Jonathan Chait at New York magazine writes—Reformers, Unions Hate Each Other, But Both Love Kamala Harris’s Teacher Pay Plan:
Senator Kamala Harris is proposing to increase teacher pay by $315 billion over a decade through federal matching funds, which would raise the average teacher salary by 23 percent. News reports are framing this plan as a way to appeal to teachers themselves, which it certainly does. But the particular cleverness of this idea is that it simultaneously appeals to education reformers.
For decades, discrimination against women in the workforce created an invisible subsidy for education: teaching was one of the few careers available for college-educated women, which supplied a talented workforce at artificially low wages. Teacher salaries have remained low even as education lost its quasi-monopoly on female labor. The 2008 recession led to massive state budget cutbacks, further suppressing teacher pay. Recently a wave of strikes has drawn attention to shockingly low wages for educators.
The teacher strikes have highlighted a left-wing trend in Democratic education politics. Teacher unions tend to oppose reforms, especially charter schools, and their growing militancy has thrown reformers in the party on the defensive. “Democrats these days don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for challenging teachers’ unions, and they’ve started to abandon the Obama-era centrist consensus,” notes Dylan Scott.
But education reformers don’t oppose Harris’s plan. They support it.
Aaron Blake at The Washington Post writes—Pompeo repeatedly declines to blame Kim Jong Un personally for human rights abuses:
This is not the first time Pompeo has, like Trump, declined to point the finger directly at Kim. He also did so early this month when he was pressed on it by USA Today. The newspaper also described a testy scene, in which Pompeo emphasized he was being “very patient” with the line of questioning but still wouldn’t point to Kim.
So this is not a coincidence or a matter of over-parsing. It’s clear he and Trump are studiously avoiding blaming Kim personally, and no amount of testiness from Pompeo should obscure that. He doesn’t even want to say Kim assassinated his relatives.
And again, this involves an American citizen. By repeatedly declining to personally blame Kim, it effectively gives him a personal pass on this one. That’s not making this about politics; it’s making sure the administration is clear about who it holds responsible for human rights violations. And the less culpability there is for human rights abuses, the less incentive there is to stop committing them.
Trump and Pompeo may have decided this is the price of doing business, just like they decided that not blaming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist, was the price of doing business with Saudi Arabia. But it’s worth emphasizing the price they’re paying — along with the very distinct possibility that they may get nothing for it, judging by North Korea’s recent activities.
Kate Aronoff at The Guardian writes—Republicans The Republican party is the political arm of the fossil fuel industry: Republicans are doing everything in their power to kneecap the country’s ability to respond to climate change:
For Republicans, the climate crisis is a joke. On Tuesday in the Senate, Mike Lee, a Republican senator for Utah, spent several minutes on the floor showing pictures of Luke Skywalker on Hoth, giant seahorses and Ronald Reagan shooting off a machine gun whilst mounted atop a dinosaur. This was his bid to “treat the Green New Deal”, which came up for a vote in that body on Tuesday, “with the seriousness it deserves”.
For a growing stretch of the country, climate change isn’t a joke but a deadly, imminent threat. Biblical flooding in the midwest this past month has left farmlands devastated and at least 20 people dead, all while the country lacks a comprehensive plan to handle such disasters. The Pine Ridge Reservation is experiencing a devastating state of emergency thanks in part to decades of federal neglect of and divestment from indigenous communities. And there are still people struggling to recover in Puerto Rico from 2017’s devastating hurricane season – efforts being actively undermined by a sociopathic indifference to the fate of that island’s residents. Rising temperatures are already a clear and present danger to millions of Americans, and disastrous Republican policy is already making it worse.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Be Thankful for Mueller’s Timing:
Trump is an incorrigible character: Nothing can truly alter the essence of the man. He will continue to do and say horrible, unforgivable things because he simply can’t help himself.
Indeed, Trump could be a far more dangerous man if he had the emotional intelligence to hide his hostility, corruption and divisiveness behind a veneer of openness and rapprochement.[...]
Trump has no idea how to ride a win. He seems to see every news cycle as him starting from scratch. He couldn’t even let the Mueller findings breathe before suffocating them. Within days, the Trump administration reversed itself on an Affordable Care Act lawsuit, announcing that it now supports a complete court-ordered annihilation of the law. For millions of Americans dependent on this act, it repositioned Trump as the destroyer and Democrats as their protectors.
The gun with which Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot has an extended clip. He will continue to do this because that’s what he does. By the time the election comes around, the Mueller report will be but a footnote.
Lawrence Douglas at The Guardian writes—Mueller could never have saved us from Trump. That's what politics is for:
…while congressional Republicans might be too craven to place restraints on Trump , not so federal prosecutors and judges. And so we looked to a handful of public servants, dedicated to no value higher than the preservation of the rule of law and the impartial administration of justice, as our saviors.
The Mueller investigation lulled us, then, into hoping that Trump’s essential unfitness for office would find objective confirmation by our system of criminal justice. By pinning our hopes on Mueller, we were hoping for legal corroboration of something millions take to be true – that an intemperate and unbridled liar, who never ceases to shower contempt on the most basic constitutional norms and practices of democracy, is unfit for the presidency.
The mistake, of course, was to seize on evidence of criminality as the standard by which to measure unfitness for office. For while proof of serious criminal actions may suffice to demonstrate a president’s unfitness, the opposite hardly is true: absence of clear criminality hardly resolves the question of fitness.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Memo to Trump foes: Buck up!
Fortunately for the republic, President Trump and his minions can’t even do an end-zone dance right. And their celebration, by the way, is wildly premature. ...]
For the first 24 hours, they did a pretty good job. It was astonishing how many sweeping conclusions were drawn about a report that no one outside of Barr’s and Mueller’s inner circle has seen. Trump’s adversaries were told to fold up their tents. Reporters who have done the hard work of unearthing the truth about Trump were denounced. A president whose approval ratings have been dismal from the start was said to be on the road to reelection. [...]
But the Trump administration really is as incompetent and mean-spirited as its foes say it is. And so it emerged that the Trump Justice Department filed a court document in support of a right-wing judge’s wild ruling that the entire Affordable Care Act should be killed. Dead. Kaput. Twenty million people or so losing health coverage. More than 100 million losing protections for preexisting conditions.
Suddenly, the Democrats were back in business.
Bill Blum at TruthDig writes—The Dangerous and Unrelenting Extremism of Clarence Thomas:
In popular culture, Thomas is still best known for his rancorous confirmation hearing, which was famously marred by accusations of sexual harassment lodged by law professor Anita Hill.
To constitutional scholars, Thomas is best known as an inflexible right-wing “originalist.” In its current iteration, originalism asserts that the Constitution should be read according to the meaning it had for the Founding Fathers rather than as a “living” document that should be interpreted not only in light of its text but also in light of contemporary values and evolving traditions.
Since arriving at the court, according to several empirical studies, Thomas has ranked as the panel’s most conservative member. Time and again, he has deployed his originalist philosophy to produce downright reactionary opinions. He issues his opinions often in dissent or as idiosyncratic concurrences, geared toward upsetting liberal precedents, returning American law to the libertarian free-market jurisprudence of the Gilded Age, and neutralizing litigation as an instrument of progressive social and economic reform.
Roland Paulsen at In These Times writes—Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Self-Serving Optimists Like Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker: There’s a reason Bill Gates loves Pinker and Rosling—their analyses obscure inequality:
Pinker and Rosling, the stars of the glass-half-full school of intellectuals known as the New Optimists, seek to persuade people that civilization is heading in the right direction, with the world getting better every day. This affirmational declaration is one of the global elite’s rituals of “neoliberal self-congratulation,” as editor-in-chief of The Baffler, Chris Lehmann, puts it. While not saying that all is well, New Optimists fixate on positive trajectories and scold critics for being “alarmists.” Social progress is not a matter of struggling for justice, the “optimistic” narrative goes, but rather extending the benefits of economic growth, a task best supervised by philanthropic capitalists (like, say, Gates), who, of course, are the biggest beneficiaries of such “progress.”
The New Optimists have successfully marketed this worldview as “neutral” and “fact-based,” to use two of Rosling’s favorite words. Some of these pundits, like Pinker in his most recent book, Enlightenment Now, aggressively argue that “none of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become,” and bemoan the fact that people seem to “whine, carp and kvetch as much as ever.”
The “facts” these New Optimists offer, however, show that their progress narratives rest on shaky assumptions, cherry-picked data and a faulty moral compass. When it comes to measuring “progress,” these optimists confuse what was, in centuries past, with what could have been, in the late 20th and 21st.
Bob Moser at The New Republic writes—What Should Stacey Abrams Do? The case for the rising Democratic star to stay local:
Transforming politics at the grassroots is exactly the “hard work” that Democrats have disastrously failed to do over the past decade and counting. By betting everything on national politics—emphasizing winning the White House and congressional majorities while ignoring state and local elections—the Democrats steadily bled seats and power throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. By 2016, Republicans controlled about two-thirds of the country’s state legislative chambers. The short-sighted emphasis on federal elections has been catastrophic for abortion rights, social welfare, criminal justice, and economic fairness. With Congress hopelessly gridlocked, the bulk of policymaking now happens in state capitals and municipalities, where the GOP is dominant.
And ironically, the emphasis on national politics has made it harder for Democrats to win nationally. They’ve given Republicans in many states free rein to gerrymander and pass restrictive voting laws that provide them with an artificial and undemocratic advantage in elections on every level.
Abrams has been the leading light for a smarter approach to moving the country in a progressive direction. Her movement, and her remarkable campaign in 2018, have already begun to remake Georgia; on her coattails, the Democrats captured 13 GOP seats in the state legislature last year, the best they’d done in 20 years, and sent a gun-control advocate, Lucy McBath, to Congress from Newt Gingrich’s old district.
Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times writes—‘On Paper, the Election Is the Democrats’ to Lose’: In response to Trump’s presidency, America has gotten more liberal — despite appearances to the contrary. Will it matter in 2020?
Two major studies released this month, the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, reveal some generally positive trends for Democrats: defections in the Midwest among Trump voters, as well as a shift to the left among all voters on issues of race, immigration and spending on the poor.
G. Elliott Morris, a political analyst for The Economist, examined state-by-state data in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. In an email, Morris wrote that the 2018 results make it clear
that the president has lost a significant amount of support across the nation, both among his “core" or “base” supporters and the rest.
While millions of suburban whites who voted for Trump in 2016 cast ballots in 2018 for Democratic House and Senate candidates, “the defection runs much deeper than that,” Morris said. Not only did better-off suburbanites defect, “but more important so did working class whites.”
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—Trump, Climate Change, and the Death of the Small Farm:
In 1982, America was home to about 2.2 million farms. That number hasn’t changed much; according to the USDA, America now has about 2.1 million farms. But today’s farms are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1987, only 15 percent of farms had 2,000 acres or more of cropland. By 2012, 36 percent did. The USDA credits the rise of big farms to consolidation: small and midsize farms combining to form larger operations, or getting bought out by such operations.
This often happens because smaller farms aren’t making enough money to survive on their own, said Joe Schroeder, a senior farm advocate for the nonprofit
Farm Aid. And one of the many reasons why they’re not making enough money is that catastrophic weather—like this year’s flooding—keep knocking them when they’re already down. “Flooding like this always accelerates consolidations,” Schroeder said. “It hurts the poor folks and it helps the rich folks.”
Consolidation has been underway for some time, and isn’t solely related to weather; agricultural policy increasingly favors large operations with lots of resources, Schroeder said. But weather events like extreme flooding “puts [consolidation] into fast-motion and intensifies it,” he added. “It’s like pouring a gasoline on a fire.” [...]
Such weather is becoming more common. According to the National Climate Assessment, heavy-rain events have risen 37 percent in the Midwest since the 1950s, and the magnitude of river floods is steadily increasing.
Mark Follman at Mother Jones writes—Why the National Rifle Association Is Under Fire Like Never Before:
[CEO Wayne] LaPierre said nothing in his address, however, about the more real ways in which the NRA is under fire. Nine Democratic senators recently called for the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the gun group illegally coordinated political advertising with several Republican Senate candidates and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The NRA’s tax-exempt status is drawing scrutiny from regulators in New York, whose new attorney general remarked last October that the NRA isn’t an authentic charitable organization but “a terrorist organization.” A steady barrage of acrid political commentary from NRA national spokeswoman Dana Loesch and other NRA media figures has stirred a backlash among the organization’s own ranks and reportedly provoked concerns even for LaPierre. There are signs of financial woes, if not for NRA executives. These troubles come as the NRA faces rising opposition from advocacy groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords.org, leaders of a national gun-reform movement ignited by the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre and further energized by the teen survivors of last year’s mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. [...]
The NRA-Russia connection is now a subject of at least five congressional investigations looking into the gun group’s finances and leadership, including a sweeping House Judiciary Committee probe launched earlier this month.
Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—Is Joe Biden Too Much Like Don Draper Living in a Peggy Olson World?
Chris Cillizza says, “the danger for [Joe] Biden in this [presidential] race is clear: He runs the risk of coming off like Don Draper in a Peggy Olson world. And, unfortunately for him, there’s just not much he can do about it.” I think that’s undoubtedly true. If you’re familiar with the show Mad Men, you know what that means, and if you are not I think you can imagine. We’ve reached a moment in this country where women aren’t accepting the old rules and where men are being routinely punished for things that previous generations took for granted.
Yet, I look at the White House and I see Donald Trump in the Oval Office. I can’t concede that we’re living in a Peggy Olson world. Maybe that’s where we’re headed. Maybe we are right on the cusp of that. Maybe the outcome of the 2020 election will decide which kind of country we’re living in.
The way it looks from here, more than a year out from Election Day, there isn’t much doubt which side of that battle will be waged by the Democrats. And this is why the Democratic primaries and caucuses don’t appear to be hospitable territory for older white men who spent most of their political careers in an environment that operated by the old rules.
Jesse Jackson at the Chicago Sun-Times writes—Imposing a Modern-day Version of a Poll Tax is a New Low:
In a stunning act of decency in 2018, Floridians voted overwhelmingly to amend their constitution and restore the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions “after they complete all terms of their sentence, including parole or probation.” According to the Tallahassee Democrat, the “Voting Restoration Amendment” would “grant most of the 1.7 million convicted felons the right to vote and help select their leaders for local, state and federal offices.” [...]
Now Republicans in the state legislature are moving to frustrate the will of citizens, adding a new burden to exclude voters, a new form of one of the most loathsome Jim Crow tactics—the poll tax. Republicans in a House committee have voted — contrary to the intent and the text of the referendum passed by voters—to exclude from voting those who haven’t paid their fines (even including those on a court-approved payment plan). Fines are imposed not by judges as part of the sentence, but by administrative clerks. They do not block any other voters from voting. If Republicans have their way—and they have a majority in the legislature—they will likely use these fines to block a substantial portion of African-Americans from voting. Despite the will of its people, Florida Republicans want to impose a racially biased poll tax to strip citizens of the right to vote—and to tilt elections in their favor.