Posts Tagged ‘Bernie Sanders’
Good Day Wednesday
* Good news: The Obama administration has decided it will no longer defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in court. This from Barney Frank suggests that Democrats may have stumbled, through no fault of their own, onto a key truth: “People who will be angry at the President over this won’t vote for him anyway.”
* More good news: Scott Walker gets awesomely prank-called. More here.
* Maybe Jon Stewart should rethink this moronic camel gag. It’s good that the protests in Wisconsin haven’t turned violent, but it’s not as if there isn’t a history of anti-union violence in the U.S. Remember that this all began with Walker promising to bring in the National Guard—and a deputy attorney general from Indiana was fired just today for advocating the use of live ammunition against the protestors.
* This is weak even by Fox standards.
* Nate Silver pregames 2012, state by state.
* Bernie Sanders is my copilot:
What we have to understand is this is not just Wisconsin. This is part of the concerted attack on the middle class and working families of this country by the very wealthiest people in America, the Koch brothers and many others. And you’re also right in suggesting that if you look at the end game, what are you talking about?
You’re talking about the end of Social Security, privatization of Social Security, massive cuts and privatization of Medicare, major cuts in Medicaid. You’re talking about over a period of time, the end of unemployment compensation, the end of the minimum wage or lowering the minimum wage.
What these guys want is to return us to the 1920′s when working people had virtually no rights to organize or to earn a decent living. Bottom line today is the top 1% earn more income than the bottom 50%. The top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%. That gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider.
And what the wealthiest people in the country are doing are using their resources to make the attack against the middle class even stronger. They want the destruction of the middle class and almost all wealth in this country to go to the people on top.
* And to top it all off: creationists suffer defeat in Oklahoma. It’s like I can’t lose today.
Friday Night
* Kevin Drum throws some cold water on the notion that the payroll tax cut is a GOP Trojan horse. Be careful, though—unlike Obama the GOP really does play 11-dimensional chess.
* But while we debate the tax policy compromise, the Obama White House moves boldly on to its next preemptive capitulation.
* Is Bernie Sanders still talking?
* Salon asks whether the time has finally come for the rich to just outsource the entire country. Charlie Stross has an even more promising cognitive framework:
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
Tax Policy Friday – 2!
Late Night Links With Very Little Context
* James Franco, will you never cease your cruel mockery of my life?
* Pawlenty already going after Romney on health care. This should be fun to watch.
* Via Yglesias, John Holbo has the only critique of bipartisanship you’ll ever need.
* Bernie Sanders doesn’t like the climate bill.
* The Walking Dead will be a series.
* Barack Obama looking at awesome things.
* And, via Tim, this perfectly reasonable report: A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.
Getting to Single Payer the Vermont Way
“Quite frankly,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said today, “we don’t have the votes for single payer.” That’s not much of a surprise, but Sanders did outline another strategy for single payer that some liberals might want to think about. “Right now,” he explained, “we have language in the bill that says that states that want to go forward with single payer can do that.” I’ve mentioned before that this seems like the best approach for progressives in the U.S., as it’s already worked in Canada; there’s every reason to think that adoption of single payer by a single state would eventually spread nationwide.
Wednesday Roundup
* Skepticism fail: James Randi jumps the shark. Ugh.
* Health care reform continues its endless slide into oblivion. Steve Benen counts the five senators still not on board: Ben Nelson/Olympia Snowe from the “center,” and Feingold, Sanders, and Burris from the left. Meanwhile, Crooks & Liars and Firedoglake still argue the Liebermanized bill is worse than nothing, while Yglesias singles out Harry Reid for praise:
…the fact of the matter is that there’s almost no precedent for the legislative mission he’s been asked to accomplish of turning 59 Democrats, one loosely Democrat-aligned Independent, and two slightly moderate Republicans into 60 votes for a package that’s simultaneously a dramatic expansion of the welfare state and a measure that reduces both short- and long-term deficits.
Fair enough. But it’s Reid’s total rejection of reconciliation as even a theoretical alternative that has left us in this mess in the first place. Reid gets no special praise from me.
* io9′s 20 best SF films of the 2000s. Totally forgot Spider-Man 2 and Eternal Sunshine were from this decade; it’s been a long ten years.
* And meat-eaters finally win a round: “Meat may be the reason humans outlive apes.”
