Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes about The Obama Opposition:
Arrogant is another word that gets regular usage by [President Obama's] opponents, like Rand Paul, Paul Ryan and Chris Christie. Some even connect Obama and supposed arrogance to anything and everything he does.
Ted Cruz has said that the Affordable Care Act and the problems in Syria are “tied together by an arrogance of this administration.” Newt Gingrich has even said that the president golfs arrogantly.
And let us not forget elitist and radical.
Occasionally someone lower on the pecking order and with a little less discipline will utter the unutterable, the racially charged word that hangs like a cloud over the others: uppity.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post urges President Obama—
Don’t govern on fantasies:
Democrats were tongue-tied about economics in the campaign. They avoided highlighting the substantial achievements of the Obama years for fear that doing so would make them seem out of touch with voters whose wages are stagnating. But neither did Democrats come up with plausible answers and policies to win over these voters. They lost both ways.
Jason Zengerle at
The New Republic laments that
The Death of the Southern White Democrat Hurts African-Americans the Most:
Not long after the polls closed on Tuesday night, Georgia Congressman John Barrow earned his place in history when he lost his reelection campaign to Republican Rick Allen by almost 10 points—a peculiar place he undoubtedly didn’t want. Barrow, a five-term Democratic incumbent with a conservative voting record that earned him endorsements from both the National Rifle Association and the Chamber of Commerce, was the last white Democrat in Congress from the Deep South.
This fact has occasioned some eloquent obituaries for that most endangered of political species, which is on the verge of extinction. Not only will there be no white Southern Democrats left in the House come January, but it’s a good bet there won’t be any white Southern Democrats in the Senate either (Mary Landrieu is likely to lose in the Louisiana run-off next month). Throw in the election of South Carolina’s Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate and, as The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson pointed out on Twitter, “there are now more black Republicans than white Democrats from the Deep South.”
Much as this is a problem for white southern Democrats, it's a crisis for black ones. That’s because blacks in the South—who, notwithstanding the very compelling counter-example of Tim Scott, are almost invariably Democrats—have for decades relied on coalitions with white Democrats to increase their political power. Lacking white politicians with whom they can build coalitions, black politicians are increasingly rendered powerless.
You can read more pundit excerpts below the fold.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times tells a personal story to show how ridiculous the right-wing is trying to bring down ACA through Death by Typo:
My parents used to own a small house with a large backyard, in which my mother cultivated a beautiful garden. At some point, however — I don’t remember why — my father looked at the official deed defining their property, and received a shock. According to the text, the Krugman lot wasn’t a rough rectangle; it was a triangle more than a hundred feet long but only around a yard wide at the base.
On examination, it was clear what had happened: Whoever wrote down the lot’s description had somehow skipped a clause. And of course the town clerk fixed the language. After all, it would have been ludicrous and cruel to take away most of my parents’ property on the basis of sloppy drafting, when the drafters’ intention was perfectly clear.
But it now appears possible that the Supreme Court may be willing to deprive millions of Americans of health care on the basis of an equally obvious typo. And if you think this possibility has anything to do with serious legal reasoning, as opposed to rabid partisanship, I have a long, skinny, unbuildable piece of land you might want to buy.
Mark Engler and Paul Engler at
In These Times via
Waging Nonviolence write
Reagan and Gorbachev Didn’t Tear Down the Berlin Wall:
Conventional political analysts see the revolutions of 1989 as a spontaneous, once-in-a-lifetime swelling of popular discontent. Their description of the wave of uprisings in Eastern Europe mirrors the assertions they make virtually every time an outbreak of mass mobilization erupts on the political stage: They tell us that these moments of peak activity are rare and unpredictable. They contend that mass protest is the product of broad historical forces. And they suggest that no one could consciously engineer events that trigger such upheavals.
On each of these points, the political tradition known as “civil resistance” offers a contrary interpretation. Those who listen will take very different lessons from the momentous ferment of 25 years ago. [...]
Certainly, the revolutions of 1989 were exceptional in their breadth and impact. Yet, viewed in another way, mass uprisings are a more regular part of our political lives than we often acknowledge. Once you are looking for them, popular mobilizations start to appear constantly—materializing with little notice in diverse countries, drawing new participants out of the woodwork, and upending politics as usual. [...]
That mainstream commentators are taken by surprise, again and again, by such mobilizations—large and small—speaks more to their own biases than to the contours of how social change happens.
And yet their biases are not unique. A predisposition toward gradualism extends even into social movement circles. The school of community organizing pioneered by Saul Alinsky has traditionally viewed mass mobilizations with suspicion. Organizers in this lineage charge that outbreaks of protest are flashes in the pan, too unpredictable and unsustainable to be relied upon. They stress that their goal is to build “organizations” not “movements”; they seek to create institutions that can leverage grassroots power on an ongoing basis. Interestingly, Alinsky himself was more open to extraordinary potential of peak moments than many of his ideological descendants.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times thinks the answer to
Can Obama's presidency be saved? is—perhaps:
en before the drubbing his party suffered in last week's congressional election, President Obama was visibly frustrated by Republicans' tenacious opposition to his second-term agenda. Now he's heading into the final years of his presidency facing a Congress that will be even harder to deal with. Does this mean Obama's last lap is destined to be a hopeless, unrewarding slog?
Not necessarily. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both spent their final two years in office with Congress in the hands of the opposition, and they're now the most revered presidents of the last half-century.
By at least one measure, Reagan and Clinton had it worse than Obama when they rounded the six-year mark. Reagan was mired in the Iran-Contra scandal, which drove his popularity as low as 43%, about where Obama's is now. Clinton was getting himself impeached.
Zoe Williams at
The Guardian writes
At least the last cold war was a clash of ideologies—now there are no big ideas:
Is it shocking to hear Mikhail Gorbachev say we’re on the brink of a new cold war? Or somehow reassuring, a familiar figure giving a familiar name to a familiar problem? Commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev articulated his stance bluntly enough to convey that his views are widely held. [...]
In the broadest possible terms, then, this is the cold war all over again—implacable opposition, openly stated, with nowhere to go, no overarching authority to adjudicate, no sit-down, no road map, only hostility expressed by cultural, territorial or financial proxy. So far, so cold war. [...]
Clearly, though, and Gorbachev would know this better than anyone, this differs from the last cold war in one important respect: it has no big idea. Last time, we were dealing with a clash of worldviews, left versus right, states versus individuals, Marx versus Hayek, two visions for civilisation with nothing in common but their voracious appetite for expansion. History, as recounted by the victors, had the capitalists winning. This version is not only contested but also blamed by Gorby for the world as it is, this triumphalism having prevented us from moving on. If declaring a winner was the wrong thing to do, how are we to read that clash between communism and capitalism? More like an unhappy marriage, bitter but interdependent; it’s not that capitalism lived longer, it’s just taking longer to die.
Barbara Ellen at
The Guardian just can't understand
Faint-hearted feminists? What’s Salma Hayek's problem?:
This is about the astonishing persistence of what I’d term small-f feminist-woman. The kind of woman who isn’t necessarily stupid or ill-informed, who, in fact, often talks and behaves in a “feminist” way, yet she still recoils from the term “feminist” as if she’d just found a scorpion nestling in her shoe. The kind of woman, such as Hayek, who accepts an award for helping women at an event also honouring Gloria Steinem (Gloria Steinem!) and then has the graceless gall to use it as an opportunity to announce that she isn’t a feminist.
Some might use the “actions speak louder than words” argument—that what someone such as Hayek does, namely her charity, is more important than what she says. Phooey. Hayek’s denouncement and dismissal of feminism, before the global media, was an action. By doing this, to my mind, Hayek exhibited classic small-f characteristics – on a night when she was rightly being celebrated for helping other women, she seemed almost embarrassed to be “caught at it”.
David Seligman and Nicholas Clark at
Salon write
Your job contract or cellphone agreement could have secret language that ruins your life. Here's how it works:
In the early 20th century, American corporations frequently required their workers to agree not to join together in a union to seek higher wages or better working conditions. The choice wasn’t whether or not to waive your rights, but whether you wanted a job—and that wasn’t much of a choice at all. Commentators at the time referred to these agreements as “yellow-dog contracts,” because they “reduced to the level of a yellow dog” every person forced to sign them. The contracts were not the result of free and equal bargaining between workers and their employers. Rather, they effectively forced employees to sell themselves into indentured servitude. With the Norris-LaGuardia Act, Congress preserved workers’ dignity and restored the freedom to contract.
Recently, a series of Supreme Court decisions have made forced arbitration agreements a new kind of “yellow dog contract.” Buried in the terms and conditions of cellphone contracts, credit agreements, school enrollment forms, nursing home contracts and employment contracts in non-union workplaces, forced arbitration clauses require consumers and employees to give up their constitutional right to a jury of their peers as a condition of keeping their job or buying goods from a company. (Through the collective bargaining process, unionized workers have the advantage of negotiating over an arbitration agreement.) [...]
The freedom to contract is one of the bedrocks of our society. Let’s take it back by stopping forced arbitration.
Chris Hedges at
TruthDig writes :
My attitude toward becoming a vegan was similar to Augustine’s attitude toward becoming celibate—“God grant me abstinence, but not yet.” But with animal agriculture as the leading cause of species extinction, water pollution, ocean dead zones and habitat destruction, and with the death spiral of the ecosystem ever more pronounced, becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species. It is one that my wife—who was the engine behind our family’s shift—and I have made.
Animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all worldwide transportation combined—cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes. Livestock and their waste and flatulence account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock causes 65 percent of all emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops grown for livestock feed consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States. Eighty percent of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals, and most of this soy is grown on cleared lands that were once rain forests. All this is taking place as an estimated 6 million children across the planet die each year from starvation and as hunger and malnutrition affect an additional 1 billion people. In the United States 70 percent of the grain we grow goes to feed livestock raised for consumption.