E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The governors exact their revenge on Marco Rubio:
The politicians from both parties who ran the states tended to be a pragmatic lot. They were pro-business because they wanted their people to have jobs, but they championed government spending in the areas that contribute to economic development, starting with education and transportation.
Democratic governors still largely behave that way, but many of their Republican peers have followed their national party to the right and now run far more ideological administrations. North Carolina, Kansasand Wisconsin are prime examples of this break from a longer GOP tradition.
But in a pivotal debate here on Saturday night, the old solidarity among Republicans in charge of statehouses made a comeback of convenience. Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and John Kasich of Ohio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush are competitors, but they had no qualms about creating an ad hoc alliance that might be called Governors Against Callow and Outrageous Candidates.
They took on both Donald Trump and, indirectly, Sen. Ted Cruz. But their central target was Sen. Marco Rubio, who had a chance to put all three governors away with a strong performance. Instead, thanks to the pugilistic Christie, Rubio wilted.
Robert Faturechi at ProPublica writes—The Conservative Playbook for Keeping ‘Dark Money’ Dark:
How do you stop states and cities from forcing more disclosure of so-called dark money in politics? Get the debate to focus on an “average Joe,” not a wealthy person. Find examples of “inconsequential donation amounts.” Point out that naming donors would be a threat to “innocents,” including their children, families and co-workers.
And never call it dark money. “Private giving” sounds better.
These and other suggestions appear in internal documents from conservative groups that are coaching activists to fight state legislation that would impose more transparency on the secretive nonprofit groups reshaping U.S. campaign finance.
The documents obtained by ProPublica were prepared by the State Policy Network, which helps conservative think tanks in 50 states supply legislators with research friendly to their causes, and the Conservative Action Project (CAP), a Washington policy group founded by Edwin Meese, a Reagan-era attorney general.
Rebecca Leber at The New Republic writes—Hillary Clinton’s Leftward Shift on Climate:
In July, the climate grassroots group 350 Action asked Hillary Clinton at a campaign stop in New Hampshire for her position on banning fossil fuel development on public lands. Clinton gave what she deemed a “responsible answer” that she wouldn’t accept a ban until we get “the alternatives in place.” I asked her campaign chair John Podesta the same question in October, and he only suggested a willingness to use “policy levers” to affect fossil fuel production.
Now, Clinton is ready to take a more definitive stand on limiting fossil fuel extraction on federal lands—which has emerged as a top priority for climate organizers after their victory against the Keystone XL pipeline. Griffin Sinclair-Wingate, a 350 Action organizer, approached Clinton after the New Hampshire debate on Thursday night and asked her, “Would you ban extraction on public lands?”
“Yeah, that’s a done deal,” Clinton said, as though her position were obvious. Afterward, she told another 350 activist that she agrees with “where the president is moving. No future extraction.” Adam Greenberg asked her in a third video on Friday while campaigning in New Hampshire, “Would you end all oil, coal, and gas leases on federal lands?” Clinton said, “I want to impose a moratorium ... because there are legal issues you have to go through, you know all of that, but I would support a moratorium.”
Elizabeth Bruenig at The New Republic writes—The feminist age divide is becoming an issue in the Clinton campaign.:
In a Meet the Press segment with Chuck Todd this morning, Hillary Clinton weighed in on former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s recent comment that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” which, given the context of a New Hampshire Clinton rally, struck many as suggesting that women who don’t vote Clinton should go to hell.
When asked by Todd if she could understand why people were offended, Clinton demurred: “Good grief, we’re getting offended about everything these days! People can’t say anything without offending somebody.”
She then went on to say she admires Albright’s life experience (which ostensibly informed Albright’s statement), and said Albright was simply trying to “remind young women that this struggle ... is not over, and don’t be in any way lulled by the progress we’ve made.”
Clinton is right about people being offended, but perhaps short-sighted in suggesting (as Debbie Wasserman Schultz has) that young women might be in need of schooling on feminism. After Gloria Steinem’s Friday night interview with Bill Maher in which she proposed young women support Bernie to attract the attention of boys, the gap between young and older feminists has become a rather urgent issue in the Clinton campaign.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Hillary Has ‘Half a Dream’:
One of the most striking statistics to come of the Iowa caucus entry polling was the enormous skew of young voters away from Hillary Clinton and to Bernie Sanders. Only 14 percent of caucusgoers 17 to 29 supported Clinton, while 84 percent supported Sanders.
On Thursday, I traveled to the University of New Hampshire, site of a debate between Clinton and Sanders that night. Before the debate, I mingled on campus with people rallying for both candidates, with the Sanders rally many times larger than the Clinton one. The energy for Sanders at the school was electric.
For the actually debate, I went to a debate-watching party for Clinton supporters at the Three Chimneys Inn, just off campus. There were more heads of white hair in that room than a jar of cotton balls.
The two scenes so close to each other drove home the point for me: Hillary Clinton has a threatening young voter problem.
James Kilgore at Truthout writes—Mass Incarceration Since 1492: Native American Encounters With Criminal Injustice:
The recent right-wing militia occupation of federal land in Oregon once again reminds us that we actually live in what historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz refers to as the US "settler colonial state." Amazingly, Ammon Bundy and his clan took over this land with the claim that they were the rightful owners. With typical settler arrogance, they neglected the historical truth - that the Indigenous people of the Northern Paiute nation were there long before a single imperialist ship set sail from Europe. As journalist Simon Moya-Smith has pointed out "for Native America being overlooked is nothing new. Our voices are seldom in the mainstream, our issues disregarded ... this country has yet to recognize our humanity."
Critical accounts of police abuse and mass incarceration often suffer from a similar syndrome, albeit with much better intentions. They overlook the particulars of structural violence that have been visited upon Native peoples for many centuries, and how this violence relates to but also differs from the experience of Black people. Adding the Native American dimension to framing the analysis of the criminal legal system adds new insights and offers some important lessons for alternatives.
Some forms of this violence are tragically familiar. Native activists too can call out the names of those who have died at the hands of police in recent years: Rexdale Henry, Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, Allen Locke, Paul Castaway and Sarah Lee Circle Bear.
Some like Henry and Circle Bear passed away in police custody under suspicious circumstances. Others such as Locke and Goodblanket perished in a hail of bullets. Such deaths are not a rarity in Native American communities. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 1999 to 2013 show per capita Native American deaths in custody as roughly equal to those of Black people and nearly double the rates for "Hispanics and almost three times the rates for whites. "
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—The Time-Loop Party:
Mr. Rubio’s inability to do anything besides repeat canned talking points was startling. Worse, it was funny, which means that it has gone viral. And it reinforced the narrative that he is nothing but an empty suit. But really, isn’t everyone in his party doing pretty much the same thing, if not so conspicuously?
The truth is that the whole G.O.P. seems stuck in a time loop, saying and doing the same things over and over. And unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” Republicans show no sign of learning anything from experience. [...]
First, there’s the ritual denunciation of Obamacare as a terrible, very bad, no good, job-killing law. Did I mention that it kills jobs? Strange to say, this line hasn’t changed at all despite the fact that we’ve gained 5.7 millionprivate-sector jobs since January 2014, which is when the Affordable Care Act went into full effect.
Then there’s the assertion that taxing the rich has terrible effects on economic growth, and conversely that tax cuts at the top can be counted on to produce an economic miracle.
John Nichols at The Nation writes— Bernie Sanders and Larry David Were a Lot Better TV Than Trump, Cruz, and Rubio:
The GOP debate was so cruel and unusual—and so frequently absurd—that it was unintentionally humorous. Analysts actually counted the number of times that Rubio robotically repeated the same cheap shots at President Obama.
It was bad television from the start—literally, as social media shared video of candidates Carson and Trump missing their cues to come on stage. The entertainment website Hollywood Life summed the moment up with one word: “AWKWARD.”
The better, and perhaps more influential, television on Saturday night inspired a different sort of laughter.
This television was coming not from Manchester but from New York. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders pulled off the New Hampshire trail for a few hours to appear on NBC’s Saturday Night Live with comedian Larry David.
David’s appearances on SNL as Sanders have been so spot-on that the candidate has picked up some of the comedian’s lines and, during Wednesday night’s Democratic Town Hall Meeting in New Hampshire, declared, “I am Larry David.”
Chandra Bozelko at The Guardian writes—The cash bail system should be eliminated rather than reformed:
Reforming the cash bail system to keep non-convicted poor people out of pretrial detention is the right thing to do. And now that many state legislatures across the country have reconvened for the 2016 session, it’s finally happening.v[...]
There is no reason not to resurrect the presumption of innocence in its practical form: we need to increase the number of defendants released on written promises to appear without any financial conditions, like Velda City, Missouri, did last summer. But such a bold move takes political will that doesn’t exist everywhere. Political power favors keeping bail structures because it relies on false connection between bail and safety, despite evidence to the contrary.
Poverty is the reason why approximately 451,000 people nationwide remain behind bars while they are still innocent by law, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. None of the proposals completely eliminate pretrial bond, so many poor defendants will still languish in detention while legally – if not factually – innocent. But these states are taking steps to make laws more reflective of data rather than of our prejudices.
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post writes—Millennials have a higher opinion of socialism than of capitalism:
In my column today, I mentioned that one reason millennials prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton is that they’re not just willing to look past Sanders’s socialism — they actually like his socialism. It’s a feature, not a bug. [...]
[O]verall, 52 percent expressed a favorable view of capitalism, compared with 29 percent for socialism. Republicans, those in families earning more than $100,000, and people age 65-plus had an especially high regard for capitalism compared with socialism, but respondents in almost every demographic category demonstrated the same preference to some degree.
There were just two exceptions to this pattern: Democrats rated socialism and capitalism equally positively (both at 42 percent favorability). And respondents younger than 30 were the only group that rated socialism more favorably than capitalism (43 percent vs. 32 percent, respectively).
Bill Laurence at The Conversation writes—The world’s forests will collapse if we don’t learn to say ‘no’:
The bottom line is that many big infrastructure projects are being pushed by powerful corporations, individuals or interests that have much to gain themselves, but often at great cost to the environment and developing societies.
Globally, the path we’re currently following isn’t just unsustainable. It’s leading to an astonishingly rapid loss of forests, wildlife and wilderness. From 2000 to 2012, an area of forest two and half times the size of Texas was destroyed, while a tenth of all core forests vanished.
If we’re going to have any wild places left for our children and grandchildren, we simply can’t say “yes” to every proposed development project.
For those that will have serious environmental and social consequences, we need to start saying “no” a lot more often.
Jamie Merchant at In These Times writes—We Don’t Need To Break Up the Big Banks. We Need To Put Them Under Democratic Control:
At its root, “too big to fail, too big to exist” relies on a romantic vision of small business competition that not only reduces the scale of our economic power, but also ignores capitalism’s built-in drive toward combination and centralization. Cutting the banks down to size might momentarily rein them in, but in the end it would merely set the stage for their eventual re-concentration in an ever larger form, at least under the current arrangement of a capitalist society.
Breaking the power of finance by downsizing it is not the solution. Rather than dismantling the banks, we must transform them.
We need a major shakeup in how we understand the relationship between politics and the economy. Instead of leveling down the scale of the economy to fit our public institutions, we need to empower and expand those institutions to match the scale of the economy. And rather than assuming the United States exists in a vacuum from the rest of the world, we have to start taking the international organization of production seriously.
This means moving from a politics of redistribution to a politics of production.
The politics of redistribution frames the question of economic and financial reform as simply a matter of sharing the existing national wealth more equitably. It means making demands around goals like tax equality, a strengthened welfare state, market regulation, and expanded access to education. These are desirable goals, of course, but all tend to be seen in isolation from the world economic system in which they are embedded.