Human rights practices inform Chicago ordinance in police torture case →

Over a period of nearly 20 years, Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his “midnight crew” allegedly tortured at least 118 people, forcing them to make confessions.
The police officers beat the victims, burned them with lit cigarettes and handcuffed them to hot radiators. They tied plastic bags over their heads and nearly suffocated them. They put cattle prods on their genitals and in their mouths and electrocuted them.
The officers’ behavior, human rights experts say, is what one would expect in a dictatorship, not a democracy.
On Wednesday, the City Council approved an ordinance to compensate Burge’s victims, most of them African-American men, and their families. The reparations ordinance is the first of its kind in the country to address police abuse. The measure draws from the United Nations Convention against Torture and human rights practices around the world, especially in nations that overcame the legacy of violent, repressive regimes.

The US is safer than ever — and Americans don’t have any idea →

There is half as much crime in the US right now as there was about 25 years ago. Both violent and property crime have declined pretty steadily since the early 1990s. But at any given time, if you ask Americans about it, between half and three-quarters of them will say that crime rates are going up.
...
But the massive disconnect between what crime rates actually are and what many Americans think they are shows two things. One is that in general, Americans think large societal issues are getting way worse than they actually are. Most Americans, for example, think teen pregnancy is going up — when in actuality it recently hit a two-decade low. A lot of people, it turns out, could stand to be a lot more optimistic about the future.
The second is this: when you ask Americans whether crime is up in their area, many of them still overstate it, but not as many. Consistently, about 20 percent of Americans think crime isn't going up in their area, but is going up nationwide. That's because many Americans, particularly white Americans, are simply isolated from the reality of crime and punishment in the US.

The 2016 Results We Can Already Predict: The battleground states will give you déjà vu. →

As the country has become more divided and polarized, the number of swing states has steadily shrunk. Even in 2000, when 537 votes in Florida elected a president, just 12 states were decided by five points or less. That number contracted to just four states in 2012.
When Jimmy Carter defeated President Gerald Ford in 1976, every big state was competitive: California, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois and Ohio all had at least 25 electoral votes, and each one was decided by less than five points. All told, 20 of 50 states were won by five points or less. This wasn’t unique; an earlier close election, the 1960 match-up between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, produced razor-thin results in exactly the same number of states, with almost all the mega-states of that day recording tight margins.
We don’t really have elections like 1960 and 1976 anymore. In the current Electoral College battlefield, 40 of 50 states have voted for the same candidate in all four elections since 2000. And, of the 10 exceptions, three were fluky: New Mexico’s pluralities were wafer-thin in both 2000, when it went for Al Gore, and 2004, when George W. Bush took the state. It has now trended mainly Democratic. Indiana and North Carolina, meanwhile, narrowly went for Barack Obama in 2008, in part because Obama’s campaign invested heavily in field operations and advertising in those states while John McCain, out of necessity, neglected them. Overall, Hoosiers are still predominantly Republican and Tar Heels marginally so. That leaves just seven super-swingy states: Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, all of which backed Bush and Obama twice each, and Iowa and New Hampshire, which have voted Democratic in three of the last four elections.
So it’s no wonder that these special seven states start as the only obvious toss-ups on our first 2016 Electoral Map...

Which party benefits from a foreign policy election in 2016? →

For those very interested in The Horse Race:

There’s been a lot of recent polling about how 2016 will be a foreign policy election. While some pundits dissent from this view, a Pew survey from January of this year suggests that national security issues like terrorism are pretty important to voters.This has been particularly concentrated on the GOP side.
OK, but if so, cui bono? Which party benefits from a focus on foreign policy?
To Republicans, this is an easy question, given that under President Obama, the world is on fire and only the GOP’s journey to the hawk side can save the republic. Or at least, that’s what the bumper sticker says.
Except that there’s this under-discussed phenomenon of Obama trending back into favorable territory, which suggests maybe he will not be the deadweight anchor that the GOP thinks he will be. Furthermore, it’s not like the last GOP standard-bearer for foreign policy has a stellar brand image...

The Last Culture Warrior: Why Mike Huckabee will lose, and what it means for evangelicals →

A look at the rise and fall of Evangelical political sway, and Huckabee's history within it:

Mike Huckabee is running for president. He will not win. But when he inevitably bows out of the Republican primaries, it will only be one more loss in a greater, longer defeat in America's culture wars.
...
The fact is that Huckabee is a candidate who has outlived his time. The days of just kings and their trusty prophets have passed, as has the era of TV pastors achieving influence beyond the (admittedly daunting) reach of the Oprah Winfrey Network. Evangelicals are frightened and angry and looking for the sort of president who will protect them from the onslaught of the world around them, which is still rapidly changing. Huckabee, with his folksy charm and church basement coffee-talk demeanor, was their preferred protector in 2008, and perhaps always will be. But he won't get anywhere near the White House.

Ben Carson Is No Herman Cain →

Carson’s announcement speech was light on substance, but it’s clear he doesn’t stray far from the rest of the Republican pack. He’s opposed to Obamacare, of course; called for an end to social programs that “create dependency”; and told supporters, “It’s time to rise up and take government back.”
With that said, there is one important difference between Carson’s rhetoric and that from the rest of the presidential field: It’s in the paranoid style...
Can Carson turn this paranoia into votes? Probably. If he makes it to the Iowa primaries, he’ll almost certainly find support from a portion of the electorate. But there’s no chance that he’ll go beyond a modest showing with social conservatives to win a contest or even the nomination. At most, he’ll harm a more mainstream Republican, like Sen. Ted Cruz, who needs to win as many voters on the right as possible. And after that? The former hero to black Americans will likely fade from view, as another fringe candidate running another vanity campaign.

Why the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review is depressing →

So what resources can the State Department throw at a problem? The bottom of page nine in the QDDR stood out for me:
In an era of diffuse and networked power, and with federal funding constrained, our diplomats and development professionals must focus on strengthening partnerships with civil society, citizen movements, faith leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and others who share our interests and values. For example, partnerships with mayors will be increasingly important, as nearly 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban environments by 2030...
Great googli moogli, that’s a lot of partnerships for a lot of variegated issues. And “partner” is the word that is shot through this QDDR (though it’s used even more frequently in the 2010 QDDR). In essence, Foggy Bottom is acknowledging that in a world of constrained funding, the best it can do is leverage its meager resources by acting as a focal point for sub-state and non-state actors.
The State Department is hardly the only agency to find itself with strict budget constraints. And as Beauchamp notes, “A massive amount of government work involves identifying huge problems … and then trying to implement a few small-bore strategies to chip away at the big problem.” That’s certainly what the QDDR is designed to do. But even if it was a pie-in-the-sky exercise, it would be interesting to hear what the State Department could do with more resources.