Somebody help me out here. This is a genuine question, not snark.

Wayfair, the online furniture giant, has apparently been selling beds to the government for use in immigrant detention centers. Its employees are unhappy about this and they want Wayfair to stop sales to ICE or CBP or any other agency involved with keeping kids in cages. Wayfair’s management has not agreed to this, so today its employees staged a walkout.

But isn’t our whole complaint that these kids are being treated badly? Shouldn’t we want companies to sell the government toothpaste and soap and beds and so forth? What am I missing here?

In the New York Times today, Sahil Chinoy presents this chart, which compares Democrats and Republicans with political parties in western Europe and Canada. As you can see, the Republican Party is very far to the right:

The impression this leaves is that Republicans have moved to the right while Democrats have stayed close to the middle. But that’s not actually what the chart tells us. All it tells us is that America is generally more conservative than western Europe. But this has always been true. Republicans were calling Medicare “socialism” decades after nearly every country in Europe had adopted national health care.

It would be interesting to see what this chart looked like in, say, 1960 and 1990. For now, though, you can get a sense of what happened to America’s two big political parties by looking at purely American data:

As you can see, back around 1900 the parties were pretty polarized. Democrats spent the next 40 years moving to the center, but ever since the Depression they’ve become steadily more liberal. Democrats are now back to where they were in 1900.

Republicans showed a similar pattern: the party moved toward the center for 75 years, but ever since the Reagan era they’ve become steadily more conservative. By 1990 they were back to about where they were in 1900.

In other words, everything is fairly normal all the way until 1990. The two parties moved back and forth but they both ended up at about the same place: their 1900 position. The difference is all in the years since then.

It’s only since the early ’90s that the Republican Party has become so extreme. As usual, I blame this on Newt Gingrich, the man who invented modern Republican politics. It’s a politics of rage and personal destruction, and the only way to keep that up is to become ever more extreme. It hardly seems possible that this can keep up much longer, but then, we liberals have been saying that for a long time. As Keynes said in a different context, “The market can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent.” Still, it can’t stay crazy forever. At some point the rage bubble is going to break.

This mountain lion is the star of our local zoo. And such a big tongue it has. All the better to lick you with, I suppose.

Late last year, Texas federal district court judge Reed O’Connor ruled that Obamacare was unconstitutional. His reasoning was absurd: because the fine for not having insurance has been reduced to $0—for the time being—it means the individual mandate no longer exists. And since the whole law is based on that, the whole law is now unconstitutional.

Naturally, this has been appealed. But today, the 5th Circuit asked for briefs on whether anyone actually has standing to appeal:

This is an ominous sign. If neither the blue states nor the House has standing, it would mean that no one has standing to appeal the decision. That would effectively leave the lower court decision unappealable.

— Nicholas Bagley (@nicholas_bagley) June 26, 2019

This sort of thing happens too frequently, and the Supreme Court needs to say something about it. It wouldn’t have to overturn decades of jurisprudence about standing, it would just need to slightly liberalize the terms under which states and legislatures can say that they’re affected by a lower court ruling.

I mean, can you imagine what would happen if this were allowed to stand? It would bless the strategy of forum shopping to find a reliably anti-Democratic judge to invalidate Obamacare nationwide, and would then prevent any higher court from hearing an appeal. No democracy can support something like this.

In the end, even if standing were disallowed, I suppose some blue state somewhere would forum shop for its own judge, who would then hand down the opposite ruling. At that point, higher courts would have to take on the substance of the case whether they liked it or not. But it’s still no way to run a railroad.

We're number one! That is . . . we will be if SB-206 passes.Jordon Kelly/Icon SMI via ZUMA

Here’s the latest from the leaders of the resistance:

The Fair Pay to Play Act, approved by the state Senate in May, now moves to the Higher Education Committee….NCAA rules bar athletes from being compensated for use of their names, images or likenesses. While the bill would not allow schools to directly pay athletes, athletes would be able to receive compensation from outside sources — for example, from a video game company or for signing autographs or memorabilia.

If this bill passes, it wouldn’t take effect until 2023: “That provides the NCAA time to make changes to its rules and California leeway to introduce future legislation if changes are needed to ensure schools are not penalized, said Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who co-authored the bill.”

That’s too bad. It would be great if it took effect immediately. Can you imagine? Pretty much every top football and basketball recruit in the country would suddenly head to California at light speed. Alabama and Ohio State and Clemson would find that not a single top high school player in the entire nation had any interest in playing for them.

This would leave the NCAA with three choices: (a) allow California schools to win everything, (b) expel all California schools, or (c) cave in. I hardly need to say that (a) would be totally unacceptable, so that leaves (b) and (c). Which would it be? A separate California league that was semi-pro and got all the good players, or caving in? The only real option is to cave in.

So why put it off? Just do it now and force the NCAA’s hand. I’m wishy-washy on the whole notion of paying college players, but I have no objection at all to college players being able to make money for themselves however they want. And the NCAA is such a fundamentally corrupt enterprise that I’m also in favor of doing anything possible to make their lives miserable. Just do it.

The New York Times today has a long piece about Joe Biden and his support for crime legislation back in the ’80s and ’90s. It starts out like this:

Mr. Biden arrived in the Senate in 1973 having forged close ties with black constituents but also with law enforcement, and bearing the grievances of the largely white electorate in Delaware.

Wait. How could that be? Biden had close ties with law enforcement but African American leaders liked him too? If you listen only to the activists of today, who grew up in an era of low and declining crime, it hardly seems possible that both of these things could be true at once. But 50 years ago they could be. Here is Josh Marshall:

Much of this current discussion is carried on as though the crime wave of the late 20th century simply didn’t happen. This is a mistake for a lot of reasons. But the biggest is that you simply can’t understand anything about the politics of the last half century without understanding the magnitude of its impact. The crime wave of the late 20th century is probably one of the two or three most consequential events that shape the world we live in in the United States.

This isn’t to justify what we now call mass incarceration. There are many who still argue that we had a crime wave, we dramatically increased the number of people in prison and since the criminals were no longer on the streets the crime rate fell dramatically. Maybe we overshot in how many people we locked up, these people argue. Maybe we can reduce the numbers of people in prison now. But locking people up was a big cause for the fall in crime.

I sometimes feel like the current discussion surrounding crime and incarceration is a lot like wondering why the United States invaded Europe in 1944. Unless you know that Hitler had conquered most of the continent, it doesn’t make any sense. Once you do know that, it makes no sense to suggest that FDR did anything wrong.

It’s the same with crime. All of the tough-on-crime sentiment of the ’70s through the ’90s makes no sense unless you know that violent crime had more than doubled since the mid-’60s:

This enormous crime wave devastated black communities, and it prompted lots of black leaders to support tough-on-crime measures. Not all of them. But lots of them. Prisons were built and mandatory minimums were passed, largely with the support of black leaders. The crack cocaine sentencing law passed as an amendment to a bill in 1986 and was barely even debated. This happened in the midst of a crack epidemic that was absolutely devastating to black neighborhoods, and most black leaders were desperate to do something about it. The only real question was whether crack sentences should be 10x, 50x, or 100x longer than powder cocaine sentences. Seven years later, with crime at its peak, Jesse Jackson famously said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps… then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

All of this stuff is up for reasonable debate. The crack cocaine law was passed during a public panic over the death of basketball star Len Bias—who, it turned out, died from overdosing powder cocaine, not crack. Building prisons did take violent criminals off the streets, but prisons were probably overbuilt by a factor of two. The 1994 crime bill was supported by most black members of Congress, and in any case was a compromise bill with some of its most punitive measures added by Republicans. And Republicans ruthlessly used the spectre of crime—along with racial imagery like Willie Horton—to appeal to their white base.

That said, nothing about this era makes sense unless you understand that crime really was rising and it really was scary. The absolute number of violent crimes tripled from 1970 to 1990 and people—black and white alike—were afraid to walk the streets at night. They demanded action, and they got it. There were tons of mistakes along the way, but the fundamental motivation for the tough-on-crime movement was the fact that there was a lot of crime.

The truly horrific part of all this has nothing to do with any particular piece of legislation. The horrific part is that it was mostly pointless. As we know now, the huge crime wave was caused mostly by lead poisoning of children from car exhausts.¹ When the lead went away, so did the crime. And since lead poisoning was worse in central cities, where cars were more concentrated, it affected black kids more than white kids: at its peak, lead poisoning was 6x worse for black kids than for white kids. Their crime rates really did go up more than white crime rates, and with the lead gone their crime rates have declined faster than white crime rates.

So that’s what happened. Crime skyrocketed. People were quite naturally scared to death. Politicians responded. Plenty of mistakes were made along the way, and racial animus surely played a role in that, but the motivation was basically simple: to reduce crime and get violent criminals off the streets. It is historically ignorant to pretend that this all happened for no particular reason at all—or for purely racist reasons.

The real question now is: what are we going to do? We know what caused the crime spike, and we’ve fixed that. Crime is now down to 1970 levels. So when are we going to get our laws back to 1970 levels too?

¹My original lead-crime piece from 2013 is here. Further information is here. A 2018 update is here.

Robert Shapiro tells us the results of a study that analyzes the value of the personal data collected by internet companies:

In the end, we calculated that internet companies earned an average of $202 per American internet user in 2018 from personal data. We believe that’s a conservative estimate.

Let’s see. There are 275 million internet users in the United States, so that’s $55 billion total. Per year. And it’s going up every year.

Shapiro thinks we all deserve a cut of that since this personal data is, after all, ours. He suggests a complicated mechanism where the government collects the money and then cuts everyone a check. But why not just levy a tax and be done with it? That would be simpler. Put all the money in a special fund designed to . . . I dunno, fight income inequality or buy everyone computers. I’ll bet Elizabeth Warren could come up with a plan for it.

I’m never quite sure how seriously to take survey results, and today Paul Waldman points to a new PRRI survey that I really, really don’t want to take seriously. Here it is:

Thanks to a baker in Colorado, we’re all accustomed to the idea that conservatives think business owners should be free to refuse service to gay people if their refusal is based on religious belief. But apparently large numbers of them also think it’s fine to refuse service to Muslims, Jews, and African Americans.

If it’s religiously based, of course.

As it happens, there are a disturbingly large number of Democrats who also think this kind of discrimination is OK. But there’s an odd difference. Among Democrats, there’s apparently a single, smallish contingent—around 14-19 percent of the total—that thinks it’s OK to discriminate against anyone. But among Republicans, it varies. About 18 percent think it’s OK to discriminate against blacks compared to 47 percent who think it’s OK to discriminate against gay people. Jews and Muslims and atheists are in the middle. This suggests that, for whatever reason, there’s a liberal bloc that, on principle, thinks businesses should be allowed to discriminate however they want. Conservatives, by contrast, don’t think that. They endorse discrimination more or less strongly depending on how much they dislike the group in question.

So to circle back to the beginning, I wonder how seriously to take this? Obviously the Colorado baker case has gotten everyone’s attention, which is why the numbers supporting discrimination have gone up over the past five years. But does this also mean that this is, like so many other things, basically just a tribal question these days? That is, your answer is less about discrimination itself, and more about simply having the view associated with your side? I hope so. But I fear it might not be.

This is Otter Creek on the Blue Ridge Parkway, near Lexington, Virginia. You may recall that this is the creek I fell into, but once again this picture is not the one that explains why this happened. Sorry. I’ll put it up someday. For now, though, this is the picture of Otter Creek that Kate and Ken selected for us, so this is the one we get.

Here are the results of our poll about which Lee you should rename your school after when you finally decide to ditch Robert E. Lee:

As you can see, fictional Lees did poorly. The early results swung back and forth between Bruce Lee and Harper Lee for first place, but by midmorning Bruce had taken a lead that he never gave up. He’s the official winner, and therefore the most worthy of having your school named after.

Remember, these are official results, so no whining.