Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’
Even More
* Chilling fact of the night: “Texas uses fourth grade reading scores to project the number of prison cells they’re going to need 10 years later.”
* LGM has your Wisconsin pre-postmortem.
* Robert Reich is teasing an imminent Obamacare ruling, claiming Roberts wants to uphold the law.
* Even Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Won’t Say The Affordable Care Act Is Unconstitutional.
* How Wes Anderson Soundtracks His Movies. Another Wes Anderson interview.
* And tonight’s dystopia: Behold the London Olympics’ Creepy ‘Brand Exclusion Zone.’
The most carefully policed Brand Exclusion Zone will be around the Olympic Park, and extend up to 1km beyond its perimeter, for up to 35 days. Within this area, officially called an Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restriction zone, no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed. (Originally, as detailed here, only official sponsors were allowed to advertise, but leftover sites are now available). This will be supported by preventing spectators from wearing clothing prominently displaying competing brands, or from entering the exclusion zone with unofficial snack and beverage choices. Within the Zone, the world’s biggest McDonald’s will be the only branded food outlet, and Visa will be the only payment card accepted.
History’s Judgment
A commenter at Kevin Drum’s place had an insightful two-sentence summary of how base politics works in the U.S. (paraphrased slightly below):
The Democratic base is certain that history is on their side: any compromise that gives them half a loaf is tolerated as moving the ball in the direction they want.
The Republican base fears that history is against them, and sees any compromise as giving ground that will then be lost forever.
But the Real Action Is in 2024
Already bored with 2012, David Leonhardt looks ahead to general election 2016. Rich Yeselson at Washington Monthly adds Sherrod Brown to the list of possible candidates.
Thursday Links
* Pteromerhanophobiac? Here’s your chilling long read of the day: What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447.
* Minecraft mod adds carbon emissions based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data. Via Eric.
* Headline of the day: DOJ to America: we won’t reveal the circumstances under which you can be assassinated by us.
* Cynical-C has your list of animals with fraudulent degrees.
Monday!
* ‘Democrats Gleeful at Prospect of Running Against Gingrich.’ That’s the first bit of Gingrich-related news that’s made me nervous.
* io9 has the trailer for Joss Whedon’s long-delayed The Cabin in the Woods.
* Duke University trustee Bruce Karsh and his wife Martha have donated $50 million to Duke for a permanent endowment to support need-based financial aid for undergraduate students from the United States and other countries, President Richard H. Brodhead announced Monday.
* Randy Balko vs. paramilitary creep.
* Aaron Bady on the Oakland Commune.
* Henry Aaron: So… here is my prediction. The Supreme Court will sustain the individual mandate, and it will do so not by the narrow 5 to 4 split that has become so familiar, but by a vote of 7 to 2. Or 8 to 1. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sottamayor, and Kagan are virtually certain to find the mandate constitutional. But also voting to sustain it, I believe, will be Justices Scalia and Kennedy, based on reasoning similar to that of Silberman and Sutton. Justices Roberts and Kennedy are in play and I am assuming that either or both will vote to affirm the mandate. Justice Thomas, who has staked out a far-reaching opposition to federal regulation in many currently accepted forms, will say that the mandate exceeds Congress’s constitutional authority.
* Apocalypse now: Radioactive water from Fukushima might have found its way into the Pacific ocean and experts believe it could contain strontium.
* And today from America’s finest news source: Global Warming May Be Irreversible by 2006.
* But it’s okay that we’ve ruined this planet; after all, there’s always Keppler 22b.
‘My Sense Is That If the Democrats Stopped Fishing There, It Is Because There Are No Fish’
Election as Heist
Adam Kotsko explains your modern Democratic Party.
…The result is that every election becomes a kind of “heist,” where we just barely pull together enough ideas to get X% of the soccer moms, etc., etc. Then, in the rare cases where liberals actually gain power, every policy debate is characterized by the infamous Obama-style “preemptive compromise” — again, since the opponents’ preferences are hard-wired, there’s no need to have any actual debate. The entire debate can happen in the mind of the liberal, and the opponent will “have to” sign on for the carefully crafted compromise that takes all the opponent’s preferences into account. In the same way, if liberals preemptively reject policies that typically prompt conservative criticism, their conservative opponents “have to” refrain from attacking them on said issue. And the consistent lack of success of this strategy only shows that liberals aren’t doing it hard enough.
Wednesday Night Links
* Breaking Bad aficionados will enjoy Bryan Cranston’s recent appearances on the Nerdist and WTF with Marc Meron, the latter of which has the (new-to-me) tidbit that Jesse was slotted to be killed off in the first few episodes; he was saved from death by the awesomeness of Aaron Paul.
* Wisconsin wants to mess with the Electoral College, too. You’ll be shocked to learn the Koch brothers are involved.
* So the U.S. government doesn’t actually have “hard evidence” Iran tried to murder the Saudi ambassador. I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.
* TPM and @fivethirtyeight (1, 2, 3) have been talking today about the fact that Romney (while unquestionably “inevitable”) has clearly hit his support ceiling in the Republican primary. The Anti-Romney has shifted through several alternatives, but the support never settles on Romney; it just keeps casting about for some new savior, Bachmann, Perry, Christie, and currently Herman Cain. It’s just more fodder for my “Draft Jeb” conspiracy theory…
* Beka Economopolis on Occupy Wall Street: We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable. Yes, perhaps, split the support, lest we not be co-opted. This will be painful, internally, as it won’t always achieve comfortable consensus. But to hold this space and expand the realm of possibility, we have to go farther than others are ready to go.
* Matt Taibbi on Occupy Wall Street.
* The Big Picture blog on Occupy Everywhere.
* Kevin Drum and Paul Waldman on the GOP’s astounding Medicare reality distortion field.
1. Health care in general, and Medicare in particular, are bankrupting our country.
2. But government should never try to figure out which treatments are effective.
3. Medicare should pay for any treatment anyone wants, regardless of whether it works or what it costs.
4. If an insurance company refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s their right as actors in the free market; if Medicare refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s Washington bureaucrats trying to kill you.
5. We need to cut Medicare benefits, because don’t forget it’s bankrupting our country.
* The fiends! In an effort to promote healthful eating and, it has been suggested, to protect traditional Gallic cuisine, the French government has banned school and college cafeterias nationwide from offering ketchup with any food but — of all things — French fries.
* Australia has passed a carbon tax.
* Imagine there’s no peanut butter.
* And Polling Shows North Carolina Faces Uphill Battle To Defeat Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment. Honestly, how are we even still arguing about this?
Four for Thursday
* The Indy writes up the David Simon event I went to the other day (and live-tweeted). If I weren’t swamped with deadlines I’d have more to say about this. Maybe soon.
* What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?
* According to the historians, by looking at things that have already happened, Americans can learn a lot about which actions made things better versus which actions made things worse, and can then plan their own actions accordingly.
* And then there’s this: Stony Brook University Student Is Being Deported Despite Being In America Since She Was 20 Months Old.
Her planned deportation comes at a time when the Obama administration has made repeated promises to focus its deportation on immigrants who’ve committed crimes while in the U.S. “Although Obama has promised not to be going after non-criminal cases, he’s going after Nadia and her mom,” noted Hunter College student Sonia Guinansaca, who works with the New York State Youth Leadership Council and is fighting Habib’s deportation. Local students have launched campaigns on Facebook in her support and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) has spoken up against her deportation as well. Both Habib and her mother are expected to be deported at 11 a.m. tomorrow.
Manichaeism in America
What Carville’s confused, contradictory screed highlights is the difficulty of trying to understand American political conflicts through an exclusively partisan prism of Democrats v. Republicans. Some issues are properly assessed via that dichotomy, but many — a growing number — are not. Nonetheless, confining oneself to Democrat v. Republican bickering is the admission price to establishment media access — that is the only prism they understand or permit — and most pundits thus happily cling to it; indeed, partisan pundits take the lead role in enforcing this orthodoxy and trying to marginalize anyone who deviates from it or resides outside of it. Political issues insusceptible to this two-team mindset are deemed fringe and rendered invisible. The result (by design) of this narrow, stultifying framework is that many — perhaps most — of the most consequential political developments are ignored.
Finally Noticing the House Is on Fire
The headline reads, “Democrats Fret Aloud Over Obama’s Re-election.”
“The alarms have already gone off in the Democratic grass roots,” said Robert Zimmerman, a member of the Democratic National Committee from New York, who hopes the president’s jobs plan can be a turning point. “If the Obama administration hasn’t heard them, they should check the wiring of their alarm system.”
‘What We’re Finding Out Is That Obama’s Pathologically Pro-Establishment and Conflict-Averse DNA Was Funded by Party Insiders and Embraced by Liberal Constituency Groups in 2008 for a Reason’
Via the comments, it’s very hard to think a stronger warning sign for Democrats than a sentence like this one:
George W. Bush’s approval rating didn’t drop this low until Katrina hit.
The piece as a whole is the strong case for dumping Obama from the ticket:
Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you’d have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.…
If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.
Historically, primarying a sitting president is tantamount to just giving the presidency to whomever the other side nominates. But if it’s Romney, given the extent of the Obama disaster, that’s a tradeoff that could potentially be reasonable; Romney would likely just be a more effective version of Obama, putting forth generally the same sorts of policies without the scorched-earth opposition from the other side. Let Romney 45 govern like Bush 41 and regroup for 2016/2020.
If it’s Perry, Bachmann, or Palin, on the other hand, rolling over seems completely suicidal, no matter how bad Obama is and will continue to be.
Of course, on the third hand, even if he remains on the ticket it’s increasingly hard to see how Obama gets reelected under these circumstances at all. Recalling Rortybomb’s well-linked post about the difference between losing badly and losing well, defeat with dignity is better than defeat without it.
(I-VT)
Depressing Sunday Links
Establishment Democrats are enthusiastically betraying their constituents, and gloating about it. I’ve already committed to not giving money and not volunteering in 2012, but the sticker’s coming off the car if the deal as described goes through. I’m done.
While the New Deal stoically awaits the guillotine, some links, many shamelessly stolen from zunguzungu’s supersized edition of Sunday Reading:
* Congressional Black Caucus: Use the 14th Amendment.
* Jeffrey Sachs: “Every part of the budget debate in the U.S. is built on a tissue of willful deceit.”
* The basic error was that Buchanan approached American politics in procedural or legal terms at a moment when the reigning political conflicts in American life were no longer in any sense shaped or resolved by procedural or legal processes. Obama as James Buchanan. More here from John Judis:
Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.
* In a nutshell, what’s going on is something that hasn’t happened in American politics for 50 years: an ideologically coherent social movement with clear political aspirations has taken shape out of murkier antecedents and disparate tributaries and at least for the moment, it has a very tight hold on the political officials that it has elected. The movement is not interested in the spoils system, its representatives can’t be quickly seduced into playing the usual games. And the movement’s primary objective is to demolish existing governmental and civic institutions. They’ve grown tired of waiting for government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, so they’re setting out with battleaxes and dynamite instead.
Social movements that aren’t just setting out to secure legal protection and resources for their constituency, but are instead driven to pursue profound sociopolitical transformations are unfamiliar enough. What makes this moment even more difficult to grasp in terms of the conventional wisdom of pundits is that this isn’t a movement that speaks a language of inclusion, hope, reform, innovation or progress. It speaks instead about restoration of power to those who once held it, the tearing down of existing structures, about undoing what’s been done. This movement is at war with its social and institutional enemies: it has nothing to offer them except to inflict upon them the marginalization that the members of the movement imagine they themselves have suffered.
* Ezra Klein dangles the carrot: maybe Obama won’t capitulate on the Bush tax cuts again. Sure, maybe.
* Surely there must be a name, in advertising parlance, for the figure of the anthropomorphized food item that happily consumes a non-anthropomorphized version of itself?
* The great teddy bear shipwreck mystery.
* On misremembering the victims of injustice as small children.
* Julian Sanchez: “The very existence of such massive trade in “defensive patents” is, in itself, pretty strong evidence that there’s something systematically quite wrong with the American patent system—because a patent that’s useful for “defensive” purposes is very likely to be a bad patent.“ I love that Planet Money and This American Life got non-IP people talking about this.
* And I may have done this one before, but what the hell: Inside an abandoned East Berlin amusement park.
Back Home Just in Time for the Economic Collapse Links
* Fantasy Premier League is starting up again! Email me for our league code or leave a request in the comments.
* My old friend Julie takes the critical thinking skills she honed on the Randolph High School debate team and takes them to the Center for American Progress with a piece on the war on diversity education.
* Jaimee reviews #13 and #14 in the Carolina Wren Press poetry series.
The final section of Pratt’s collection calls on us to transcend our economic predicaments. “Street of Broken Dreams” delves into the mortgage crisis: “No way to tell who owns my neighborhood homes/ until the for-sale-by-bank signs grow overnight.” It is a poem that celebrates the people who resisted their neighborhood home foreclosures, ending with their imagined chants: “We demand. Not rabble and rabid, not shadow, not terror,/ the neighbors stand and say: The world is ours, ours, ours.”
* Also in breaking Jaimee news: her pop culture icons will be hanging in Bean Trader’s on 9th Street starting August 1.
* America eats its future: Debt Ceiling Plans Take Aim At Graduate Student Loans.
* Not-so-post-racial America: As a result of these declines, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009, the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth and the typical white household had $113,149.
* And House Democrats are finally starting to say what I’ve been saying all along. Even if the Republicans are capable of delivering any deal at all—which is by no means clear—there’s no deal they can offer that’s better than eliminating the debt ceiling altogether in one fell swoop. And as I’ve been saying eliminating the debt ceiling completely is now the only way left to calm the markets and prevent a potentially catastrophic downgrade:
Asian stock markets fell Thursday as uncertainty over the U.S. debt ceiling debate continued to weigh market sentiment, while concerns over a stronger yen dragged exporters in Tokyo.
“The scary part of the story is the fact that markets have not priced-in the U.S. defaulting on its debt. Should the unthinkable happen in the next week then a throw back to the chaos of 2008 would again become a reality,” said CMC Markets analyst Ben Le Brun. “Should the majority of opinion be correct and the U.S. does avoid a default, global markets do appear as if they are positioned for a relief rally of sorts. Until then investors should brace themselves for more pain.”
