Gayatri Devi at The Guardian notes that creationism from the mouths of right-wing politicians is not about belief in divine origian, but rather something more worldly: Creationism isn't just an ideology – it's a weapon of political control:
The Republican presidential candidates’ public obsession with creationism, though, isn’t really about education. It’s about cementing their Christian credentials with the influential evangelical voting bloc by announcing their opposition to all that is not heterosexual, Christian and not “speaking American” – whatever that means.
It can be a winning strategy: a 2014 Gallup poll showed that
42% ofAmericans believe that God created human beings in their present form 10,000 years ago. And
a 2014 Pew Research Center poll of American voting behavior found that 78% of white evangelicals voted for Republican candidates, while only 20% voted for Democratic candidates.
The Republican obsequiousness to creationist philosophy might not be so much anti-science as good politics: being pro-creationism often appears to be pandering to a conservative base – a way to whip up intellectually regressive policies to win the “culture wars” and, more importantly, elections.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes Anti-Muslim Is Anti-American:
“Efforts to single out Muslims and to advance the ugly idea that anything Islamic is un-American are unjust and discriminatory and should be rejected. Laws that single out Sharia violate the First Amendment by treating one belief system as suspect.”
This demonizing a single religious faith is a slippery slope. It feeds something that is at odds with the most noble ambition of this country’s better angels: equality.
Deflection is a powerful tool for those who want to maintain the status quo as Jailyn Gladney writes at The Guardian in Black students who demand equality aren't impinging on your rights:
Critiques of the anti-racism student protesters and their demand that universities actively address systemic racism in higher education have been both frequent and swift. What could have been – and might yet still be – a valuable opportunity to discuss and begin to address a very real issue has been commandeered by those who would frame the conversation as one in which protesters are accused of trying to limit the free speech of their peers.
These first amendment enthusiasts are either unaware or unconcerned with the persistent racial inequality that prevents students of color from even accessing this right in the first place. And yet, critics would rather focus on an imagined denial of rights to the dominant group, instead of the legitimate and persistent denial of rights to the oppressed.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times points out in Health Reform Lives! that there would eventually be negatives with Obamacare but that we should be reasonable about them:
Without question, the run of unexpectedly good news for Obamacare has come to an end, as all such runs must. And look, we’re talking about a brand-new system in which everyone is still learning how to function. There were bound to be some bobbles along the way.
But are we looking at the beginnings of a death spiral? Some people are indeed saying that, but as far as I can tell, they’re all people who have been predicting disaster every step of the way, and will still be predicting imminent collapse a decade from now.
The reality is that Obamacare is an imperfect system, but it’s workable — and it’s working.
E.J. Dionne is a cheery, hopeful sort most of the time and he sets out some optimism in his latest column at The Washington Post—America’s leaders are hurting the nation’s image. He only saves his audience from a major round of ROTFL with a big caveat:
The often chaotic budget and debt-ceiling battles between the president and congressional Republicans (along with a great deal of demagoguery on immigration, race and Islam) have inspired little confidence among either friends or foes that we can manage even our own affairs.
The coming mid-December deadline for reaching a budget agreement should thus be seen as more than just another inning in a long fiscal game. Congress has an opportunity to show that it takes all this world leadership talk seriously. It needs to demonstrate that even though the voters have given the presidency to one party and control of Congress to the other, we are still capable of being at least a functional democracy.
At the great risk of overestimating our politicians, there is a good chance that they might pass the test. Merely writing such a sentence produces instant shivers of doubt, but this time, political calculation may be on the side of good government.
The Washington Post’s editorial board is rarely known itself for smart politics, so it is a tad ironic that it titles its stance on the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination: Hillary Clinton smartly distances herself from Obama when it comes to dealing with ISIS/Daesh. It will also be most interesting to see how avid supporters of both President Obama who have chastised other Democrats for “running away from Obama” will deal with Clinton’s take in the matter:
What is a bit more surprising, perhaps, or at least counterintuitive, is that the likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee has put distance between herself and Mr. Obama. Not only is Hillary Clinton a member of Mr. Obama’s party, but she is also his former secretary of state, closely linked to his foreign policy record. Yet in a speech Thursday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms. Clinton described the Islamic State as “demonstrating new . . . reach and capabilities,” and the appropriate U.S. policy goal as “not to deter or contain” the group but to “defeat and destroy” it. The contrast between Ms. Clinton’s remarks and Mr. Obama’s more limited objectives and more upbeat progress report was implicit but clear.
And it was appropriate. Ms. Clinton has a strong claim to express her differences with Mr. Obama, since it’s well-known that she argued them privately during her time in the administration, especially about how to handle Syria.
Many activists may skeptically view Suzy Khimm’s take at The New Republic in The Left's Green Lantern Problem. But she’s right that there hasn’t been anywhere nearly enough focus by the left on down-ballot contests, which is a focus that those of us who have launched Crowdsourcing the 50-State Strategy. That project is not simply a move to elect more congressional progressives and state legislators but also to reinforce crucial movement work around issues of inequality, police violence and climate change. Khimm writes:
Electing a new Democrat to the White House in 2017 won’t likely mean big policy changes, but rather holding the line against Republican attacks and pushing far more incremental reforms through execution action. That is essential, of course, and the threat of unified Republican governance is reason enough for progressives to invest deeply in electing a Democrat to the White House. But the only way to achieve anything approximating the kind of change that the rising left wants to see—or Hillary, for that matter—is by wresting back control of Congress and the states. To believe otherwise essentially relies on the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. This, as political scientist Brendan Nyhan defined it to Vox, is the idea “that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.”
The real road to progressive victory doesn’t run through the White House in 2016, but the states in 2020. Those races will decide who controls the next round of redistricting—and whether Republicans can largely lock down majorities in state capitals and Washington for another decade, as they did after their sweeping wins in 2010. “In Congress, the Tea Party lunatics have taken over the asylum,” says Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party. “It’s state legislatures where progressives need to win back power.”
John Nichols at The Nation gives some much needed historical pushback to the the pathetic and opportunistic xenophobes in Muslims Have Been Living in America Since Before the Revolutionary War:
As a young journalist, I wrote a good deal about the rural Muslim and Jewish farm communities of the Midwest. I met the children and grandchildren of those Muslim farmers from the Dakotas, and from eastern Iowa, where the Mother Mosque of America was constructed in 1934 in Cedar Rapids. As a reporter for the Toledo Blade, I came to know Yehia “John” Shousher and other Muslims who built a pioneering mosque in the city’s “Little Syria” neighborhood more than six decades ago. Later, they constructed one of the great mosques in North America, the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, at which people from dozens of countries proudly celebrate their community’s “equal and vibrant representation of women and the democratic and constitutional processes that the Center diligently follows.”
It is because I have spent so much time in these mosques, because I have for so long known them as part of the fabric of the communities where I have lived, of the regions I love, of an American experiment I have treasured, that I was shaken by Donald Trump’s crude claim that “there’s absolutely no choice” but to monitor mosques, to consider closing some of them, to begin tracking Muslims using “surveillance, including a watch list.”
Sasha Abramsky at The Nation writes The GOP Stampede Toward Fascism After the Paris Attacks:
There is an odor of early fascism, or rather of the hysteria that precedes the march away from democracy, to much of this Trumpian rhetoric. An odor of the street fight. An odor of the iron fist.
It is an acrid smell, a mid-century aroma tinted with totalitarianism and historical ignorance. No society can protect its open, pluralistic politics by thoughtlessly clamping down on civil liberties. No country can seriously sustain its claim to being a beacon for human liberty if its most demagogic forces are unleashed against vulnerable, hungry, scared, and desperate refugees.
In my mind’s eye, I see the young child drowned in the Mediterranean, the photographs of whom, just a few weeks back, captured the world’s attention and, quite rightly, tugged at our collective heartstrings. I see the families who get off airplanes after odysseys of thousands of miles, pick up their worldly belongings—usually just two or three suitcases—and, with the help of organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, are given a chance to start lives anew, welcomed into communities around the country. I see all of our better instincts at work in helping these men, women, and children start afresh. And now, competing with these images, I see something uglier being unleashed. I see powerful figures such as Trump beating up on helpless refugee children. I see a stampede on the right to exploit a catastrophe, to exploit the war crimes of madmen, for partisan political gain.
John Kiriakou writes at Other Words How the Government Made Me a Dissident:
I sometimes say the government turned me into a dissident — after I spent 14 years at the CIA and two more at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I only say it half-jokingly. While I’m proud of winning this year’s PEN Center’s First Amendment award, I never intended to make a career out of being at odds with the government.
Sometimes, though — like when I spent two years in prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program — it’s felt like the government’s gone out of its way to be at odds with me.
And it’s clear that our government demonizes people who disagree with the official line. Things got bad for anyone who disagrees with the official line right after 9/11.
Theo Anderson at In These Times writes What Is Actually Radical About Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism Isn’t the Socialism:
What makes Sanders a radical, and what constitutes the essence of his revolution, isn’t his commitment to certain spending priorities or a particular economic plan—it’s his fierce commitment to democracy.
“Change never takes place from the top down,” he told his audience at the University of Chicago. “It always takes place from the bottom up. It takes place when people by the millions, sometimes over decades and sometimes over centuries, determine that the status quo—the world that they see in front of them—is not the world that should be, and they come together. And sometimes they get arrested. … And sometimes they die in the struggle. And what human history is about is passing that torch from generation to generation to generation.”
Though they are very different in their approaches to achieving it, Sanders shares this commitment to a radical version of democracy with Saul Alinsky, the activist and organizer who made Chicago his home and has played an outsized role in our recent national politics. Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals, the summary of his organizing philosophy that was published a year before his death in 1972, is particularly notorious among right-wing pundits, and he was often invoked by conservatives in the 2008 and 2012 elections as evidence of Barack Obama’s secret radicalism. [...]
As with Sanders, though, Alinsky’s radicalism wasn’t a matter of the specific reforms he pushed for, which were about winning incremental and often relatively modest improvements in the lives of the poor and disenfranchised. Rather, he was a radical and a revolutionary because he actually believed in democracy.