s, Trump’s, and Stein’s answers would have been worth listening to as well. And it would be nice to hear what Clinton would have asked, Trump would have asked, and Stein would have asked.

But instead, we were treated to a display that was neither revelatory nor substantive, really. The media (and, to be fair, all of us on Twitter and Facebook and everything else) are rushing to anoint one winner and polish the best one-liners that show our candidate as the victor supreme.

Whatevs. Clinton and Trump are each disliked by about 60 percent of the country and each is pulling in the low 40-percent range. Assuming that Johnson and Stein don’t see too much of a decline in support between now and November, about 90 percent of us are spoken for. There wasn’t a lot on display tonight to help that 10 percent of undecided voters figure out what to do next. Part of that is because two national candidates weren’t allowed on a debate stage run only for the benefit of Republicans and Democrats. Part of it is because we are still stuck in the ’70s, using “the most stupid arrangement of any debate in the history of debating.”

It’s a new century, for god’s sake, and we deserve a new way of seeing how presidential candidates think and what they think is important. Letting all legitimate candidates—read: those who are on enough ballots to theoretically win, or those who are polling at 5 percent, the level needed to qualify for federal matching funds—on stage would be a great first step. Making the candidates ask and answer one another’s questions would be a great second step.

At tonight’s presidential debate, both the National Rifle Association’s candidate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton talked a lot about the fact that people are using guns to kill other people in America, in Trump’s case particularly emphasizing the city streets of Chicago which is, as he points out, President Obama’s hometown.

Knowing they had an audience to impress in thrall to the notion that all the ills and joys of the nation are in the hands of the imperial presidency, both candidates made it clear, not that they actually had a meaningful, workable, and constitutional solution to the problem of gun violence, but that they wanted to bluster as if they did.

Clinton declared that “we’ve got to get guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death of young African- American men, more than the next nine causes put together. So…we have to tackle the plague of gun violence.”

Hillary declares later that “Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses” but seems unaware that merely possessing a gun when one is legally prohibited from doing so is, in and of itself, a nonviolent offense (if one has used the gun to harm someone else, that’s a different story), and one she wants cracked down on.

Clinton states, carefully using the new language that avoids mentioning “gun control” in favor of “commonsense gun safety measures” that she wants to, through unspecified means, get “military-style” weapons off the streets (though they are used in a vanishingly small percentage of gun crimes), and that we “need comprehensive background checks, and we need to keep guns out of the hands of those who will do harm.”

We already have federal laws requiring background checks on guns sold by licensed firearms dealers, so what she’s asking for is something like “universal background checks” in which every private firearm sale must by law go through a similar background check, usually in such proposals by using a licensed dealer as a middleman of sorts.

Given the wide range of Americans who by law should be prevented from buying a gun via such background checks, from felons to the adjudicated mentally ill to illegal drug users, such laws would, if stringently enforced, almost certainly cause more “young African-American and Latino men” to end up in jail “for nonviolent offenses” than it would keep guns from “those who will do harm” (as opposed to those who merely fall into a legally prohibited category, the overwhelming majority of whom would not “do harm” to another with a gun).

Trump tries to say the same thing about the president’s power over gun violence but in language that sounds somehow tougher, calling on the old right-wing shibboleth of “law and order.”

He openly called for a return to the discredited, legally and empirically (as Anthony Fisher explained earlier tonight), policy of just stopping people randomly on the streets to see if they have a gun on them and trying to take it away.

“We have to be strong, we have to be vigilant,” Trump said, expressing his opinion as if it is policy without bothering to note that city police practices are neither in the hands of nor the business of the president of the federal government.

It’s a bitter delight to see the NRA’s man loudly proclaiming that being suspected of carrying a weapon in public is something that should leave you liable to being harassed by a cop and having to prove you are not a “bad [person] who shouldn’t have them.” That Trump’s first, easy and certain, response to this perceived crisis in public order is an instant abandonment of core constitutional liberties like the 4th amendment should be disquieting, but it’s not that we didn’t already know.

Nor should it be a surprise that the two candidates are hand-in-hand in selling the lie that the president has or ought to have the power to prevent gun violence in city streets. We should remember the context that, despite a disquieting rise in certain cities in the past year or so (as Jesse Walker reported today), we saw as of 2015 “the sixth lowest homicide rate of the last half-century.”

Hillary Clinton argued at tonight’s presidential debate that the decision to end the war in Iraq and completely withdraw U.S. troops from the country was made by George W. Bush, and not Barack Obama, in response to Donald Trump’s contention that it was Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq that created the space for ISIS to grow there.

Clinton’s admission, which was correct, is a startling reversal from 2012, when President Obama made ending the war in Iraq a corner-stone of his re-election campaign. Republican nominee Mitt Romney, at the last debate that year, tried to point out that President Obama had actually at the start of his term tried to renegotiate Bush’s status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq past the withdrawal date, but Obama persisted in denying it. By 2014, when ISIS began to become a substantial destabilizing force in an Iraq with an already ineffective, corrupt government, President Obama changed his tune, blaming Bush for negotiating the status of forces agreement that governed the total U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and insisting he had tried to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq past the withdrawal debate. This presidential election season, the talking points have made a complete reversal, with Hillary Clinton, this year’s Democratic nominee, assigning credit (or blame, as it’s become in mainstream politics today) for ending the war in Iraq on George W. Bush.

What difference, at this point, does it make? Not much. Obama eked out a victory in 2012 by repeating the talking point about having ended the war in Iraq (false) and bringing the Afghanistan war to a responsible end (it is in its 15th year with no sign of ending anytime soon), and the U.S. returned to Iraq in 2014 for an anti-ISIS campaign that continues, rudderless but persistent, to this day. The two major candidates argued about who had the better rhetoric on wiping ISIS out, but neither questioned the premise of interventionism itself. Without a third party candidate on the debate stage, there won’t be a conversation on the wisdom of U.S. interventions that have almost uniformly led to destabilization, from Libya to Afghanistan, both places where ISIS now also operates thanks to those U.S. interventions.

Tonight’s first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was a massive reminder that they’re both on the same page on some of the worst policies. In the law-and-order section arguing over policies on fighting crime, Hillary Clinton declared her support for denying citizens their Second Amendment right to purchase arms if they are placed on government “watchlists” for being suspected of crimes or involvement in terrorism.

Not charged. Not arrested. Merely placed on lists. Unfortunately, Donald Trump declared his agreement with Clinton. Neither of them seem to hold either the Second Amendment, enshrining the right to bear arms, or the Fifth Amendment, requiring due process before taking away those gun rights.

This isn’t new, unfortunately. When Democrats raised the idea of using federal government watchlists to deny people the right to own guns, it drew the attention of many conservatives and libertarians. And it created a new push to take a closer look at how these watchlists and no-fly lists actually worked. The opaque and bureaucratic system has previously been operating with very little oversight. If you ended up on a watchlist, the “due process” involved was to send a letter to the government begging to be removed from the list and trying to prove that there’s no reason to be suspected of any criminal activity.

The utter lack of actual due process in the system prompted a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) representing several people on no-fly lists, and they (and the experiences of a scholar who was put on the no-fly list due to a clerical error) have prompted the government to provide a small measure of transparency. But it’s not nearly enough, and the ACLU is continuing to fight to add some real due process for people placed on the list.

The ACLU submitted a letter opposing a failed Congressional attempt to craft a law blocking gun ownership from those on watchlists. Clinton’s response makes it clear that she will want to see it return if she is elected president. Unfortunately, it looks like Trump has the same idea.