After Democrats won the White House in 2012 despite enormous amounts of spending by conservatives, the Koch brothers commissioned a study. It concluded that their efforts had been hampered “by the widespread perception that conservatives don’t care about the plight of regular folks struggling to make ends meet ? let alone the underprivileged.”

Where would people get that idea? In any case, apparently the Kochs became obsessed with the “empathy gap,” a poll result showing that Mitt Romney did abysmally on the question of whether he “cares about people like me.” So they launched the Well-Being Initiative:

The outreach includes everything from turkey giveaways, GED training and English-language instruction for Hispanic immigrants to community holiday meals and healthy living classes for predominantly African American groups to vocational training and couponing classes for the under-employed. The strategy, according to sources familiar with it and documents reviewed by POLITICO, calls for presenting a more compassionate side of the brothers’ politics to new audiences, while fighting the perception that their groups are merely fronts for rich Republicans seeking to game the political process for personal gain.

So how’s it going?

And one former network executive said, “There are a lot of high-up lieutenants who roll their eyes when they talk about this and question whether it’s getting any bang for the buck. How does teaching people how to clip coupons or giving them free turkeys translate into convincing them that conservatives or Republicans have the best interests of the disadvantaged at heart? Is this really changing people’s minds or are they just showing up for the free turkeys?”

Well, at least the poor are getting some free turkeys out of it. And I suppose that showing up for some food and having to listen to a short lecture on free enterprise is no worse than having to listen to a short sermon.

But is it changing perceptions that the Kochs are basically just a front for rich Republicans seeking to game the political process for personal gain? Nah. A free turkey only goes so far, after all.

Don’t worry: catblogging isn’t being ditched today. But first, I’m going to make you read about our year-end fundraising pitch. Why? Because Monika and Clara have written a piece that breaks down our entire operation in chart form. Be still my heart! As you can see, two-thirds of our operating budget comes from readers:

From our beginning almost 40 years ago, we have made a bet that you would support a newsroom that tells the stories no one else will. And you did. Today, two-thirds of our annual budget comes from readers; some 40,000 of you contribute, more than at any other nonprofit news organization outside public radio and TV.

….Some of you—about 175,000, to be exact—subscribe to our magazine. Another 12,000 folks buy individual issues on the newsstand. About 10 percent of our subscribers also become donors—they tack on an extra $20, $50, or even (hooray!) a five- or six-figure gift. Then there are donations in response to specific appeals: For example, about 6,000 people have pitched in online to help us fight the billionaire who sued us for covering his political giving and anti-gay activism. What’s critical for the long haul is that our base is broad and deep enough to ensure that we’re not dependent on any single check or revenue stream.

Click the link if you want all the gory details of how we operate. Or, if you’re one of the brainy ones and you already get it, just click the button below:

And now for catblogging. Because you guys deserve it. This week is a classic: a cat in a box. Lots of Christmas stuff comes in boxes, and that means the house is full of cat toys this time of year. And cat chew toys, since Hopper likes to gnaw boxes to shreds. She’s no pussycat about it, either. (Wait. Am I allowed to say that?) I tell you, she goes after boxes with a will. Every time she bites off a piece, she spits it out and makes a yucky face, but it doesn’t stop her. She may not like the taste, but she really likes to shred cardboard. She also likes to stick her furry little snout into the camera, which gives you a picture like this—taken early in the week when the box was still relatively intact.

During Wednesday’s oral arguments in the University of Texas affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia said this:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.

As many people have pointed out, what Scalia was haltingly trying to describe is “mismatch theory.” I’ll let a conservative explain this:

The argument is that students who are (1) not up to a college’s usual admissions standards and (2) nonetheless admitted for reasons wholly unrelated to their academic backgrounds are less likely to have good educational outcomes than if they had gone to a college for which they were more properly prepared and qualified. It’s not a new argument.

No indeed. In fact, several amicus briefs were filed making exactly this argument.

When I first read about Scalia’s remarks, I wasn’t surprised that he had brought this up. There’s considerable debate about mismatch theory, but it’s a respectable argument. What I was surprised about is the way he brought it up. Scalia had read the briefs. He has a famously keen mind. And yet, he sputtered and searched for words, and eventually described mismatch theory in the crudest, most insulting way possible.

I don’t think that was deliberate. I think he was just having trouble searching his brain for the right words. He’s also seems even more prone to outbursts of temper than usual lately. I wonder if Scalia is still as sharp as he used to be?

A Guardian headline today blares: “Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users.” Interesting! But you sure have to read a long way into the story to figure out what the real problem is. Is it the fact that Cambridge Analytica—the firm Cruz is using—compiled “psychographic profiles” of Facebook users? Nah. Call it what you will, but that’s practically old hat these days. Is it that fact that Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, founder of CA’s parent, paid users of Mechanical Turk a dollar to fill out a questionnaire and turn over their Facebook profiles? No again. If people want to sell their profiles for a dollar, they can do it. So what’s the problem?

Crucially, Kogan also captured the same data for each person’s unwitting friends. For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends, meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size. Research shows that in 2014, Facebook users had an average of around 340 friends.

….By summer 2014, Kogan’s company had created an expansive and powerful dataset. His business partner boasted on LinkedIn that their private outfit, Global Science Research (GSR), “owns a massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States — for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles”.

Consumer research firms do this kind of stuff routinely, so there’s not really any big news here. And if there’s anyone at fault, it’s our old friend Facebook. Once again, they’re allowing people to take advantage of the fact that Facebook’s default settings open users up to this kind of harvesting. Very few people ever bother to change their defaults, and Facebook knows it.

As for Cruz, there are plenty of places to get information like this. I don’t know if CA is one of the best or not. But every serious campaign does this kind of microtargeting. As Cruz explained last month, he’s a big admirer of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy—which just goes to show that there’s at least one thing that Cruz and Obama agree about.

Bottom line: I don’t think Cruz really did anything wrong here. Facebook probably did. Big surprise.

I’ve got a nasty cold, which is why blogging started a bit late today. It might also explain why I haven’t found anything good to blog about since I finally rolled out of bed. Alternatively, maybe I’m just suffering from Trump fatigue. (Is he a fascist? Let’s ask ten top experts!)

Instead, I present to you a Wonkblog chart that every man reading this blog will immediately appreciate. I’m pretty sure no comment is necessary. This is just my way of telling you that I’m alive and (sort of) well.

BloombergBusiness reports on the Russian mission in Syria:

Many senior officials in Moscow underestimated how long the operation in support of Bashar al-Assad would take when Putin entered Syria’s civil war on Sept. 30 and no longer talk in terms of just a few months, with one saying the hope now is that it won’t last several years.

With the mission in its third month, Putin is pouring materiel and manpower into Syria at a pace unanticipated by lawmakers already struggling to meet his spending goals….“This operation will last a year at a minimum,” said Frants Klintsevich, deputy head of the Defense Committee in the upper house of parliament. “I was expecting more from Syria’s army.”

….While Syrian forces backed by Russian firepower have had some successes, such as breaking Islamic State’s two-year siege of a strategic air base near Aleppo, Putin is only now starting to realize that he can’t defeat the group through air power alone, said Anton Lavrov, a Russian military analyst….Russia now has as many as 5,000 servicemen on the ground, more than double the original estimate of 2,000, according to RUSI researcher Igor Sutyagin. While Putin continues to rule out a land offensive, hundreds of advisers are already embedded with the Syrian army, he said.

I suppose I should be immune to this kind of thing by now, but did Putin seriously think he’d wipe out ISIS and the Syrian opposition in a few months? It’s not as if Russia doesn’t have plenty of recent experience with long quagmire-ish campaigns—in Afghanistan in the 80s, in Tajikistan in the 90s, and against Chechen rebels in both the 90s and aughts. After the United States spent over a decade in Afghanistan and Iraq without winning a decisive victory, did Putin really think that Syria would be just a bit of military muscle stretching, like South Ossetia?

Beats me. And I love Klintsevich’s comment: he was “expecting more” from Syria’s army. Join the club. For more than a decade we’ve been expecting more from the Iraqi army and the Afghani army and every other army in the Middle East. Oddly enough, they’re all poorly trained and riven with sectarian tension. Who could have predicted the same would be true in Syria?

Blowhards are the same the world over, I guess. Always convinced that their wars will be short and victorious, and never willing to listen to anyone else. They just don’t learn.

Hmmm:

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said Thursday he would sign an executive order directing state authorities to deny the purchase of firearms to people on federal watch lists.

….Mr. Malloy agreed there can be mix-ups on those lists and said there will be “an appropriate appeal process” but he “would rather the appeal be after a denial” rather than before a firearm has been issued.

For a while, this business of people on watch lists still being allowed to buy guns was just a political football and I ignored it. Like most of these things, I figured a bunch of hot air would be expended and then we’d move on to a new shiny toy when we got bored.

But now it’s turning real, and that makes it harder to ignore. It doesn’t matter if you like the fact that the US Constitution and the Supreme Court have granted us all a right to own and carry firearms. They have. It’s a right. And it shouldn’t be taken away without due process.

But federal watch lists are practically the opposite of due process. They’re famously arbitrary and secret. Some agent somewhere decides you sound dangerous, and suddenly you can’t fly on airplanes anymore. As for an “appropriate appeal process,” a judge ordered the government last year to tell people if they were on the no-fly list and, if possible, why. But they’re still not doing it. Let’s listen in on US Attorney Brigham Bowen back in court yesterday:

Bowen argued that the government had no obligation to tell people why they were placed on the list.

“Government is not required in name of due process to put its national security at risk,” he said. “The plaintiffs’ interest must necessarily give way.”….The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which operates the list, won’t reveal the evidence against those on the list, allow them to question witnesses or challenge the findings in court.

This is disgraceful. Hold a secret hearing if you must. Maybe it will turn out that 99 percent of the folks on the no-fly list deserve to be there. But this can’t just be a black hole that people are dropped into and can never get out of. There needs to be some sort of due process, even if it’s not a full-blown trial.

In any case, it’s bad enough that we strip people of their right to fly using a system that’s well known to be arbitrary, secret, and basically unappealable. It’s appalling to take this atrocity a step further and strip them of constitutional rights based on the same system. It’s time for this nonsense to stop.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent has more here. Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson is leading the charge to implement this on the federal level. Thompson seems to think that an appeals process will make this all hunky dory. And I suppose it might, if the appeals process were speedy and fair. But it’s rather plainly not.

Today brings a new IOP poll of 18-29 year-olds. So what’s on the minds of our nation’s youth?

Well, among Democrats they prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. Among Republicans, they like Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Young whites like the idea of building Trump’s wall. Young Hispanics don’t. A disheartening 60 percent now support sending American ground troops to fight ISIS. And about two-thirds of Republicans think the American Dream is still alive for them.

Except for one subset of Republican voters: Trump supporters. This is who Trump appeals to: voters who think they’ve been screwed by the system and no longer have much faith in it. Maybe it’s because the Mexicans are taking away their jobs or because the fat cats are scooping it all up. But one way or another, they’ve lost faith in a better life and they think maybe Trump can give it back to them. For a sample of this, check out today’s LA Times story about Bruce Goacher, a Trump supporter from a decaying part of Davenport, Iowa:

On Saturday, Goacher shook the candidate’s hand at a Davenport campaign rally. He noticed the smooth texture of Trump’s palm. “He didn’t have to work as hard as I did with my callused hands,” said Goacher, 56. “If a man can become a billionaire without having to work that hard for it, he’s evidently a pretty smart man, money-wise, and the United States has to be run as a business.”

….As for Trump’s agenda, Goacher likes it all, starting with immigration…. Goacher mentioned a local company that charges “8, 10 grand” to replace a roof. “OK, there’s a boatload of Mexicans come by, and you can get it done for 2 or 3 grand. They’re not from here. That’s hurting the businessperson that’s here.”

….Goacher sees some of himself in the former star of “The Apprentice.” When repossessing a car, it’s best to dodge contact with the owner, Goacher explained. But when it’s unavoidable, the ability to size people up quickly is essential. “It’s either that or get screwed,” he said. “I can look at somebody, in 30 seconds of talking to them, I can tell you whether they’re a con … or they’re a pretty decent person.” Trump, he said, uses a similar talent on a grander scale. “He thinks a lot like me.”

It’s hard to parse this. Goacher thinks Trump is smart because he made a lot money without doing any manual labor. He doesn’t like cheap Mexican workers. And he somehow thinks that Trump is “a lot like me” because he can size people up quickly.

I don’t know if boatloads of Mexicans are putting up cheap roofing in Davenport, but the idea that Trump is especially smart or especially savvy is kind of nuts. Donald Trump thinks Donald Trump is smart and savvy, and he certainly says it often enough. His record, however, suggests just the opposite: he inherited a lot of money and has done a pretty average job of managing it. He knows how to needle people effectively, but otherwise his people skills seem pretty undistinguished. And his construction business is nothing special.

But he does have a big mouth. If you think the political system has failed you, I guess that’s enough.

Remember the American SAFE Act? It’s the bill that would have done … something … about tightening up the flow of refugees from Syria to the US. Exactly what it would do was never entirely clear, but it had its 15 minutes of fame when the House passed it last month. At the time, I was unsure it was anything more than a feint to make it look like Republicans were doing something, and suggested that the Senate would ignore it until refugee hysteria had died down and they could quietly kill it.

Yesterday I got curious: how’s it doing? I tried a Google search, but that brought up nothing. Finally I just went to congress.gov to see where it was in the legislative sausage machine. On the day it passed the House, this happened:

Received in the Senate. Read the first time. Deemed read the second time, pursuant to the order of November 19, 2015. Placed on Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders. Calendar No. 300.

And that’s it. It apparently hasn’t been assigned to a committee. It hasn’t been scheduled for a vote. Not a single thing has happened. If there’s a hold on the bill, I can’t find it. It appears that it’s just being ignored in hopes that by January nobody will care anymore. That may or may not turn out to be a good bet. We’ll see.

Last night, as I was mass-deleting email, I noticed a message from some conservative group touting NEW! Benghazi information that proved something or other. I almost thought about reading it, but why bother? My finger continued clicking the delete key and it was soon history.

Today, though, I see that it was apparently based on yet another bombshell from Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.

….Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

….“The Obama administration and Clinton officials hid this compelling Benghazi email for years,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The email makes readily apparent that the military was prepared to launch immediate assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA Annex. The fact that the Obama Administration withheld this email for so long only worsens the scandal of Benghazi.”

The copy of the email that Judicial Watch received was redacted, so perhaps their excitement is understandable. But here’s the whole email:

Yep: just the same old stuff. There were forces in Croatia and Spain that could have responded, but it would have taken hours to get them to Libya. In the end, there was no hope that they could respond in time, so they weren’t mobilized. This is exactly what Panetta and every other Obama official have been saying for the past three years.

Repeat after me: There is no Benghazi scandal. There may have been mistakes, but nothing nefarious or negligent.