I feel guilty. The New York Times is running a marathon look at arbitration and other forms of private justice, and I haven’t highlighted any of it even though it’s long been one of my pet issues. Big corporations increasingly insist on private arbitration if customers have complaints, and this is happening at the same time the Supreme Court is making it harder and harder to file class-action suits. The upshot is that big corporations can still sue each other (you can bet they don’t accept arbitration clauses when they sign deals) and ordinary people can sue other ordinary people. But when it comes to ordinary people suing big corporations, good luck. Increasingly, you can’t sue them yourself, and law firms can’t initiate class actions. Your only option is to go before an arbitrator who depends for her living on getting lots of corporate business. Good luck getting a fair hearing.

Today brings Part 3 of the series, and it’s all about the creeping imposition of sharia law in arbitration hearings. No, wait. That’s not it:

For generations, religious tribunals have been used in the United States to settle family disputes and spiritual debates. But through arbitration, religion is being used to sort out secular problems like claims of financial fraud and wrongful death.

Customers who buy bamboo floors from Higuera Hardwoods in Washington State must take any dispute before a Christian arbitrator, according to the company’s website. Carolina Cabin Rentals, which rents high-end vacation properties in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, tells its customers that disputes may be resolved according to biblical principles. The same goes for contestants in a fishing tournament in Hawaii.

….Pamela Prescott battled for years to prove that she had been unjustly fired from a private school in Louisiana. The crux of her case — which wound through arbitration, a federal appeals court and state court — was references in her employment contract to verses from the Bible.

The Prescott case is sort of amusing. Prescott partially won her complaint based on the arbitrator’s cite of Matthew 18:15. Here’s what happened next:

The school had required Ms. Prescott to agree to Christian arbitration as a condition of her hiring. But when Northlake lost, it appealed the arbitration award in federal court, arguing that Mr. Thomas’s ruling was inconsistent with Louisiana law.

The case dragged on for four more years. An appeals court in New Orleans ruled that it had no ground to overturn the Christian arbitrator. Northlake appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.

In other words, religion for thee, but not for me.

Anyway, I guess this is just a typical liberal media cover-up, since we all know the real problem is Muslims and sharia law. But that was too hot for the Times to handle, so instead they’re pretending that Christians do the same thing. It’s no wonder so many people turn to Fox for the real story these days.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll suggests that Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi committee was pretty successful. More people are satisfied about her account of Benghazi. More people think the continuing investigation is unfair. And more people think her email server is not an important issue.

The changes aren’t huge, and I imagine there’s a hard base of around 35 percent who will go to their graves believing that these are indisputable examples of her unfitness to serve as president. But these are mostly the same people who think Bill Clinton spent his presidency dealing dope out of Mena airport, so there’s not much chance of influencing them in the first place.

In other good news for Hillary, she leads Bernie Sanders by 62-31 percent, while a whopping 84 percent think she’s most likely to win the nomination. Apparently only about a third of Bernie’s supporters actually think he has much of a chance to win.

The whole Republican bedwetting exercise over their allegedly heinous treatment at the hands of CNBC is certainly entertaining for those of us who aren’t Republicans. But Republicans themselves are now making it even more Survivor-like by splitting into two competing tribes: Team Letter and Team Buck Up. The former is outraged at CNBC and plans to write a stern letter to future debate sponsors. The latter thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. Anyone who wants to be president probably ought to be able to handle a few tough questions from John Harwood.

Ed Kilgore goes further. He thinks Team Letter is basically one guy:

The whole debate debate is beginning to look like an effort spearheaded by the one candidate who probably has the most to lose from probing debate questions, current poll leader Ben Carson. As HuffPost’s Sam Stein reports, Team Carson would apparently prefer a “debate” made up basically of opening and closing statements.

Could be! In the long run, Carson may be the big loser from last week’s debate if this Mannatech stuff takes off. It’s in a bit of a lull right now, but my guess is that this is because a few of the big news outlets have assigned reporters to really dig into it, and it will take a couple of weeks for them to put together their pieces.

Elsewhere, Ezra Klein does what I just didn’t have the energy to do: compare the actual questions in the first four debates to see if CNBC was really “uniquely hostile.” Even Klein can only bring himself to analyze the first six questions, but here’s his conclusion:

The Fox News moderators were more aggressive in their questioning and more focused on creating conflict — but Fox News is inside the Republican Party to some degree, and its choice of targets, and its angles of attack, suggested it had the GOP’s best interests at heart. Similarly, CNN’s Republican debate was co-moderated by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, and so it was clear, again, that the tough questions were meant to strengthen the GOP, not weaken it.

As for CNN’s Democratic debate, it really was a bit softer on the candidates than the Republican debates….CNBC, by contrast, sought to focus its debate around economic policy, and so its angles of attack reflected critiques of the candidates’ plans on taxes, immigration reform, monetary policy, and more. But since the candidates’ plans on those issues tend to broadly reflect Republican thinking on those issues, the questions put CNBC in opposition to the Republican Party broadly, rather than to individual candidates narrowly.

As it happens, Ted Cruz’s critique of CNBC was precisely wrong. He lamented that the moderators weren’t asking substantive questions, when the questions, up till that point, were more substantive than those asked by any other network.

Yep. The CNBC debate had some problems, but it was about as substantive as any of the other debates. The big problem, I think, is that a focus on economic issues just begs for questions that expose the worst of the modern Republican Party. For example, at one point Trump was asked how he was going to save Social Security, and he blustered that he planned to create a “really dynamic economy.” Jeb Bush was almost plaintive in his reply: “The idea that you’re just gonna grow your way out of this — I have a plan to grow the economy at 4 percent, but you’re gonna have to make adjustments for both Medicare and Social Security.”

Bush himself started this whole thing with his absurd plan to grow the economy 4 percent per year, based on nothing in particular. But once he did that, he opened the box. Trump says he’ll grow the economy at 6 percent, and what’s Bush going to say? My absurd plan is realistic but your absurd plan is absurd? He can’t really do that, but it allows Trump to simply declare that no sacrifices at all are required because he’s going to turn the American economy into such a powerhouse. It’s frustrating for Bush (and for some of the others, notably John Kasich), but it’s the natural reductio ad absurdum of the Republican Party’s infatuation with magical economic theories.

Is it the CNBC hosts’ fault that these kinds of fissures got exposed over and over? No. It’s the fault of nonsensical plans with nothing to back them up. It would be derelict not to bring up this stuff.

This happened last Friday and I completely missed it:

Six years after legislation to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a furor over “death panels,” the Obama administration issued a final rule on Friday that authorizes Medicare to pay doctors for consultations with patients on how they would like to be cared for as they are dying.

The administration proposed the payments in July, touching off none of the rancor that first accompanied the idea during debate on the Affordable Care Act in 2009….“We received overwhelmingly positive comments about the importance of these conversations between physicians and patients,” Dr. Conway said. “We know that many patients and families want to have these discussions.”

Huh. It turns out that Republicans never really had any problem with this at all.¹ I guess that whole “death panel” thing was just a big misunderstanding. The Wall Street Journal explains what happened:

Since 2010, legislation that would allow reimbursements to physicians for advance planning discussions has gained bipartisan support….The climate has changed in part because of lobbying and education campaigns by medical groups.

Yeah, that must be it. I’m glad we got that straightened out.

¹Except for Sarah Palin, of course, who offered her familiar common-sense take: “Government needs to stay the hell out of our ‘end-of-life’ discussions,” she said in a long, um, commentary on Facebook. “I’m so angry at democrat and republican politicians who just rolled their eyes when I, and many others, rose up with warnings that each step forward taken by champions of this socialist program would jerk back two steps from every free American and our God-given rights.” Etc.

The latest on Syria:

A source close to the Russian delegation at the meeting told Asharq Al-Awsat there had been some disagreements between the Russian and Iranian delegations in Vienna regarding the fate of Assad.

“Russia is dealing with the [question of] the fate of the presidency in Syria from the point of view of the legitimacy of the regime. In that sense it is not insisting on particular people; it is more concerned that any transition in governance must follow international protocols and laws,” the source, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said.

“Iran, on the other hand, is very insistent on Assad himself . . . because it fears losing its influence in Syria if [his] regime is removed.”

Is this true? Does it matter? I don’t know. I do know that I probably don’t want the United States getting into the middle of this.

Also: if I were Assad, this might make me a wee bit nervous about my partner-in-arms, Vladimir Putin. I figure Putin is helping out Syria to (a) test his military in live combat, (b) give the United States a poke in the eye, and (c) keep things quiet along his southern border. None of those things really require Assad at the helm. If someone better comes along, that might be the end of a beautiful friendship.

From Freddie deBoer:

The anxiety that someone, somewhere is looking down their nose at your cultural consumption is the most exhausting aspect of being a consumer of art criticism today.

The topic here, oddly enough, is the demise of Grantland. Since I never read it, I have no idea if deBoer’s larger point has merit. But you can always click the link and decide for yourself.

In the previous post, I called Marco Rubio the next human piñata in the Republican primary. On Twitter I got called out for this: “I think we can all agree that describing Hispanics as ‘pinatas’ is offensive.”

Ralph Nader is mad at Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates low, so he wrote her an open letter suggesting that she sit down with her “Nobel Prize winning husband, economist George Akerlof, who is known to be consumer-sensitive.”  Jordan Weissmann called out Nader: “Yes, Ralph Nader just told the most powerful woman in the world to take more tips from her husband.”

Neither of these is a big deal. Still, it’s way past time to knock it off. “Piñata” is a common term for anyone who’s getting beat up, Hispanic or otherwise. And Nader wants Yellen to talk to Akerlof because he thinks Akerlof agrees with him, not because Akerlof is Yellen’s husband.

I wouldn’t care so much about this except that I think it does real harm to the cause of fighting racism and sexism. In bigger doses it makes us all look silly, and provides an endless series of excuses for ordinary folks to get exasperated at us and for conservatives not to take any of it seriously. We really need to stop this. If conservatives want to be offensive, at least make them work for excuses to ignore those of us who care about this stuff. We’re making it too easy for them.

The lazy gits at the major polling houses still haven’t produced any national updates since last week’s Republican debate, but today Monmouth released a poll for New Hampshire. As usual, I’m more interested in change than absolute levels, and on that score the big winner from last week was Marco Rubio. (Trump and Carson still lead, with Rubio in third.) Anyway, I assume this means that Rubio now has a big fat target painted on his back, and this means we’ll soon be treated to a brand new insult from Donald Trump. The obvious route for Trump is to mock Rubio’s inability to balance his own checkbook, but I’m hoping for something more original. Immigration is too obvious. Water bottle jokes are stale. Maybe something about disloyalty to Jeb Bush? Or maybe a tweet about Marco’s favorite business book being Dress for Success? Maybe he should suggest that Rubio is the Cersei Lannister of Republicans? Is that too esoteric? Or a great pop culture reference?

Anyway, Rubio better watch out. It’s his turn to get knifed in the back in the great scrum called the GOP primary.

Over at Vox, Christopher Faricy tells us that both Democrats and Republicans like to give away free stuff:

The main difference between the two political parties is not whether to deliver government benefits to supporters but rather who those supporters are. The Republican Party’s core socioeconomic voting groups are wealthier households and businesses, both of which benefit when social welfare is provided through the tax code rather than through explicit spending.

We are talking here of tax expenditures, that lovely oxymoron in which welfare for the rich is disguised as a tax cut. Tax expenditures include just about anything that gives people a tax break: health savings accounts, retirement accounts, the mortgage interest deduction, and so forth. These are usually pitched as ways to help the average Joe, but in fact the average Joe usually doesn’t take much advantage of them. And when the average Joe does, his tax rate is low enough that it doesn’t help much.

But high earners are a different story. About 70 percent of the benefit of all tax expenditures goes to top earners. For that reason, the chart on the right should come as no surprise: Republicans love tax expenditures, while Democrats are lukewarm about them. On average, tax expenditures have gone up about 12 percent under Republicans, but less than 5 percent under Democrats.

Bottom line: To quote Jeb Bush, the Republican message is “Get in line, and we’ll take care of you with free stuff.” But only if the free stuff goes to corporations and the wealthy.

Rainbow: zzveillust/Shutterstock; Wedding topper: Ivonne Wierink/Shutterstock; Smoke: ecco/Shutterstock; Marijuana plant: Jan Faukner/Shutterstock; Photo-illustration: James West

Now that gay marriage is legal, what’s next? We liberals need a new movement that will once again put conservatives on the wrong side of history. The LA Times reports the answer might be marijuana:

The latest sign was the full-throated call last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders to end federal prohibition. With that one move, the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination plunged into uncharted territory — and, arguably, so did the presidential race. Never before has a contender with so much to lose so unequivocally suggested that smoking a joint should be viewed the same as drinking a beer, at least in the eyes of the law.

….Hillary Rodham Clinton has told small audiences in the pot havens of Oregon and Colorado that marijuana businesses in states where it is legal need relief from federal restrictions that can make it impossible for them to operate.

Back in 2009—in a piece whose headline I still don’t get—I predicted that marijuana would be generally legal by 2019. That’s only a bit more than three years away, and so far it’s legal in only four states (Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Alaska). However, 24/7 Wall St., which rather charmingly tracks marijuana commodity prices compiled by New Leaf Data Services,¹ thinks another 11 states are getting close. And the latest Gallup poll shows that 58 percent of American favor pot legalization. That’s not quite up to the magic two-thirds level that’s often the tipping point for broad social change, but it’s close. We might get there by 2019 yet.

¹Here’s the latest: “For the week ended Friday, October 30, the spot price index for a pound of cannabis increased by $51 (2.7%) from $1,790 in the prior week to $1,839. The simple (non-volume weighted) average price for a gram increased by 22 cents to $4.58.” Futures and forward prices were also up.