FiveThirtyEight: How Many Republicans Marry Democrats?

Evidence abounds that Democrats and Republicans really do not like each other. Researchers have found that they avoid dating one another, desire not to live near one another and disapprove of the idea that their offspring would marry someone outside their party (see here, here, here). Sure, most people are not very political, but among those who are, partisanship seems to be affecting nonpolitical realms of their lives.

That phenomenon motivated a colleague and me to gather data about mixed-partisan marriages. We were curious: How many Americans are married to someone of the other party? Who are these people? Are they old or young? Where do they live? Do they vote? [...]

Second, 55 percent of married couples are Democratic-only or Republican-only, which raises a question: Is that a big number or a small number? In other words, is there more or less partisan intermarriage than we should expect? Here are two ways we try to answer that. We can compare interparty marriages to interracial marriages. Using voter registration data, we can do this in three states, Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina, where public voter files list everyone by their party affiliation and their racial identity. In those states, 11 percent of married couples are in Democratic-Republican households. In comparison, only 6 percent of married couples are in any kind of interracial household. At least in these states, there’s about twice as much interparty marriage as interracial marriage. [...]

If you have an image in your head of a “battleground neighborhood” that is fiercely divided between Democrats and Republicans, you might imagine tension between neighbors. But the truth is that in these neighborhoods, half of the married couples living under the same roof are not one-party pairs. In fact, except in overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods (which tend to be African-American neighborhoods), close to half of households are not Democratic-only or Republican-only. This is likely to contribute to a more tempered political climate in battleground areas than we might first expect.

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The Huffington Post: "The Only Thing Jesus 'Open Carried' Was the Cross": A Minister Confronts the Gun Industry

When the local minor league baseball team, the Battle Creek Bombers, advertised that one of their home games would be hosting a “2nd Amendment Appreciation Night” that encouraged gun owners to “open carry” at the game, at the same time as they were honoring the Boy Scouts, Rev. Dannison decided it was time to act decisively. He started a petition to boycott the team if they went ahead. Despite the many signatures supporting this action, the team went ahead. [...]

That’s the new strategy of this faith and community movement. Town by town, baseball game by baseball game, and faith commitment by faith commitment we change the image of guns from the way Americans express their “freedom” to the dangerous bondage to the gun industry and its false and idolatrous promises of safety. [...]

“Jesus conquered death. There is no reason for a Christian of good faith to carry a weapon.”

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The Week: Is Pope Francis revolutionizing the Catholic Church — or just ad libbing?

If what the pope means is that individual Christians have often treated gays badly, subjecting them to violence, overt discrimination, and abuse, and shown an egregious lack of charity toward them for pretty much the entirety of the past 2,000 years, that is indisputable — as is the contention that an apology for such mistreatment is in order.

But if Francis means that the Roman Catholic Church as an institution owes gays an apology — well, that raises some unsettling issues. [...]

Not only does this mean that the church cannot bless same-sex marriages. It also means that no act of homosexual intercourse is ever acceptable. In order to conform to church teaching, a gay man or woman must embrace celibacy — meaning, he or she must forever renounce any hope of sexual fulfillment or companionship. Because, once again, acting on homosexual desires is always and everywhere gravely immoral, innately sinful, and "objectively disordered."

Pope Francis' suggestion of an apology to gays raises the question of whether he thinks it would be possible for the church to make such an expression of contrition while continuing to affirm and teach this view of homosexuality. I'm just going to go out on a limb and speculate that such an apology would not be especially well received in the gay community.

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AP: Israel's security figures take aim at hard-line Netanyahu

 Long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a potentially formidable challenge to his hard-line rule — not from Israel's civilian politicians but instead from its revered security establishment.

An extraordinary array of former top commanders are criticizing Netanyahu in increasingly urgent terms, accusing him of mishandling the Palestinian issue and allying with extremists bent on dismantling Israel's democracy.

On Tuesday, a group representing more than 200 retired leaders in Israel's military, police, Mossad spy service and Shin Bet security agency presented a plan to help end the half-century occupation of the Palestinians through unilateral steps, including disavowing claims to over 90 percent of the West Bank and freezing Jewish settlement construction in such areas. [...]

Following years of failed peace efforts and occasional violence, Israel pulled troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. But in the West Bank, hundreds of thousands of settlers receive an array of subsidies and privileges in what is in effect an Israeli colony. The Palestinian majority there does not have Israeli citizenship and lives under a mix of limited autonomy and Israeli military rule.

The view that this is corrosive is becoming overwhelming across the country's established classes: Beyond the security figures, leaders in academia, the legal system, the media, business and the arts also seem increasingly agitated by the prospect of permanent attachment to millions of restive, politically disenfranchised Palestinians.

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Slate: Donald Trump, Defender of the American Worker, Sure Used to Love Outsourcing

Donald Trump just got done giving a speech, staged appropriately in front of a pile of recycled trash, about the evils of trade. This has, of course, been one of his consistent campaign themes—that incompetent (or possibly courrupt) U.S. politicians (especially Bill and Hillary Clinton) have sold out U.S. workers in one bad trade deal after another, and that only he, Donald Trump, is willing to stand up for the interests of American blue-collar workers. (He even had a charming, seemingly ad libbed aside in this speech about how presidents after him might go back to mucking things up.)

Because, like an elephant, the internet never forgets, some writers have been having fun remembering the days when Trump wasn't so sour on the idea of sending jobs overseas. NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald pulled up this 2005 gem from the Trump University blog, titled, “Outsourcing Creates Jobs in the Long Run.” [...]

But it does add to the sense that his opinions on globalization can be a bit mushy, or, you know, hypocritical. Before he was praising Brexit, he once wrote a Davos-pegged op-ed for CNN praising Europe and saying that we'd have to “leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability,” whatever that meant. There's the fact that the anti-immigration demagogue and friend of the American worker happily uses seasonal guest workers at his Florida golf clubs (he says he can't find qualified Americans to work short term, which seems like a fairly weak excuse). Then there are his clothing lines, which are of course made overseas. He says it's difficult to have apparel manufactured here (that'd be true, if he added the words "cheaply" to the end of that sentence). Add it all up, and you get the impression the man might not have cared all too deeply about the plight of middle-class wage earners until recently. Perhaps we should start calling him a born-again protectionist.

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The Guardian: Where the streets have new names: the airbrush politics of renaming roads

And when new mayor Manuela Carmena swept to power with the backing of the anti-austerity movement Podemos nine months later, British MPs were said to be up in arms at reports she was planning to wipe Thatcher’s name from the city’s street map.

While Carmena’s office issued a denial, and Plaza Margaret Thatcher still stands in Madrid, the mayor has now set her sights on street names associated with former dictator General Francisco Franco. Policies such as ordering Balthazar in the annual Three Kings parade be played by a black man rather than a white man blacked up, or opening the elite Club de Campo Villa de Madrid to the public, have proved controversial in some quarters, but it is the idea of changing Franco-era street names that has arguably gone deeper and reopened old divisions. 

While many streets and squares directly bearing the name of Franco were renamed a decade ago under socialist prime minister José Luis Zapatero’s Historical Memory law, Carmena believes the Popular party of Botella never went far enough in the two and a half decades it ruled Madrid until her surprise victory last June. [...]

It’s not only in Madrid where name changing is a big issue. In Poland, around 1,500 streets, squares and bridges could have their names revised in an effort by the ruling Law and Justice party to “de-communise” the country. [...]

Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities, says that much of our sense of identity and belief is wrapped up in signs and symbols. “Once you decide to name a street after a person or an event, rather than topography, you’ve started something intrinsically political and subjective,” he says. “When we fail to look at what existed previously and why, we rob ourselves of context and roots.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Die Linke: Ten Years On

The refugee crisis gave Die Linke a unique opportunity to articulate a principled, leftist response that connects antiracist and antifascist groups to the national pro-refugee movement.

Although the party largely continues to maintain a firm open borders stance, it has not been proactive in any real sense, outmaneuvered by Angela Merkel’s surprisingly humane policies in the crisis’s first months. [...]

It is an irony of recent German history that Die Linke figures with no influence over policy call for restrictions and deportations, while those with power publicly advocate open borders while quietly cooperating with the state’s deportation program in the background. But looking back at the party’s formation helps to understand this fault line.

Die Linke is both part of a broad European trend and uniquely German. Like other new left parties, its social and political base rests on a crisis of class representation and a rising but uneven wave of social protest that began in the early 2000s.

These European parties are — to a greater or lesser extent — contradictory formations, described by Daniel Bensaid as “part of a range of forces polarized between resistance and the social movements, on the one hand, and the temptation of institutional respectability, on the other.” [...]

Rather than pandering to chauvinism or trying to minimize the injury of deportation by having a “left government” carry them out more humanely, Die Linke ought to defend refugee rights as a matter of principle, while continuing to develop a popular narrative that links the current situation with wider international and social questions to win over disenfranchised German workers.

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Land of Maps: EU Referendum and National Identity of Northern Ireland

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The Guardian: Ignored by the authorities, emboldened by Brexit, Europe’s far right is a real danger

Extreme rightwing terrorism has been a growing problem in Europe for some time. A recent study by a consortium led by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) highlighted that when looking at the phenomenon of “lone actor” terrorism in particular (terrorist acts conducted by individuals without any clear direction from an outside group), the extreme right wing was responsible for as many as Islamist extremists. And not all were random one-off killers – Anders Breivik was able to butcher 77 people in a murderous rampage in Norway. What was particularly worrying was the fact that these individuals sat at the far end of a spectrum of extremists that included elements closer to the mainstream. [...]

The response from security forces has been mixed. While we have seen an apparent increase in extreme rightwing violence, there has been less attention paid to it by authorities. In the RUSI-led research, a particularly striking finding was that in about 40% of cases of far-right extremists, they were uncovered by chance – the individual managed to blow himself up or was discovered while authorities conducted another investigation. By contrast, around 80% of violent Islamist lone actors were discovered in intelligence-led operations – in other words, the authorities were looking for them. [...]

The concern from this phenomenon must now be twofold. On the one hand, the increasing mainstreaming of a xenophobic anti-immigrant narrative will feed the very “clash of civilisations” narrative that groups such as al-Qaida and Isis seek to foster – suggesting that there is a conflict between Islam and the west which they are at the heart of. It will only strengthen this sense and draw people towards them.

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The Guardian: Benedict endorses Pope Francis in unprecedented Vatican ceremony

Benedict XVI has endorsed Pope Francis’s ministry in an unprecedented Vatican ceremony featuring a reigning pontiff honouring a retired one on the 65th anniversary of his ordination as a priest.

The ceremony in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace served in part to show continuity from Benedict to Francis amid continued nostalgia from some conservatives for the former’s tradition-minded papacy. [...]

While Francis presided, it was Benedict who stole the show with an off-the-cuff mini theology lesson sprinkled with Greek and Latin that showed that the mind of the German theologian is still going strong at 89.

In it, Benedict thanked Francis for letting him live out his final years in the beauty of the Vatican gardens, where he said he felt protected.

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Business Insider: Russia thinks the US government is using Netflix to get into its people's heads

You might joke that Netflix is taking over the world, but to Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky, it is no joke.

In an interview with news service The Rambler, translated by The Moscow Times, Medinsky suggested that the US government is funneling money to exert American power across the globe. [...]

The idea of using “soft power,” and specifically American culture, to further the American political agenda is not a new one. But Medinsky seems to also fundamentally not believe that the Silicon Valley system of venture capital could exist.

That said, if the goal of Netflix is to exert control over Russian minds, it might not be doing a particularly good job. Netflix launched in Russia in January, and research from UBS in April suggested that interest in the service might be lackluster.

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euobserver: Poland to push for 'radical' new EU treaty

The EU should have a new treaty that shifts power from the European Commission to EU states and Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk should resign, Poland has indicated ahead of Tuesday’s (28 June) summit.

Polish foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told press on Monday that prime minister Beata Szydlo would likely outline Poland’s post-Brexit vision at the leaders’ dinner. [...]

Speaking the same day in an interview with the Rzeczpospolita daily, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the powerful head of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), said mounting euroscepticism in countries such as France and the Netherlands showed that “the vision of the EU forced upon us by the Lisbon Treaty has failed”. [...]

Other Polish politicians criticised Kaczynski's ideas, however.

Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, a left-wing former Polish PM, warned that there is no appetite in the EU for a new treaty. “These proposals are senseless, because they amount to an invitation for a no-holds-barred [political] scrap”.

Ryszard Petru, an economist who founded the liberal Modern party, predicted the EU would split into three zones: the eurozone, pro-EU countries outside the euro, and “almost-out of the EU” states such as Hungary and Poland.

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Politico: What the EU will tell David Cameron

That question of how quickly and dramatically to react has divided the other 27 EU countries and even the European institutions. Should they start the divorce process immediately or give Britain time to sort out its internal politics before difficult negotiations on the way forward can begin? [...]

For the summit Tuesday and Wednesday — and also for the foreseeable future — the Brexit vote has forced other important issues off the table: migration, security policy, the European economy. Talks on those matters usually fill up a summit; on Tuesday they will be shoehorned into a three-hour opening session during which most leaders will undoubtedly be impatient to get to the big question: What now?

Here’s a tour de table of what several of the countries are likely to tell Cameron:

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The New Yorker: How to Steal an Election

Early American Presidential elections were not popular elections, not only because the vote was mainly restricted to white male property owners but also because delegates to the Electoral College were elected by state legislatures. The legislative caucus worked only as long as voters didn’t mind that they had virtually no role in electing the President, a situation that lasted for a while since, after all, most people living in the United States at the time were used to having a king. But a new generation of Americans objected to this arrangement, dubbing it “King Caucus.” “Under what authority did these men pretend to dictate their nominations?” one citizen asked in 1803. “Do we send members of Congress to cabal once every four years for president?” New states entering the union held conventions to draft state constitutions, in which they adopted more democratic arrangements. This put pressure on old states to revise their own constitutions. By 1824, eighteen out of twenty-four states were holding popular elections for delegates to the Electoral College. Between 1824 and 1828, the electorate grew from fewer than four hundred thousand people to 1.1 million. Men who had attended the constitutional convention in 1787 shook their gray-haired heads and warned that Americans had crowned a new monarch: “King Numbers.” [...]

Populism is very often a very clever swindle. But since 1831, with only one exception—the Whigs in 1836—every major party has nominated its Presidential candidate at a Convention. [...]

The rise of the primary was a triumph for Progressive reformers, who believed that primaries would make elections more accountable to the will of the people. That didn’t quite come to pass. Instead, primaries became part of the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of newer members of the electorate. Frederick Douglass addressed Republicans at a Convention in Cincinnati in 1876, asking, “The question now is, Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?” Sarah Spencer, of the National Woman Suffrage Association, was less well received at that Convention, which marked the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. “In this bright new century, let me ask you to win to your side the women of the United States,” Spencer said. She was hissed. In 1880, Blanche K. Bruce—a former slave, a delegate from Mississippi, and a U.S. senator—served as an honorary vice-president of the Republican Convention, and wielded the gavel.

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