E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes that Both parties face a blue-collar imperative:
The elections in Georgia and Kentucky are different in important ways, but one lesson from both is that Democrats can’t win without a sufficient share of the white working-class vote. Nunn, on offense, and Grimes, on defense, are both trying to secure ballots from the sorts of voters who were once central to the Democratic coalition. [...]
And Bill Clinton’s comments reflected what his party is up against: Republicans have been quite effective at turning the anger that working-class whites feel about being left behind in the new economy against liberals, Democrats and especially the president. The Democrats’ worries were nicely captured in a headline on Matthew Cooper’s recent Newsweek article: “Why Working-Class White Men Make Democrats Nervous.”
Harry Siegel at the
New York Daily News writes
The new protest paranoia:
Now, technology is upending what both the state and its dissidents can do, and everyone else’s viewing expectations for tuning in to those conflicts.
But the new cinéma vérité lacks context, and reporters frantically tweeting from the scene rarely add it. Yes, violence is violence, but the NYPD is not the Oakland Police Department is not the Egyptian military.
Every protest that grows involves three groups, with dedicated activists backed by moneyed interests trying to use ordinary citizens as their public faces, while hoping that they don’t have a tiger by the tail. Power always hedges its bets.
The New York Times Editorial Board praises
Cuba’s Impressive Role on Ebola:
Cuba is an impoverished island that remains largely cut off from the world and lies about 4,500 miles from the West African nations where Ebola is spreading at an alarming rate. Yet, having pledged to deploy hundreds of medical professionals to the front lines of the pandemic, Cuba stands to play the most robust role among the nations seeking to contain the virus. [...]
With technical support from the World Health Organization, the Cuban government trained 460 doctors and nurses on the stringent precautions that must be taken to treat people with the highly contagious virus. The first group of 165 professionals arrived in Sierra Leone in recent days. José Luis Di Fabio, the World Health Organization’s representative in Havana, said Cuban medics were uniquely suited for the mission because many had already worked in Africa. “Cuba has very competent medical professionals,” said Mr. Di Fabio, who is Uruguayan. Mr. Di Fabio said Cuba’s efforts to aid in health emergencies abroad are stymied by the embargo the United States imposes on the island, which struggles to acquire modern equipment and keep medical shelves adequately stocked.
In a column published over the weekend in Cuba’s state-run newspaper, Granma, Fidel Castro argued that the United States and Cuba must put aside their differences, if only temporarily, to combat a deadly scourge. He’s absolutely right.
More pundit excerpts can be found below the orange cloud.
Nathan Lean at The New Republic writes Hey, Bill Maher: There Is No Such Thing as “Islamic Extremism”:
During a recent episode of HBO's “Real Time” on HBO, host Bill Maher mocked President Obama’s insistence that the Islamic State does not represent Islam, and lambasted Islam as “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.” One of Maher's guests, actor Ben Affleck, called his remarks “gross” and “racist.”
The testy exchange went viral, prompting an important debate about the relationship between religion and violence. Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, for instance, lamented the “cancer of extremism within Islam today,” while the New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff described the diversity of the “Islamic world” and a bygone era where “Islam was not particularly intolerant.” Author Reza Aslan emphasized that the Islamic State, like Al Qaeda, is a “jihadist” group, not an “Islamist” one.
Embedded within many of these well-intentioned discussions is a central part of the problem: a lazy lexicon that has come to dominate how we speak about, and subsequently what we think about, Islam. Words matter, and the linguistic terrain born of post–Cold War politics and fortified by 9/11 is riddled with imprecise language that perpetuates unhelpful stereotypes and associations.
We talk about an “Islamic world” or “Muslim world,” despite the fact that such an ill-defined expanse does not exist.
Matthew Rothschild at
The Progressive writes
Scott Walker Vulnerable on Minimum Wage Stance:
Back in 1913, Wisconsin and other states passed laws, over the objections of employers, to put a floor on wages based on what it cost workers to live. They calculated the costs of food, housing, and other basic necessities. The beneficiaries of these laws were mainly women and children.
The Walker administration, taking a page from the early twentieth-century industrialists who wanted to keep exploiting child labor and keep forcing workers to slave for next to nothing, denied their claims. “The department has determined that there is no reasonable cause to believe that the wages paid to the complainants are not a living wage,” said Robert Rodriguez, administrator of the equal rights division of the Department of Workforce Development. [...]
“For the governor to brazenly say to the working families of Wisconsin that $7.25 an hour is enough to sustain themselves is not only misguided, it is incredibly ignorant and willfully obtuse," d[Wisconsin Jobs Now] said.
It is also unpopular. And with Walker in a dead heat with Mary Burke in the latest Marquette poll, his reactionary view on the minimum wage could come back to haunt him.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes
One Thing Hillary Clinton Understands About Politics in 2014:
Hillary Clinton is never going to be confused for an economic populist. Her record as a key player in Bill Clinton’s administration, as a United States senator, as secretary of state and as a favorite on the corporate speaking circuit in recent years bends a lot more toward Wall Street than Main Street.
But Hillary Clinton understands something important—make that vital—about the politics of 2014.
Clinton recognizes that the issue that matters in 2014 is the economy (number one in the latest Gallup Poll) and that voters want “good jobs” that pay a family-supporting wage (number two in the latest Gallup survey). And Clinton knows that the clearest policy connection between where the economy is today and where it needs to be is made via support for a substantial hike in the minimum wage.
So when the presumed Democratic front-runner in 2016 swept into Kentucky this week to muscle up the US Senate campaign of Clinton-family favorite Alison Lundergan Grimes, Clinton was on message—far more on message, in fact, than most prominent Democrats who have hit the trail this month in an effort to save the Senate, win governorships and generally prevent the 2014 midterms from going the way of the 2010 midterms.
Ari Berman at
The Nation writes
The GOP Is Winning the War on Voting:
The new restrictions could spark a backlash. “There’s a lot of passion,” says Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, which is leading voter protection efforts in the Tar Heel State. “The pushback against this is fueling a stronger get-out-the-vote effort. We’re pushing harder than we were in 2010.”
The drop-off in young and minority voters that typically occurs in midterm elections may be reversed in battleground states like North Carolina this year. “All justice-minded North Carolinians should be outraged,” the Rev. William Barber II, leader of the state’s Moral Monday movement, said after the Supreme Court’s ruling on North Carolina. “And they should show this by voting like never before.”
Heather Smith at
Grist writes
This proposed pipeline would be even bigger than Keystone XL:
Meet Energy East: It will be 2,858-miles long, putting it right up there with some of the longest pipelines in the world. It would pump about a third more crude than Keystone XL was intended to. It’ll be bigger than the Druzhba pipeline, which carries oil 2,500 miles from Southeast Russia to the rest of Europe.
“Bigger” is the point. There’s no sense in extracting crude from Canada’s tar sands if you can’t sell it in extreme bulk, and a big part of selling it is figuring out how to get it to people. The fight against Keystone XL complicated plans to sell it to the U.S., so the crude had to be moved through preexisting channels instead. [...]
More uncertain is the business of Quebec: The pipeline will have to pass through the province in order to reach the coast, and Quebec is not a fan of tar sands. The province passed a fracking moratorium two years ago, despite being sued for the decision under NAFTA. A Quebec judge already temporarily shut down TransCanada’s exploratory work at the site of the proposed export terminal so that beluga whales could leave the area and migrate further south.
How much sway do whales hold with Quebec in the long term? Is Energy East just another pipe dream? We’re about to find out.
Henry A. Giroux at
Truthout writes
Beyond Orwellian Nightmares and Neoliberal Authoritarianism:
Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is evident in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech and constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness wraps itself in government dictates such as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, Military Commissions Act and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the "right of the president "to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists," (4) use secret evidence to detain individuals indefinitely, develop a massive surveillance Panopticon to monitor every communication used by citizens who have not committed a crime, employ state torture against those considered enemy combatants, and block the courts from prosecuting those officials who commit such heinous crimes. (5) The ruling corporate elites have made terror rational and fear the modus operandi of politics.
The "deep state" empties politics of all vestiges of democratic rule while attempting, on the one hand, to make its machinery of power invisible and, on the other, to legitimate neoliberal ideology as a matter of common sense.
Power in its most repressive forms is now deployed not only by the police and other forces of repression such as the 17 US intelligence agencies, but also through a predatory and commodified culture that turns violence into entertainment, foreign aggression into a video game and domestic violence into goose-stepping celebration of masculinity and the mad values of militarism. Meanwhile, the real violence used by the state against poor people of color, women, immigrants and low-income youth barely gets mentioned, except when it is so spectacularly visible that it cannot be ignored, as in the shooting death by a white police officer of the young black man, Michael Brown. The "deep state" empties politics of all vestiges of democratic rule while attempting, on the one hand, to make its machinery of power invisible and, on the other, to legitimate neoliberal ideology as a matter of common sense.
Jonathan Chait at
New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer writes
Let’s Argue Some More With Ezra Klein About Liberals and Due Process:
The current debate over campus rape is less important for a set of specific rules on campus—though the potential that these rules backfire is probably much higher than advocates are admitting—than for what it shows about broader currents of illiberalism that have moved beyond the far left and into the mainstream. I recently cited an Ezra Klein column as an important marker in this social change. The significance of the column lay in the combination of the fact that it was authored by an influential journalist who is (justifiably) admired for his fairness and the striking illiberalism of its argument.
Klein, as one might expect, disagrees.
Ezra Klein at
Vox writes
What people get wrong about the Yes Means Yes law:
These studies of women attending college are not outliers. They don't tell us something about sexual assault at colleges that looks radically different than what we see nationally. The National Violence Against Women Survey, which uses a massive panel of more than 9,000 women and 7,000 men, found that in 2010, "Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration." That number has remained roughly the same in recent decades: a 1995 version of the survey found 17.6 percent of women reporting that they had been raped.
And, again, we have good reason to believe the real number here is higher, as people often don't want to tell a random stranger about their most traumatic, humiliating moments.