Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations” Mr. Blow has a question:  Why do Republicans keep endorsing African-American voices intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves?  In “Here Comes the Sun” Mr. Nocera says despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary presented by a Senate panel, Apple denies avoiding taxes.  Ms. Collins, in “Somebody Did Something,” says yes, people, it’s true. Immigration reform has advanced in the Senate. At least the committee didn’t repeal anything.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Why do Republicans keep endorsing the most extreme and hyperbolic African-American voices — those intent on comparing blacks who support the Democratic candidates to slaves? That idea, which only a black person could invoke without being castigated for the flagrant racial overtones, is a trope to which an increasingly homogeneous Republican Party seems to subscribe.

The most recent example of this is E.W. Jackson, who last weekend became the Virginia Republicans’ candidate for lieutenant governor in the state.

In a video posted to YouTube in 2012 titled “Bishop E.W. Jackson Message to Black Christians,” Jackson says:

“It is time to end the slavish devotion to the Democrat party. They have insulted us, used us and manipulated us. They have saturated the black community with ridiculous lies: ‘Unless we support the Democrat party, we will be returned to slavery. We will be robbed of voting rights. The Martin Luther King holiday will be repealed.’ They think we’re stupid and these lies will hold us captive while they violate everything we believe as Christians.”

He continues:

“Shame on us for allowing ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder. We belong to God. Our ancestors were sold against their will centuries ago, but we’re going to the slave market voluntarily today. Yes, it’s just that ugly.”

(Jackson also took swipes at the gay community and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan.)

The Democrat Plantation theology goes something like this: Democrats use the government to addict and incapacitate blacks by giving them free things — welfare, food stamps and the like. This renders blacks dependent on and beholden to that government and the Democratic Party.

This is not completely dissimilar from Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments, although he never mentioned race:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

Star Parker, a Scripps Howard syndicated columnist, failed Republican Congressional candidate and author of the book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can do About It,” argued in an article in 2009 on the conservative Web site Townhall:

“A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind-sets from ‘How do I take care of myself?’ to ‘What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?’”

Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R. I., put it more bluntly in an editorial on the Ashbrook University Web site in 2002:

“For the modern liberal Democratic racist as for the old-fashioned one, blacks are simply incapable of freedom. They will always need Ol’ Massa’s help. And woe be to any African-American who wanders off of the Democratic plantation.”

That last bit hints at the other part of Democrat Plantation theology: that black Democrats and white liberals are equal enforcers of enslavement.

A 2010 unsigned article published on the Web site of the conservative weekly Human Events reads:

“If black Americans wish to be Democrats, that is their choice — or is it? Despite the fact that Democrats enjoy the support of over 90% of black America, the other 10%, those who dare to ‘stray from the plantation,’ have been routinely vilified — by other black Americans.”

The article continued:

“The not-so-subtle message? Support liberal dogma — or face social ostracism.”

Dr. Ben Carson, who delivered a speech blasting the president during the National Prayer breakfast this year and quickly became a darling of the right (The Wall Street Journal declared: “Ben Carson for President”), said of white liberals in a radio interview:

“They are the most racist people there are. Because they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

(Carson also got in trouble for comparing homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality. He later apologized for those comments, “if anybody was offended.”)

Unfortunately, the runaway slave image among many black Republican politicians is becoming ingrained and conservative audiences are applauding them for it.

Herman Cain, for example, built an entire presidential campaign on slave imagery.

C. Mason Weaver, a radio talk show host, failed Republican Congressional candidate from California and author of the book “It’s OK to Leave the Plantation,” said of President Obama at a 2009 Tea Party rally in Washington: “You thought he was saying was ‘hope and change’; he was saying was ‘ropes and chains,’ not ‘hope and change.’ ” Weaver continued: “Decide today if you’re going to be free or slaves. Decide today if you’re going to be a slave to your master or the master of your own destiny.” Weaver would repeat the “rope and chains” line on Fox and Friends that year.

The Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Tea Party member and occasional Fox News guest, even made a movie called “Runaway Slave,” in which he says that America should “run away from socialism, run from statism, run away from progressivism.”

While these politicians accuse the vast majority of African-Americans of being mindless drones of the Democrats, they are skating dangerously close to — if not beyond — the point where they become conservative caricatures.

The implication that most African-Americans can’t be discerning, that they can’t weigh the pros and cons of political parties and make informed decisions, that they are rendered servile in exchange for social services, is the highest level of insult. And black politicians are the ones Republicans are cheering on as they deliver it.

Now who, exactly, is being used here?

Next up is Mr. Nocera:

Among the many things Tim Cook apparently learned at the knee of Steve Jobs, during his long tenure as Apple’s No. 2, was how to create a “reality distortion field.” Or so it would appear after watching Cook, now Apple’s chief executive, testify on Tuesday at a Senate hearing on the company’s tax avoidance schemes.

Jobs was so persuasive that he could claim the sun was setting when it was actually rising, and everyone would nod in agreement. On Tuesday, despite the overwhelming evidence presented by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that Apple engaged in dubious tax avoidance gimmicks, Cook claimed that Apple never resorted to tax gimmickry. Even though the company appears to pay about 10 percent of its pretax income in taxes — when the federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent — Cook said, “We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar.” He added that Apple had never shifted any of its American profits to an offshore tax haven when, in fact, that is basically what it has done, routing tens of billions in pretax profits to a shell corporation in Ireland that exists solely to avoid taxes in the United States. He even said that the low taxes Apple pays overseas is on the profits of its overseas sales. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was a flat-out lie.

In other words, Cook spent Tuesday claiming that the sun was setting when it was actually rising, and, predictably, by the time the hearing had ended, most of the senators were agreeing with him. Senator John McCain, the committee’s ranking Republican, who had earlier labeled Apple “a tax avoider,” was soon swooning over Apple’s “incredible legacy.”

Indeed, Apple’s fabulous success over the past decade or so — its creation of the iPads and iPhones that the world lusts over — is a large part of the reason it always gets the benefit of the doubt, whether deserved or not. Two years ago, when David Kocieniewski of The Times reported on General Electric’s tax-avoidance prowess, a storm of protest resulted. Last year, however, when Kocieniewski and Charles Duhigg wrote about Apple’s tax avoidance schemes as part of a series about the company that won a Pulitzer Prize, it was greeted mainly with yawns. Nobody really wants to hear anything bad about Apple.

Yet as documented both by The Times and the Senate subcommittee, Apple is as much an innovator in tax avoidance as it is in technology. Take, for instance, a scheme known as The Double Irish, which it largely invented and which many American companies have since replicated. This strategy, which was the primary focus of Tuesday’s hearing, involves setting up a shell subsidiary in an offshore tax haven — a k a Ireland — and transferring most of Apple’s intellectual property rights to the dummy subsidiary. The subsidiary, in turn, charges “royalties” that allows it to capture billions of dollars in what otherwise would be taxable profits in the United States. In Ireland, according to Apple, it pays an astonishing 2 percent in taxes, thanks to a deal it has with the government. (The Irish government denies giving Apple a special deal.)

Here is another whopper from Mr. Cook on Tuesday. He said that his company not only doesn’t violate the letter of the law, that it doesn’t even violate the spirit. He may be right on the first part, but he is wrong on the second. As the subcommittee’s chairman, Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, pointed out to me on Wednesday, one of the main goals of American corporate tax policy is to tax profits in the jurisdiction where they are produced.

“That intellectual property and patents are the crown jewels of the company,” Levin said. “The Irish subsidiary had nothing to do with creating those crown jewels. It has no employees. It has no offices. Yet most of Apple’s profits are now offshore because they were able to utilize a shift of their intellectual property to a tax haven.”

(Question for the government of Ireland: Do you really want your country to be known as an offshore tax haven? Indeed, at a time when your citizens are dealing with the pain of an austerity program, how can you justify allowing Apple to pay virtually no taxes on a subsidiary established solely to avoid taxes in the United States? Just wondering.)

Levin has proposed a bill that would curb the most blatant abuses of the tax code like the Double Irish. Part of the purpose of the hearing was to bring these abuses to light and generate bipartisan support for closing them. When I asked Levin whether he felt that the subcommittee had made a mistake in singling out Apple, given its Teflon reputation, he said no. “You can’t ignore the most blatant examples just because it is a popular company,” he said.

He’s right about that, of course. But that’s only obvious if you are willing to say the sun is rising when Apple says it is not.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Whenever the world of Washington seems hopeless, someone will point out that the Senate Judiciary Committee did a good job on immigration reform.

That’s it? Yeah, pretty much.

Immigration reform has been the 2013 bipartisan bright spot in the Senate, unless you were really moved by the day they voted to debate gun control before killing all the gun control plans. The committee members cheerfully plowed through 300-odd proposed amendments, while taking turns telling which country their great-grandfather came from. There was, of course, a lot of disagreement, although almost everybody seemed to enjoy slapping down ideas offered by Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

Mainstream Republicans have been super-energized to do immigration reform ever since the Hispanic vote went against them in the last election. Democracy does work. If somebody came up with a dramatic poll showing that all the people with diabetes, asthma and chronic back problems had voted against Mitt Romney, there would no longer be a problem getting funding for health care reform.

High points in the committee’s long slog toward passage included a proposal from Tea Party icon Mike Lee of Utah to exempt employers of “cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governesses, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use” from checking to make sure their help had the proper legal status. It didn’t go anywhere, but if you happen to run into Lee, feel free to say: “The butler did it.”

The most painful low point in the committee’s deliberations came at the end, when the Democrats gave up on an amendment allowing same-sex spouses the same right as heterosexuals to apply for permanent resident status for their partners. It’s not every day when you hear a senator announce that he had decided to support a move that involved “rank discrimination.” But the Republicans who were needed to get an immigration bill through the Senate had made it supremely clear that if any hint of gay marriage entered the legislation, they were going to take their toys and go home.

Decide for yourself how you feel about this one, people. Stand up for equality or finally get a major bill through the Senate? Defend equality or cave in and hope that the Supreme Court bails you out when it rules on the Defense of Marriage Act next month?

It is, at minimum, a useful reminder of what lawmaking looked like back in the days when the two parties made deals and we complained that nobody was sticking to their principles. Back to the can-do days when senators routinely said things like Senator Orrin Hatch’s explanation of his thinking on immigration: “I’m going to vote this bill out of committee because I’ve committed to do that.”

The bill, which would give millions of undocumented residents a path toward eventual citizenship, now goes to the full Senate, where it actually looks as though it’s going to pass. Any further progress would require cooperation from the House of Representatives, the circle of hell where the damned are condemned to spend eternity voting to repeal the health care reform law.

Perhaps you missed the one last week. Let me summarize:

■ “The Obamacare law must be ripped out by its roots!”

■ “The 37th time! The 37th time!”

■ “A malignant tumor that’s metastasizing on America’s liberty!”

■ “We have spent over 56 hours on the floor debating repeal of the law of the land!”

The House Republican leadership would probably rather have been working on something else. But the newer members whined that they’d hardly had any opportunities to vote to repeal Obamacare at all. “It sends a great statement back to our district,” said Representative Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, who many people enjoy quoting because they like saying Ted Yoho.

Also, it’s hard for the Republicans to agree among themselves about anything else. One influential conservative organization recently urged Speaker John Boehner to drop the whole legislation idea completely and just hold committee hearings about the I.R.S. scandal and Benghazi forever.

“Recent events have rightly focused the nation’s attention squarely on the actions of the Obama administration,” argued the Heritage Action for America. “It is incumbent upon the House of Representatives to conduct oversight hearings on those actions, but it would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican conference.”

We really hate it when they get imprudent.

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Resonance Resistant” Mr. Blow says that Republicans miss another chance to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.  Joe Nocera shrieks that “Energy Exports Are Good!”  But he has a question:  Why is the Dow Chemical Company lobbying to keep a lid on them?  Apparently he’s as big a fan of fracking as he is of the Keystone pipeline.  (Well, as long as the shit doesn’t end up on his block, I guess…)  Ms. Collins, in “Hard of Hearings,” says don’t worry, people. If you missed the heated hearing on the I.R.S. held by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, she has a complete rundown.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Whether one thinks the demiscandals being howled about in Washington should or should not resonate more widely, they don’t.

According to a Gallup report released Thursday, “The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.” (The Associated Press phone records case wasn’t mentioned.) Why might this be? I have a few theories:

CREDIBILITY People know that the Internal Revenue Service is the conservatives’ bogeyman. It’s the agency that collects the taxes that Republicans hate so much. Some Americans see taxes as, at worst, a necessary nuisance; Republicans see them as an absolute evil. The I.R.S. is the agency that collects the wealth from “us” for the government to redistribute to “them.” As National Journal pointed out Friday, “The agency also implements much of the country’s social policy through the tax code.” We all know that anything with “social” in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.

And on the Associated Press front, it just doesn’t ring true to have Republicans standing up as defenders of the “lame-stream media.” It’s like the person with the club feigning common cause with the baby seal. People just don’t buy it.

Furthermore, Republicans have exhibited a near-pathological need to say anything, no matter how outlandish, that would invalidate the Obama presidency. This has left them with little credibility now that there may be legitimate problems. This is the story of the political party that cried “Kenyan.”

COMPLEXITY Where is Benghazi? Seriously, folks, quickly point it out on a map. Thought so. Now, to the controversy: the talking points — what they said, and the machination of how that was altered, and whether Al Qaeda should have been immediately blamed, and whether the word “terror” should have had an “-ist” or an “-ism.” Seeking to find the killers of four dead Americans is honorable; endless testimony about a fussed-over script used to explain the tragedy is mind-numbing.

UNPOPULARITY It is clear that the Justice Department overreached on the Associated Press scandal and that its strong-arm tactics are likely to have a chilling effect. But Americans are not big fans of mass media. A November Gallup poll found that only a fourth of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of journalists highly. Even bankers ranked higher.

As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé.

The policy issue is a different story, as The Washington Post pointed out this week: “In 2010, the Supreme Court’s landmark ‘Citizens United’ decision cleared the way for corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums of money, and register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4).”

That decision was extremely unpopular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released nearly a month after the decision was handed down found that 80 percent of Americans opposed it.

So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that.

ZEALOTRY The Congressional Tea Party Caucus founder, Michele Bachmann, who never misses a chance to say something asinine, suggested to the conservative site wnd.com that it was “reasonable” to worry that the I.R.S. might use Obamacare to kill conservatives.

The article reads, in part:

“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, she asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ”

“Reasonable” and “Bachmann” don’t even belong in the same conversation, let alone the same sentence, and yet she remains one of the most visible spokeswomen for the movement.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Republicans against overreaching. In an NPR interview that aired Friday, Gingrich, referring to the impeachment of President Clinton, said, “I think we overreached in ’98 — how’s that for a quote you can use?”

He continued, advising his party to be “calm and factual.” Ha! That’s too rich, and too late. Republicans are already invoking the I-word.

Republicans are their own worst enemies at times like these, unable to leave well-enough alone, and missing chances to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.

Well, if you have nothing to offer that the country wants, just howl louder…  Here’s Mr. Nocera’s love song to the energy industry:

What first caught my eye was the op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. Published in late February, it was written by Andrew N. Liveris, the chairman and chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company. Liveris, an Australian, has become quite the Washington player in recent years. Among other things, he heads President Obama’s efforts to revive manufacturing.

The op-ed was about one of my favorite subjects: the abundance of natural gas reserves discovered in the United States since the “fracking” revolution began. This newly found gas, Liveris wrote, offered “a historic opportunity to strengthen the economy, increase national competitiveness and create jobs.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Within a few paragraphs, however, the Liveris article took on a Pravda-like quality: a political insider sending a coded message to other insiders. He wrote, for instance, that the new jobs the natural gas boom was expected to create would depend on an “affordable” and “plentiful” supply. Given that that’s exactly what we currently have, what was the real subtext?

Then it became clear: Liveris’s plan for ensuring cheap domestic gas was — are you ready for this? — limiting exports. An export market driven by, you know, supply and demand was described as “unchecked.” What was left unsaid was that if natural gas could not be exported, the resulting oversupply would depress prices — and boost Dow’s profits.

Finally, Liveris acknowledged that Dow owned 15 percent of a proposed facility in Texas, which was causing “advocates of unchecked exports” to “attack” the company for being in a position to profit from exports while publicly opposing them. But, he insisted, Dow would not make a profit. Hmmm.

I bring all this up because on Friday, the Department of Energy, after a two-year hiatus, granted a permit to a facility called Freeport LNG, which will allow it to export liquefied natural gas to countries with which we do not have free-trade agreements.

Originally built to import natural gas, the plant will cost as much as $11 billion to retrofit and take years to complete. It will export only a tiny fraction of the natural gas that is consumed by Americans. And wouldn’t you know it? This is the facility in which a Dow Chemical limited partnership holds a 15 percent stake.

Exporting natural gas has enormous benefits for the United States. Exports create jobs that are every bit as good as manufacturing jobs. They help our trade deficit. They tie us closer to important allies like Japan, which desperately need the gas. According to Michael Levi, the author of an authoritative new book, “The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future,” the prospect that America could export natural gas has even helped our European allies gain leverage with its primary supplier of fossil fuels, Russia.

“Most studies suggest that the main impact of exports will be to increase U.S. production rather than take away other uses,” Levi says. Thus, it will not likely have a major effect on the price of gas. Levi told me that one legitimate fear is that the additional drilling could increase the potential environmental risks posed by fracking. But the answer is to ensure that wells are drilled in an environmentally safe manner. That is true whether we export gas or not.

And what does Dow Chemical say now that “its” facility has been approved? I spent much of Friday afternoon peppering the company with questions, most of them revolving around Dow’s seeming hypocrisy in opposing “unfettered” exports while owning a big chunk of a facility that would someday be shipping natural gas to Japan.

Finally, more or less in exasperation, a Dow spokesman put Liveris on the phone. The Dow chairman pointed out that when the company originally invested in Freeport LNG, the facility was meant to import gas rather than export it. He said that the company won’t make money because its stake will be so diluted once capital is raised for the retrofitting. He insisted that he is a believer in market forces, but that the natural gas market is so different from other commodities that it must be treated differently.

He also said, though, that the company was not opposed to natural gas exports — just so long as it was limited.

Earlier, a Dow spokesman had sent out a press release claiming that the permit approval by the Department of Energy was actually a victory for Dow’s position. To put it in words that the press representative would never use, so long as the Department of Energy permitting process is so absurdly slow — thus creating a government bottleneck that restrains “unfettered” exports — Dow and Liveris have gotten exactly what they’ve been seeking: limited exports and plenty of cheap domestic gas to help fuel their profits.

There is a technical term for this. It’s called “having your cake and eating it, too.”

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Before Congress is finished with the Internal Revenue Service, there’s a serious danger some of us are going to wind up feeling sorry for the auditors.

And, honestly, that is not the way we were planning on spending the spring. Especially since it appears that there are people making decisions at the I.R.S. who have the intelligence of a wet Frisbee.

But, so far, the Congressional hearings of outrage have been even less sympathetic. Perhaps you didn’t have time to spend much of your Friday watching the House Ways and Means Committee grill Steven Miller, the newly axed I.R.S. head, about the agency’s targeting of groups with names like “Tea Party” for unwelcome in-depth attention.

Let me summarize:

Committee Chairman Dave Camp: Thank you all for coming here today. Our topic is abuses in the Internal Revenue Service, an entity that I believe is about the size of China, with long, spiky tentacles that reach out and squash all the hopes and dreams of the American people. My first question, Mr. Miller, is whether your agency is so enormous and evil that it will one day destroy the nation as we know it, or whether it already has, and this committee is actually just sitting on the scattered shards and rubble of what once was a great republic.

Steven Miller: Thank you for inviting me here today. I would like to begin by apologizing for mistakes that have been made. Now I am prepared to begin answering your questions, and then gradually fade into sullen exhaustion.

Sander Levin, Ranking Democrat: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for organizing this bipartisan outpouring of rage. I would like to begin by welcoming Inspector General J. Russell George, and asking him to repeat his conclusion that none of the bad things we’re discussing were the result of partisan pressure. Possibly he could say that twice. Then I would like to ask him to confirm that he was appointed by George W. Bush. And then to point out that the guy who was in charge of the I.R.S. when all this happened was also appointed by George W. Bush.

Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California: Mr. Miller, how would you like it if we were to subpoena your e-mails and phone calls and records of anyone you’ve met with over the last four years? Also, have you ever had any contact with the Obama re-election campaign?

Mr. Miller: I would just like to say in my defense that the I.R.S. provided horrible customer service.

Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington: What the I.R.S. did was inexcusable. Also, I want to register my strong protests about the way Mr. Miller keeps interrupting me while I am demanding that he answer my questions.

And then everybody went home for the weekend.

What are we going to do about the I.R.S.? Some of its workers made wildly inappropriate judgments and some of its top brass appears to have the spunk of a pillow. Congress is demanding that heads roll, but the inspector general says that, so far, there’s no evidence of political pressure, just ineptitude. There is literally only one person in the entire operation who’s not covered by civil service, so I wouldn’t expect a purge. Miller, in his testimony, said that, so far, one employee has been relocated in punishment for his or her role in the case. The American people cry out for blood and they get a transfer.

But here’s where the sympathy comes in. The I.R.S. employees were stuck with a pile of 70,000 applications for the tax-exempt status that’s awarded to organizations engaged in social welfare issues. Recently, political groups have been gaming the system, announcing they’re just do-gooders with a minor political sideline in order to qualify. When they succeed, they get to keep their donors secret. The rules for who qualifies are murky, and, according to Miller, only about 150 to 200 people were making the decisions about who got further scrutiny.

Also, they were working at the Determinations Unit of the Rulings and Agreements Office of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service. Spending their lives trying to clarify the 501(c)(4) status. You try that for a while and see how you like it.

If Congress wanted to help, the members could simplify the law so I.R.S. minions aren’t trying to figure out which groups spend only 49 percent of their resources on politics as opposed to 51 percent.

Or, they could give the I.R.S. more money to do the job it’s stuck with now. The budget has been cut almost $1 billion over the last few years, while its duties have expanded. Next Friday, I.R.S. workers will enjoy the first of a series of unpaid furloughs thanks to that sequester.

Or Congress could just keep holding committee hearings in hopes that investigators will finally discover that the I.R.S. offices in Cincinnati are actually controlled by a pack of left-wing operatives who are not only Obamaphiles but also vampires. Vampires who had no respect for the laws regarding 501(c)(4) status.

Blow and Collins

Both Mr. Blow and Ms. Collins have been pondering scandals.  In “Scandalous vs. Scandal Lust” he says Outrage! Disgrace! But, really, there’s not enough there there.  Ms. Collins has a suggestion in “On The Plus Side …,” and says it’s been quite a week of scandals! Maybe, as part of crisis-management, our fearless leaders could come together and do something worthwhile like name a national rock.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

I have watched in recent days as a parade of conservatives have used specific and real governmental missteps to justify their wide-ranging paranoia and irrational hostilities. “Aha!”

You have to take their glee in sorrow with a grain of salt. For them this is more about their scandal lust than what’s scandalous. These people have been searching for a scandal — Kenyan birth certificates and a Michelle Obama “whitey” tape — for years. The fact that they now have something solid and not made of sand is going to make sad souls happy. That’s to be expected.

What’s not to be expected — but has become depressingly predictable — is to watch liberals rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in woe-is-us doom chanting. The overreaction is exhausting and embarrassing.

Let’s say what this confluence of missteps is and what it is not — at least as the evidence now suggests.

First, the three issues — Benghazi, the targeting of conservative groups by the I.R.S. and the Department of Justice’s monitoring of Associated Press journalists — appear to be completely unrelated, try as politicians and pundits may to connect them. Second, the president does not appear to have had any direct involvement in any of the episodes. Third, their weight and resonances differ greatly, although all could be diminished by their emerging concurrently.

At this point, this is about flaws of procedures — some possibly illegal, all very disturbing — and problems of perception. But they are neither fatal nor unfixable.

Now, let’s separate the well-worn Benghazi witch hunt from the other two. From all appearances that is just a callous use of a tragic event to take a political slap at President Obama and a stab at the likely Democratic presidential heavyweight Hillary Clinton. It is being conducted by hyperpartisan politicians and aggravated by Fox News, both with a stake in justifying their unjustifiable contempt for this Democratic administration, and foiling the next one.

But Americans appear to be tiring of all that chasing of smoke and little finding of fire.

According to a Pew Research Center poll issued this week, the percentage of Americans closely following the Benghazi news has continued to fall. Less than half of the respondents believe that the Obama administration has been dishonest, while almost as many say that the Republicans have gone too far in the hearings. At least one in five don’t know either way.

According to the Pew Poll:

“About half (56 percent) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they regularly watch the Fox News channel, and this group is particularly frustrated over the Benghazi situation. Fully 79 percent of Republicans who regularly watch Fox News say the Obama administration has been dishonest, compared with 60 percent of Republicans who don’t watch Fox regularly. Nearly half (46 percent) of Republicans who regularly watch Fox News say they are following the story very closely — compared with 23 percent among other Republicans. Those who regularly watch Fox News are also far more critical of the news media: 59 percent say the hearings have not received sufficient coverage by the news media.”

On the I.R.S. scandal, however, it certainly appears that the agency behaved stupidly. Not because they sought to scrutinize the mockery that is these 501(c)4 “social welfare” groups, but because they did so unevenly. But what will be left after all the hue and cry? As the Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Mayer told the Christian Science Monitor this week:

“What has been missed in the outrage is the recognition that this problem arose from much deeper sources than the poor judgment or possible partisan bias of a handful of I.R.S. employees.”

He continued:

“Congress has given the I.R.S. the difficult task of applying an incredibly vague definition of political activity and an uncertain standard for how much political activity tax-exempt social welfare organizations may engage in.”

That, in the end, is the real scandal.

And now to the Associated Press scandal. The Justice Department was just wrong in the employ of its dragnet, and the administration — as represented by a spokesman, Jay Carney — was disingenuous in its insistence that the administration supports “unfettered” journalism. It just doesn’t. But we’ve always known that, at least we in the media have. The scandal here is that an atmosphere of intolerance for leaks — which Republicans ironically accused the Obama administration of encouraging — seems to have overtaken the Justice Department.

On Wednesday the White House took steps to mitigate the damage, releasing more than 100 pages of Benghazi talking point e-mails, seeking to revive a shield law for reporters who refused to disclose confidential sources, and having the president himself deliver a statement on the I.R.S. In it he announced the resignation of the acting commissioner of the agency, the implementation of new safeguards and a pledge to work with Congress in investigating the matter. As the president said, “The good news is that it’s fixable.”  And, it is.

That’s it — the gist of all three as far as we know at this point. These are not administration-enders. People can be punished, or fired or even jailed, if Speaker John Boehner has his way, but at this early stage signs are not pointing to any of those people being in the White House.

Even if I had hair, I wouldn’t be setting it on fire, not yet anyway.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Let’s try to come up with some positive thoughts about the recent political fortunes of the Obama White House:

• Economy’s getting a little better. Deficit’s dropping.

• Bill Clinton had a really terrible second term and look how well things turned out for him.

• Nobody in the administration has been caught driving to Canada with Bo the dog strapped to the car roof.

It’s been quite a week, what with the I.R.S. scandal, the Benghazi controversy and revelations about the Justice Department’s sweep of The Associated Press’s phone records. Plus, the Russians came up with an alleged American spy in a bad wig who they said was caught carrying a compass, an atlas of Moscow and a ridiculous traitor-recruitment letter. That one could be a set-up, but if it’s real, then we are just going to have to cancel the summer.

Republicans were leaping joyfully through the capital like overcaffeinated gazelles. There is not a committee chairman in the House of Representatives who isn’t planning hearings of outrage about something — except maybe the poor woman John Boehner appointed to run the committee in charge of housekeeping.

Heads must roll! Senator James Inhofe announced that “people may be starting to use the i-word before too long,” having apparently missed all the prior calls for the president’s impeachment for everything from failure to balance the budget to gun control.

Senator Marco Rubio demanded “the I.R.S. commissioner’s resignation,” possibly unaware that the nation had not had an I.R.S. commissioner since last November. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid expressed doubt that the nation would be satisfied just with the head of “some temporary guy” and called for a permanent appointment. This was presumably due to Reid’s desire for stability, not just a more rewarding target.

The acting commissioner did, indeed, get the ax on Wednesday, but the chances that the Senate is going to approve a new Internal Revenue Service commissioner are approximately as good as the odds it will include zombies under Social Security. Reid is still struggling with the nominations for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency, which have been held up by the Republicans on the grounds that they don’t really like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Labor Department appears likely to get a new leader the very second hell freezes over. Also, Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has vowed to put a hold on E.P.A. nominee Gina McCarthy until he gets a new flood-way project.

Serious problem for Washington: How do you get heads to roll when there aren’t any heads? Except for Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been running the Justice Department for what seems like 100 years, and appears linked to just about every disaster in the history of the Obama administration. I believe we may soon discover that he was the one who provided the would-be spy in Russia with a brown wig that looks like an obese cat.

People, this too shall pass. We’re in a moment, not a map for the entire Obama second term. It is, of course, possible that things will get worse, and we’ll discover the president’s health care plan is, as Michele Bachmann claims, part of a plot to deny medical treatment to conservatives. Or things could get better. The White House seems to be getting some traction on the I.R.S. Maybe the economy will really improve, the scandals will run their course, and people will turn their attention to worthy causes like early childhood education or stopping climate change.

Admittedly, the last scenario is a long shot. And even if Barack Obama ascended into heaven, the Republicans would point out that before he went, the I.R.S. picked on the Tea Party.

Maybe, while he’s crisis-managing, the president could also figure out a way to show people government working at something other than reorganizing troubled agencies. Maybe he could start off with passing a bill that’s supereasy. I notice that in state legislatures, when times are tough, parties are sometimes able to get together in order to pick a new state thing. You know, state bird, state animal. Some states find this so relaxing they never stop. (New Mexico has an official state guitar, state tie and state aircraft, which, unfortunately, is the hot-air balloon.)

The United States has a few of these items, like a bird and an anthem, but there’s plenty of territory to cover. The president could demand that Congress pick an official national rock. Committees could hold hearings about the relative merits of slate and granite. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would threaten to filibuster unless his colleagues considered coal. But, in the end, I believe everybody would rally around a grand compromise for marble. And the country would feel much, much better.

Baby steps. Then we can get to the debt ceiling.

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Bruni and Collins

The Pasty Little Putz is just seething with righteous indignation.  In “The Taxman vs. the Tea Party” he howls that at the I.R.S. we get a glimpse of the paranoid style of liberal politics.  It’s really all projection all the time with him…  MoDo is gearing up for Benghazigate.  In “When Myths Collide in the Capitol” she says it’s a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Sana, Yemen.  In “The Yemeni Way” he says the national dialogue taking place in Yemen is a lesson for other Arab nations.  Mr. Bruni thinks we’re stupid.  In “America the Clueless” he says on subjects ranging from Obamacare to the Supreme Court, our body politic isn’t especially brainy.  Well, considering that there’s a brand spanking new cable channel called “The Blaze” that’s being advertised down here as “straight from the brain of Glenn Beck” I’m not surprised…  Ms. Collins, in “Is Yours More Corrupt Than Mine?”, says with 32 state officials arrested, New York is setting quite a standard. But it has competition.  Here’s The Putz:

As a taxpayer and a conservative who hopes to remain on good terms with the Internal Revenue Service for many April 15ths to come, I don’t want to speculate too freely about the motives of the “low level” I.R.S. employees who decided to single out Tea Party groups for an inappropriate level of attention during the heat of the 2012 campaign.

But I’m willing to guess this much: Even though an American Civil Liberties Union official described their excessive interest in right-wing groups as “about as constitutionally troubling as it gets,” the bureaucrats in question probably thought they were just doing their patriotic duty, and giving dangerous extremists the treatment they deserved.

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

The historical term for this kind of anxiety is “Brown Scare” — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past. As the historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2009, Brown Scares no less than Red Scares recur throughout American history. They fasten on real-enough phenomena, from homegrown fascist sympathizers in the 1930s to the militia movements in the 1990s, but then wildly exaggerate both the danger these extremists pose and their ties to the conservative mainstream.

In the ’30s, Jenkins noted, this mentality inspired the persistent media-fed fear that “the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers.” In the ’60s, it persuaded many liberals that Dallas’s right-wing fever was somehow responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination even though the president’s actual assassin was a Communist sympathizer. (This idée fixe persists to the present day.) After the Oklahoma City bombing, it led many people to tar the entire militia movement as terrorist, not just extremist, and then to conflate the militias (this was one of Bill Clinton’s defter moves) with the mainstream small-government right.

Our own era’s Brown Scare followed a similar pattern. Early in President Obama’s first term, a Department of Homeland Security report predicted an increase in right-wing extremism, citing real threats but also employing “a definition of extremist so broad,” Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker noted, that “it seemed to include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power.”

As the Tea Party movement gathered steam, liberals consistently echoed the D.H.S. report’s themes, warning that the movement’s fringier elements and often-overheated rhetoric (which were real enough, and worth criticizing) were laying the groundwork for a wave of far-right violence.

Invoking J.F.K.’s assassination and Oklahoma City, these critics then leapt to connect the dots every time a kook pulled a gun or set off a bomb somewhere — whether it was a lone neo-Nazi shooting a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, the apparent murder (ultimately ruled a suicide) of a census worker in rural Kentucky, or even the failed Times Square bombing (which turned out to be the work of a would-be jihadist, but not before Michael Bloomberg had suggested that it might be “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something”).

The dots-connecting peaked, of course, with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, which was instantly deemed a case of right-wing incitement leading to political violence, with the blame going to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and conservatism in general.

When none of this turned out to be true, however — the shooter was not really a political actor at all, but just a mentally ill lost soul with no connection to partisan politics — the scare began a slow retreat. The Tea Party had won its midterm victory, and as the movement’s ardor cooled and its influence diminished, the fears of its critics began to diminish as well. With Beck off Fox and the Tea Partyers off the streets — replaced by Occupy Wall Street and union protesters, often shouting none-too-moderate slogans of their own — it became harder to look at American conservatism and see Brownshirts or grand wizards on the march.

But moods and prejudices linger even after panics recede. The I.R.S. and the conservative movement have never been on the best of terms, and perhaps the recent abuses just reflect that longstanding tension. But I suspect it’s more than that, and that this episode will be remembered as one of the last embarrassments produced by our era’s Brown Scare.

Now, gawd help us, here’s MoDo:

The capital is in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined by a presidential aide on the hit ABC show “Scandal” as damage control that goes like this: “It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.”

The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: “Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.”

(Though now that the I.R.S. has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.)

Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld.

The toxic theatrics, including Karl Rove’s first attack ad against Hillary, cloud a simple truth: The administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi, in which four Americans died, was unworthy of the greatest power on earth.

After his Libyan intervention, President Obama knew he was sending diplomats and their protectors into a country that was no longer a country, a land rife with fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Yet in this hottest of hot spots, the State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected, and contingency plans were not drawn up, despite the portentous date of 9/11 and cascading warnings from the C.I.A., which had more personnel in Benghazi than State did and vetted the feckless Libyan Praetorian Guard. When the Pentagon called an elite Special Forces team three hours into the attack, it was training in Croatia — decidedly not a hot spot.

Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Chris Stevens were rushing to make the flimsy Benghazi post permanent as a sign of good faith with Libyans, even as it sat ringed by enemies.

The hierarchies at State and Defense had a plodding response, failing to make any superhuman effort as the siege waxed and waned over eight hours.

In an emotional Senate hearing on Wednesday, Stevens’s second-in-command, Gregory Hicks, who was frantically trying to help from 600 miles away in Tripoli, described how his pleas were denied by military brass, who said they could not scramble planes and who gave a “stand-down” order to four Special Forces officers in Tripoli who were eager to race to Benghazi.

“My reaction was that, O.K., we’re on our own,” Hicks said quietly. He said the commander of that Special Forces team told him, “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more” chutzpah “than someone in the military.”

The defense secretary at the time, Leon Panetta, insisted, “We quickly responded.” But they responded that they would not respond. As Emma Roller and David Weigel wrote in Slate: “The die was cast long before the attack, by the weak security at the consulate, and commanders may have decided to cut their losses rather than risking more casualties. And that isn’t a story anyone prefers to tell.”

Truth is the first casualty here when competing fiefs protect their mythologies. Some unhinged ideologues on the right cling to the mythology that Barry and Hillary are out to destroy America.

In the midst of a re-election campaign, Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror. So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi attack.

Looking ahead to 2016, Hillaryland needed to shore up the mythology that Clinton was a stellar secretary of state. Prepared talking points about the attack included mentions of Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan militant group, but the State Department got those references struck. Foggy Bottom’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, a former Cheney aide, quashed a we-told-you-so paragraph written by the C.I.A. that said the spy agency had “produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya,” and had warned about five other attacks “against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British ambassador’s convoy.”

Nuland fretted about “my building leadership,” and with backing from Ben Rhodes, a top White House aide, lobbied to remove those reminders from the talking points because they “could be abused by members” of Congress “to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

Hicks said that Beth Jones, an under secretary of state, bristled when he asked ask her why Susan Rice had stressed the protest over an anti-Muslim video rather than a premeditated attack — a Sunday show marathon that he said made his jaw drop. He believes he was demoted because he spoke up.

Hillary’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, also called Hicks to angrily ask why a State Department lawyer had not been allowed to monitor every meeting in Libya with Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who visited in October. (The lawyer did not have the proper security clearance for one meeting.) Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, has been a rabid Hillary critic on Fox News since the attack. Hicks said he had never before been scolded for talking to a lawmaker.

All the factions wove their own mythologies at the expense of our deepest national mythology: that if there is anything, no matter how unlikely or difficult, that we can do to try to save the lives of Americans who have volunteered for dangerous assignments, we must do it.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

If you want to know how bad things can go in Syria, study Iraq. If you want to know how much better things could have gone, study Yemen. Say what? Yemen?

Yes, Yemen. Maybe the most unique postrevolutionary political process happening in any country experiencing an Arab awakening is in poor, fractured, water-starved Yemen. In its own messy way, Yemen is doing what all the other Arab awakening countries failed to do: have a serious, broad-based national dialogue, where the different political factions, new parties, young people, women, Islamists, tribes, northerners and southerners are literally introducing themselves to one another in six months of talks — before they write a new constitution and hold presidential elections. (After decades of autocracy, people in these countries did not know each other.)

It is what Egypt certainly failed to do in any serious way before rushing ahead with presidential elections that have left many people feeling disenfranchised and Islamists running away with the politics. One of the most important things President Obama could do to advance the Arab awakening is give a shout-out to Yemen’s approach. Yes, the odds of success here are still really, really long — the effects of 50 years of overexploiting Yemen’s water and soil could overwhelm even the most heroic politics — but what Yemen is doing is the only way any Arab awakening state can hope to make a stable transition to democracy.

Kicked off on March 18, the 565 delegates to Yemen’s national dialogue are tasked with developing recommendations on how to address nine issues ranging from future relations between the feuding north and south to state-building to the future role of the Army to rights and freedoms — all of which will go into the writing of a new constitution and holding of elections in February 2014.

“In the beginning, it was very tough,” said Yahia Al-Shaibi, a former education minister participating in the dialogue, but, “after a while, things started getting calm, people were sitting together and eating together and we see our different views. Now we can hear what each other says. We are starting to listen to each other and try to come to consensus.”

The official dialogue has stimulated an even bigger unofficial one. Yemeni Facebook pages and Twitter feeds have exploded with debates about politics, women’s rights and the Army. After decades of being silenced, everyone wants to talk now. Women are one-third of the dialogue delegates, and the men are having to adapt. An American democracy adviser here told me this story: “We find that the women members of the dialogue usually come prepared and show up on time. It’s open seating, so sometimes they sit in the front row. The other day a tribal leader came late and went to the front seat, which was already occupied by a woman, and he said, ‘That’s my seat.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s not.’ ”

The dialogue is possible because of the gradual (and messy) way Yemen’s awakening played out. It started in 2011 with youth-led protests that escalated into near civil war and a government breakdown until then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh handed power to a transitional government. Saleh’s party and his followers, along with the biggest opposition bloc, Islah, Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood, still retained influence. There was no “de-Baathification” or “de-Mubarakization” in Yemen — but much more of a “no-victor-no-vanquished.”

No party was absolutely “defeated,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Mohy al-Dhabbi. It gave everyone a stake in the democracy transition and “allowed for everyone to give concessions.”

It also allowed time for women and the youths who started the revolution “to all get involved politically before the elections,” added Aidrous Bazara, a businessman in the dialogue. Now no one party “can steal” the revolution, he said. That has been reinforced by the recent decision by Yemen’s new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to professionalize the Army, starting by purging Saleh’s relatives from the intelligence agency and the elite Republican Guard.

Yemen is a National Rifle Association paradise. It seems as if every Yemeni man owns a gun and many walk around with daggers in their belts. Yet this country may end up having the most extensive Arab awakening dialogue, with relatively few casualties — so far. It is a reminder for Syria’s rebels that better guns may be needed to topple their dictator. But, without a culture of inclusion, it will all be for naught.

Jamila Rajaa, a woman participating in the dialogue, told me she still worries that some old parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are happy to let the dialogue distract the country, while they are feverishly working the streets to cultivate votes to win the election in order dominate the next government. Some modern Yemeni women see how the Muslim Brotherhood is ruling in Egypt, when it comes to women, and they want their own Islamists to go through a mind-set shift before assuming any power.

It’s all part of the dialogue — why it is really hard and why it has to succeed, otherwise, as a recent United States Institute of Peace report warned: “Yemen risks falling backward into open conflict.” The good news is that — for now — a lot of Yemenis really want to give politics a chance. You’ve got to root for them.

Next up we have Mr. Bruni:

The problems with our country’s political discourse are many and grave, but an insufficient attention to Obamacare isn’t among them. We have talked Obamacare to death, or at least into home hospice care. The “Obamacare” shorthand itself reflects our need to come up with less of a mouthful than “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” given how regularly the topic recurs. “Obamacare” is like “J. Lo” or “KFC.” It saves syllables and speeds things along.

So explain this: according to a recent poll, roughly 40 percent of Americans don’t even know that it’s a law on the books.

Now if I learned that 40 percent weren’t aware of when Obamacare was to be fully implemented or whether any of it had yet gone into practice or precisely how it’s likely to affect them, I wouldn’t be surprised or distressed. Obamacare is nothing if not unwieldy and opaque: “Ulysses” meets “Mulholland Drive.” The people confused about it include no small number of the physicians I know and probably a few of the law’s authors to boot.

But 40 percent of Americans are clueless about its sheer existence. Some think it’s been repealed by Congress. Some think it’s been overturned by the Supreme Court. A few probably think it’s been vaporized and replaced with a galactic edict beamed down from one of Saturn’s moons. With Americans you never know.

According to a survey I stumbled across just weeks ago, 21 percent believe that a U.F.O. landed in Roswell, N.M., nearly seven decades ago and that the federal government hushed it up, while 14 percent believe in Bigfoot.

According to another survey, taken last year, about 65 percent of us can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. Not the chief one, John Roberts. Not the mute one, Clarence Thomas. Not even the mean one, Antonin Scalia. Though when it comes to Scalia, perhaps the body politic suffers less from ignorance than from repressed memory.

That we Americans are out to lunch isn’t news. But every once in a while a fresh factoid like the Obamacare ignorance comes along to remind us that we’re out to breakfast and dinner as well. And it adds an important, infrequently acknowledged bit of perspective to all the commentary, from us journalists and from political strategists alike, about how voters behave and whom they reward. We purport to interpret an informed, rational universe, because we’d undercut our own insights if we purported anything else.

But only limited sense can be made of what is often nonsensical, and the truth is that a great big chunk of the electorate is tuned out, zonked out or combing Roswell for alien remains. Polls over the last few years have variously shown that about 30 percent of us couldn’t name the vice president, about 35 percent couldn’t assign the proper century to the American Revolution and 6 percent couldn’t circle Independence Day on a calendar. I’m supposing that the 6 percent weren’t also given the holiday’s synonym, the Fourth of July. I’m an optimist through and through.

Here’s one of my favorite findings: in a poll in 2011, after intense, closely chronicled fiscal battles in California, a sampling of the state’s residents were quizzed about which category of spending accounted for the biggest share of California’s budget. Only 16 percent correctly said public education through the 12th grade. And they did this poorly in spite of being given just four possible answers, including the correct one, from which to choose. They more or less underperformed the odds.

Apart from perennial news stories about how many Americans would flunk the citizenship test that immigrants must pass, we mostly gloss over our ignorance or deny it. Election analysts are constantly saying that voters are “too smart” for some ploy or “smarter than” they get credit for being.

And there’s a whole subgenre of nonfiction that assures us that we shouldn’t be spooked by how uneducated we are. “The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place, while “Blink” portrays snap judgments as the fruits of an information intake that isn’t easily measured but is meaningful nonetheless. There’s “Emotional Intelligence” as well as nuts-and-bolts knowledge, and we can be guided, profitably, by it.

I buy some of that. I’ve talked to enough voters over enough elections to recognize that their flabby impressions aren’t always antonyms of concrete information but instead cruder, lesser versions of it, colored if not governed by facts that they’ve picked up in a peripheral, semiconscious fashion.

Still. In 2010 in California, I covered a Tea Party rally at which Carly Fiorina, vying for the Republican nomination for a United States Senate seat, was scheduled to speak. I approached a couple whose profusion of hats and buttons and handmade signs — along with their willingness to spend hours in a crowded field under a punishing sun — led me to believe that they were at least somewhat politically engaged. I asked them if they were inclined to support Fiorina. With great seriousness, they said that they hadn’t yet decided between her and Meg Whitman. Whitman was running not for senator but for governor, in a race that hardly wanted for coverage. They didn’t have to choose.

At a heated point of the 2012 presidential primaries, when both Rick Santorum and the news media were making much of his faith and fecundity, less than 30 percent of voters could identify his religious affiliation as Catholic, according to one poll. Months later a different poll asked voters about President Obama’s religious affiliation, persistently mistaken by some Americans to be Muslim. The good news? The share of voters making the Muslim error had dropped, to 10 percent. The weird news? Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish.

It’s possible, of course, that respondents just mess with pollsters’ heads. He’s a Seventh-day Adventist! He’s a Scientologist! But too many surveys over too many years show too much abject ignorance for the phenomenon to be belittled or dismissed. What’s more, there’s no consoling arc over time, no trajectory of progress. Wherever the Internet is speeding us, it’s not toward greater civic erudition and enlightenment.

Into the vacuum of substantive knowledge rush the unprincipled advertisements, the unctuous hucksters, the “super PACs,” the Swift boating, the Sunday-morning-talk-show spin. A clueless electorate is a corruptible one, and one that seems ill poised to make the smartest, best call about something as sweeping as Obamacare and how it gets tweaked or not down the line. Maybe we’ll blink our way to the right decisions. Or maybe we’ll just stumble around with our eyes closed.

And last but not least we have Ms. Collins:

Let’s talk about what makes a delinquent state legislature. I know it’s been on your mind.

The newest political trend in New York involves corrupt state legislators attempting to curry favor with federal prosecutors by wearing wires to work. Perhaps there have been worse fads. There was a time, not long ago, when Assembly members could punch in early in the day, leave to play golf and still be recorded as voting “yes” on every single bill that hit the floor.

Officials recently revealed that a 74-year-old senator named Shirley Huntley secretly recorded assorted pols who she invited over for a chat while claiming to be laid up with a broken ankle. She was sentenced to prison for embezzlement anyway, but not before putting an entirely new spin on the concept of visiting the sick.

There was also a state assemblyman who was wired up for virtually his entire two-term career, before resigning recently to pursue a new life as a defendant in a perjury case.

All of this raises some interesting questions. Is everybody in Albany now operating under the presumption that everything they say is being secretly recorded for the F.B.I.? Does that improve the legislative ethos or just lead to a lot of uncomfortable breaks in conversation?

Also, is New York’s State Legislature the most corrupt in the country? At last count we had 32 state officials get into deep trouble over the last few years, including four former Senate majority or minority leaders. The offenses ranged from taking bribes to throwing coffee in the face of a staff member. The last was not actually a corruption matter, but it was definitely behavior we wish to discourage.

It’s quite a record, but there are still other states in contention.

“We have three people in the State Legislature facing trial. Four of the last seven governors have gone to jail,” said Andy Shaw of Illinois’ Better Government Association. “And we’re a fiscal train wreck.”

That four-of-the-last-seven-governors record is really hard to argue with. New York, of course, had the disastrous resignation of Eliot Spitzer. But that was about sex. Sex scandals, while embarrassing, are far less depressing than financial corruption. I would way rather have an important elected official who patronized prostitutes than one who spent $60,000 of the taxpayers’ money on sushi and lobster. Although in New York we have recently had both.

Still, we’re not alone. “We used to say — thank God for Illinois,” said Gerald Benjamin, a former Albany hand who is now an executive at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

And then there was the Alabama bingo debacle and the Arizona Fiesta Bowl scandal. Louisiana showed up at the top of a study of political corruption that calculated the number of convictions per capita. Georgia came out as worst on a corruption risk report from the State Integrity Investigation, which measured factors like accountability, transparency and ethics enforcement.

New Jersey got the best grade.

“There was an audible gasp across the entire state,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.

“It was counterintuitive for us as well,” said Gordon Witkin, the managing editor at the Center for Public Integrity. Witkin’s theory is that New Jersey got to be good by being bad. “Where there has been a major, major scandal, that was the catalyst for very specific reform.”

Well, New Jersey has had its problems. Over the last decade there was Gov. James McGreevey’s affair with the male Israeli poet. (The state could have accepted the gay part, and the adultery part, if only McGreevey had not decided to prove his love by making the poet head of homeland security.) That was followed by a slew of political indictments, after which the Legislature did end some of its most notorious ethics loopholes. But it’s still, you know, New Jersey.

It’s at this point in every rant about state legislators that we stop to point out that most of them are honest, and some downright heroic. Really, just try spending a good chunk of your life as a reformer in the New York State Senate. See how you like it.

Also, some entire state legislatures are both honest and effective. People speak highly of the one in Nebraska. (It’s unicameral!) I once covered the Connecticut Legislature, where people took their jobs very seriously, holding endless public hearings on every bill and then having long, earnest debates in which the outcome was not preordained. But that was way back in the 1970s, when Joseph Lieberman was the Senate majority leader, and even at that early age was being accused by the liberals of selling out.

At the time, the Connecticut lawmakers did not think they were all that great. What they wanted, more than anything else, was to be like New York. Yes! Legislators in New York, they kept noting, got serious salaries, and staff, and offices. In Connecticut you were lucky if they gave you a desk.

Reformers call this the drive for professionalization. I’m sure it helps give a good legislature more juice, but when one is off track, it just gives everybody more places to be ineffective. When I first went to Albany, I walked through a mall of offices so grand it felt like something out of the chariot scene in “Ben Hur.” Yet the rank-and-file members had nothing to do in their expansive quarters but send press releases to their constituents. There were almost never any public hearings on anything. And the debates were conducted for the benefit of those people on the golf course.

What does make a difference? I think it’s just that some states have a good political culture. Generally, the good ones are places where the lawmakers have serious work to do beyond passing thick mystery bills that come thonking down from the governor’s office minutes before the voting begins. States with two real, functioning political parties that feel at least a modest obligation to work together.

“There’s a thing down here called the Virginia Way — being as collaborative and bipartisan as possible,” said Dan Palazzolo, a professor of political science at the University of Richmond.

There’s a thing up in Albany called “three guys in a room,” in which all the serious decisions are made behind closed doors, by the Assembly speaker, the Senate majority leader and the governor. Someday, I believe, New York may evolve to the point where there will be two guys and a woman in the room. But that may be the most we can expect.

The other day in Albany, the Republicans decided to take the unusual step of having a public hearing on a campaign financing bill that they opposed. When supporters of the bill showed up to testify, the legislators closed the public hearing to the public.

It feels hopeless. But there are definitely places in more desperate straits. “We don’t have a corrupt legislature, but in part that’s because they don’t have a lot to sell — they don’t have that much discretion,” said Joe Mathews, the author of “California Crackup.”

“I wish we had a little more corruption,” Mathews mused. “That would mean we could do things.”

O.K. — not the way we are intending to go.

You can reform a political culture, but it’s a big lift. First, the voters would have to convince the legislators that they’re being watched by someone other than the lobbyists. Then they’d have to press for laws that would force a change of behavior, like nonpartisan redistricting and ethics reform. Then the voters would have to follow up, year after year, until the old guard was replaced by a whole new generation who went into politics with dreams of drafting serious legislation, rather than just bringing more stuff back into the district or, at worst, shaking down some landlord at the airport for a thousand bucks.

It’s a lot of watching. Or, failing that, we could just have everybody wear wires.

Blow and Collins

In “Terms of Art” Mr. Blow says that many on the political right have a bone-deep contempt for those who are different.  Ms. Collins, in “Guess Who’s Back!”, says with the newest member of the House of Representatives being a disgraced ex-governor, we now know that voters today are willing to overlook bad judgment of epic proportions.  Well, Gail, it is South Carolina…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Many on the political right simply can’t get this diversity thing right — and I deeply doubt that they want to. Theirs is a bone-deep contempt for otherness, a congenital belief in the superiority-inferiority binary, a circle-the-wagons, zero-sum view of progress, prosperity and power.

This became apparent yet again Wednesday when it was revealed that one of the co-authors of a much maligned Heritage Foundation “study” about “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” Jason Richwine, had written a Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 2009 titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.”

Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post summarized Richwine’s dissertation thusly:

“Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in I.Q.’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group I.Q.s are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’ ”

Matthews continues:

“He does caution against referring to it as I.Q.-based selection, saying that using the term ‘skill-based’ would ‘blunt the negative reaction.’ ”

Skill-based. Clever. Or Machiavellian.

In reality, it’s just another conservative euphemism meant to cast class aspersions and raise racial ire without ever forthrightly addressing the issues of class and race. This form of Roundabout Republicanism has entirely replaced honest conservative discussion, to the point that anyone who now raises class-based inequality is labeled divisive and anyone who raises race is labeled a racist.

It’s a way of wriggling out of unpleasant debates on which they have stopped trying to engage altogether. The new strategy is avoidance, obfuscation and boomerang blaming.

This “skill-based” phraseology is simply the latest in a long line of recent right-wing terms of art.

There was Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment about the people who would “vote for the president no matter what.” He continued: “there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

That was in line with the other-ing of President Obama, whether in the form of aspersions about his birth or his faith or his understanding of and commitment to the country he leads. Recall John Sununu, a top Romney surrogate, saying that Obama “has no idea how the American system functions” and saying that he wished the president “would learn how to be an American.”

Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, blamed turnout in “urban areas” for their loss, rather than their ragtag campaign operation and a coreless nominee who was utterly inept when attempting to connect with average voters. Remember Romney liked grits, y’all.

The former House speaker and failed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — the one who said that poor children had no habit of working “unless it is illegal” — told Fox News last year that President Obama was “not a real president.” During that same television appearance, Gingrich said of the president: “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while, um, watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythms are.”

Huh. Needs large amounts of rest and to go play basketball and watch television. Nothing subliminal there. Moving along.

This list could extend to more than one column — including terms like “job creators” and “we built this,” and the candidate Rick Santorum (who has three degrees) calling the president a snob for wanting “everybody in America to go to college ” (which is not at all what the president said).

And it could stretch back further to the patron saint of the right Ronald Reagan’s use of the welfare queen meme and George Bush’s and Lee Atwater’s invocation of Willie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign.

But I think you get the picture.

The right is constantly invoking class and race as cudgels in our political discussions; they just hide the hand that swings the club.

The rebranding of the Republican Party is to a large degree the renaming of intolerance.

Now we have Ms. Collins:

Right now you are undoubtedly asking yourself: What does the return to Congress of the disgraced ex-governor Mark Sanford mean to me?

Well, we now definitely know that 21st-century voters are willing to overlook not just a moral lapse, but also bad judgment of epic proportions. This is useful information if you happen to live in a city where Anthony Weiner is thinking about running for mayor.

“I want to acknowledge a God not just of second chances, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth chances,” said a jubilant Sanford in his victory speech Tuesday night.

So far, the voters — and God — have awarded Sanford at least five or six do-overs, what with the adultery, his decision to go to Argentina for an assignation without leaving his gubernatorial staff a phone number where he could be reached, that inclination to discuss embarrassing details of his sex life during press conferences, the ethics fine, the trespassing accusation, and so on. But talk about the availability of eight chances seems to suggest the newly elected congressman is leaving daylight for additional forgiveness opportunities in the future.

Still, this does not necessarily mean that Weiner gets to be mayor of New York City. People are way more careful about picking a mayor or a governor than they are a legislator. Because, really, how much judgment does it take to be a member of Congress? The House delegation from the State of New York is always losing people because of stupid sex tricks: marathon tickling sessions with the aides, the e-mailing of half-naked photographs, or Weiner’s habit of texting pictures of his private parts to strangers. And life goes on, unchanged. But you want an executive to be better-behaved, or you could wind up with … Eliot Spitzer.

One surefire result of this special election will be a plethora of Republican candidates debating cardboard versions of Nancy Pelosi next fall. It looked stupid when Sanford tried it, but, by gosh, it really did seem to do the trick. To be fair, Sanford’s opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, didn’t seem to come out in public very often, and he needed to argue with somebody. However, the demonizing of the House minority leader has its limits. Pelosi’s own opponent last year ran a very exciting ad depicting her as the queen of a zombie cult, and it had no effect whatsoever.

Everybody got excited about the South Carolina race when, at one point, Public Policy Polling showed Colbert Busch nine points ahead. Clearly, that wasn’t the case, and, in retrospect, I’m afraid we may have to revisit the P.P.P. poll last year that showed that 15 percent of Ohio Republicans believed that Mitt Romney had killed Osama bin Laden.

In the end, Sanford’s victory was just about a very Republican area picking a Republican member of Congress. South Carolina’s Republican mapmakers have spent eons stuffing as many Democrats as possible into the House district represented by Democrat James Clyburn in order to keep the other six districts as deeply red as possible. Their party controlled the seats anyway, but you never knew when there might be some emergency, like a special election with a Republican candidate who was due in court two days after the balloting to answer charges of trespassing at his ex-wife’s home.

The political makeup of Congress will be unchanged; Sanford replaces Republican Tim Scott, who was promoted to the Senate to replace Jim DeMint, who recently retired to lead the Heritage Foundation and do war against the immigration reform bill. While Sanford was celebrating his victory, DeMint was unveiling a big study showing that immigration reform would cost the country trillions and trillions of dollars. Its methodology was ridiculous, and The Washington Post discovered its co-author had once argued that Hispanic immigrants would have “low I-Q children and grandchildren.” Truly, South Carolina politics is a gift that just keeps on giving.

Nobody outside the state seemed terribly thrilled by Sanford’s political resurrection. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which has a tolerance for screwing up that’s notably less extensive than God’s, had wiped its hands of his campaign awhile back. Gabriel Gomez, the Republican candidate in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, called him “pathetic.” And the House leadership needs another Tea Party zealot the way it needs another vote to repeal Obamacare.

“Mr. Sanford will have the opportunity to make a difference for his constituents as a member of the Republican House majority,” said a spokesman for John Boehner, in a statement that reflected the general euphoria over the ex-governor’s return.

So, Representative Mark Sanford. Where do you think he’ll live? Sanford was in the House once before and he slept in his office. This was possibly about staying close to his work but more likely about the same qualities of thriftiness that caused him to give his then-wife a $25 used bicycle for Christmas and her birthday combined. And what committee do you think he’ll serve on?

Please God, let it be Foreign Affairs.

Blow, Nocera and Collins

Today we have Blow, Nocera and Collins.  Mr. Blow, in “Dear College Graduates…” says congratulations and good luck, Class of ’13. You’ll need it.  Mr. Nocera has a question in “2 Killings and 2 Guns, Unattended:”  Why is it that a reckless driver can be prosecuted but not an irresponsible gun owner?  Gee, Joe, I don’t have a clue.  Why don’t you ask the NRA?  Ms. Collins, in “An Ode to Helium,” says forget the hot air jokes, people. Who said that Congress hasn’t been getting anything done lately?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

I’m scheduled to deliver the commencement address Friday at my alma mater, Grambling State University in Louisiana, so I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to the America into which these students are graduating.

I must admit that finding hopeful, encouraging things to say has been exceedingly difficult, in part because the landscape at the moment — particularly for young adults — is so bleak.

Here are some of the facts that I’m up against rhetorically and that these students will be up against more literally.

1. Being a college graduate is becoming less exceptional. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in November, “Record shares of young adults are completing high school, going to college and finishing college.” College graduation rates are growing even more in other countries. And Anya Kamenetz noted in The Atlantic magazine in December, “During the past three decades, the United States has slipped from first among nations to 10th in the percentage of people holding a college degree, even as the job market has eroded for Americans without one.”

2. Graduates are emerging with staggering amounts of debt and entering a still-sluggish job market. This is causing them to delay major life decisions, like marriage or buying a home or even moving out of their parents’ home.

A Pew report from February 2012 found that:

“Since 2010, the share of young adults ages 18 to 24 currently employed (54 percent) has been its lowest since the government began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults — roughly 15 percentage points — is the widest in recorded history. In addition, young adults employed full time have experienced a greater drop in weekly earnings (down 6 percent) than any other age group over the past four years.”

3. Emerging markets, like China and India, have become major competitors for exportable jobs.

4. Income inequality between top earners and the rest of America has risen. And the recovery since the Great Recession has essentially been a recovery of the rich. A recent study by Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, found that:

“From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7 percent but the gains were very uneven. Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery.”

This was similar to a finding by the Pew Research Center last month:

“During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

5. At the same time, the cost of basic goods has soared. For example, when I graduated from college the average price of a gallon of gas was about $1 (adjusted for inflation, that would still be less than $2), and it’s currently nearing $4. Some people now have to make desperate choices: a tank of gas, a bag of groceries or a bottle of medicine.

6. Our politics have become polarized to the point of paralysis. A Pew poll last June found that Americans’ “values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.”

What gives me hope is that despite this dire environment, young people remain more optimistic than anyone else. Some of that may simply be the intrinsic glow of youth, but I believe that with this generation, something more is afoot.

This is a generation of people who have come of age in an era of overlapping traumas — terrorism and wars and recession. They have also come of age in changing times, and are more tolerant and less punitive in their social view. They see this country, and the world, differently than we older folks do. Theirs is an America waiting to be made better, not one that is simply, and irreversibly, getting worse.

According to a CNN/ORC poll released last month, young adults (those 18 to 34) were the most likely to think that things were going well in this country.

I plan to tap into that optimism on Friday, and I hope to reflect some of it back at those beaming faces under square hats.

Dear college graduates, this is your moment and your America. Both need your vision and demand your efforts. Keep your head up and your hopes rising. Congratulations and good luck. You’ll need it, and I’ll be rooting for you. (Flip tassels.)

Next up we have Mr. Nocera:

On the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2012, Greg Imhoff — a big, friendly 61-year-old construction superintendent from Madison, Wis., who had moved to Florida with his partner, Shari Telvick — went to check on the home of a neighbor.

The neighbor, Richard Detlor, was a friend, someone Imhoff had known back in Madison, where the Detlors still lived for part of the year. Whenever the Detlors went back to Wisconsin, Imhoff would look in on their house, something he did for many of his neighbors.

It is impossible to know whether, on that August afternoon, Imhoff ever saw the stranger in the house with the .22 caliber revolver; all we know for sure is that Imhoff was shot in the head. When Telvick and a friend found him that evening, he was lying in a pool of blood, dead.

The killer turned out to be a man named Billy Ray Retherford, who was on the lam after killing a woman two weeks earlier and was hiding in the Detlors’ empty home. The next day, Retherford was killed in a shootout with the police. He was using the same .22 handgun.

The gun, however, was not his. It belonged to Richard Detlor, who, according to the police report, had left it, loaded, in the nightstand by his bed before departing for Wisconsin several months earlier.

When Imhoff’s murder was brought to my attention recently, I was stunned that a supposedly “responsible gun owner” would leave a loaded gun in a house that was empty for months at a time. Yes, the odds of someone breaking into the house and using the gun were small, but they weren’t zero. That the Detlors didn’t take the simple precaution of unloading their gun and locking it up struck me as incredibly negligent.

Not surprisingly, that’s how Shari Telvick sees it, too. “I think the Detlors had a responsibility to secure their weapon,” she told me when I spoke to her earlier this week. “I think they should be held accountable.” But when she talked to a lawyer, she discovered, to her dismay, that leaving a loaded gun in an empty house doesn’t violate Florida law. As Arthur Hayhoe, the executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, explained to me, “Safe storage laws in Florida only apply if a minor lives in the house. If it’s adults, you can do whatever you want.” (He added, “In Florida, there are more laws to protect guns than people.”)

For all the protestations by gun owners that most are responsible with their weapons, I have been struck by how many killings take place because people do careless, stupid things. In the gun report that my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I compile on my blog, I see daily examples of children accidentally shooting other children with a gun found in the house.

Just the other day, in Burkesville, Ky., a 5-year-old boy shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a small rifle that had been given to him as a present. Who gives a 5-year-old a gun? (The rifle is called a Crickett; incredibly, it is marketed specifically to children.) Who leaves the room where their children are playing without checking whether the rifle in the corner is loaded? For that matter, who puts a shotgun within such easy reach of a child?

Gary White, the county coroner, was quick to say that no charges would be brought because it was an accident — and, after all, “accidents happen.” But it was a completely preventable accident. When a passenger dies in a car accident that is the result of negligence, there are usually serious legal consequences for the driver. If we really want to reduce gun violence, there must be consequences for negligent gun owners, too. The entire culture of gun ownership has to begin emphasizing safety in a way it doesn’t now. It is as important as universal background checks, or limits on magazine rounds.

Shari Telvick couldn’t live in Florida after Imhoff’s death. “It was unbearable to be in that house without him,” she said. She remains devastated. Two months after Imhoff died, she told me, his first grandchild was born.

Telvick had never been friendly with the Detlors, and she made it clear that she didn’t want to see them. But she’s been surprised, she said, that they’ve never reached out to Greg’s children, whom they’ve known for years.

I decided to call the Detlors. The woman who answered refused to put Richard Detlor on the phone.

“Do you think he is sorry?” I asked. “Sorry for what?” she said, before hanging up on me.

A few days later, I called again. The same woman picked up. This time, she said, “We are as much victims as anyone else in this.”

Then, once again, she hung up the phone.

And, according to the NRA, the obvious answer to any problem at all is MOAR GUNZ!!!  Here’s Ms. Collins:

We have not been paying nearly enough attention to helium legislation.

Seriously. We’ve been complaining about the way Congress fails at everything except scheduling vacations. So it seems only fair to salute the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act. The way things are going, it could be the most significant piece of legislation to make it into law this year.

The issue is our helium stockpile, which is scheduled to go out of business. The House approved a bipartisan bill to save the program just before the members — yes! — left town for vacation. The Senate seems inclined to go along, unless, of course, Ted Cruz decides it’s a United Nations plot.

The House debate took two days, which some people felt was way more than enough time, given the fact that the final vote was 394 to 1. The lone “nay” came from Representative Linda Sanchez of California, who accidentally pressed the wrong button.

Democrats complained that the House could have taken care of helium in an hour, if the Republicans hadn’t been afraid of discussing anything else. It’s been a tough stretch for Republican leaders, who had set aside several days to debate a plan to improve the Obama health care act, before the rank-and-file rejected the idea on the grounds that it might improve the Obama health care act.

So, helium. “I’m pleased to support this bill, which shows that this Tea Party Congress will make the tough choice to keep children’s birthday parties on schedule and give industries that rely on helium the lift that they deserve,” sniped Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia.

The second most popular theme for speeches, which Johnson ignored, was: look, helium is not a joke.

“Despite what many think, helium is not just used for party balloons,” said Representative Doc Hastings of Washington, the Republican who brought the bill to the House floor.

Actually, if you’d heard the entire debate you would have been so impressed with helium that you would be wondering whether it should be wasted on balloons at all. It’s used in M.R.I. machines, scientific research, fiber optics, aerospace technology. And it’s not all that easy to come by, being the product of slow radioactive decay deep in the earth.

“It’s liquid down to absolute zero. You can pour it on M.R.I. magnets. It’ll cool those superconductive magnets down. There’s nothing else like it,” said Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a physicist who has very strong feelings about helium.

The United States began stockpiling helium after World War I because Congress was worried about catching up with the Germans in the race to build a fleet of dirigibles. Miraculously, despite the Pentagon’s affection for continuing to build things that have no earthly use in modern warfare, the government eventually cut back on the blimp program. But it kept the stockpile going at a helium reserve near Amarillo, Tex.

In 1996, during the Newt Gingrich era, Congress voted to go out of the helium business and let private enterprise take over as soon as the reserve paid off the money the government had sunk into it.

Hasn’t quite worked out. The debt is almost paid off, but the magic of the marketplace hasn’t kicked in. If the reserve closes now, the country loses 40 percent of its helium supply. So, last week, the House voted to extend the program. “Many people don’t believe that the federal government should be in the helium business, and I would agree,” said Hastings, as he pushed the bill to keep the government in the helium business.

There are two ways to look at this story. One is that it’s about the impossibility of ever actually stopping any government program. Former Representative Barney Frank, who said in 1996 that if Congress could not manage to get rid of the helium reserve “then we cannot undo anything,” hasn’t changed his mind. “Everybody is against waste, but strongly defends this or that particular piece,” Frank said in a phone interview.

He’s right. I have fond memories of listening to protests after Congress managed, with great effort, to end a totally useless subsidy on mohair. Most of the howls came from lawmakers from Texas, land of many mohair goats. “I have a mohair sweater! It’s my favorite one!” cried Republican Lamar Smith. The subsidy came creeping back a few years later.

But there’s another possible moral. The helium program is great; it provided the country with a crucial product that business wasn’t prepared to produce. It spurred economic growth and scientific research and made enough profit to pay the taxpayers back.

Maybe the only mistake was trying to pull the plug in the first place.

“The federal government going into helium in the 1920s I think was a fine thing,” said Holt. He looks upon the current bill not as a temporary fix but as “a validation” of government’s role in looking after things that the private sector is reluctant or afraid to take on.

The helium reserve, by the way, is still going to run dry in five or 10 years. Maybe private enterprise will step up to the plate. But if not, somebody’s going to have to organize one hell of a balloon recycling program.

Blow and Collins

In ” ‘The Juice,’ The Jousting and the Job” Mr. Blow says President Obama’s second term is just beginning. Let’s let him have it before skipping ahead to 2016.  Ms. Collins has turned her attention to the state to my north.  In “The Luv Guv’s Last Stand” she says Mark Sanford is on the barricades, and his fate might tell us something about how far Americans are willing to go in overlooking a politician’s misbehavior.  Well, seeing as it’s South Carolina, and given what they’ve elected in the past…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

During Tuesday’s presidential news conference, Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked the president if he still had “the juice” to get the rest of his agenda through Congress.

The president responded jokingly.

It was a funny exchange, but also a telling one, less about this president’s ability to maneuver and push policy than about media organizations that are forever looking beyond the moment, so much so that they do little justice to — and demonstrate a marvelous vacuity about — the present.

Too many people want to skip — or write off — the second term of this presidency and begin covering the contenders for the next one.

O.K., if that’s the way you want it, let’s take a glance at that lot of unbridled ambition and hapless long shots. Get your fill. Then maybe we can get back to talking honestly about the true encumbrances to Obama’s agenda. The president’s issue is not so much his unwillingness to coax or threaten or sweet talk or browbeat. It’s the compromise-resistant form of conservatism in this country that has fed on Obama’s very existence: an illogical, immutable opposition to him. In short, Obama leads an army amassed against him.

But, so that we can get this out of our system, here’s a look at the distant 2016 presidential race, the never-ending campaigning and invariably incorrect prognosticating.

The likely candidates are in full maneuver mode and the media are hanging on it. No sooner had the Republican Party released its autopsy of why Mitt Romney lost than a slew of Republican upstarts began stampeding over the campaign’s corpse.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — who chided his party for being the “stupid party” after the November election — has seen his poll numbers plummet, in part because of his failed, stupid plan to replace the state’s income tax with a higher sales tax. A Southern Media and Opinion Research poll released in March showed that his approval rating had dropped to 38 percent, down from 51 percent in September. Jindal is now even less popular than President Obama in Louisiana, and Obama lost that state by 18 percentage points.

The Washington Post reported this week that the F.B.I. was looking into the relationship between the Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell — “Governor Vaginal Probe” (remember that ultrasound bill he supported?) —and an executive who “gave more than $100,000 in political contributions and thousands of dollars more in gifts to McDonnell’s family.”

There was Senator Rand Paul’s disastrous speech at Howard University, where he sought to overlook decades of Republican Party hostility to African-Americans, subtly shift his own positions and educate students about a history they already knew all too well.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey may be the Republicans’ best hope, but it’s not clear that he could even get the nomination: he’s so disliked by the G.O.P. base that he wasn’t even invited to speak at CPAC. One of the biggest laughs during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday came when the host, Conan O’Brien, joked:

“I’d like to acknowledge that earlier this evening, there was some confusion with the seating chart. For a moment, someone accidentally sat Governor Chris Christie with the Republicans. That was awkward, and I apologize.”

Jeb Bush’s own mother threw him under the campaign bus last week, saying of a possible run by the former governor of Florida, “We’ve had enough Bushes.”

National Review reported Wednesday that Senator Ted Cruz “is considering a presidential run, according to his friends and confidants.” Enough said.

This, of course, leaves Senator Marco Rubio. The problem is that he’s relatively unknown by most Americans. A February Fox News poll found that while 25 percent of respondents said that they thought he would make a good president, 33 percent said that they had never heard of him. Still, because he is Hispanic, the party may believe that he will up their support among that much needed voting bloc. But an April Wall Street Journal/Telemundo survey found that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s approval rating among Hispanics was nearly three times higher than Rubio’s.

Speaking of Clinton, and the Democrats, they are jousting for position, too.

Clinton is still being coy about whether she can resist the gravitational pull of the most powerful job known to man — or woman — and the history she would make if she won.

Last week, the Democratic governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, announced while visiting Jerusalem that he might consider a run for president. He told reporters, “I plan for the latter half of this year to dedicate some more thought time — reflection time — to the question of whether or not I would run in 2016.”

And The Times reported this week that the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who just passed a sweeping gun-control law, would be penning a memoir. We all know that memoirs by rising-star politicians are just 60,000-word résumés for the next job.

There you have it, many of the big names at least. (I’m sure you have others.) Now, any of these potentials could straighten things out — make up their minds or clean up their messes — before the next election. There’s time for them. But there’s also time for President Obama.

The second term of the Obama administration isn’t over, it’s just beginning. There are three and a half years left, for Pete’s sake. The hapless and the hopeful for 2016 will take care of themselves.

Oh, hell.  We were being “treated” to breathless speculation about who would be running in 2016 BEFORE the 2012 election fergawdsake…  It’s only going to get worse.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s fight for post-Appalachian Trail forgiveness ends Tuesday with a big Congressional election. The focus, of course, is on issues, issues, issues.

“He skipped town to be with his mistress on Father’s Day,” says a Democratic ad currently being broadcast in the district. “Sanford even asked his wife for permission to have the affair and wasted our taxpayer dollars on himself.”

O.K., but that was then.

“Do you think that President Clinton should be condemned for the rest of his life based on a mistake he made in his life?” Sanford asked during a recent debate with his opponent, the Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch. That would be the same President Clinton that Sanford once voted to impeach.

The issue divide is actually pretty clear. Sanford is straight Tea Party; in the debate, he warned the audience that overspending had put us at the “tipping point as a civilization.” Colbert Busch, who more than held her own, kept linking herself to the Chamber of Commerce and the dredging of the local port. If the Republicans who dominate South Carolina’s First Congressional District want someone who will fight to reduce federal spending on everything except their area, she’d be perfect.

Sanford kept reminding the audience that Colbert Busch contributed $500 to his first gubernatorial campaign. Unfortunately, the debate came shortly before Hustler founder Larry Flynt announced that he had donated $2,600 to Sanford “because no one has done more to expose the sexual hypocrisy of traditional values in America today.” The former governor has certainly been plagued with unwanted supporters. His picture is prominently displayed on billboards recently erected by a Web site dedicated to connecting people who want to have extramarital affairs.

This election won’t change the composition of the House of Representatives, which will remain its same old wild and crazy self no matter who wins. But Sanford’s fate might tell us something about how far Americans are willing to go in overlooking misbehavior on the part of a politician. We all know that voters don’t generally punish adultery. The question is whether they at least require some reassurance that the pol under scrutiny won’t wind up being really weird forever.

Right now in New York, we need all the guidance we can get on this point, since we’re facing the distinct possibility of having to live through an Anthony Weiner for Mayor campaign. True, the chances are pretty slim that Weiner will ever again text pictures of his private parts to complete strangers of the female persuasion. But I think I speak for all city residents when I say that we do not have the emotional energy to come up with a complete list of other sexual feats we want taken off the table.

It’s pretty certain that Sanford will never again go jetting off to meet with a South American mistress while his aides desperately assure callers that he’s gone on a wholesome camping expedition. But ever since he was found out, the former governor has been periodically behaving as if he has a screw loose.

Sanford began this particular campaign with a meeting with his former wife, Jenny, in which, she said, he asked her to run his campaign. She declined, and the next time she saw him, he was standing on her back porch under the glow of his cellphone flashlight, violating their divorce settlement that prohibits him from entering her home without permission. At a minimum, the candidate suffers from an overoptimistic assessment of his relationship with the ex.

After court documents involving Jenny’s trespassing complaint became public, Sanford ran a full-page ad comparing himself to the defenders of the Alamo.

The ad was disturbing, and only partly because Sanford got the date of the fall of the Alamo wrong. It was written in the first person, in a manner that seemed designed to remind people that this is the same guy who once gave rambling, T.M.I. interviews about his marriage, his affair, and how he drew a “sex line” between normal lust objects and his Argentine “soul mate.”

“It’s been a rough week,” the ad understated. Sanford launched into an explanation of the trespassing incident and then a rebuttal of his opponent’s charges that he had spent taxpayer money on his affair. That part was virtually impossible to understand, possibly because Sanford delicately referred to paying for his flights to assignations in South America as “dealing with business class tickets.”

After quite a long ramble, Sanford wound up at the Alamo, where “a South Carolinian by the name of William Travis drew a line in the sand. …” Travis has a lot of fans, but you could definitely argue he was an overemotional, self-dramatizing failed family man who was precisely the kind of person you would not want as the designated leader.

“I’m outnumbered right now but will fight to the end toward freedom and financial sanity in Washington so important to sustaining it,” Sanford concluded.

Also, the candidate really needs an editor.

Collins, solo

Mr. Blow and Mr. Nocera are off today, so Ms. Collins has the place to herself.  In “Congress is Socially Insecure” she has a question:  What’s going on in Washington, people? Could it be that the great partisan stalemate is actually wobbling?  Gee, Gail, thanks for joining Bobo in inveighing against all us olds and poors who are bleeding the country dry at the expense of “the children.”  Don’t say a fcking word about the defense budget or even consider removing the FICA cap.  Why don’t y’all just come out honestly and ask us to kill ourselves so you can be shed of the lot of us?  Here she is:

When it comes to congressmen behaving badly — and such a list it is, my friends — the prize this week goes to Representative Greg Walden of Oregon. Although I am sorry to say that his bad behavior does not involve any interesting new illicit sex issues.

It’s surprising that we never noticed him before. After all, Walden has a long legislative background, including being a founder of the House Small Brewers Caucus, as well as the first member of the House to contract swine flu in 2009. But our mission today involves his role as the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — the member in charge of getting other Republican members elected next year.

When President Obama released his budget, Walden put on his NRCC hat and homed in on the much-publicized proposal to reduce the way cost-of-living raises are computed for Social Security. It was, the congressman from Oregon claimed on CNN, “a shocking attack on seniors.”

“I think he’s going to have a lot of pushback from some of the major senior organizations on this and Republicans, as well,” Walden said.

Consider the poor American public. They were already being flung into a debate that involves long discussions about the impact of “chained C.P.I.” Now they have to figure out what to make of the leader of the Republican re-election effort attacking their president for doing something the Republicans have been demanding for years.

And it was awful for the Democrats, who generally spend their political lives defending Social Security from any changes whatsoever. Most of them rolled their eyes, muttered soft, low moans and tried to change the subject. One, Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, successfully diverted all attention from entitlement issues by tweeting Cyndi Lauper “couldn’t believe how hot u were” after a show at the White House. We will take this matter up again when we revisit the importance of having elected officials restrict their social media visits to moments when they are under the strict supervision of staff members.

But then the Republican House leaders started to come down on Obama’s side. Asked about Walden, Speaker John Boehner said: “I’ve made it clear that I disagree.” And the House Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, announced that Obama’s concessions left him “cautiously optimistic” that there could be a bipartisan budget deal.

What’s going on here? People, are you hopeful that the great partisan stalemate is actually wobbling? Or does Ryan’s cautious optimism make you wildly pessimistic? Do you think the Republican leaders are really hoping to put an end to the march of the fiscal cliffs? Or are they just worried because people have started to compare the House of Representatives to North Korea? Historically, when it’s in a period of implacable nonproductivity, the House has always been compared to a kindergarten class. Pyongyang does have a similar tendency to call everybody out to dance around in colorful costumes for special occasions. But it’s not what you could call a step forward.

To be fair, Washington has already come a long way budgetwise, compared with say, last year or the year Alexander Hamilton had to deal with the Whiskey Rebellion. The House and Senate have already passed their own versions, which are largely detail-free Big Thoughts. (Ryan’s plan expresses concern about the future stability of Social Security and decrees that “both parties must work together to chart a path forward on common-sense reforms.”) The president’s budget, however, is required to be detail-dense, and Obama proposed new spending for infrastructure repair, research and schools along with specific tax increases and spending cuts.

All the attention, so far, has gone to the Social Security change. Obama has been offering this deal to Republican leaders for ages, yet there seemed to be a tacit agreement on the part of everyone to ignore it. When the president began having dinners with the Republican senators last month, they walked out expressing amazement that he was open to such a thing. This continued in some circles long beyond the point at which the plan was up on the White House Web site.

So what do you think? There are some arguments on every side, except of course the one on which Representative Walden is swinging.

But if you take it in concert with the rest of the budget, Obama’s proposal does speak, in a very modest way, to the fact that this country currently spends a ton of its resources on the elderly and relatively little on the young. I’d trade a dramatic new commitment to funding quality early childhood education for a change in the way cost-of-living increases are computed for Social Security, as long as the oldest and neediest of the recipients are protected.

However, anything that makes Paul Ryan this enthusiastic is scary.

Blow and Collins

In “Rand Paul Goes to Howard” Mr. Blow tells us how the Republican Party lost the black vote.  Ms. Collins is concerned.  In “Yipes, It’s Congress On the Move” she says listen up, people! There is so much more to current events than just ferrets.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

The Republican Party is struggling with its future. Will it be a regional, Congressional party fighting a last-gasp battle for a shrinking base in a David and Goliath war against ominously expanding federal government? Or will it become a national, presidential party capable of adapting to a new American reality of diversity and expression in which the government serves an essential function in regulating public safety, providing a safety net and serving as a safeguard against discrimination?

Senator Rand Paul is trying to find a balance between the two. The same week that a dozen defiant senators threatened to filibuster any new gun control legislation, Paul ventured across Washington to historically black Howard University and gave a speech aimed at outreach and bridge building.

The man is mulling a presidential run after all.

The speech was a dud. It was a clipped-tail history lesson praising the civil rights record of the pre-Southern Strategy Republican Party, while slamming the concurrent record of the Democrats.

It completely ignored the past generation of egregious and willful acts of insensitivity by the G.O.P. toward the African-American community.

During the speech Paul asked, rhetorically and incredulously:

“How did the party that elected the first black U.S. Senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American Congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race? From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, for a century, most black Americans voted Republican. How did we lose that vote?”

You can’t be serious, Senator Paul. In fact, I know that you’re not. No thinking American could be so dim as to genuinely pose such questions.

Let me explain.

Republicans lost it when Richard Nixon’s strategist Kevin Phillips, who popularized the “Southern Strategy,” told The New York Times Magazine in 1970 that “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

They lost it when Nixon appointed William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, a man who, while he was a law clerk in Justice Robert Jackson’s office, wrote a memo defending separate-but-equal during Brown v. Board of Education, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”

They lost it in 1976 when Ronald Reagan adopted the racially charged “welfare queens” trope. They lost it when George Bush used Willie Horton as a club against Michael Dukakis. They lost it when George W. Bush imperially flew over New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when people were still being plucked from rooftops and were huddling in a humid Super Dome.

They lost it when the McCain campaign took a dark turn and painted Barack Obama as the other, a man “palling around with terrorists,” a man who didn’t see “America like you and I see America.”

They lost it when Republican Representative Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at the president during a speech to a joint session of Congress. They lost it when a finger-wagging Republican Gov. Jan Brewer publicly chastised the president on an Arizona tarmac.

They lost it in 2011 when a Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrinch, who was the front-runner for a while, falsely and preposterously claimed that: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.”

They lost it when another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, he of “blah people” infamy, accused President Obama of “elitist snobbery” and “hubris” for supposedly saying “under my administration, every child should go to college.” (For the record, the president never actually said that.)

The Republicans lost the black vote when Herman Cain, an African-American candidate for the Republican nomination, began using overt slave imagery to suggest that he had left “the Democrat plantation.”

They continued to lose it when the African-American Republican of the moment, Dr. Benjamin Carson, echoed Cain and said of white liberals:

“Well, they’re the most racist people there are. You know, they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

The Republican Party has a tarnished brand in the eyes of the African-American community, largely because of its own actions and rhetoric. That can’t be glossed over by painting the present party with the laurels of the distant past.

The best thing that could happen is that the current Republican party splinter into its various rabid factional groups (the Teatards, the Forced Birthers, etc., etc.) and disappear.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Wow, there’s a lot going on in Washington! Budgets are flying all over the place. The Senate might actually start voting on a gun bill Thursday. And immigration reform has now gotten so far that the House of Representatives has a bipartisan Gang of Eight working on it.

Personally, I think they just wanted to have a gang.

“It’s a good day for guns and immigration, and who knows what tomorrow may bring,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, a member of the Senate bipartisan Gang of Eight on immigration reform. It’s like a little legislative West Side Story in Congress these days, minus the dancing.

But the point is that there’s movement. It was only days ago that things were so slow that we were forced to devote our serious thinking time to the reports from South America that overgrown white ferrets are being sold to people as toy poodles. This is something I believe we can rally against in a bipartisan manner.

First off the block came a gun agreement, announced Wednesday by two conservative senators who mentioned repeatedly that they were themselves proud weapons owners. This is, of course, the rule for these kinds of events. If they really do have a full-fledged debate, somebody is for sure going to leap up and yell: “I have four bazookas!”

Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican of Pennsylvania, held a press conference to describe their plan to close loopholes in gun purchase background checks. The negotiations actually involved a slightly larger number of people, including Schumer. But, according to a report in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, Toomey refused to speak on the same podium with the National Rifle Association nemesis.

“Toomey and Manchin did great work on this. They belonged out front. My job was to work behind the scenes. I’m perfectly happy,” said Schumer, who has been laboring on this issue for about nine million years. It isn’t every day you see the senator from New York leap out of the way of a major televised press conference. Kudos.

If the agreement as described actually passes, it would mean a real improvement — expanding background checks so people who buy guns on the Internet or at gun shows are screened for criminal records and serious mental illness.

You may remember Manchin as the guy who seemed, after the Newtown massacre, to be calling for an assault weapons ban, then scurried away. Also, he was the one who ran a campaign ad showing him plugging a bullet through the heart of a piece of climate change legislation. Also, he still won’t say whether he voted for Barack Obama last year. But now we ought to give him a hand — quickly, before he breaks our hearts.

Which might happen any moment. During their press conference, Manchin and Toomey said their bill could be a step toward new rules on carrying concealed weapons, in which a permit from the state with the most lax gun laws trumps the stricter laws in, say, Times Square. If an amendment like that gets stuck on the bill in the Senate, Schumer acknowledged, “the bad it would do would equalize the good.”

But that’s several endless stretches of procedural confusion away. First, there’s got to be a vote on whether to take up gun legislation in the Senate at all. Miraculously, a bunch of Republican senators have announced they do not want to simply squash any consideration of the matter by staging a filibuster.

“No one really expected that we wouldn’t get to a vote on this. There’s going to be a debate on this. Which is a good thing,” said James Risch of Idaho on CBS. He was actually one of the senators vowing to stop a debate, but he’s apparently sort of evolving.

Did I mention that Risch is from Idaho? The governor of Idaho is Butch Otter. He has nothing to do with this discussion. I just like writing “Gov. Butch Otter” as often as possible.

This is going to be crunchtime, citizens. Do you root for the bipartisan gun bill or worry about the National Rifle Association turning it into something that makes the situation worse? Also, would you feel more confident about immigration reform’s chances if the House had a Gang of 12?

As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, this week’s Times Magazine has a story by Jonathan Van Meter announcing that former Representative Anthony Weiner is seriously thinking about running for mayor of New York City. This year!

That one I’m pretty confident we can handle. The citizens of New York just have to decide whether to forgive an elected official who tweeted pictures of his crotch to women he had never actually met. We’ve had bigger challenges. Maybe we can form a committee.

Well, you know what a camel is, right?  A horse designed by a committee.

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “The Young are the Restless” Mr. Blow says the millennial generation is the generation of change. Advantage Democrats.  Mr. Nocera, in “Why Rutgers Blinked,” says the Rutgers incident is just one example of the problems with big-time college sports.  Ms. Collins addresses “A New Era in Political Corruption” and says New York’s recent corruption scandals shatter our confidence that taking money was the one thing politicians know how to do well.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

The surge of generational change continues in this country, altering the cultural landscape with a speed and intensity that has rarely — if ever — been seen before.

The latest remarkable change concerns the decriminalization of the use of marijuana. A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that for the first time more Americans support legalizing marijuana use than oppose it.

It was rather unsurprising that more young people would support the move, but it was striking how quickly they adopted a more liberal position. About seven years ago, millennials (defined by Pew as people born in 1981 or later), Generation Xers (those born between 1965 and 1980) and baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) shared the same view on marijuana: Only about a third thought it should be legalized. Since then, the share of millennials supporting its legalization has risen more than 90 percent. Meanwhile, the number of legalization supporters in Generation X and among the baby boomers has risen by no more than 60 percent.

The millennial generation is the generation of change. Millennials’ views on a broad range of policy issues are so different from older Americans’ perspectives that they are likely to reshape the political dialogue faster than the political class can catch up.

I surveyed the past six months of Pew and Gallup polls, to better understand the portrait of a generation bent on rapid change — even if that means standing alone.

ON GAY MARRIAGE Much has been made of the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage in this country, but a Pew poll last month found that that the change is driven mainly by millennials. Theirs was the only generation in which a majority (70 percent) supported same-sex marriage; theirs was also the only generation even more likely to be in favor of it in 2013 than in 2012, as support in the other generations ticked down. The longer-term picture is even more telling. Support for same sex-marriage among Generation X is the same in 2013 as it was in 2001 (49 percent). But among millennials, support is up 40 percent since 2003, the first year they were included in the survey.

Some of this no doubt is the result of younger adults’ having more exposure to people who openly identify as LGBT. According to an October Gallup poll, young adults between 18 and 30 were at least twice as likely to identify as LGBT as any other age group.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that millennials overwhelmingly agree, on a moral level, with same-sex relationships. In fact, a survey released last year by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University in conjunction with the Public Religion Research Institute found that they “are nearly evenly divided over whether sex between two adults of the same gender is morally acceptable.”

ON GUN CONTROL According to a February Gallup report, Americans ages 18 to 29 are the least likely to own guns, with just 20 percent saying that they do. That is well under the national average of 30 percent of Americans who own guns.

And in a Pew poll taken shortly after the Newtown, Conn., shootings, younger Americans were the most likely to say that gun control was a bigger concern in this country than protecting the right to own a gun. (Younger respondents barely edged out seniors with this sentiment.)

In fact, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of those 18 to 34 years old saying they want the nation’s gun laws and policies to be stricter doubled from January 2012 to 2013. No other age group saw such a large increase.

It is remarkable that young people’s opinions shifted so dramatically, especially since a December Pew poll found that young adults under 30 were the least likely to believe that the shootings in Newtown reflect broader problems in American society. This age group was, in fact, the most likely to believe that such shootings are simply the isolated acts of troubled individuals.

•

Young people also are the least religious (more than a quarter specify no religion when asked), and they are an increasingly diverse group of voters. Fifty-eight percent of voters under 30 were white non-Hispanic in 2012, down from 74 percent in 2000. Like it or not, younger Americans are thirsty for change that lines up with their more liberal cultural worldview.

Advantage Democrats.

Well, from what I’m seeing lately (I’m looking at you, President Obama) what passes for a Democrat today would have been a rather conservative Republican 40 years ago.  Here’s Mr. Nocera, who is writing from Atlanta:

On Friday afternoon, around 1:15, the president of Rutgers University, Robert Barchi, held a press conference to announce that his athletic director, Tim Pernetti, had resigned. This, of course, came two days after Pernetti fired the basketball coach, Mike Rice, when a deeply offensive video was leaked to ESPN. It showed the coach physically and verbally abusing his players during practice, sprinkling his harangues with a homosexual slur.

I was in Atlanta during the Rutgers press conference, attending the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships, a k a the Final Four. Waiting for the press conference to begin, I watched Rick Pitino, the coach of the Louisville Cardinals, respond to questions about whether he would be better remembered for his early use of the three-point shot or his pressing defenses.

Later, as reporters banged out their stories, I watched Barchi on the television screens in the press room, as he tried to explain why he hadn’t bothered to watch the video when he first became aware of it last November, and why he had agreed to Pernetti’s recommendation that Rice be fined and suspended instead of fired. The cognitive dissonance was dizzying.

You don’t have to be at the Final Four to realize that the N.C.A.A. has big problems. But in Atlanta, the sense of crisis is palpable. The chatter you hear is that morale among N.C.A.A. employees is awful. The N.C.A.A. is facing more — and more serious — legal threats than ever before. Its missteps in the University of Miami investigation — in which it engaged a bankruptcy lawyer to depose witnesses its investigators couldn’t reach — stunned many people. The once heretical thought that college athletes ought to be paid for their labors — and that the N.C.A.A.’s amateurism rules are meant to ensure a free labor force — has gained real currency. This week, USA Today published an unflattering article about the checkered academic career of Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A.’s current president. A tough article like that would have once been unimaginable.

At his press conference on Thursday, Emmert was petty and defensive. He called himself an agent of change who suffers the slings and arrows of the small-minded. When Dennis Dodd, an online reporter for CBS Sports who has been critical of Emmert, asked him whether the N.C.A.A. was still relevant, Emmert bristled. Later, as he walked off the stage, he snarled to Dodd: “I’m still here. I know you’re disappointed, but here I am.” What kind of leader says something like that?

The Rutgers incident isn’t really within the purview of the N.C.A.A. (Then again, neither was Penn State, though that didn’t stop the N.C.A.A. from ignoring its procedures to penalize the university.) Instead, it stands as a telling symbol of what is wrong generally with big-time college sports. Last November, when Pernetti became aware of Rice’s heinous behavior, he was negotiating a deal to have Rutgers join the wealthiest conference in the country, the Big Ten.

With its own television network, and various marketing and rights deals, the Big Ten doles out tens of millions of dollars each year to member universities. Rutgers’ athletic department, meanwhile, struggles financially, despite being subsidized by student fees. The sensible move would be for Rutgers to de-emphasize athletics: it really can’t afford the cost of big-time college sports.

Yet with Pernetti leading the charge, the university has upped the ante, and will compete against such Big Ten powerhouses as Ohio State and Michigan. It will reap millions — but it will also have to spend millions to keep pace.

Did it cross Pernetti’s mind last November that if he fired Rice, and the video leaked out, it might jeopardize Rutgers’ chances of joining the Big Ten? It is hard to believe that didn’t play a role.

There are no good guys in this story. The “whistle-blower,” Eric Murdock, a former Providence College star, was motivated — let’s be honest here — by revenge. Pernetti had fired him, and he was seeking a termination payment of $950,000. The video was his cudgel to get that money. I am told that the F.B.I. has been on the Rutgers campuses in recent days, investigating the circumstances.

Pernetti is said to be one of the bright lights of college sports. Around the same time as he was dealing with both the Big Ten and the Rice video, he was on a panel at New York University School of Law at which he spoke — passionately, it seemed to me (I was on the same panel) — about the importance of putting the needs of the “student-athlete” first, and hiring “the right people.” Yet, faced with a moment of truth, he blinked.

Just like Joe Paterno, another supposed good guy, blinked. Just like they all blink when their professed ideals bump up against the ever-increasing pressure to generate cold, hard cash.

The N.C.A.A., it turns out, isn’t the only hypocrite in college sports.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Have you ever noticed how high the bar is when it comes to getting arrested for political corruption? Really, you practically have to go around with a sign that says “Will Trade Influence for Cash.”

I have been thinking about this because New York is having awful corruption scandals. The charges involve politicians acting in such an insanely stupid way, it shatters our longstanding confidence that taking money was the one thing they know how to do well.

We have a Democratic state senator, Malcolm Smith, under indictment for trying to buy the Republican New York City mayoral nomination. Nobody knows what he wanted with it, since Smith has no real supporters, a stupendously bad record even by State Senate standards and could not actually be elected mayor if he were running against Donald Trump’s retriever.

Prosecutors say his henchman was Councilman Daniel Halloran, a Tea Party Republican and a practitioner of Theodism, a strain of Germanic neopaganism. That may make Halloran the highest-ranking self-identified heathen in American politics, so already we have a little bit of a national spin on this saga.

Also there’s Eric Stevenson, an unremarkable assemblyman from the Bronx accused of taking bribes from some men who wanted to start adult day care centers. Among other things, he introduced legislation prohibiting anybody else from opening a similar facility anywhere in the New York City area. Even in Albany, this idea is not likely to garner much support, but it’s a tribute to the ethos of the State Capitol that people seemed prepared to believe it could happen.

According to the indictments, one Republican official from Queens frisked a briber, who was actually an undercover F.B.I. agent, to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire. Then failed to find the wire. Then took the bribe while being recorded. This all happened at a super-secret meeting at Sparks, the steakhouse where John Gotti had Paul Castellano rubbed out. I believe there should be an unwritten rule in criminal conspiracy that you do not schedule your big payoff at the most famous gangland murder site in Manhattan.

Prosecutors say Stevenson, the Bronx assemblyman, was also worried about whether he was being taped. He expressed those concerns to a co-conspirator who was actually doing the taping.

Everybody was taping everybody! Plus these secret plots seemed to require more participants than the cast of “Game of Thrones.” All of them muttering what sounded like lines stolen from Season Two of “Bad Knockoff Sopranos.”

“We have a system that only catches morons,” sighed a member of the State Legislature’s brave but not terribly large band of reformers.

Yeah, why didn’t these guys do things the normal way? A donation to the campaign war chest and a promise to “keep in close contact,” followed by a visit from a lobbyist with a copy of the proposed legislation?

“Most lawmakers in Congress do a lot of that stuff. They’re just more tactful in how they go about it,” said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She recalled the recent discovery that Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey had been using his influence to try to resolve a multimillion-dollar Medicare billing dispute for a Florida ophthalmologist whose company contributed more than $700,000 toward the election of Senate Democrats, Menendez included. The senator, who is nothing if not a skilled practitioner of business as usual, is shocked, wounded and dismayed that anyone would imagine a quid pro quo.

“At least he’s expensive,” Sloan said.

Our New York gang comes pretty cheap. Although perhaps it’s heartening to realize that America is still a country so filled with promise that even the chairman of the Bronx Republican Party can dream of one day being indicted for taking a $15,000 bribe. There are hardly any Republicans in the Bronx to chair — the party leader himself, who got the job when his predecessor went to the clink, actually lives someplace in the suburbs.

One of the stranger elements to the New York story was word that a Bronx assemblyman named Nelson Castro has been wearing a wire for the feds for virtually his entire political career. He originally got into trouble when election officials noticed nine voters were registered as living with him in his one-bedroom apartment. Unable to demonstrate how all that worked out, Castro agreed to cooperate with authorities and became the F.B.I.’s own social networking system. Nobody knows yet what else showed up on the Castro tapes, but the assemblyman announced his resignation this week, expressing pride “of my accomplishments and the many benefits that I have secured on behalf of my district over the last four years.”

So, here’s a hopeful thought: maybe you can hit a point of ethical bankruptcy where, for want of anybody else to sell out, all the plotters betray each other.