Unfortunately, this graph is pretty illegible, but it’s interesting:

So what is that? It’s something Gary Phillips put together that breaks out different American states and inserts them into the TIMSS international comparison of school performance:

Turns out that a few of our states are on par with the world’s highest performing countries when it comes to educational achievement. Massachusetts in particular stands out, and four other states–Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Kansas–received grades of “B,” up there with the likes of Japan. On the flip side, there were a bunch of C’s and one D+ in, of course, Washington, DC, where fourth graders learn math at the same level as Ukraine.

As Kevin Carey says, one thing about this is that it gets around the fact that it typically seems illegitimate to compare the United States to other countries that are often much smaller:

But New Jersey isn’t an autocratic city-state on the tip of the Malay peninsula or a Nordic socialist paradise or anything like that. Nor is Massachusetts (well, maybe the socialist part) or Minnesota or New Hampshire or Kansas. They’re all medium-sized states in America, subject to American laws, filled with lots of Americans in all the diversity that makes this nation great. Massachusetts in particular, the highest performing state, is full of people from all manner of racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. It has relatively high business taxes and relatively good social services compared to other American states but it’s far from France or Finland or Japan.

To be fair, I’m not sure I would say that New Hampshire features “all the diversity that makes this nation great.” But I think the point holds. If New Jersey can have schools that are as good as Japan’s, and Massachusetts can have schools that are better, then there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve similar results in Oregon or Arizona and what have you.

Torture for me, but not for thee.

Eric Cantor loves human rights:

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip who has put out blistering statements about the White House’s response, spoke loudly and emotionally about “America’s moral responsibility to speak out on the protection of human rights wherever they are violated” — hint, hint. “I urge President Obama to follow the lead of this House,” Cantor said.

Adam Serwer wonders where this commitment was when “Cantor voted against the military appropriations bill that banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror detainees.”

Specifically, according to the State Department’s official human rights brief on Iran:

Common methods of torture and abuse in prisons included prolonged solitary confinement with sensory deprivation, beatings, long confinement in contorted positions, kicking detainees with military boots, hanging detainees by the arms and legs, threats of execution, burning with cigarettes, sleep deprivation, and severe and repeated beatings with cables or other instruments on the back and on the soles of the feet.

Now to be clear, neither the scale of abuses nor the intent of the abuses is equivalent in the United States and Iran. But when it comes to techniques, it’s hard not to notice the fact that several of the methods condemned here, most notably including sleep deprivation, stress positions (“long confinement in contorted positions”), and shackling (“hanging detainees by the arms and legs”) were specifically authorized by the Bush administration. Many of the others, though not specifically authorized, appear to have become widespread in several detention facilities in part as a result of the administration’s general habit of throwing out the human rights rulebook. These bad actions don’t justify bad actions on the part of the Iranian regime. But whenever you read about these kind of techniques being applied in Iran or North Korea, it’s immediately apparent to everyone that it’s torture, it’s cruel, it’s inhumane, and it’s wrong. It’s also cruel, inhumane, and wrong when authorized by Dick Cheney.

Bill Press had a good opening to his latest column:

As usual, the president said it best: “Millions of our citizens do not have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health care. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”

And the president was right. However, that wasn’t Barack Obama in 2009. That was Harry S. Truman, addressing a joint session of Congress, in 1945. Can you believe it? His legislation to provide universal health care failed by only a few votes, and Congress has done nothing about it ever since.

It’s just incredibly frustrating that we’ve basically been stuck in this same holding pattern for over sixty years. But I think it’s important to keep this stuff in mind when people make broad characterological assertions about why the United States doesn’t have a robust social safety net. Truman ran on a platform of single-payer health care in 1948. And he won the election. If we had the kind of political system wherein politicians who win elections then get to enact their agenda—the kind of system that exists in Canada and the UK and most other countries—then we would have had a single-payer system decades and decades ago. The difference is the institutions, not the intrinsic nature of the people.

I’ve written a few times about the central role played in political crises by the question of whether or not the regime maintains the will and capacity to crack down with violence. Neil MacFarquhar’s story on Iran’s Basiji militia groups helps shed light on the regime’s strategy in this regard. Essentially they’re eschewing mass violence directed at the protests while they’re ongoing. Instead, “Iranians shudder at the violence unleashed in their cities at night, with the shadowy vigilantes known as Basijis beating, looting and sometimes gunning down protesters they tracked during the day.”

This preserves a certain level of deniability. It also, if it works, can cause the protest movement to die of a thousand cuts. Instead of a decisive moment at which the protestors are cut, the constant threat and sporadic reality of small-scale violence can intimidate people out of participating. At first, maybe only a small number of people will be intimidated. But watching the size of the protests diminish can, on its own, be demoralizing to the remaining protestors. Then if after another round of beatings and killings the protests get even smaller you can quickly have a snowball effect. People who might be willing to mount the barricades alongside hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens can swiftly grow disenchanted with putting their lives on the line if they feel that others have started to stay home. And unfortunately at the moment the Basiji look more likely to start escalating their violence than restraining it.