Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes—Bernie Sanders: Why the guy who won't win matters:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist who kicked off his presidential campaign on Tuesday with a characteristically fiery speech, isn't going to win the 2016 Democratic nomination unless lightning strikes. To be really effective, in any case, the lightning would have to strike Hillary Rodham Clinton, who holds a prohibitive lead in every poll. But Sanders will still have a major impact on the Democratic race, and that could, paradoxically, be good for Clinton.
The Vermont senator preaches a bracing populist message that's likely to thrill millions of voters on the left, the ones who sometimes dub themselves "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party." A lot of those progressives are democratic socialists, whether they realize it or not; the only unusual thing about Sanders is that he actually uses the "S-word."
"There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of 1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%," Sanders said at a raucous lakefront rally in Vermont. "This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about." [...]
Second, until now most of the media coverage of Clinton's campaign has focused on secret emails, entanglements with uranium moguls and outlandish speaking fees. If Sanders forces a robust debate on issues such as healthcare, taxes and trade, the media will have to pay attention to that instead. Sanders' entry into the race will allow Clinton, who has already veered left, to call for vaguely similar policies and still say: "He's a socialist; I'm not."
More pundit excerpts can be read below the fold.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Bernie Sanders: The new St. Nick:
How is it that Democrats forgot about the joys Santa Claus can bring? How is it that Republicans managed to steal the Santa idea from the party of FDR and never let go?
Understanding why Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy is important requires revisiting the politics of St. Nick. The senator from Vermont has little chance of defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. But he is reminding his party of something it often forgets: Government was once popular because it provided tangible benefits to large numbers of Americans.
At a time of rising inequality and short-circuited social mobility, Sanders is unapologetic about taking some wealth and income away from those who have a lot of both to ease the path upward for those who don’t. He has proudly called himself a democratic socialist, but he doesn’t spin abstract Marxist theories. He wants government to do stuff, and the sort of stuff he has in mind is potentially quite popular.
Political commentators routinely complain about politicians who are not specific enough. Sanders has more specifics than Ben and Jerry’s has ice cream flavors. He has called for $1 trillion in infrastructure investment. He wants the federal government to mandate a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour and restrict the ability of employers to declare normal employees as “managers” and thus rob them of overtime pay.
The Editorial Board at
The Washington Post offers in
A good-enough plan to cut greenhouse gasses no hint on what ameliorative elements for low-income Americans its carbon-tax plan would have:
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S global warming strategy will cut the country’s climate-change-inducing greenhouse emissions significantly — but at some cost. That’s the upshot of a new Energy Information Administration (EIA) analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark Clean Power Plan, which, once finalized, will be at the core of the president’s strategy to reduce U.S. carbon-dioxide output.
The report underscores a fundamental truth about the U.S. stance on global warming: The nation’s plan has merit, but it is a second-best policy that the country is stuck with because Congress is too cowardly or unwise to endorse a better one.
[...] Acceptable, but not ideal. Any economist will tell you that the most efficient way to reduce emissions is to put a price on them and get out of the way, allowing consumers and businesses to wring carbon out of the economy without grandiose central planning or favor to preferred interests. Congress would have to approve such a plan, and lawmakers have dodged the climate issue for decades. Until that changes, the Obama administration’s approach is the only option.
Ariel Dorfman at the
Los Angeles Times writes—
When a government spies on its citizens: lessons from Chile:
What are the deep, long-term effects of clandestine surveillance on a country? The current debates in Congress regarding the renewal — or modification — of the Patriot Act offer an occasion to hold an open discussion that is long overdue.
My own experience may be relevant to that discussion.
It was on Sept. 12, 1973, the day after a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, that I started to understand that language was also a victim when massive state spying permeates a hitherto free nation.
[...] And yet here in the United States, the country where we finally sought and received refuge, the experience of Chile is now sadly significant. I am not so naive as to ignore the many past instances when the U.S. government spied on its citizens and hounded them with information illegally extracted. But there is nothing that compares with the sweeping and unchecked powers of surveillance authorities exercise today. The fact that technology now allows eavesdroppers to collect every conversation, every intimate exchange, every secret or joke should make Americans tremble. Tremble not only because the potential for abuse is so enormous, but also because such suffocating scrutiny will inevitably corrode and corrupt free expression.
Trevor Timm at
The Guardian writes—
Republicans' 'plans' for Isis would drag us into Iraq for another ground war:
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the groundwork being laid for US ground troops to return to Iraq for another indefinite war with no end game.
Republican presidential candidates (of which there now seem to be more than a dozen) have spent the past month ripping President Obama for his administration’s approach to the war against Isis, in which the US military has dropped tens of thousands of bombs, sent 3,000 troops back to Iraq, and killed over 12,000 people, all without any legal authorization. Predictably, the Republicans have no problem with the war technically being illegal, or the tens of thousands killed - only that we haven’t used more of our military weaponry yet.
The New York Times detailed many of the Republican candidates’ nebulous “criticisms” of the Obama administration, most of which assume a fantasy world in which Obama is not sending the US military to fight Isis at all, even though he’s authorized thousands of airstrikes per month in both Iraq and Syria. Most of the candidates, while competing with each other over who can sound more “muscular” and “tough”, are too cowardly to overtly call for what they likely actually want: another ground war in the Middle East involving tens of thousands of US troops.
David Sirota at
In These Times writes—
The $165 Billion Question for Hillary Clinton:
Among all the rivers of money that have flowed to the Clinton family, one seems to raise the biggest national security questions of all: the stream of cash that came from 20 foreign governments who relied on weapons export approvals from Hillary Clinton's State Department.
Federal law designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries. In practice, that meant that Clinton was charged with rejecting or approving weapons deals—and when it came to Clinton Foundation donors, Hillary Clinton's State Department did a whole lot of approving.
While Clinton was secretary of state, her department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors. That figure from Clinton's three full fiscal years in office is almost double the value of arms sales to those countries during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term. [...]
During Hillary Clinton’s 2009 Senate confirmation hearings, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar said the Clinton Foundation should stop accepting foreign government money. He warned that if it didn't, “foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the secretary of state.”
The Clintons did not take his advice. Advocates for limits on the political influence of money now say that Lugar was prescient.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes—
Martin O’Malley Attempts a Politics of Moral Duty:
Martin O’Malley must say that he believes he can win the 2016 Democratic nomination and the presidency. That’s how it works. The former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland who formally announces his candidacy this weekend cannot get caught suggesting that he is mounting an uphill race against front-runner Hillary Clinton in order to make enough of a name for himself so that Clinton will consider him as a vice presidential running mate—or perhaps as a cabinet member in the next administration. [...]
But could O’Malley really be a contender? [...]
O’Malley embraces elements of a Catholic social-justice ethic that will be highlighted as Pope Francis tours the United States this year. The governor is often at his best when he speaks of a duty to address poverty and inequality, and of the need to respect the dignity of work with living-wage pay and workplace fairness. As governor, he acted on these values by, for instance, making Maryland the first state in the nation to require government contractors to pay their employees a living wage and arguing passionately and practically for raising the state’s minimum wage to $10,10 an hour.
That does not mean that O’Malley marches in lockstep with the church; he is pro-choice and he has been a leading advocate of marriage equality; when Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien urged the governor to oppose marriage equality,
Leslie Savan at
The Nation writes—
The Hillary-Carly ‘Cat Fight’ That Men, the Media, and Fiorina Want:
If Carly Fiorina gains any traction from her barbed attacks on Hillary Clinton, the right-wing cartoons will practically draw themselves: Carly and Hillary in a teeth-baring cat fight, Carly’s claws like a tiger’s, HRC’s eyes as red as a Demon Sheep’s, their hair seriously mussed, and Benghazi burning in the background.
As one man tweeted, “Let the Cat Fight begin!! Fiorina will tear Hillary to shreds.”
“Fiorina vs Hillary in 2016,” someone else raved. Why? “Because men love a cat fight.”
It is indeed a male dream, especially males who are Republican presidential candidates (and who isn’t?). If Carly handles the edgy, personal attacks on Hillary, they figure, we won’t get Rick Lazio-ed off the stage.
But at the press conference-ambush that Fiorina held outside a South Carolina hotel where Clinton was speaking, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO bristled at suggestions that she was doing the male Republicans’ dirty work.
Brian Beutler at
The New Republic writes—
Martin O'Malley Shouldn't Be Mad at Bernie Sanders—and Shouldn't Attack Clinton, Either:
Martin O'Malley has checked enough boxes as a prominent Democrat—big city mayor, mostly successful governor, chairman of the Democratic Governor's Association—that he probably didn't expect to be trailing in presidential polls to a Vermont senator who serves as an independent and identifies as a democratic socialist. But for now he does trail, and pretty badly. O'Malley is more dependably liberal than Hillary Clinton has been, but the emergence of a crusading progressive like Bernie Sanders has convinced some analysts that O'Malley miscalculated, and let Sanders steal his thunder.
"Late to the dance," as one strategist told The Hill, and presumably he's pissed off about it. You might suppose that O’Malley harbors frustration not just with Hillary Clinton, for the immensity of her lead, but also with Sanders, who, if the field stays narrow, will skim support from left-wing Democrats that might otherwise back him in a one-on-one matchup between Democratic establishmentarians.
But if that's true, which it may not be, it's because O'Malley has fundamentally misread the status quo in Democratic politics, and imagines a potential parallel between the 2008 and 2016 elections that doesn’t exist at the moment.