Answering a question about climate change, Carson spun off into a discussion of why he isn’t an atheist, and how he doesn’t have to accept climate science or astrophysics in order to be a good neurosurgeon.

To the extent that Carson did answer the climate change question, it was with a patronizing non-sequitur, saying, “Is there climate change? Of course there’s climate change. Any point in time, temperatures are going up or temperatures are going down. Of course that’s happening. When that stops happening, that’s when we’re in big trouble.” He did then say that it was important to take care of our environment, but not as a “political issue,” ignoring the fact that he is running for the nomination of a party that is uniformly of the political belief that the environment should be secondary to the market. As The New Republics’ Rebecca Leber rhetorically asked, “If we don’t use politics to protect the environment, who will? The Earth itself? God?”

But then things got weird.

Spinning off into a discussion of his personal religious beliefs, like how his young-Earth creationism is perfectly compatible with evolutionary biology:

As far as evolution is concerned, you know, I do believe in micro-evolution, or natural selection, but I believe that God gave the creatures he made the ability to adapt to their environment. Because he’s very smart and he didn’t want to start over every 50 years.

And, later, a selection of open questions about sciences great mysteries:

Just the way the Earth rotates on its axis, how far away it is from the sun. These are all very complex things. Gravity, where did it come from?

Yes, Dr. Carson, where did gravity come from??? And while you’re at it, how’d the moon get there?

Can’t explain that!

Except we can. As it turns out, we know where gravity comes from. And we’re pretty sure how the moon got there. And we are one thousand percent sure that life on this planet took longer than six thousand years to evolve into what it is today.

We’re lucky that gravity and evolution aren’t political issues that Ben Carson would have to deal with if elected president, but that doesn’t let him off the hook here. These kinds of unscientific beliefs should — and yet somehow don’t — disqualify you in the minds of the American electorate. As I wrote back in February:

None of the issues that fall under the umbrella of “science” should be partisan issues at all. Analytical thinking may correlate with liberal ideology, but that doesn’t mean that facts themselves are biased. A presidential candidate’s position on evolution is as important as their position on vaccines because both speak to that person’s respect for and ability to understand evidence. So evolution doesn’t need to serve as a proxy for the current scientific issues of the day; on the policy side alone, it serves as a proxy for the next issues of the day.

Ben Carson is sure that the world was created in six days, but he isn’t sure that we can explain one of its most basic governing principles — even though he could have Googled it. That he’s considered the intellectual, smart candidate in the Republican primary is even scarier than the fact that Donald Trump is leading it.

You’ve probably read the details elsewhere by now, but at the end of the day, they don’t matter. This story isn’t all that different from the many that came before and are sure to come after. America averages one shooting of at least four fatalities per day, with one shooting per week at schools. These shootings are happening faster than we can meme them. The routine is familiar, and we already know how the next few days are going to play out:

First, we will be reminded that this is definitely not the time to discuss ways that we could have prevented this shooting, along with tomorrow’s and next week’s and the ones to follow. At times like these, a bad reading of the Second Amendment is more important than a basic understanding of the First:

There needs to be a mandatory waiting period imposed on anti-gun extremists commenting on breaking news crime incidents. #UCCShooting

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) October 1, 2015

Instead, it would be much more productive for all of us to quietly appeal to a higher power — one that has pretty clearly signaled to us that they’re agnostic when it comes to American gun policy:

Praying for Umpqua Community College, the victims, and families impacted by this senseless tragedy.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 1, 2015

Second, we will be reminded that although America’s homicide rates are practically off the charts compared to other countries, now is definitely not the time to second-guess our borderline religious commitment to the killing machines make it way easier to kill a bunch of people at once:

After all, don’t you know we might need to revolt against the government some day?

Gun policy from America’s gun experts

Third, someone from the NRA will say that real solution that would have prevented all of this is more guns. Most of America will find this ridiculous. Congress will find this reasonable. President Obama will scold them.

Fourth, there will be a new round of public opinion polling showing broad support for public policies that could have prevented the shooting, ranging from universal background checks to a ban on high-capacity magazines. We will flash a momentary glance at Congress to see if they will pass any of these policies, and then remember how unbothered they were by what that guy from the NRA said.

Fifth, gun sales will go through the god damn roof.

Sixth, this video will go viral:

Seventh, another mass shooting will take place. We will go back to step one.

See you next week.

The case was brought as a challenge to the state’s ill-defined constitutional ban on felons convicted of “infamous crimes” from voting, as well as an attempt to reconcile conflicting statutes relating to when and how ex-felons have their rights restored once they are no longer under state supervision.

Some background:

In 2005, then-Governor Tom Vilsack signed a law that automatically restored felons’ voting rights after they left state supervision. In 2011, current Governor Terry Brandstad signed an executive order requiring them to petition his office in order to take advantage of those restored rights. According to the Des Moines Register, “The Branstad process requires ex-felons to complete a detailed application, submit proof that court costs have been paid and provide a detailed criminal history.” Only Kentucky and Florida have similarly strict requirements.

Brandstad’s executive order threw the status of ex-felons like Kelli Jo Griffin into question. Griffin, who completed her parole for a cocaine conviction in 2008, registered to vote under the assumption that her rights had been restored under the old law, when in fact they had since been revoked. She was then charged with perjury for registering to vote. A jury acquitted her, agreeing that she had made an honest mistake. After all, there are two conflicting statutes on the books.

Griffin, represented by the ACLU, then sued the state to challenge its automatic disqualification process. Again from the Register:

Terry Brandstad, via Gage Skidmore / Flickr

Iowa’s constitution says conviction of an infamous crime automatically strips citizens of the voting right; however, an “infamous crime” has never been well defined. A divided Iowa Supreme Court last year concluded that not all felonies are infamous crimes and that it would define in future cases which felonies qualify.

Griffin’s challenge said her low-level, nonviolent drug conviction is not an infamous crime and she should not have been disenfranchised.

ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis expects the case to wind up before the Iowa Supreme Court.

There are two separate issues at hand here. First, how much ground does the word “infamous” cover in the state constitution? Broadly defined, it can be read as covering all felonies, but if it is interpreted to mean, say, only violent offenses, then Griffin’s voting rights should never have been taken away in the first place. Second, how is the state supposed to handle the ex-felons who registered and voted in between Vilsack’s law and Brandstad’s executive order? Is it fair, or even legal, to retroactively take voting rights away from someone who has had them restored automatically and committed no subsequent crimes? Did the Brandstad administration make any attempt to notify the felons whose rights were un-restored that they would have to actively petition the state for a right they already had? If not, did they really expect them all to just understand, by some form of civic osmosis, that they weren’t allowed to register to vote anymore?

All this is to say that if denying voting rights to ex-felons wasn’t enough of an undemocratic, immoral policy to being with, the way in which Iowa’s gone about implementing said policy is beyond confusing.

True the Vote said it sent each of North Carolina’s 10 largest counties lists of potential duplicate registrations, based on similarities in the names, ages or addresses listed. It said five of the counties have told them they’re processing the data, and one, Guilford, has already removed 655 names from its rolls.

True the Vote said it’s currently compiling similar data for the 10 largest counties in two other 2016 swing states, Ohio and Colorado.

At least one county registrar has already used True the Vote’s list as a resource to conduct the purge, told Roth that they erred on the side of leaving records as-is if they found any reason to believe the record wasn’t duplicated. Still, that county still found 655 duplicates to remove from its voting lists.

And if you checked registrars across the country, you’d likely find similar rates of duplicate records. As the Pew Center on the States has found, we simply aren’t very good at storing and updating records of who is registered to vote where. As of 2012, approximately 24 million (one in eight) voter registrations were invalid or inaccurate, with 1.8 million deceased 2.75 million dual-state registrations.

The high number of people registered in more than one state is due to the fact that we don’t have one voter registration system; we have 51 (including DC) systems, and they often rely on snail mail and the honor system to talk to each other. This doesn’t work in a country where one in eight people — including one in four young people — move every year. Myself included: When I registered to vote in Cambridge last year, I filled out a change of address that the Cambridge registrar should have mailed to my registrar in Virginia, where I registered previously, alerting them to un-register me there. They didn’t. Some months later, got an angry letter from my old registrar not-so-subtly wondering if I was registered in two places (I was moving back anyway, so I simply re-did the process once I returned to Charlottesville).

And while organizations like True the Vote freak out over dual registrations because they’re convinced there’s a far-reaching conspiracy on the part of Democrats to stuff ballot boxes, in reality these bureaucratic oversights, if anything, suppress turnout by making voting more complicated. Case in point: over the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, a majority of Kenyon College students registered to vote, and voted, at the one precinct in Gambier, Ohio that covered the college’s roughly 1650 students (the town’s overall population is just over 2000, including students). However, in the years that followed, students graduated and their registrations weren’t updated. As of last year, there were 2623 registered voters in Gambier, Ohio — nearly a thousand more registered voters than there are students at the college and definitely greater than the village’s actual population. While there is obviously no coordinated effort to get those graduates to keep voting on campus — they either haven’t registered elsewhere or, like me, didn’t have their changes of address go through —  the accumulation of voter registrations forced the state to split Gambier into two precincts — there were more registered voters than legally allowed for one precinct. This confuses students as to where they are supposed to vote. And as prior research has shown, policies that confuse voters can do more to suppress turnout than active attempts at voter suppression.

Register, via Shutterstock

All this is to say that cleaning up voter registration is a ballot access issue as much as if not more than it is an election integrity issue.

What’s more, there are better resources available for cleaning up our voter registration databses than on activist organizations and relatives of presidential candidates. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), established by the Pew Charitable Trusts and IBM, runs an opt-in database that states can use to match voter registration records across state lines. ERIC also helps states identify eligible voters who have not yet registered. The program was endorsed by the 2014 Presidential Commission on Election Administration as a best practice for states’ efforts to maintain clean lists of eligible and active voters.

Currently, eleven states and Washington, DC have opted in to use the system — North Carolina has passed legislation to do so, but has not begun using it. Of course, systems like these become far more useful as they get closer to full participation; tracking registered voter mobility between eleven states and DC is great, but it misses voters that move to or from the other 38 states.

So, rather than scouring voter rolls for slight misspelling and other minor errors in an attempt to make the electoral process like “driving and seeing the police following you,” organizations like True the Vote would be better served campaigning to get more states on board with ERIC and other cooperative efforts between the states to centralize a process that’s inherently inefficient and error-prone as a result of our country’s dogged commitment to decentralized federalism. That’d be a much more efficient (or “true,” if you will) way to ensure that voter registration records accurately reflect who is eligible to vote where.

That is, if they actually cared about open, representative elections.

According to the Associated Press, a bipartisan group of Senators is set to introduce a bill today that would give judges discretion to give sentences below mandatory minimums for non-violent offenders and allow some current prisoners to reduce their sentences through rehabilitation.

The deal was reached between some of the Senate’s most diehard partisans on both sides of the aisle, bringing together Chuck Schumer and John Cornyn; Cory Booker and Mike Lee; Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham; Pat Leahy and Chuck Grassley. And with good reason: there are liberal and conservative cases to be made that mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent (usually drug-related) offenses are nonsensical and counterproductive. As the AP reported:

The package was years in the making, the result of negotiations among some of the most powerful members of the Senate. Among their goals: make the sentencing system more fair, reduce recidivism and contain rising prison costs.

Since 1980, the federal prison population has exploded, in part because of mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders. In 1980, the federal prison population was less than 25,000. Today, it is more than 200,000.

Mandatory minimums, in particular have been a particular focus of criminal justice reform advocates for quite some time. As John Oliver breaks down here, they make absolutely no sense:

Which is why the Obama administration issued guidelines for reduced mandatory minimums for non-violent offenders in 2013. President Obama has since called for ending mandatory minimum sentencing entirely.

It’ll be interesting to see if the bill is able to cobble together a coalition of enough Democrats and Republicans to get it over the line. Assuming there aren’t any thorny riders (a big assumption, but still), one would expect the libertarian wing of the Republican caucus to support the general framework of this sentencing reform package as proposed, as would most Democrats. That should be enough to get 50 or even 60 votes.

Granted, sentencing reform is one small piece of the criminal justice reform puzzle. But it’s an important one. And in today’s Senate, having enough votes to take action on any issue of substance is nothing short of amazing.

Which is why it’s a major deal, to say the least, that the state just cut the number of locations where citizens can get drivers licenses in half — a move that disproportionately affects low-income and African-American residents.

Red counties will now be devoid of drivers license bureaus, via Kyle Whitmire / AL.com

According to Kyle Whitmire at AL.com, the state Law Enforcement Agency announced yesterday that, after a series of closures of drivers license bureaus, 29 of Alabama’s 67 counties will be without an office where citizens can obtain a drivers license. As Whitmire’s colleague, John Archibald, adds, eight of the ten counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters in the state will be without a drivers license bureau and every resident of a county that is at least 75 percent African-American will have go to another county to obtain their drivers license.

State officials are citing budgetary constraints for the bureau closings, which isn’t all that absurd of a claim. Facing budget shortfalls, all kinds of public services in Alabama are either being cut back or eliminated. But the demographics of counties in the state that are seeing their drivers license bureaus go, as compared to the counties that are keeping them, suggests that Governor Robert Bentley’s administration didn’t miss an opportunity to turn a budgetary shortfall into a political gain. And as both Whitmire and Archibald note, the resulting disparity in the effects of these bureau closing are all but inviting a civil rights suit.

Because even if the decision to close the bureaus in question was racially and politically neutral (a generous assumption, but let’s grant it for a moment), its effects aren’t. By Archibald’s tally, eight of the fifteen counties in Alabama that voted for President Obama in 2012, along with the five most Democratic counties in the state, are seeing their drivers license bureaus close. According to Whitmire, between twelve and fifteen counties in the state’s “Black Belt” will be without a bureau.

This would be bad enough in any other state, but in Alabama it serves as yet another reminder as to why pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act was so necessary before the Supreme Court gutted it. As Archibald wrote:

So roll out the welcome wagon to the Justice Department, and tell the world what it already so desperately wants to hear.

That Alabama is exactly what they always thought she was.

That Alabama refuses to pay for its own government, and used it as an excuse to keep black people from the polls. That Alabama hasn’t changed a bit.

You can’t on the one hand require a form of ID in order to vote while at the same time curtailing access to that form of ID. If anything, you’re supposed to make that form of ID easier to obtain, or completely free.

Enough Alabamans have already been denied access to the ballot over the state’s photo ID requirements. Ridiculousness like this is why we need a constitutional right to vote.

The raw data for water loss is really quite shocking:

• In most cities, infrastructure is in such a state of disrepair that breakdowns occur daily. Houston, TX, for instance, saw an estimated 700 water main breaks every single day in 2011.
• Those leaking pipes lose untold billions of gallons of water annually. In the city of San Jose alone, it’s estimated that the city’s systems lose 23 billion gallons of water every year.
• To put these figures into perspective, Next City reports that national water leakage is enough to drown both Manhattan and Chicago on an annual basis.

Clearly that’s a lot of precious cargo lost. Yet if everybody agrees this is a huge problem, critics remain divided on how best to remedy the situation. The trending solution also tends to be the most contentious, and (many agree) dangerous: privatization.

The Push for Privatization 

For many years there has been an organized effort by private actors to move America’s water systems towards privatization.

Some of the biggest players advocating for water privatization in the U.S. are corporate advocacy groups.

Other cheerleaders for the initiative include the poster-boys for the 1%, the billionaire Koch Brothers — who, in 1980, called for “the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households,” along with practically every other major infrastructural element of American society.

Over the years, a plurality of Koch-related organizations have pushed water privatization as part of a wider agenda of supposedly “libertarian” policies.

In 2012, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank backed by the Kochs, wrote a long report arguing that “competitive bidding” offers a “way out” for American infrastructural decline. “As decay takes hold of one water network after another, it becomes clear that the old ways of doing things are inadequate to the task at hand,” proclaims the report. “By opening up the bidding process…municipalities can let competition decide the future of their underground water networks.”

In 2013, another Koch backed think tank, the Cato Institute, offered a summary of why private ownership is superior to public ownership:

Federal agencies don’t have the strong incentives that businesses do to ensure that infrastructure projects are constructed and operated efficiently…when Washington makes mistakes it replicates them across the nation…federal infrastructure…usually comes part and parcel with piles of regulations…

This is the standard frame used time and again as the rationale for privatization: government is inept, wasteful and incapable of properly managing public resources, while private industry is competent, efficient and responsible.

Why, exactly? In the logic of capital, the profit-motive is often touted as the indispensable carrot that fuels corporate efficiency, which is sorely lacking in state and federal governments. Private industry (so argues private industry) is better than government because public officials have no proper motivation (i.e., money) to efficiently manage public resources.

Yet based on the track record of companies like American Water and Nestle shamelessly screwing over their customers in the pursuit of higher returns, one might argue that that same profit-motive is the very element that makes private ownership a terribly inefficient alternative to government — especially when it comes to managing a resource with perfectly inelastic demand, like water.

The Many Failures of Private Water Stewardship 

In Crumbling Infrastructure, Crumbling Democracy, academic Ellen Dannin lays out her argument for how privatization contracts are endangering democratic institutions:

• Privatization allows companies to assume the power of local government, while avoiding all of the transparency. Dannin notes that key provisions in privatization contracts give “private contractors power over decisions that affect the public interest and are normally made by public officials and subject to oversight, disclosure, and accountability—none of which apply to private contractors.”
• Privatization deals often make government “the insurer of the private contractor’s financial success,” meaning that if the company experiences unforeseen financial losses, it can hold the local community accountable for these losses. So called “compensation events” are written into most privatization contracts, and are exactly what they sound like: guarantees of a certain amount of income for the company investing in the community in question. This essentially makes communities indentured to the corporation for its own resources.
• Cost-Benefit Analysis doesn’t really factor into most decisions to privatize. Dannin notes that most legislators decisions to privatize don’t consider the long-term. Due to compensation events, or other unforeseen externalities, the decision to privatize may, and often does, come with unforeseen financial costs.

Despite warnings like these from academics and public advocacy groups, the overwhelming push seen in the U.S. is to trend water management towards private power. Support for these initiatives comes from the highest levels of government.

The WRRDA: Saving U.S. Water or Ushering in a New Age of Privatization? 

In 2014, a federal bill, The Water Resources Reform and Development Act (WRRDA), seemed to offer the beginnings of a solution to the U.S. water predicament. Hailed as the “first step” towards repairing infrastructure, the bill promised to reform unnecessary government bureaucracy and mainline new water projects. The bill was pushed hard by Republicans in the senate, but also garnered enough Democratic support to be billed as strongly bipartisan legislation. President Obama signed the bill into law on June 10th, 2014, saying that the WRRDA would “put Americans to work modernizing our water infrastructure and restoring some of our most vital ecosystems.”

Yet advocacy groups have protested certain clauses within the bill that they say further legitimize public-private agreements, which they warn effectively “opens the door for privatization” on a national scale. Following the bill’s passage, Corporate Accountability International’s Public Water Works! issued a statement, saying “We are alarmed by the implications of this bill, which would open the doors to an increase in water public-private partnerships in the U.S. and effectively subsidize water privatization.”

Public-private relationships have been flagged by many progressives as a means of paving the road to full privatization of public institutions. Reportedly, the bill:

…seeks to encourage public private partnerships, under the idea that public funding alone can’t fill the gap. A project carried out by a private entity is eligible for WIFIA financing, but the project must be publicly sponsored, and the local public agency must support the project.

Additionally, the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA), the amendment that allows for this, allows private actors to put their own money into public infrastructure projects, which means they get partial legal claim to public domains.

David Vitter, via Wikimedia Commons

While the idea of the public and private sectors working together to solve problems sounds great on its face, there’s every reason to believe that the politicians who crafted WRRDA had less noble goals in mind. Many of the congressional leaders who pushed it through not only are going to be given the boon of local district projects (Republicans overwhelmingly benefited), but also have strong ties to industries that stand to benefit from further privatization. Republican David Vitter, who said that the bill is “a jobs bill that is very much needed in our weak economy,” has large ties to industrial construction corporations that will likely see business in conjunction with new private infrastructure projects. Vitter, who has accosted Obama in the past for attempting to pass climate change reform (a look at his healthy campaign subsidies from the oil and gas industries shows why), isn’t exactly the type of person you’d hope would be shepherding legislation related to natural resources and the public interest.

Yet the WRRDA essentially conforms to his worldview — the kind of worldview that sees Nestle selling your own water back to you at $5 a gallon and chalks it up to the invisible hand of the market. The bill enables companies and private actors to cash in on public infrastructure in a big way, subjecting taxpayers to the whims of corporate power instead of local government. And if there’s some promise of more expedience and efficiency than the lumbering groups like the Army Corps of Engineers, then we’re yet to see whether those promises will be kept.

Clearly America’s water systems are in dire need of a fix-up. Yet given all the evidence of the potential dangers of privatized water, it bears some consideration whether the public-private friendliness of bills like WRRDA are the right path to take.

The gesture was not universally embraced. While the Pope invoked the Golden Rule, Congress invoked questions about resources and national security.

There is an existential crisis upon us today, not only on America, but on Europe and much of the rest of the world. People are on the move, the largest number of displaced persons since the end of World War II. Europe is inundated with millions fleeing the madness in Syria and the Middle East. In speaking recently to a meeting of EU presidents, European Council President Donald Trask claimed that there are currently eight million displaced persons in Syria, while four million more have fled the country, mostly for Europe. In discussing the crisis, he promised only one thing: the problem will not end “anytime soon.”

While the loudest headlines may be coming from Europe, there is hardly a continent not somehow embroiled in a refugee crisis today. Across the Mediterranean, refugees from Africa and West Asia are braving the sea in suicidal flotillas seeking sanctuary in Greece, Italy and Spain. The rest of Africa is a Rubik’s Cube of displaced populations festering in camps having fled wars, ethnic cleansing and persecutions in their home countries. In addition to the millions of refugees from wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen there are other Muslims in camps in Bangladesh– Rohingya, fleeing Myanmar and what has been called “one of the worst persecutions in the world.” Mass graves of Rohingya have been found over the border from Myanmar in Thailand. Those who have succeeded in “escaping” are warehoused by the thousands by human traffickers in boat camps, rusting offshore hulks. And of course, in the Western Hemisphere Mexicans and other Latinos are headed north to the United States and an increasingly hostile reception, intensified now by the heated rhetoric of a presidential campaign.

Welcome, as John Cleese famously quipped, to 430AD.

Cleese was referring to history’s cyclic nature and the fact that traumatic mass migrations like these are nothing new. They have rarely been peaceful, and in the resulting clash of cultures the newcomers frequently win, destroying established societies and uprooting those who had been there before them.

Cleese’s particular reference is to what is oft called the Migration Period, 4th through 9th centuries AD, a time of intense barbarian movement into and through Europe, when such tribes as the Goths, Vandals, Anglos, Saxons and Lombards were pouring into a declining Roman Empire from one direction, while Huns, Slavs, Bulgars and others were pushing in from another. In the mix, the Roman Empire ceased to exist, while the names of many of the newcomers remain emblazoned on the maps.

Two thousand years earlier, around the 12th century BC, what was arguably the world’s first internationalized society of Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites and Minoans crumbled under the onslaught of mysterious strangers, who remained to build a new civilization on the ruins of the Late Bronze Age.

But history also has its stories of less ruinous outcomes. Huguenots fleeing persecution in 17th century France resettled peacefully and prosperously in surrounding European nations. 18th century Turkey welcomed – and was transformed by – the assimilation of from five to seven million Muslims from the Caucasus, Crimea, Croatia, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia. The 19th century found populations fleeing the potato famines of Ireland and the pogroms of Russia finding new and successful lives in Europe or the United States. Examples extend throughout history and geography.

But today isn’t the 17th, 18th or even the 20th century. Today’s crises move quickly and forcefully across the globe and leave little time for reflection. Even where good intentions exist, they aren’t sufficient to meet the needs of the refugee populations.

Syria via Shutterestock

Under the Common European Asylum System, every refugee is entitled to asylum in Europe. Last week, EU Interior Ministers voted to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers in Europe, a well-intentioned effort that was already impracticable when adopted: nearly half a million refugees have already arrived in Europe so far this year. Nearly 9,000 entered Croatia in a single day. Last week Slovakia announced that they will sue the EU over the quota plan, which was also appealed by Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic. Hungary, the scene of massive recent refugee disturbances, last week passed laws giving draconian new powers to the military to help contain the situation. Even Germany, which had initially put out the welcome mat for refugees (with, of all places, Buchenwald as the welcome center) has suspended the agreement that allows for free movement across Europe’s borders. With Germany’s withdrawal from what is called the Schengen Agreement, there is the possibility of reversing decades of European integration.

The Gulf States are providing plenty of cash for humanitarian relief – $700 million from Saudi Arabia alone – and are housing plenty of refugees of their own (even if the West refuses to call them refugees). Nevertheless, the situation is complicated for the Gulf States. The Saudi air force has been bombing parts of Syria held by the Islamic State. Are these refugees fleeing the Islamic State (good), or fleeing the bombing (bad)?

Which, while harsh, is instructive of why today’s crisis differs from refugee crises of the past. Even granting history’s migratory success stories, the game in 2015 is radically different, the cost of mobility are much lower and the stakes much higher.

At what point does humanitarian action become a national suicide pact? When does decent humanitarian behavior court the ultimate destruction of the humanitarian?

Forget Donald Trump’s rants about Mexican murderers and rapists. Are we in danger of opening our doors to the next generation of extremist proselytizers and terrorists? Today’s land of opportunity could become tomorrow’s target of opportunity. There has been no shortage of news stories in recent years of terrorist acts, actual or contemplated, by displaced, new-grown radicals from abroad.

But the photograph of a dead boy awash on a Turkish beach becomes the iconic image for this latest humanitarian crisis, and comes to haunt us. Pope Francis, in his remarks to Congress, said, “You must … view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation. To respond in a way which is always humane, just, and fraternal. We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome.”

And so we are left with the horrific images of despair and unimaginable chaos, to ponder our own part in ameliorating this crisis that is upon us, in no small part of our own making.

Answer, anyone?

This would seemingly make him at once remarkably successful and remarkably unsuccessful as Speaker at the same time.

Silver explains the latter phenomenon — conservative dissatisfaction with Boehner — with the following chart, which shows that there is more ideological diversity in the House Republican caucus than there has been for at least the last century:

Source: FiveThirtyEight

As far as relative conservatism goes, the 90th percentile Republican is more more conservative than the 10th percentile Republican today than they were at other times when the party controlled the House. That’s a big tent to hold together, and it’s no wonder that there were divisions within the party as to which fights to prioritize, how to approach the Obama administration, whether to concede the point on immigration reform and so on.

In other words, Peter King (DW-Nominate: .283) and Justin Amash (DW-Nominate: .898) are both fine with voting to repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood a kajillion times, but only one of them wants to repeal and defund the entire government, and both of them are representative of sizable chunks of the Republican caucus.

But that’s not all. As I hope you noticed at first glance, the chart also shows just how unprecedented House Republicans’ conservatism is. The 10th percentile Republican today is more conservative, as measured by DW-Nominate, than the 90th percentile Republican was under Reagan. As Silver adds:

John Boehner, via Wikimedia Commons

GOP lawmakers have steadily become more conservative, according to the system. DW-Nominate scores run on a scale from roughly -1 (extremely liberal) to +1 (extremely conservative), where 0 represents a centrist, and the median House Republican in the 92nd Congress, which served from 1971 to 1973 under President Richard Nixon, had a DW-Nominate score of +0.193, only very slightly to the right of center. By the 113th Congress, the median score had increased to +0.732, which is extremely conservative. The most conservative Republicans in the House 25 or 30 years ago would be among the most liberal members now, says DW-Nominate.

Taken together, the data show that House Republicans cover more ideological ground than they have in at least a century, and all of that ground is to the right of where their most conservative members have sat since the Great Depression. They aren’t just on the right side of the American ideological spectrum; they’ve essentially created an entirely new spectrum.

Having convinced themselves that Democrats are wrong and bad and evil about literally everything, the only debates Republicans still feel are worth having are amongst themselves. They aren’t just on the other side of the ideological playing field; they’ve picked up their ball and moved a few fields over.

But sure, tell me more about how “both sides” are to blame for our historic levels of polarization.

In an interview on Hannity last night, McCarthy gave Boehner’s speakership a grade of B- (Style: D+, Substance: B) and assured Hannity that he, too, felt “betrayed” by Republican leadership — odd, given that he’s #2 in said leadership.

However, the most consequential moment in the interview came when McCarthy highlighted the House Select Committee on Benghazi as a reason why when it comes to taking on the Democrats, he means business. As he said, quoted by Roll Call:

Kevin McCarthy, via Wikimedia Commons

What you’re going to see is a conservative speaker, that takes a conservative Congress, that puts a strategy to fight and win.

And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?

But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.

To date, the Republican obsession with Benghazi has been couched in concern for the four Americans who died — we need to find out what happened — despite their shoulder-shrugging in the face of similar attacks that occurred under George Bush. And all this time, it’s been patently obvious that their concern has very little to do with American lives and very much to do with making it look like Hillary Clinton was on the one hand totally incompetent and on the other hand engaged in a far-reaching, detailed conspiracy to undermine American interests. The steady drip of hearings and investigations aren’t designed to find wrongdoing; they’re designed to simply raise the possibility that there’s something there.

As Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in a statement:

…this stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public: the core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi Committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an even-handed search for the facts.

Hillary Clinton will testify before the Benghazi Committee later next month in what we already know amounts to a show trial — a fact laid even more bare by McCarthy’s admission that the committee exists for the sole purpose of taking her down.

If the Republicans are as ready for her hearing as they were for Cecile Richards yesterday, it’ll be an absolute train wreck.

Here’s the punch line:

I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes,…Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, “We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night. The only problem was that it was almost entirely false. The clip Fiorina’s referring to was a segment of stock footage that played over an audio clip of a former employee of StemExpress (a company that until recently partnered with Planned Parenthood) describing an abortion procedure. The fetus shown was not confirmed to have been an aborted fetus, and the footage was not said to have been filmed at Planned Parenthood.

Her claim was so false, in fact, that her super PAC had to step in to make its own video that squared with Fiorina’s account.

Yesterday, the full video of the clip Fiorina described was released, which again confirmed precisely nothing in Fiorina’s claims and subsequent double-downs. As TIME reported:

[Center for Bio-Ethical Reform founder Gregg] Cunningham, an anti-abortion activist, declined to identify the date, location or authors of the video in an interview with TIME Monday night, saying his group makes agreements of confidentiality in an effort to acquire images of abortions. He also made no claim that the images shown in the video had anything to do with Planned Parenthood, the organization that Fiorina and others have targeted for federal defunding. “I am neither confirming or denying the affiliation of the clinic who did this abortion,” Cunningham said.

…

The full source video, which is extremely graphic, lasts about 13 minutes, and shows a fetus being extracted from the mother, placed in a metal bowl, prodded with medical instruments and handled by someone in the room. At times the fetus appears to move, and at other times it appears to have a pulse. There are no images on the full video of any attempt to harvest the brain of the fetus, and there is no sound. Cunningham said the jump cuts in the video are the result of the camera being turned off and on.

Cunningham also did not confirm that the procedure in the video was an abortion instead of a miscarriage, saying only that he was “confident” it was the former.

As Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum quipped, “So there you have it. The video was not taken at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The fetus shows some reflexive movement, but that’s all. No one says the fetus has to be kept alive. No one harvests the brain. But other than that, Fiorina was 100 percent correct!”

But Fiorina’s (and now Cunningham’s) claims weren’t done unraveling. Later in the day, Fusion reported that not only were the pictures of aborted fetuses in the videos not taken at Planned Parenthood, but in at least one case the picture isn’t of an aborted fetus in the first place; its of a stillborn fetus. What’s more, the Center for Medical Progress did not have permission to use the photo in question, which has apparently been circulated widely in the anti-abortion community

Lexi Oliver Fretz has since granted CMP and Carly Fiorina permission to use the photos, which originally appeared on her blog while she was mourning her loss. Which is fine, if odd given that she never had an abortion (she is a committed Christian), and that the photos aren’t depicting what CMP and Fiorina are insisting they depict.

Every day, it seems like the conservative push to defund (let’s be honest, eliminate) Planned Parenthood intensifies, and every day it seems like a new lie emerges that directly undercuts their central claims about the organization. First it was deceptively edited videos. Yesterday it was deliberately nonsensical charts and misappropriated photos.

What’s next?

“The Pope spoke in English,” she told [reporter Robert Moynihan]. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’ I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.”

Liberty Counsel, the group representing Davis, was quick to jump on the report, publishing a press release touting the Pope’s endorsement as yet another badge of honor for Davis. In addition, they claimed that the meeting was the Vatican’s idea, not theirs or any American officials':

Kim Davis' meeting with @Pontifex was arranged thru Vatican officials – not any U.S. bishops, her lawyer told me.

— Laurie Goodstein (@lauriegnyt) September 30, 2015

The Vatican has not yet confirmed the meeting, and Davis herself is the only source cited in the Inside the Vatican article, which is in turn the only source for Liberty Counsel’s press release (ItV is not an official Vatican site). This is significant given that Kim Davis and Liberty Counsel have proven to be unreliable sources insofar as Davis’s international appeal is concerned. So until the Vatican weighs in, it’s probably best to take the entire account with a full shaker of salt.

Pope Francis. Philip Chidell / Shutterstock.com

That said, there are plenty of reasons to believe that the meeting did happen. For one thing, we already know that Francis gave Davis’s stand against the government’s requirement that she do her job a full-throated endorsement as he was leaving the country. Second, Francis had a very public meeting with the Little Sisters of the Poor, the group of nuns at the center of the legal battle over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate fix in a case that’s about as one-sided as Kim Davis’s. And, finally, this is a big claim to have made up. It’s one thing to appropriate a picture from a prayer rally that wasn’t praying for what you said it was for; it’s another thing entirely to claim you met with the Vicar of Christ on Earth and dare him to call you a liar. That’s probably a bit too bold, even for Kim Davis and Liberty Counsel.

So let’s grant that the meeting happened. Why is everyone freaking out about it?

Again, we already know how the Vatican feels about LGBT people. We already know how Pope Francis feels about religion’s relationship with secular liberal democracy. We already know that he didn’t have any problem holding politically-charged meetings with self-professed religious activists while he was in the United States. And we already know that when he was asked about Kim Davis’s situation, he took her side.

Why should the maybe-fact that he told her so in person change how I feel about either of them?

If anything, all this means is that the Pope took fifteen minutes out of his historically busy schedule to grant an audience — something that for many Catholics would be the experience of a lifetime — to the most newsworthy (and non-Catholic!) anti-gay crusader in the United States. In secret, because he knew it would look bad.

So shame on Pope Francis, but keep in mind that going out of his way to stick up for anti-gay religious activists doesn’t make him a bad pope.

It makes him Pope.

UPDATE: The Vatican has confirmed that the meeting did take place.

Chaffetz was particularly interested in getting Richards’s take on a chart that used data he claimed to have pulled straight from Planned Parenthood’s corporate records, purporting to show that between 2006 and 2013, Planned Parenthood’s abortion services overtook its non-abortive services as a share of their overall care, undercutting their claim that the majority of the work they do is for medical services that have nothing to do with abortion.

From a distance it looks pretty damning. That is, if you have no idea how charts work:

This @AUL chart was just projected on-screen by @jasoninthehouse in #PPAccountability hearing http://t.co/Nc6W57HDKp pic.twitter.com/DIh31T9I76

— Bound4LIFE (@Bound4LIFE) September 29, 2015

See that? Pink arrow going down BAD. Red arrow going up WORSE. This is apparently what counts as data in the anti-abortion movement. The chart, put together by Americans United for Life, lacks basic features that one expects in a chart. Like a Y-axis, which would help clear up the fact that 935,573 is in fact a much larger number than 327,000.

In an effort to clean up this affront to everything you learned in middle school math, Vox’s Timothy Lee and Javier Zarracina retooled the AUL’s chart to make it fit its own numbers. Here’s what the original chart should have looked like:

But that’s not all. If one assumes that abortions and cancer screenings are all that Planned Parenthood does, even this chart makes it look like Planned Parenthood is performing more abortions as a share of the overall number of patients it sees. But if one adds in STD/STI testing and treatment, along with contraceptive services, that claim goes out the window, too:

Notice how that Y-axis keeps extending upward? Those things are pretty useful when measuring dependent variables (and since it’s apparently safe to assume that AUL doesn’t know what a dependent variable is, in this case it’s the volume of yearly abortive and non-abortive procedures as a function of time).

Taken together, Planned Parenthood performed nearly identical numbers of non-abortive procedures like cancer screenings and STD treatments in 2013 as they did in 2006 — 10.26 million and 10.29 million, respectively — while performing only slightly more abortions. In other words, their ratio of abortive to non-abortive care hasn’t changed in any significant way.

But none of that matters to Representative Chaffetz. This push to defund Planned Parenthood was started on a lie, so why not keep it going on lies?

As long as the fundraising dollars keep pouring in, who cares if the broader public thinks your lies are a big waste of time?

As opposed to all of those black Democrats, who did see race…the wrong way.

This kind of racial subtext was baked into Reverend Jackson’s campaign. He built his state profile by campaigning hard against the social safety net and abortion, which he wove into the increasingly-familiar narrative asserting that the “Democrat Party” has been using the tools of government to oppress black people — not through the police state, the War on Drugs and the denial of access to housing and the ballot, but rather through welfare dependency and outright genocide. It’s an ugly trick, but it’s a neat one if you want to convince a big group of pasty-white Republicans that they aren’t racist.

Fast forward to 2015, and you see Ben Carson is doing the same thing. He just doesn’t yell into the camera as loudly as Jackson did.

Asked about Richard Petty’s description of the summer’s debate over the Confederate flag as a “passing fancy” while appearing with the former NASCAR star in North Carolina yesterday, Carson compared the flag to the Swastika…by downplaying the significance of both.

From TalkingPointsMemo:

“Swastikas are a symbol of hate for some people, too. And yet they still exist in museums and places like that,” Carson said, describing the decision about flying the flag “a local issue.” ”If it’s a majority of people in that area who want it to fly, I certainly wouldn’t take it down.”

Carson wasn’t asked the followup question as to whether he would be fine with a community’s decision so fly the Nazi flag if a majority of that community’s residents wanted to.

Either way, the signal there is clear: To the white Republican worried about “heritage” and “states’ rights,” Ben Carson “doesn’t see race.”

Just ask this one maybe-Carson supporter (again from TPM, emphasis added):

Ben Carson, via Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons

Julie Lopp, whose family owns Lexington Barbecue, where Carson and his team stopped for lunch Monday, said Trump is “a little bit too extreme.”

She said she was still learning about Carson, but would likely support him or former technology executive Carly Fiorina in the Republican primary. “I just think he’s honest,” she said of Carson.

She also suggested there were white southerners who probably wouldn’t support Carson because of his race.

“As much as people try to sound like they don’t care, some people think a black president will look out for the black lifestyle,” said Lopp, who worked in Lexington Barbecue for the last 36 years, adding that women like Fiorina would likely face discrimination from some voters as well.

Lopp is presumably unaware of just how abundantly racist her insistence that she isn’t a racist is. She might as well have said, “Not voting for Carson because he’s black? You silly racist. Don’t you know that he doesn’t see race? He won’t just look out for his kind; he’ll be the president for you and me everybody! Not like Barack Hussein Obama, no sir.” If you’re parrying your friends’ concerns about your candidate by telling them not to worry because he’s “one of the good ones,” it’s time to pause and reflect.

But this is exactly the frame Carson is setting by railing against “dependency” while warning that “One of the reasons you find most [Planned Parenthood] clinics in black neighborhoods is so you can find a way to control that population.” Coupled with his “I’m okay if you’re okay” stance on the Confederate flag, it appears that a large part of Carson’s appeal is his subtle reassurances to Republicans that all of their racial talking points aren’t actually that racist.

Unless we’re talking about Muslims. Then a bit of overt bigotry is totally fine:

Just minutes ago Ben Carson sent this email raising money off of his anti-Muslim views. Let me offer one retort… pic.twitter.com/RZx7LOodip

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) September 29, 2015

Want proof? Just look at this massive prayer rally in Peru:

The picture in the video was circulated by Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber a day earlier:

Christians in Peru had a prayer rally for #KimDavis & American Christians. over 100K showed up. Amazing! #ImWithKim pic.twitter.com/RhGVTEec3B

— Matt Barber (@jmattbarber) September 25, 2015

That’s right: Peruvian Christians heart Kim Davis and other persecuted American Christians so much that 100,000 people in Lima (population: just over 8 million) turned out to pray for her in a massive soccer stadium.

Or not.

It didn’t take too long for the claim to unravel. Thanks to work from Twitter user @DCHomos and ThinkProgress’s Zack Ford, the picture was identified as being from a prayer rally held in May 2014 by the pentecostal Movimiento Misionero Mundial (Worldwide Missionary Movement):

One would think that this is the part in the story where Liberty Counsel admits their mistake, apologizes and moves on. One would be wrong. In response to Ford’s post, Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber spent the better part of yesterday insisting that the photo was real, and that Peruvians really were cuckoo for Kim Davis.

As he wrote in a now-deleted press release (screenshotted for posterity here and quoted on Matt Barber’s website here):

Julio Rosas, a member of the Peruvian Congress, met personally with Mat Staver and Kim Davis the day prior to the award, explained the prayer meeting, and presented the photograph. Congressman Rosas was involved in announcing the prayer gathering. This past Saturday Congressman Rosas again confirmed the event, and this morning he again reaffirmed the prayer meeting.

…

While meetings of 70,000 to 100,000 Christians in a soccer stadium may shock people in the United States, they are much more common in Peru. Oftentimes such gatherings do not appear on traditional media any more than the weekly church services in the United States appear on television.

Not only did people gather to pray in Peru on September 13, but Liberty Counsel has received reports of churches in other parts of the world gathering to pray for Kim Davis.

Later yesterday evening, faced with the original picture from the 2014 MMM rally, Barber was forced to back off these claims (slightly) and apologize.

Which leads one to ask the somewhat rhetorical question of why Liberty Counsel felt the need to lie about Kim Davis’s international acclaim in the first place.

The first reason is obvious: money. Liberty Counsel has been taking Kim Davis, and the rest of the religious right, for a massive ride. Their defense of her has much more to do with their public profile than it does with minimizing their client’s legal damage (a strategy of theirs that is far from unique to Kim Davis’s case). If they can convince whoever will listen that their client has become an international symbol of conscientious objection in the name of Christ, they’re all but guaranteed to represent the next minister of God public official who insists on breaking the law. They’ll lose all of their cases, but that will only feed the persecution complex that their soon-to-be clients hold.

Second, that persecution complex. Kim Davis’s entire rationale for why she she should have the privilege of ignoring the laws she is sworn to uphold while Muslims in her position shouldn’t is because Christianity is special. Or, rather, because when the Founders said “religious freedom,” what they meant was the freedom to practice Christianity in any way you see fit. Other beliefs, especially a lack of religious belief, come secondary. The religious right in America are making every attempt to cling to this privilege, and a great way to do that is to convince yourselves that your privilege isn’t a privilege at all. Instead, they see it as a right that’s being taken away unjustly, constituting a relegation to second-class citizenship that must be undone at all costs.

But even if that were the case — even if Christians really were being persecuted as second-class citizens in America — the idea of over a hundred thousand people in a foreign country filling a soccer stadium for one particular Christian is still all kinds of unbelievable. Seriously, why did Liberty Counsel expect even their own audience to take that claim at face value?

In order to fill that credulity gap, one must take stock of the religious right’s anglocentrism. While American Christians are certainly not ignorant of Christian persecution abroad (which is a very real thing in countries where Christians are a religious minority), you don’t see Americans holding rallies with six-figure attendance over the actual crimes being committed against their fellow faithful around the world. They’ll donate a lot of money to prevent more believers from being executed by the Islamic State, but you don’t see them renting out the Georgia Dome to hold a rally in the name of those who already have been.

On the flip side, it appears to be entirely believable for those who attended the Values Voter Summit that Kim Davis is so special, that her cause is so pure and godly, that it inspired a soccer stadium full of Peruvians to rise up for this one American Christian who turned a mild annoyance into a stint in jail. This kind of activism in the name of one foreign compadre over this minor of a grievance wouldn’t cross the mind of an American Christian, yet it was obvious to the attendees at the Values Voter Summit that they could expect this kind of support in their name from abroad.

That’s a particularly American arrogance that deserves to be called out as forcefully as the lie it spawned.

That means no debt ceiling increase and no funding the government until Obama lets them make health insurance reform and Planned Parenthood disappear.

So at some point down the road, we’re going to have another showdown. That is, unless Alan Grayson has anything to say about it.

Grayson has introduced a bill, the Shut Down the Shutdowns Act, that would continue to fund federal agencies at existing levels until a new budget is passed. This would make it impossible to hold the government’s funding hostage in order to extract political concessions, avoiding situations like the one that was developing over Planned Parenthood. For instance, we wouldn’t have to worry about medical research being held up over one sixtieth of one percent of the federal budget (the share Planned Parenthood’s reimbursements constitute).

Alan Grayson (photo by LDL766)

And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that Congress is designed to avoid difficult decisions, and that the application of pressure — such as deadlines for funding federal agencies — is often the only way to bring them to the negotiating table, the way such deadlines have been used as leverage during the Obama presidency have been unprecedented and irresponsible. There are good reasons to leverage a deadline into a compromise; a lie about a doctored sting video isn’t one of them.

What’s more, the political climate that fostered compromise legislation is gone, and there’s no reason to believe we’ll be getting it back anytime soon. As the partisan realignment has concluded, with the South becoming solidly Republican and the parties becoming more ideologically coherent, both (although to a far greater extent Republicans) are behaving as parties do in a parliamentary system, voting as a bloc. There simply aren’t that many Blue Dog Democrats or New England Republicans left to forge compromises, leaving the parties more polarized than at any time since the Civil War.

This being the case, maybe it’s time we modified our expectation of Congress and got them out of the government’s way.

It bore zero relationship to how businesses, let alone governments, are run. That’s what made it great TV.

But here’s the thing: For all too many Americans, the job of being president is imagined to be a lot like the job of managing people on The Apprentice. As far as they’re concerned, the president sits in a room, barks orders and fires people when things go wrong — because it’s always someone else’s fault.

And who better for that job than the person who practically trademarked the phrase, “You’re fired”?

A post-debate poll conducted by AMG, a media research group, found that while Donald Trump’s favorability is relatively split among Republicans who didn’t watch The Apprentice, he has a net +35 favorability rating among Republicans who did. In other words, Much of Trump’s appeal is coming from viewers who thought his reality TV persona was, well, reality.

Source: AMG / CNN

38 percent of Apprentice viewers said they were voting for Trump. Only 21 percent of non-Apprentice viewers said the same — only giving Trump a one point lead over Jeb Bush in that group.

As David Axelrod wrote in reaction to the poll findings, “I once thought The Donald might be running for president to boost his brand and his TV ratings. Looking at these numbers, it appears as if it’s the other way around.”

To be clear, for people who gravitate toward reality TV, Donald Trump is the perfect candidate. As Seth Grossman, a reality TV show producer, wrote in The New York Times over the weekend:

Donald Trump, via Gage Skidmore / Flickr

I’ve been working in reality television for 10 years, and I can tell you that Mr. Trump is exactly what we look for in our casting process. He’s uncomplicated and authentic: You can understand his entire personality from a 15-second sound bite. His brand is blunt self-promotion. His buildings are big and gold, shouting TRUMP in all caps. The Donald has absolute confidence even in his most wrongheaded opinions, and doubles down on every mistake, comfortable in the assurance that his wealth provides evidence for his intelligence. He doesn’t need to be good at his job — if he fails, he creates chaos, and chaos makes good TV.

…

Donald Trump is the presidential candidate that reality TV made. An electorate trained in voting contestants on and off shows like “American Idol” wants to keep him around because he makes things interesting. Instead of any plausible policy stance, Mr. Trump has built his campaign around an entertaining TV persona.

In the context of AMG’s poll results, Grossman’s analysis seems all too real.

The finding isn’t wholly unexpected. We’ve known for a while that Mars used to have water. There’s even a not-too-absurd theory that life on Earth was “seeded” from earlier life on Mars. NASA’s announcement simply confirmed that, while the planet is now almost entirely barren, some water remains.

But don’t tell that to Rush Limbaugh.

As he advised his audience:

They’re just making up the amount of ice in the North and South Poles, they’re making up the temperatures, they’re lying and making up false charts and so forth. So what’s to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?

And why not be skeptical? It’s not as if NASA hasn’t explained how they found the water using, you know, science. From CNN:

Rush Limbaugh, via DonkeyHotey / Flickr

NASA researchers using an imager aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter confirmed the watery flows by looking at light waves returned from seasonal dark streaks on the surface, long suspected to be associated with liquid water.

The investigation showed the streaks absorb light at specific wavelengths associated with chemicals known to pull water from the Martian atmosphere in a process known as deliquescence, said Georgia Tech doctoral student Lujendra Ojha, who first discovered the streaks while still an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona in 2011.

Light waves? Chemicals? Atmosphere? Deliquescence? Those are just words. Rush Limbaugh deals in cold hard facts. And there is no fact colder and harder than NASA being a bunch of liberal stooges who just want to get their hands on more liberal government monies for all of their spooky, scary liberal projects.

Gosh, when will we just WAKE UP, people?

Lance Sanderson, a student at Christian Brothers High School who was previously prohibited from bringing a male date to their homecoming dance, arrived at school this morning to find out that he had been suspended for the week.

He hadn’t broken any rules — when CBHS told him he couldn’t bring his date to homecoming, he complied, instead opting to skip the dance altogether. Instead, the school suspended him simply because they didn’t want him around. In part because of all the bad press they’d been getting after not letting him bring his date to the dance.

As Sanderson wrote in a letter to his school’s administration:

Lance Sanderson, via Twitter

Today I arrived at school around 6:30am. I sat down to complete my assignments for the classes I planned on attending today. At 7:30am, I was speaking to a teacher when an administrator walked into the room and told me to gather my books and come to the office.

When I arrived at the office I was told that the administration “had 890 other students to worry about” and could not deal with me. I was told to go home for the week. I said goodbye to a few teachers and students, then drove home.

As Sanderson said in a conversation with New Now Next:

I am disappointed that I am unable to sit in class today. While many assignments can be reached online, I was going to take two tests today and an in class timed essay. Tomorrow at CBHS, I was going to meet with admissions representatives from around the country (they do not visit often). I hope to be welcomed back into a classroom setting soon.

Not only has Sanderson not broken any rules, let alone any that would warrant a weeklong suspension, CBHS has likely violated its own Code of Conduct, which clearly states that (emphasis added), “All CBHS students should feel safe, secure and accepted regardless of color, race, background, appearance, popularity, athletic ability, intelligence, personality, sexual orientation, religion or nationality.”

Additionally, discriminatory behavior is listed as the first item in its Student Handbook’s list of behaviors that violate the “spirit of charity and fraternity” it takes pride in cultivating:

CBHS considers the following to be serious failures in that spirit of charity and fraternity:

1. Any words to or about another student’s past, present or future that can be taken as discriminatory or hurtful

It appears that one of three things must be true: Either CBHS’s administration didn’t read the Code of Conduct they expect students to abide by, they disagree with it or they feel it doesn’t apply to them. After all, it’s easy to say you don’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation as long as you don’t think you’ll ever have to follow through on that declaration.

As CBHS is a private high school, there probably isn’t much Sanderson can do in order to undo the suspension. If they want to arbitrarily decide that a gay student should be sent home for exposing a tension between their bigotry and their self-professed acceptance, that’s their prerogative.

But they should welcome the bad press they get as a result.

While Bush has maintained that he’s playing the long game, racking up as much money as he can in an effort to outlast his opponents instead of outcompeting them, Bush’s large donor network is getting antsy. And with a number of other viable establishment options available who seem primed for a stronger general election showing against Hillary Clinton — from John Kasich to Marco Rubio — they’re seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick around.

From the Washington Post:

Bush “needs to get his favorables up,” said a senior GOP bundler who is backing him and requested anonymity to speak candidly.

“People are looking at the stage and saying: ‘Jeb and Marco? I’m going with the new,’ ” said a top party fundraiser not aligned with a campaign. “You’re seeing people really gravitate to [Rubio] and saying, ‘Okay, we’ll buck the Bush machine.’

“What I hear everywhere when you say Jeb’s name is, ‘If you want to lose the general election, nominate Jeb,’ ” the fundraiser added.

No help to Bush is the fact that he is faced with dual problems that require mutually exclusive solutions. In order to keep his donors from flocking to Rubio or Kasich, he needs remain the most viable general election candidate in the Republican field, which he does by (in perfectly circular strategy) continuing to raise astronomical sums of money through both his campaign and super PAC. But in order to keep those donors around, he has to start saying increasingly disqualifying things for the general election, from his embrace of the term “anchor baby” to his promise to phase out Medicare to his assertion last week that black voters have flocked to the Democratic Party over the promise of “free stuff.”

Jeb Bush, via Gage Skidmore / Flickr

And from the outside looking in as a non-donor, every time Jeb haltingly, uncomfortably lurches to the right it undermines his own case for the presidency. Gone is the candidate who insisted that Republicans like him had to be willing to lose the primary in order to win the general, perhaps because he realized that that isn’t how how nominating processes work.

Believe it or not, you do have to win the primary in order to win the general. And the Republican primary electorate has very little interest in a candidate like Bush — the son and brother of presidents who patronizes about entitlement culture; the husband of a Latina immigrant who is Very Concerned about anchor babies; the “populist” who want to cut his own taxes; the compassionate conservative who rigged an election.

From the moment Jeb Bush began thinking about putting together a presidential campaign, it’s been clear that he has bought in slightly too heavily to the idea that money equals electoral success. While that correlation is there, and it’s strong, it’s imperfect. If your primary goal is raising as much money as humanly possible, then it isn’t winning as many votes as humanly possible. As obvious as that sounds, the concept appears to have been lost on Jeb Bush.

And it may be too late for him to find it.