Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 871

Passing Legislation Is Easy. Just Win the House.

AP

If your political party wants to pass legislation, here is a tip. Don't worry about the presidency or the Senate. Take the House.

As we noted in July, this current, 113th Congress has been remarkable in its inability to get anything done. At that point, only 15 laws had been signed into law. A bit of good news, then: the number has gone up. Slightly NBC News delineates the year so far.

At this point in George W. Bush’s second term as president, for example, 113 bills had been enacted into law, according to numbers crunched by Pew Research Center’s Drew DeSilver. In the same amount of time during the 110th Congress – from January until before the Thanksgiving recess of 2007 – that number was 120.

With the ceremonial measures excluded, according to DeSilver’s calculations, Congress has enacted just 44 “substantive” laws so far this year.

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With the ceremonial measures, the count is only 52. But something occurred to us in looking at the data, which is available at GovTrack: most of those 52 laws were sponsored by Republican members of Congress. We went back and looked at each Congress back to the 100th (the last two years of the Reagan administration), to assess the party breakdown of signed legislation. Which gave us this.

That is the raw count of bills, of course. It's more telling if you look at the percentage of signed legislation. Once you adjust for that, you get the graph below, which is of the percentage of signed legislation that originated with each party (and independents).

Four Congresses in which Democrats had more bills signed into law. Then six dominated by Republicans. Two Democratic and two more Republican. Or: Precisely the breakdown of who controlled the House. On average, the party that controlled the House was responsible for the majority of laws signed into law a little over 75 percent of the time, regardless of how many laws were passed. When Democrats controlled the House, the total was slightly higher, 76 percent. When it was the GOP, 74 percent.

What's remarkable is that those percentages aren't much different than when a party controls both chambers of Congress but not the White House — or even all three. The sample sizes get a little small (Democrats and Republicans rarely control both chambers of Congress and the presidency) and there's overlap with the House data, but here are the percentages for each of those scenarios.

Party controls the House and Senate only

Party controls the House, Senate, and White House

Even when one party controlled the entire Congress and the White House, the opposition party saw bills signed into law 20 percent of the time. So you might as well take the House and not worry about the rest.

       

Detroit's Creditors Want the City to Sell Its Art Collection

Picasso's 1939 work "The Bather by the Sea" hangs on display, at left, as a viewer looks at The Detroit Institute of Arts display of nearly all of the works in its collection by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.  (AP)

A group of Detroit's largest creditors filed a motion in federal court on Tuesday that could lead to the sale of at least some of the bankrupt city's multi-billion dollar art collection, held at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The motion comes months after Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr asked Christie's Auction House to appraise the DIA collection, infuriating Detroit-area residents and the art community at large. At the time, Orr said that "there has never been, nor is there now, any plan to sell art." 

​Detroit filed for bankruptcy in July, with $18.5 billion in debt. The DIA collection has been previously valued at about $2.5 billion, but that's not an exact figure. Some individual paintings in the collection, such as DIA's works by Van Gogh, Matisse, and Bruegel, could be worth about $50 to $100 million each. 

As the Detroit Free Press first reported, the motion filed on Tuesday by a handful of bond insurers, three European banks, and the largest union in the city asks for the formation of a committee, appointed by Judge Steven Rhodes, in order to determine the collection's market value, apparently independent of the Christie's valuation initiated by Orr. It's the first legal step taken in the city's bankruptcy case that puts the collection at risk of sale. Free Press has more on what's at stake here: 

The filing suggests major creditors are unlikely to agree to any restructuring plan if they believe Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is offering a low-ball figure for the value of the art. The move increases the chances that Rhodes will ultimately be forced to decide whether the art can legally be sold.

The paper spoke to an executive at Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., the bond insurer that led the draft filing process. He spoke of the sale of at least some of the city's collection as a necessity, claiming that "there will be a viable DIA that will survive this process and possibly even thrive." He added, "there needs to be a construct that addresses the fact that the DIA, or art, is not an essential asset and especially not one that is essential to the delivery of services in the city." DIA has previously argued that any sale of art will put the museum's future in jeopardy. The city's creditors, for what its worth, don't have the power to force the city to sell anything. However, Judge Rhodes could end up throwing out any deal proposed by the city that he believes hides some of the its assets. 

The city owns DIA, but provides it with little to no funding. As the Chicago Tribune explained in a lengthy piece on DIA's plight during the bankruptcy case, the museum actually relies on a property tax approved by the surrounding suburban towns. In exchange, those residents receive free admission. Speaking to the Tribune, DIA director Graham Beal estimated that the property tax — approved in 2012 for 10 years — accounts for $23 million of the museum's $30 million annual budget. 

       

Why Is Pennsylvania's Governor So Incredibly Unpopular?

Associated Press

According to a poll released on Tuesday from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett would lose to literally any Democratic challenger in 2014. Even candidates nobody's heard of, like the current state treasurer and the former state auditor general. PPP finds Corbett trails "his potential Democratic challengers by anywhere from 12 to 20 percentage points."

And so, naturally, GOP officials in the state don't want him to run for reelection. But he's already announced that he will seek a second term, despite the fact that only 20 percent of the state's voters believe he deserves one (according to this poll from Franklin & Marshall College). He's considered the most vulnerable governor in the 2014 election. What did Corbett do to earn these lousy approval numbers?

Well, he disagrees with a majority of voters on a number of social issues.

Gay Marriage

Corbett's comments about the ongoing battle to legalize same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania have drawn the most national attention. His state attorneys (who are defending the state's gay marriage ban) compared gays who want to get married to children in August. When asked about the comment in October, Corbett responded, "I think a much better analogy would have been brother and sister, don't you?"

He later apologized for his gay-marriage-is-just-like-incest comment. While there are still Pennsylvania voters who think the gay marriage ban should remain in place, the state looks very different than it did in 1996, when the ban was passed. Fifty-two percent of Pennsylvania voters favor legalizing gay marriage, while 41 percent oppose it. There are now two openly-gay lawmakers in the legislature, and some state representatives who originally voted for the ban say today that they wish they could change their vote.

Gun Control

According to a February poll by Franklin & Marshall College, a full 94 percent of Pennsylvanians favor background checks for all gun purchases. And 61 percent "favor banning high capacity magazines and assault weapons, and limiting gun purchases to one per month."

Corbett, a lifetime member of the NRA, doesn't want any more gun control. Right after the Sandy Hook tragedy, Corbett said that the U.S. shouldn't rush to pass new gun control laws. He instead favors increasing services for the mentally ill, which, as some opponents have unfortunately pointed out, he actually cut in his first two state budgets. 

Medicaid Expansion

Corbett has agreed to expand Medicaid under Obamacare — as long as participants pay for it themselves. Which, some might argue, defeats the purpose of the program. The federal government has already promised to pay 100 percent of the cost.

Liberal group Keystone Progress made fun of the governor at an October Eagles-Cowboys game by passing out football cards picturing him in a Dallas uniform as the “Quarterback for Corporate Privateers.” The group also flew a banners over the Philadelphia game reading “Governor Corbett likes the Cowboys … but hates Pennsylvania families.”

Privatizing the State Lottery

Pennsylvanians feel very strongly about their lottery, apparently. Only 18 percent of them support Corbett's plan to privatize it. 

While the governor's lotto plan probably didn't seal his fate, Corbett does suffer from being a not-so-savvy conservative in a state that's increasingly liberal on social issues. If Pennsylvanians don't have a change of heart, he won't be reelected in 2014. 

       

Mary Cheney (Finally) Becomes a Gay Rights Activist

Liz Cheney (L) and Mary Cheney (R) (AP)

After a public feud with her Senate-hopeful sister Liz, Mary Cheney is finally wading into the state-by-state same sex marriage debate. Mary Cheney, who is openly gay, will host a fundraiser on December 11th to fight against a proposed ban on same-sex marriage in Indiana. Cheney announced her plans in an email to Freedom Indiana's mailing list. She wrote (via The Washington Post): 

When I heard about HJR-6 -- the proposed constitutional amendment that would permanently ban all protections for same-sex couples and their families -- I knew I had to join the powerful bipartisan movement that’s working to stop this anti-freedom amendment...Speaking out against HJR-6 isn’t a matter of politics. It’s about family. It’s about everyone feeling welcome in the state they call home.

Until recently, Mary was relatively quiet and uncontroversial about gay rights — The New Republic used the word "bland" in a recent piece on the Cheney sisters' public disagreement, citing, a quote from Mary's memoir that reads, “The consensus was that when an issue causes strong feelings, as gay rights does, bland is probably all right.”  Mary is married, with two kids, and has long worked on Republican outreach to the gay community. In the 1990s, she worked for Coors to improve its reputation among gays. In other words, she'd worked more on improving conservative institutions' relationships with gay people than on winning new rights for gays.

But then Liz Cheney started condemning same-sex marriage in public, as part of her campaign to unseat Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi. In a Fox News interview earlier this month, Liz said that "I believe in the traditional definition of marriage," adding, "I love Mary very much, I love her family very much. This is just an issue on which we disagree." Liz Cheney first took a stance against gay marriage in August, making her the only member of the Cheney family to oppose it. That includes former Vice President Dick Cheney. 

This prompted an uncharacteristically direct response from Mary Cheney. In a Facebook post earlier this month, Mary responded to Liz's Fox News statement: "Liz - this isn't just an issue on which we disagree," she wrote, adding, "You're just wrong - and on the wrong side of history." (Her wife Heather Poe posted a much more thorough takedown of Liz's stance). The backlash has apparently hurt Liz's already not-great campaign enough to prompt a new ad promoting the Senate candidate's loving family. 

       

It's Never a Bad Time for an Obamacare Death Panel Debunking

Mark Halperin, who once called President Obama a dick. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

On Monday Mark Halperin, Time magazine's senior political analyst and co-author of Double Down, sorta screwed up when he said that the Affordable Care Act's death panels were real, and part of the law. He was wrong. Halperin doubled down on Sarah Palin's geriatric dystopian nightmare during an interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax's Steve Malzberg. Here's a transcript via Poor Richard's News:

Malzberg: I think they focused on the death panels which will be coming, call them what you will. Rationing is part of it.

Halperin: I agree. Huge. It’s going to be a huge issue, and that’s something else about which the President was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.

Malzberg: Alright, so you believe that there will be rationing, AKA death panels.

Halperin: It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled.

That is wrong. Incorrect. Not accurate. False. It's literally the complete opposite of what is actually "built into the plan" in Section 3403, the Independent Medicare Advisory Board section (also known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which reads: 

That's referring to the proposals to cut Medicare spending that the board will be charged with providing. We looked, and there's no death panel section. 

This just goes to show that no matter how many times death panels have been debunked, no matter how long ago it won Politifact's Lie of the Year (2009), it's never a bad time to remind people that death panels don't exist. 

The myth: Obama's death panels decide who lives and dies

On August 7, 2009 Sarah Palin, less than a month after she resigned as governor of Alaska, posted this on her Facebook page:

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.

She then goes on to cite Michele Bachmann. Her comment won "Lie of the Year" by a landslide, even though that was the same year rumors of the president being born in Kenya were big. As mentioned above, Obamacare does not ration care.  According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Advisory Board is "an expert body charged with developing and submitting proposals to slow the growth of Medicare and private health care spending and improve the quality of care." There's no mention of death panels. The board will be made up of "physicians and other health professionals, experts in health finance, health services researchers, employers, and representatives of consumers and the elderly," not Obama's bureaucrats. 

The real concern here is a fear that Obamacare will encourage euthanasia. Whereas now health care talking points focus on costs for middle-class Americans, the concern then was that Obama would decide who lives and dies, and also force people to go to counseling sessions telling them how to end their lives faster.

The myth: Mandatory counseling on when to pull the plug on Grandma

A month earlier, Betsy McCaughey, a conservative and former New York lieutenant governor, said Democrats planned on mandating counseling that would help people euthanize themselves, according to Politifact. "Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner," she said. 

As FactCheck.org explained in August 2009, Medicare can now reimburse people for, as Obama put it, "consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, et cetera." In other words, for seniors who were already paying for and receiving those consultations, their insurance would now cover it. 

Still, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley ran with the death motif, and during a speech in August 2009, said: “In the House bill, there is counseling for end of life,” Grassley said, according to the Iowa Independent. “You have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life, you should have done that 20 years before. Should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma." Not only does that require you to predict your death by two decades and plan accordingly, it's also false.

Myth: Sarah Palin was right, and even Democrats agree with her

In September, Talking Points Memo posted Sarah Palin's rockin', grizzly bear roarin' video about how she was vilified for speaking up about the death panels (mocked might be a better word), but now a few Democrats are coming around to her side. 

Five Democratic congress members sided with Republicans to repeal the Advisory Board because they believed it would limit care for seniors. As Mother Jones pointed out, all five are facing tough re-election campaigns and, more importantly, that's not accurate — the Advisory Board can recommend cuts that would affect that physician reimbursement rates or the cost of specific medications. It doesn't affect medical care.

And that's where Howard Dean, former chair of the Democratic National committee comes in. He's the centerpiece in Palin's Toldja video. Dean wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing against the Advisory Board in July. The phrase "death panels" never comes into play — he just thinks it won't help, which makes sense, given that he's a lobbyist for a firm that works with the healthcare industry. So even if some Democrats aren't voting for the Board that still doesn't mean Sarah Palin was right. Unless, of course, you're Mark Halperin.

       

Microsoft Is Cracking Down on Your Curse-Filled Video Game Commentary

AP

When playing competitive video games online, it doesn't take long to hear a slew of curse words, slurs, and other offensive rabble-rousing, often from an annoying, precocious 12-year-old. That might not be the case for long, though. Microsoft is cracking down on swearing gamers using its new Xbox One console and suspending users who upload videos with curse words. Some of game makers are getting in on the potty mouth backlash, too.

One of the big selling points of the Xbox One was its Upload Studio, a built-in app that can edit and share videos of gameplay. Through Xbox's Kinnect device, the app records gamers' video and commentary, which can then be overlaid onto the gameplay video and easily posted to YouTube or elsewhere. But videos shared through Upload Studio can also be heard by Microsoft, and the company isn't liking what it's hearing. As a response, Microsoft is suspending gamers that use “excessive profanity” from accessing its online Live network. The company explained the policy in a statement:

"[W]e take Code of Conduct moderation via Upload Studio very seriously. We want a clean, safe and fun environment for all users. Excessive profanity as well as other Code of Conduct violations will be enforced upon and result in suspension of some or all privileges on Xbox Live.

Those online suspensions also forbid Skype use, leading some to question whether Microsoft was eavesdropping on private conversations, but Microsoft was quick to put the kibosh on those rumors. 

To be clear, Microsoft isn't do anything to quell cursing on its Live platform or on Skype, but only on videos shared through Upload Studio. That, to Techcrunch writer Alex Wilhelm, screams of a weird double standard. "Gamers are notoriously dickish to one another over in-game chat on any platform. Saying that swearing is not to be tolerated (at least partially) in this one area of gaming on top of a platform that is an obscenity cannon just feels squishy."

But it's not just Microsoft attempting to clean up the cursing-heavy video game culture. Best-selling soccer game FIFA 13 last year introduced a feature in which the digital referees and commentators heard and responded to the human gamer's real-life cursing with in-game penalties, such as yellow cards. That same feature appears in this year's edition, FIFA 14, and it's now getting greater public attention as part of the pro-free speech backlash to Microsoft's snooping.

One of Reddit's top rated posts today comes from user "Rossboomsocks", who posted the picture at right showing that the game's sensors are listening. Framed as a warning from "Manchester City's Board of Directors," (the franchise that he controls) the message reads that "the language you have used puts us all in a bad light. Please try and refrain from using such colourful language in the future and control your overly aggressive nature." Apparently, Mr. Rossboomsocks had been a bit too vocal in his surely tasteful and respectful disagreements.

If Microsoft holds its line and gets foul mouths out of its online Upload Studio, there might be one decisive winner: rival console maker Sony and the Playstation 4.

       

Comparing Obama to Trayvon Martin Is Fine if You've Declared Racism Over

D'Souza, with no ulterior motives, interviews the president's half-brother. (AP)

Since author and Obama-disliker Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book declaring The End of Racism (three bucks at Amazon), it was not racist when he on Tuesday referred to the president as the "Grown-Up Trayvon in the White House." Can't be. Racism is over.

Update: He deleted the tweet, but we took a screenshot.

The book, released in 1996, articulates the conservative writer's position on racism. If you're not interested in paying even $3 for it, D'Souza (pictured above at left) explained its argument to PBS shortly after the book came out. In short: Racism was created as a concept to explain why non-Western cultures didn't match the West's cultural achievements. He says "racism is a doctrine of biological inferiority usually accompanied by the practice of systematized discrimination," then arguing that that perception of inferiority has largely subsided.

And then, later, that one problem distinctive to black culture is "the extremely high, virtually parasitic reliance of African-Americans on the government."

So I’m not saying that it’s peculiar or bizarre that blacks rely on the government. I’m saying today, when the government cannot employ large numbers of people, when public confidence in the government is low, the Korean or the Asian strategy of entrepreneurship, of small business, which is very weak in the black community, we need to stress that.

See how it works? There's no racism anymore, so now we can have some Real Talk about African-Americans. Arguments that institutionalized racism — and the obvious and persistent existence of discrimination — somehow affect the black population are dismissed in favor of the argument that African-Americans choose to rely on government assistance.

If this sounds familiar following last year's maker-vs-taker, 47-percent-are-dependent-on-government campaign, it should. D'Souza's theories launched him into the conservative pundit stratosphere. Here was a person of color saying that conservatives are authorized to dismiss entire minority groups. D'Souza didn't invent this argument, but by declaring racism over, he certainly helped clear its path.

The first line of @DineshDSouza's Wikipedia bio is amazing (via @the_sy_guy) pic.twitter.com/1s6Vg01zYJ

— Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) November 26, 2013

D'Souza's role in the 2012 campaign was more direct than obliquely influencing political theory. He also created the (completely unfounded) idea that President Obama was influenced by his father to hate Western culture, by virtue of his father being a Kenyan anti-colonialist. It's an argument that starts with D'Souza's goal — prove that Obama hates America — and then work backward to find the cause. At the time D'Souza released that theory, The Economist
    

The U.S. Flew B-52s Through China's New 'Air Defense Zone'

AP

Two American B-52 bombers on a training mission flew right through China's newly expanded air defense zone on Monday. The air space in question happens to be over a portion of the East China Sea claimed by both China and Japan. The "long-planned" training exercise, announced by Pentagon officials on Tuesday, underlines that the U.S. still considers the air claimed by China to be an international space. The planes flew from and returned to the U.S. territory of Guam. 

On Saturday, China unilaterally decided that any non-Chinese planes entering the space over the East China Sea — and a disputed grouping of islands — must give Beijing a flight plan ahead of time, and maintain radio contact with the country while in that space. The punishment for not complying, China warned, could include “defensive emergency measures." In other words, China might shoot down the plane. 

The U.S. did not inform China of its Monday flight. Pentagon spokesperson Col. Steve Warren told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that the U.S. "will not in any way change how we conduct our operations as a result of the Chinese policy of establishing an ADIZ, an Air Defense Identification Zone," indicating that the U.S. was moving forward with the previously planned training mission. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the establishment of the zone "counterproductive," and urged Japan and China to settle their differences over the islands through diplomacy. 

Among other things, China's new ADIZ substantially overlaps an earlier one established by Japan, as the Aviationist outlines. Both countries consider the airspace to be theirs, although Japan currently administers the islands in that territory. American officials aren't explicitly framing today's flight as a rebuke, but that's pretty much how everyone will read it, including China. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel condemned the expansion in a weekend statement. "We view this development as a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region," Hagel said, adding, "this unilateral action increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations.”

       

How the 'Knockout' Game Let Media Outlets Flex Their Muscles

Screenshot via NBC

Two weeks ago, a 78-year-old Jewish woman was punched in the face in Midwood, Brooklyn, by a young, black man. A similar incident occurred on Monday, and an unknown number of similar incidents have prompted an NYPD investigation into whether a attacks on Jewish victims constitute hate crimes — and whether they are actually part of a disturbing new trend, called the “knockout” game.

Naturally, the knockout game — specifically, whether not it exists as an epidemic — has spurred a media frenzy, with believers claiming the trend is cause for alarm, and skeptics deriding the coverage as proliferation of yet another trend that doesn't exist. 

At best, they say, the believers are naive and hysterical; at worst, racists following a systematic trend of pointing to isolated incidents of crimes committed by young black men as justification for harmful generalizations. The believers, for their part, say the denial is typical of the left-wing media, who prefer politically correct sensibilities to the truth. Neither side has much to go on.

The New York Times cited Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as saying his team is “trying to determine whether or not this is a real phenomenon.” He adds, “I mean, yes, something like this can happen. But we would like to have people come forward and give us any information they have.” That's actually a pretty reasonable reaction, considering the difficulty in determining criminal trends; especially in the age of 24-hour news coverage, where the copycat effect creates attackers inspired by the ‘trend’ to capitalize on the media’s branding. 

Still, media outlets leading the discussion on how to classify the knockout game seem to have taken a definitive stance. The New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica opened his oped with the sentence: “Sometimes an act of terror can be as simple as this: Some punk suddenly trying to put you down and put you out because of ‘knockout,’ described as a game even if it seems to be anything but,” and NBC News led a story on the subject with the line; “Police around the nation are on high alert for a new and dangerous trend among urban teenagers: the ‘knockout game,’ in which teens knock out unsuspecting strangers for the fun of it."

Yet, almost before the trend pieces could reach enough people to start a nationwide panic, the counterpoints came in to quash the whole thing. Slate, to debunk such reports, ran a piece with the headline “Sorry, Right-Wing Media: The ‘Knockout Game’ Trend Is a Myth,” and the Daily Beast matched it for candor with the title: “Guess What? The ‘Knockout Game’ is America’s latest phony panic.”

As is often the case, speculative coverage tends to say more about each respective news outlet than the story. Believers focus on the anecdotal evidence in each case, while debunkers draw on their broad strokes. Neither is an especially effective method of fact-finding. So the narrative breaks down to conservatives versus progressives, realists versus optimists, bigots versus defenders, and so on, and so on. This debate, it seems, has fallen across fairly defined media lines, with traditional, local outlets jumping to call the attacks a trend and younger blogs and online outfits shouting them down. The debate can be seen as a means for each side to flex their bona fides - old media plays to its demographic, zeroes in on human interest, and uses dramatic video coverage to flesh out a thin story. New media also plays to its demographic, and rightly points to dog whistles in conservative coverage, while toying with levels of snark to fine-tune an institutional voice.

So far, neither side has mentioned the external conditions that could help parse whether the incidents could reasonably be part of an actual crime pattern, like the mayoral overhaul, income inequality, a homelessness crisis, and other factors that shift the day-to-day life of city dwellers. And neither has fully examined the implications or repercussions for victims and attackers if the knockout incidents are found to be real hate crimes. Until the knockout games fade away or solidify into an actual threat, we may all benefit from some radio silence.

       

The Turkey Is the Worst Part of Thanksgiving

AP

If you believe in American exceptionalism, then the last thing you should be doing is eating this second-rate bird this week.

In two days, families will congregate around dinner tables across this great country and eat turkey that someone spent many hours cooking just so it can be half as good as the rolls, cranberry sauce, and stuffing that share its plate. The turkey, with its bronzed skin, will sit at the head of the table and, like Anne Hathaway, beg to be worshipped. It, like Hathaway, might even smell good. But this is a sham, and you'll know it the moment you put the stringy white meat (the turkey, not Hathaway) in your mouth. 

Here's why turkey is actually a Thanksgiving fraud:

Turkeys Cannot Have Sex

One of the most pathetic things about the turkey is that it cannot have sex its own. Left to their own devices, turkeys would die out because they can't reproduce. A 2010 report from the Humane Society found that the turkeys we eat for Thanksgiving are too fat to fornicate. "Turkeys have been bred for such heavy body weight that they are physically incapable of mating, necessitating artificial insemination via tube or syringe," the report explained. 

Don't Americans want to eat an animal that has plenty of crazy sex ... like lobsters?  Or shrimp?  The turkey is one of the animals, along with pandas and French bulldogs that need human help when breeding. Unlike the panda and French bulldogs, the turkey is not cute. 

Granted, turkeys were bred this way because of American whims. Though, that should be even one more reason we should do away with turkeys. 

Turkeys Are Not Worth Pardoning

Turkeys who get a presidential pardon don't usually make it to their second Thanksgiving. By then, they're usually found dead of heart disease, National Journal reports. These are wastes of pardons. 

Turkeys Are Not Very Tasty

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," a wise person once said. That person was not referring to turkey. That's why people have many different theories on how to prepare turkey: brines, butters, stuffings, basting, injections, etc. Turkeys might be the only animal on this planet that are so boring that they need to be stuffed with two other animals (ducks and chickens) to become delicious. 

The Leftovers Theorem: The true heroes of Thanksgiving are the sides. Mashed potatoes, mac n' cheese, cranberry sauce, rolls,  stuffing, green bean casserole, parsnips — Thanksgiving hosts will have none of these left by the end of the night. What they will have are mounds and mounds of turkey (despite all the preparation done to make sure it tastes wonderful).  

The Fried Chicken Theorem: Thanksgiving would be a better holiday if, instead of turkey, Americans would celebrate and congregate around a mountain of buttermilk fried chicken (fried in shortening). 

The "If It's So Good" Theorem: If roast turkey was as good as some people would have you believe, why do we only do it at Thanksgiving and Christmas? Shouldn't we be roasting turkeys left and right or even as much as chickens? And why do they need to be mixed with everything else like cranberry sauce and gravy to achieve their best taste? Finally, shouldn't turkey be better than the fourth-favorite protein in America?

Turkeys Are Dangerous

Nope. No, turkeys are not like the winged bringers of doom known as Peregrine falcons. They're not even half as cool (partly because turkeys are not real birds). The only damage that a turkey can really inflict upon a human is from beyond the grave and it fully depends on a human making mistakes.

Because turkeys don't taste good (we went over this) people have come up with ways to make them taste better. One of those ways is to deep-fry the bird. Deep-frying things automatically makes them taste good. I would wager that dishrags would taste good deep-fried. The thing with turkeys is that deep-frying is especially dangerous because these cumbersome birds require large amounts of oil and fire.

According to State Farm insurance, "more than twice as many cooking fires occur on Thanksgiving than any other day of the year" and November is known in some circles as the month of the turkey fire. Texas leads the country in deep-fryer turkey accidents.  That's why we have frightening videos of turkey carcasses unleashing fiery doom. 

What kind of food can burn down your house via grease fire? Oh, right, turkey. Could you imagine explaining how you lost your house because of a turkey grease fire? Fight the power.