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How an old cliché has been warped and weaponized in contemporary American politics.
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Jon Allsop
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Tag: Common Sense
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The Illusion of Joe Manchin’s “Common Sense”
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Commentary: It’s not just Latinos. Supreme Court says all brown people are suspicious
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What makes someone suspicious enough to be grabbed by masked federal authorities?
Is it a Mexican family eating dinner at a table near a taco truck?
Afghan women in hijabs working at a Middle Eastern market?
South Asian girls in colorful lehengas, speaking Hindi at an Indian wedding?
According to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing a concurrence in the Supreme Court’s emergency ruling allowing roving immigration raids in Los Angeles, any of these could be fair game, using law and “common sense.”
Brown people, speaking brown languages, hanging out with other brown people, and doing brown people things like working low-wage jobs now meets the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” required for immigration stops.
Living while brown has become the new driving while Black.
Of course, this particular high court ruling — and our general angst — has centered on Latino immigrants. That’s fair, and understandable. In California, about half of our immigrants are from Mexico, and thousands more from other Latin and South American countries.
But increasingly, especially for newer immigrants, more folks are coming from Africa and Asian countries such as China and India — some of which, you may recall, Donald Trump called “shithole countries” way back in 2018, while questioning why America doesn’t take more immigrants from white places such as Norway.
It’s a dangerous mistake to think Trump’s immigration purge is just about Latinos. He’s made that clear himself. We have reached the point in our burgeoning white nationalism when our high court has deemed brown synonymous with illegal, regardless of what country that pigment originated in. False distinctions about who is being targeted create divisions at a time when solidarity is our greatest power.
“It’s really about racial subordination, and this is really about promoting white supremacy in this nation,” George Galvis, executive director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, told me. He’s part Native American and part Latino, and 100% against policies like this one that target people by skin color.
Mexico, India, China, Iran. People from these places may not always see what they have in common, but let me help you out.
Racists see two colors: white and not white. Although this particular case was filed on behalf of Latino defendants, there is nothing in it that limits its scope to Latinos.
“It’s not targeting, you know, Eastern Europeans. It’s not targeting people who are Caucasian,” said Amr Shabaik, legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in L.A., a nonprofit civil rights organization advocating for American Muslims. “This is going to be on Black and brown communities, and that’s who’s going to feel the brunt.”
For Black Americans, this argument is as old as dirt. Our criminal justice system, our society, has a long and documented history of viewing Black Americans with suspicion — considering it “common sense” to think they’re up to something nefarious for actions like getting behind the wheel of a car. But, for the most part, our courts have frowned upon such obvious racism — though not always.
That anti-Black discrimination can be seen today in Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into urban centers in what Trump has described as a “war” on crime, a callback to the war on drugs of the 1990s that targeted Black Americans with devastating consequences.
This ruling on immigration enforcement goes hand-in-hand with that military deployment, two prongs in a strategy to wear away our outrage and shock at the dismantling of civil rights.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the 4th Amendment is supposed to protect us all from “arbitrary interference” by law enforcement.
“After today,” she wrote, “that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
That makes this ruling “unconscionably irreconcilable” with the Constitution, she wrote.
ICE has detained about 67,000 people across the country since last October, according to government data. Of those, almost 18,000 are from Mexico. Detentions of people from Guatemala and Honduras add almost 14,000 Latinos to that number. Places including Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela add thousands more. Certainly, by any measure, Latinos are bearing the brunt of immigration enforcement.
Other parts of the brown world are not immune, however. More than 2,800 people from India have been detained, as have more than 1,400 Chinese people. Thousands of people from across Africa, including more than 800 Egyptians, have been locked up, too.
So we are not just talking about Latino people at car washes or Home Depots. We are talking about Artesia’s Little India; Mid-City’s Little Ethiopia; the Sri Lankan community in West Covina.
We are talking about Sacramento’s Stockton Boulevard, where Vietnamese men congregate in the cafes every afternoon.
We are talking about the farms, schools and towns of the Central Valley and the Central Coast, where Latino and Asian immigrants grow our food.
We are talking about cities such as Fremont in the Bay Area, where 50% of the population is Asian, from places including India, China and the Philippines.
We are talking about California, where immigrants make up 27% of the state’s population, more than double the national average. And yes, many of them lack documents, or live in families of mixed status.
A recent UC Merced study found that there are about 2.2 million undocumented immigrants in California. Of those, about two-thirds have been here more than a decade, and half have been here for more than 20 years.
“This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on social media. “Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family — and every person is now a target.”
Remember a few short months ago when our dear leader swore they were only going after criminals? How quickly did that morph into criminals being anyone who had crossed the border illegally?
And now, it has openly become anyone who is brown — and we are not even shocked. We are happily debating what the rules of these broad sweeps will be, having given up entirely on the fact that broad sweeps are horrific.
Do you think it will stop with immigration, or even crime? What about LGBTQ+ people? Or protesters? Who becomes the next threat?
Immigration sweeps are not a Latino problem, a Latino fear. We have opened the door to target people who “common sense” tells us are un-American.
The only way to close that door is with our collective strength, undivided by the kind of “common sense” discrimination that men like Kavanaugh embrace.
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Anita Chabria
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5 New Releases You Might’ve Missed Last Week: Featuring State Champs, Softcult, And More!
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Nothing gets us more excited than a week packed with new music. The past few days delivered just that, and we’ve pulled together a roundup of the releases we can’t keep off repeat. From pop-punk heavyweights like State Champs to genre-shifters like Poppy, alongside rising voices including Winona Fighter, Softcult, and Girl Tones, there’s plenty of new music ready to claim a spot on your playlist!
State Champs – ‘Common Sense’
State Champs have done it again with their latest single, ‘Common Sense!’ This track shows off a heavier side of the band while still packing in the classic pop-punk sound that made us fall for them in the first place. It feels like the perfect next step in their evolution, and honestly, we can already picture crowds screaming this one back at them on tour.
Speaking of tour—the band just kicked off a US run with iconic bands like Yellowcard and A Day to Remember. Visit here for a list of remaining dates and grab your tickets before it’s too late!
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT STATE CHAMPS:
FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | TWITTER | WEBSITESoftcult – ‘16/25’
Softcult are back with ‘16/25,’ and it’s impossible not to sit up and take notice. The track blends their dreamy, grunge-y sound with sharp, powerful lyrics calling out predatory older men and the double standards women face. It’s bold, raw, and stays in your head long after it ends. Right now, ‘16/25’ is the one we can’t stop playing.
Softcult also stay keeping us fed! Along with the new single, they’ve announced their debut album, When A Flower Doesn’t Grow (pre-save it here!), and are about to head out on a full US tour — We can’t wait!
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SOFTCULT:
INSTAGRAM | TIKTOK | TWITTER | WEBSITEWinona Fighter – ‘(Don’t Get) CLOSE’
Winona Fighter are serving up something special with the deluxe edition of My Apologies To The Chef! This expanded release takes their debut to the next level with acoustic versions, covers, and a new single, ‘(Don’t Get) CLOSE.’ It’s packed with raw energy and emotional punch—proving once again why the band has become one of the most exciting acts in punk right now.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WINONA FIGHTER:
FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TWITTER | WEBSITEPOPPY, Amy Lee, And Courtney LaPlante – ‘End of You’
Our queen of collabs, Poppy, is back with ‘End of You,’ and this time she’s not holding anything back! Poppy, Amy Lee, and Courtney LaPlante have joined forces and unleashed a track that’s equal parts heavy, melodic, and downright unforgettable—with each voice bringing its own fire to the mix (think if boygenius went metal). The result is a song that hits emotionally and sonically, leaving you hitting replay again and again.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT POPPY:
FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TWITTER | WEBSITE | YOUTUBEGirl Tones – ‘Cherry Picker’
We are so here for ‘Cherry Picker’! This track hits like a punch to the chest with every riff, drum beat, and lyric, and we’ve had it on repeat since it dropped. It pulls you in, shakes you up, and just doesn’t let go—Girl Tones have officially taken over our brains, and we’re so not mad about it.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT GIRL TONES:
FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TIKTOK | WEBSITE | YOUTUBEThis past week was such an iconic week of new music! Which release was your favorite? Or was there any track you wish we had included? Let us know in the comments, or tweet us at @thehoneypop! You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Discord.
Buzzing for more alternative content? We got you, honey!
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Liz Montville
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You Are Not Going To Believe This
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They are good for your mental health and most occasionally remember them, here is how marijuana effects dreams.
It is sometimes confusing when someone we know says something a little wacky. Like chocolate milk comes from cows. But 7% of Americans believe it comes from brown cows. There is a difference between book smart referring to knowledge gained primarily through reading and studying, and common sense the ability to make practical judgments and navigate real-world situations. Common sense doesn’t always need explicit instruction, which can sometimes be seen as lacking in someone considered book smart. MacGuyer, Scorpion and other shows have been based on the difference. While it is logical, you are not going to be believe this list of things things people think!While carrots are rich in vitamin A, which is essential for eye health, they do not enhance vision beyond normal levels. This myth was propagated during World War II as a way to explain why British pilots were successful at night raids.Based on many, many detective shows is the belief you can not report someone missing until 24 hours have passed. Actually, you can contact the authorities as soon as you feel they are unaccounted for without any waiting period.
While it is annoying and may freak some people out, research indicates knuckle cracking does not lead to arthritis or joint damage. The sound comes from gas bubbles in the synovial fluid, and while it may annoy others, it poses no health risks.And despite what your parents may have said, there is no need to wait an hour after eating before you go swimming. The American Red Cross and other medical professionals say eating before swimming is not dangerous. There are no documented deaths from swimming after eating, and the idea that it’s dangerous is a myth. While swimming does divert blood flow, it’s not medically recommended to wait before eating.
And last, a small portion of the population believe the earth is flat. This has been a benefit for YouTube who receives tons of traffic when a “flat earthed” does a video proven the world is flat and ends up doing the opposite.[ad_2]
Anthony Washington
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The Enigma of ‘Heat-Related’ Deaths
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The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my colleague and I found what we anticipated: Nearly every organ was riddled with tumors. But after we had completed the work, I realized that I knew why the patient had died, but not why he’d died that day. We found no evidence of a heart attack or blood clot or ruptured bowel. Nothing to explain his sudden demise. Yes, he had advanced cancer—but he’d been living with that cancer the day before he died, and over many weeks and months preceding. I asked my colleague what he thought. Perhaps there had been some subtle change in the patient’s blood chemistry, or in his heart’s electrical signaling, that we simply couldn’t see? “I guess the patient just up and died,” he said.
I’m a hospital pathologist; my profession is one of many trying to explain the end of life. In that role, I have learned time and again that even the most thorough medical exams leave behind uncertainty. Take the current spate of heat-related fatalities brought on by a summer of record-breaking temperatures. Residents of Phoenix endured a month of consecutive 110-degree days. People have been literally sizzling on sidewalks. And news organizations are taking note of what is said to be a growing body count: 39 heat deaths in Maricopa County, Arizona; 10 in Laredo, Texas. But the precision of these figures is illusory. Cause of death cannot be measured as exactly as the temperature, and what qualifies as “heat-related” will always be a judgment call: Some people die from heat; others just up and die when it happens to be hot.
Mortality is contested ground, a place where different types of knowledge are in conflict. In Clark County, Nevada, for example, coroners spend weeks investigating possible heat-related deaths. Families are interviewed, death scenes are inspected, and medical tests are performed. The coroner must factor in all of these sources of information because no single autopsy finding can definitively diagnose a heat fatality. A victim may be found to have suffered from hyperthermia—an abnormally high body temperature—or they may be tossed into the more subjective bucket of those who died from ”environmental heat stress.”
Very few deaths undergo such an extensive forensic examination in the first place. Most of the time, the circumstances appear straightforward—a 75-year-old has a stroke; a smoker succumbs to an exacerbation of his chronic lung disease—and the patient’s primary-care doctor or hospital physician completes the death certificate on their own. But heat silently worsens many preexisting conditions; oppressive temperatures can cause an already dysfunctional organ to fail. A recent study out of China estimated that mortality from heart attacks can rise as much as 74 percent during a severe, several-day heat wave. Another study from the U.S. found that even routine temperature fluctuations can subtly alter kidney function, cholesterol levels, and blood counts. Physicians can’t easily tease out these influences. If an elderly man on a park bench suddenly slouches over from a heart attack in 90-degree weather, it’s hard to say for sure whether the heat was what did him in. Epidemiologists must come to the rescue, using statistics to uncover those hidden causes at the population level. This bird’s-eye view shows a simple fact: Bad weather means more death. But it still doesn’t tell us what to think about the man on the bench.
Research (and common sense) tells us that some individuals are going to be especially vulnerable to climate risks. Poverty, physical labor, substandard housing, advanced age, and medical comorbidities all put one in greater danger of experiencing heat-related illness. The weather has a way of kicking you while you’re down, and the wealthy and able-bodied are better able to dodge the blows. A financial struggle as small as an unpaid $51 portion of an electricity bill can prove deadly in the summer. In the autopsies I’ve performed, a patient’s family, medical record, and living situation often told a story of long-term social neglect. But there was no place on the death certificate for me to describe these tragic circumstances. There was certainly no checkbox to indicate that climate change contributed to a fatality. Such matters were out of my jurisdiction.
The public-health approach to assessing deaths has its own problems. Mostly it’s confusing. Reams of scientific studies have reported on hundreds of different risk factors for mortality. Sultry weather appears to be dangerous, but so do skipping breakfast, taking naps, and receiving care from a male doctor. Researchers have declared just about everything a major killer. A few months ago, the surgeon general announced that feeling disconnected is as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The FDA commissioner has said that misinformation is the nation’s leading cause of premature death. And is poverty or medical error the fourth-leading cause? I can’t keep track.
With so many mortality statistics at our disposal, which ones get emphasized can be more a matter of politics than science. Liberals see the current heat wave—and its wave of heat-related deaths—as an urgent call to action to combat climate change, while conservatives dismiss this concern as a mental disorder. A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed concluded that worrying about climate change is irrational, because “if heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning.” (Humans survived thousands of years without penicillin, but syphilis was still a net negative.) Similarly, when COVID became the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., pandemic skeptics said it was a fiction: Victims were dying “with COVID,” not “from COVID.” Because many people who died of SARS-CoV-2 had underlying risk factors, some politicians and doctors brushed off the official numbers as hopelessly confounded. Who could say whether the virus had killed anyone at all?
The dismissal of COVID’s carnage was mostly cynical and unscientific. But it’s true that death certificates paint one picture of the pandemic, and excess-death calculations paint another. Scientists will be debating COVID’s exact body count for decades. Fatalities from heat are subject to similar ambiguities, even as their determination comes with real-world consequences. In June, for example, officials from Multnomah County, Oregon—where Portland is located—sued oil and gas producers over the effects of a 2021 heat wave that resulted in 69 heat-related deaths, as officially recorded. This statistic will likely be subjected to intense cross-examination. The pandemic showed us that casting doubt on the deceased is a convenient strategy.
No matter how we count the bodies, extreme weather leads to suffering—especially among the most vulnerable members of society. A lot of people have already perished during this summer’s heat wave. Their passing is more than a coincidence—not all of them just up and died.
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Benjamin Mazer
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Joe Lieberman Weighs the Trump Risk
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Joe Lieberman wants to make one thing clear. “The last thing I’d ever want to be part of,” the former Connecticut senator and onetime vice-presidential nominee told me by phone last week, “is bringing Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.”
Democrats have their doubts. Lieberman and his former party have been warring for years, ever since he won a fourth Senate term, in 2006, as an independent after Connecticut Democrats dumped him in a primary. Suddenly liberated, Lieberman endorsed the Republican John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008 and proceeded to tank the Democrats’ dreams of enacting a public health-insurance program through the Affordable Care Act.
He’s now a co-chair of No Labels, the centrist group that, to the growing alarm of Democrats, is preparing to field a third-party presidential ticket in 2024. The organization’s leaders say they’re trying to save voters from a binary rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden that most Americans have told pollsters they don’t want. But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House. Both No Labels’ own polling and independent surveys have shown that a “moderate, independent” candidate could capture as much as 20 percent of the popular vote and would pull more of that support from Biden than from Trump. If the 2024 election is as close as 2020’s—and pretty much every political prognosticator believes it will be—that could be decisive.
No Labels has already lost one of its co-founders, William Galston, over its push for a third-party ticket; Galston resigned in protest this spring over the possibility that the bid could tip the election to Trump. Democratic members of the No Labels–backed Problem Solvers Caucus in the House have disavowed the effort for the same reason. The moderate Democratic group Third Way is adamantly opposed to the idea, and a new bipartisan group is forming to stop it.
For now, Lieberman is undeterred. “I think people in both parties, particularly the Democrats, are greatly overreacting,” Lieberman told me. “They really would do better to try to build up support for their own ticket and adopt a platform that’s more to the center.”
Founded by the Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson, No Labels launched in 2010 with an initial focus on promoting centrist policies and breaking partisan gridlock in Congress during the Obama presidency. It formed the Problem Solvers Caucus in 2017 and has touted some of the major bipartisan bills that have passed with Biden’s support, including the 2021 infrastructure law. It is now putting significant money behind an idea—a so-called unity ticket featuring one Democrat and one Republican—that has come up repeatedly over the past two decades but never actually materialized. Leaders of No Labels have said they won’t decide whether to nominate a ticket until the spring, when they would assess the major-party nominees and see what polling shows about the effect a third-party bid might have. So far they’ve refused to discuss who their actual candidates might be.
Citing a large poll the group commissioned in December, No Labels has argued that a third-party ticket could win enough states—including some that are deeply red and deeply blue—to capture the Electoral College. Lieberman acknowledged that that remains a tall order. He said No Labels wanted a potential unity ticket to play “a constructive role” even if it didn’t win, drawing both parties back toward the ideological middle. They are hoping, for example, that one of the two parties will embrace the “Common Sense” policy agenda it released yesterday. It’s not clear, however, that this would make Biden or Trump any more palatable to voters.
The group’s lodestar is the late Ross Perot, who captured 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and was the last third-party candidate to draw significant popular support. Lieberman credits Perot’s bid for prompting President Bill Clinton to embrace policies that led to a balanced federal budget; many Republicans believe the Texas businessman cost George H. W. Bush a second term. More recent third-party candidates such as Jill Stein in 2016 have garnered much less support but played more obvious spoiler roles, delivering Republican presidential victories. And Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, is well aware of the impact that Ralph Nader had in that election, when he took crucial votes away from the Democratic ticket in Florida.
“When I look at the data next year, I’m going to be very cautious about interpreting it,” Lieberman said. “If it appears that, notwithstanding our goals, we may create a real risk of inadvertently helping to reelect Donald Trump, I will be strongly opposed to running a third-party ticket. And I think I’m reflecting a majority of people in No Labels, including the leadership.”
For all of Lieberman’s talk about caution, however, the group is aggressively laying the groundwork for what it calls a national “insurance policy” against a Biden-Trump rematch. No Labels is pursuing a $70 million effort to secure ballot access in every state and has already made progress in a few important battlegrounds. Today, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman will headline the formal launch of the group’s “Common Sense” agenda in New Hampshire. Manchin has not ruled out running for president on a No Labels ticket, although he insisted to CNN that his high-profile visit to the early-primary state was no indication that he’s warming to the idea.
Lieberman is clear about his distaste for Trump, but he’s hazier on the question of why—or even whether—Biden has fallen short. He’s said repeatedly that if the choice came down to Biden or Trump, he’d vote for the Democrat, and he speaks affectionately of a man he first met nearly 40 years ago and with whom he served for 20 years in the Senate. Yet he’s still hunting for a better option. I asked him whether he supported a third-party ticket because Biden had done a bad job or because voters think he’s done a bad job. “I think it’s both,” Lieberman replied. “He’s an honorable person, but he’s been pulled off his normal track too often” by pressure from the left. That’s a frequent talking point from Republicans and a complaint Manchin has made from time to time.
The perception that Biden has veered too far to the left, though, is not what has driven his low approval ratings. Indeed, in many ways Biden is the kind of president for whom moderates like Lieberman have long been clamoring. Yes, he signed two major bills that passed along purely party-line votes (the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act a year later), but he has repeatedly prioritized negotiating with Republicans, most recently over the debt ceiling. Lieberman credited Biden for his bipartisan infrastructure law and the budget deal he struck with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this spring. “He’s done some significant things,” Lieberman said, also praising the president’s initial handling of the coronavirus pandemic. When I asked him what specifically Biden had veered too far left on, he initially declined to list any issues. Then he pointed to No Labels’ policy plan, noting that it included “commonsense” proposals on guns and immigration.
Although he’s been out of office for more than a decade, Lieberman, at 81, is less than a year older than Biden. He said he believes the president remains up to the job, both physically and cognitively, and he was reluctant to call on him to stand down. But Lieberman gently suggested that might have been the better course. “I’m struck by how intent he is on running again,” he said with a chuckle. “It would have been easier for him not to run, and he could retire with a real sense of pride and just an enormously productive career in public service.”
Lieberman’s response subtly pointed to No Labels’ hope that, come springtime, their decision will be an easy one. Perhaps Biden will change his mind and withdraw, or Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere. At the moment, neither of those scenarios seems likely.
Lieberman and his allies might decide that nominating a third-party ticket won’t help reelect Trump, but that’s not something they can know for sure. I asked Lieberman: If he was so intent on keeping Trump out of office, wasn’t that too big a risk to take? He didn’t have a clear answer. “Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we’ll see.”
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Russell Berman
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