Greg Sargent on whether Bernie Sanders should concede, already:
Other Democrats argue the same. As one puts it, Sanders’ leverage is “dissipating every day.”
I’m having a lot of trouble getting worked up over this.
It is true, as Matthew Yglesias says, that Sanders’s speech did contain some elements that legitimately annoyed Democratic leaders. Sanders did suggest that only he and his movement can ensure that the Democratic Party becomes a “party of working people” and “not just wealthy campaign contributors,” and a party with the “courage” to take on special interests, as if lots and lots of Democrats have not been working incredibly hard for years to pass things like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and to defend Obama’s actions on climate change. This is of a piece with Sanders’ broader tendency to be too dismissive of the gains of the Obama years, and too simplistic in his accounting for why Democrats did not accomplish more than they did.
On the other hand, Sanders did accomplish a great deal in the last year. If he wants a little time to try to translate that achievement into some form of lasting influence, well, so what?
Greg has a point. So what? Me, I don’t really care what Bernie does. I figure he’ll get there eventually, and/but way later than most of his supporters, who are already abandoning him along with the unions and his prior Congressional supporters like Raul Grijalva. In the meantime, he didn’t make the evening news Friday, and I expect there will be many more days like that ahead
First Read:
Bernie Sanders hasn't played his hand well -- at all
Well, the 2016 primary season came to an end last night with Hillary Clinton beating Bernie Sanders in DC, 79%-21%. And it came to an end without Sanders conceding or endorsing Clinton, although the two met last night and released positive-sounding statements. Here's the reality: Sanders hasn't played his hand well. Many of his demands from yesterday (wanting Debbie Wasserman Schultz out of the DNC, ending superdelegates, having more open primaries) seem small. By not conceding a race he trails by every measure possible, he seems even smaller. And smaller still is the real leverage he holds, especially after losing eight out of the last 11 contests, after Obama and Warren have already endorsed Clinton, and after polls show Clinton increasing her lead over Trump. The irony here is that Sanders already won -- he performed better than anyone imagined, and he already effectively moved Clinton and her campaign to the left. But one of the arts in politics is declaring victory after you've already won. But Sanders continues to march on…
Brian Beutler:
Most Republican leaders expected (or hoped or prayed) that, once victorious, Trump would move in their direction, if not substantively then at least temperamentally. But those Republicans were essentially asking Trump to abandon the qualities that drove his early political success and swap them out for qualities that in his mind define the losing candidates in the primary he won, and the Republican nominees whom Barack Obama defeated handily. This would be the right way of thinking if Trumpism had a wide general-election consistency.
But Trump has lost the plot. He is following instincts that are serving him poorly. Republicans would be perfectly happy with Trump if his rhetoric and policies divided Democrats from one another, even if in deploying wedge issues, he occasionally veered from GOP orthodoxy. Instead, he is uniting the Democratic coalition faster than Hillary Clinton could have hoped, and tearing his own party apart.
Timothy Egan:
They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech.
The shrug from Mitch McConnell, the twisted explanation of Paul Ryan, who said Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, but he’s ours — party before country. As well, the duck-and-hide Republicans, so quick to whip out their pocket copy of the Constitution, now nowhere to be seen when the foundation of that same document is under assault by the man carrying their banner.
They will remember, in classrooms and seminars, those who wrote Trump off as entertainment, a freak show and ratings spike, before he tried to muzzle a free press, and came for you — using a page from another tyrant, Vladimir Putin, admired by the homegrown monster.
Jeffrey Goldberg with a long and good read about Obama’s views on Islam and ISIL:
It is true that Trump’s critique of Obama’s handling of terrorism is, among other things, analysis-free and comprehensively unserious, but it is also true is that there are non-hysterical critiques to be made, and not only critiques that concern Obama’s reluctance to describe the threat as one posed by “radical Islam” (a reluctance the president addressed on Tuesday). Critics to Obama’s right fault him for prematurely withdrawing American troops from Iraq, and for not doing enough to prevent Syria from becoming a safe haven for ISIS. His reluctance to involve the U.S. more systematically in the Syrian civil war, the argument goes, has allowed jihadists to fill the vacuum created by the absence of the world’s sole superpower. Some critics on the right also argue that Obama blanches when confronted by the ugly truth about Muslim dysfunction and extremism; political correctness, in this view, hamstrings the president, and makes him obtuse. Critics to Obama’s left, on the other hand, argue that he is killing too many people, particularly through the use of drone strikes, and that his policies are distressingly of a piece with those of his Republican predecessor. The over-militarization of the so-called war on terror, that argument goes, exacerbates a problem that has already been hyped by “Islamophobic” fearmongers.
Over the course of many conversations with Obama about the Middle East, terrorism, Islam, and the role of religion in fomenting extremist behavior, I’ve developed at least a partial understanding of his thinking on these subjects. Suffice it to say that I find neither the right’s nor the left’s interpretations of Obama’s policy and rhetorical predispositions to be particularly satisfying or comprehensive.
Max Fisher:
So is ‘radical Islam’ accurate or not?
When I asked Mr. Hamid this, he countered with a different question. Given how many labels already exist to describe terrorists that draw on Islam, why insist on this one?
He listed several — “radical jihadists, Salafis, Islamist extremists, jihadis, jihadi-Salafists” — none of which, he said, carry the baggage of “radical Islam.”
But if it’s that baggage that repels scholars, it may also be what draws others. “Radical Islam” has come to imply certain things about issues that are closer to home than abstract terrorist ideology: political correctness, migration, and the question of who belongs.
Those same issues have animated debates over terrorism and terminology in other societies. In Germany, “multiculturalism” has become shorthand for larger questions of how to absorb migrants and whether there is a degree of minimum assimilation. There is endless sparring over “British values,” and what sort of burden this puts on migrants before they will be welcomed into society.
John McWhorter:
Still, the right claims the two are ignoring the fact that a disproportionate number of men who perpetrate acts such as Mateen's are Muslims infuriated at the West.
They assert further that as long as we say "radical Islam" rather than "Islam" alone, we are suitably specifying that we don't hate Muslims. But that isn't how it would appear to Muslims themselves, and -- if we break the language down to its structure and meaning -- they're right.
In a sentence such as "We must eradicate radical Islam," the object of the verb eradicate is technically "radical Islam," yes, but the core object, the heart of the expression "radical Islam," is "Islam." Radical Islam is a kind of Islam. The object of the eradication in the sentence is "Islam," modified -- not redefined into something else -- by "radical."
Newtown’s Monte Frank:
From Sandy Hook to Orlando, too many communities are forever scarred
We said goodbye to Nicole Hockley and the other Newtown families and scooted over to U.S. Senate to support our senator's filibuster to demand action now so that we can begin to reduce the risk of another Newtown or Orlando. Each day that Congress fails to act, it remains complicit in the carnage that is occurring in our cities on a daily basis and the mass shootings in our schools, movie theaters, college campuses and night clubs. Nowhere is safe anymore.
With Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) at his side, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) stood for all of us, refusing to yield to Senate colleagues who are in the pockets of the gun lobby. Murphy stood for the Newtown families we had just left at the White House and all the families of gun violence. But he also stood for all Americans who have just had enough. One by one, other senators paraded in to ask Murphy questions, and he answered them all with passion. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) spoke at length about each of the Orlando victims. Sen. Robert Casey (D-Pa.) brought to the floor the page of the newspaper he has kept in his desk since Dec. 14, 2012 which contains photos of the Sandy Hook victims. He showed members of Team 26 that same page when we visited him in his office following the Sandy Hook Ride to Washington.
What Murphy is calling for is simple and will save lives.
Margaret Talbot:
The lethal intersection of firearms and intimate-partner violence is actually one of the few gun-safety matters that Congress has acted on. In 1996, it adopted the Lautenberg Amendment, which bans people who have been convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors, or who are subject to restraining orders, from owning firearms. This was sound and compassionate legislation. Guns are the most common method, by far, for killing intimate partners. Not surprisingly, the presence of a firearm in the home makes it much more likely that a woman in an abusive relationship will end up dead. And there is evidence that restrictions of the kind the Lautenberg Amendment and some state legislatures have enacted truly help. According to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “laws restricting firearm access for batterers subject to restraining orders are associated with a 19% reduction in rates of intimate homicide.”
MedPage Today:
After an emotional discussion, the American Medical Association House of Delegates passed a resolution Tuesday at its annual meeting urging Congress to end the ban on gun violence research at the CDC.
"During this AMA meeting, we witnessed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history," said Joshua Cohen, MD, a neurologist in New York City and author of the resolution. "America is looking to its physicians for our voice on this public health crisis. We will not stand idly by and watch our fellow Americans be slaughtered by the thousands."
Philip Bump:
Support from working class white voters is integral to Trump's general election strategy. He has repeatedly pointed to Ronald Reagan's support from white Democrats in 1980 as a possible blueprint to victory -- and members of labor unions were an important part of Reagan's success.
Exit poll data shows how Reagan overperformed with members of union households in 1980 -- relative both to 1976 and to every presidential election since. This is union households, not union members, so this isn't a perfectly precise measure of union support. But it makes the point.