Category Archives: Politics

05.20.16
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Oklahoma Abortion Bill Is Just Raw, Mafia-Like Intimidation

The Oklahoma Legislature on Thursday passed a bill that would effectively ban abortions by subjecting doctors who perform them to felony charges and revoking their medical licenses — the first legislation of its kind.

Pictured: Nathan Dahm, who clearly sees bigger things for himself. 

 

The measure passed by the Oklahoma legislature will be struck down by any court- it’s as blatantly unconstitutional as it is punitive. Senator Nathan Dahm, the sponsor, said he knew it would be challenged, but that he hoped it would lead to overturning Roe v. Wade. It won’t, or course- if Mary Fallin (who is openly angling for a Trump/Fallin ticket and has November on the mind) signs it, it’ll get slapped down by the first judge whose desk it slithers across.

 I don’t know if Dahm is stupid enough to believe his bill will make the Supreme Court, or just cruel, but it doesn’t matter. This bill isn’t about the law. It’s nothing more than intimidation, making it chokingly oppressive to provide women’s health services in Oklahoma. It’s about putting fear in the heart of anyone who wants to perform a vital (and as we seem to need to be reminded, legal) service.  It’s goons smashing windows and breaking kneecaps, and it is designed to encourage violence by legal labelling any abortion doctors as felons. You don’t want felons in your neighborhood, do you Clem? Of course not. Let’s go get ’em.

That defending the bill will cost money doesn’t make this less a mafioso tactic. The mob rarely did anything that didn’t turn a profit, but they knew that while war would cost business, it was sometimes needed. And that’s what this is: the biggest bomb yet dropped in the war against women’s health. Cost doesn’t matter. Can you really put a price tag on fear?

05.18.16
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Legacy And Language: Politico vs. Tim Noah

Timothy Noah had a typically sharp article this morning in Politico about the Obama administration implementing new rules that help promote a progressive policy, the most important being the new overtime wage rule, which guarantees the dangerous and un-American notion that people should be paid for the work they do.

The reason there is a rush of rules is due, as Noah explains, to a regulation passed in 1996 by Newt’s Congress. Per Noah:

Blame the Congressional Review Act. Enacted by a newly Republican Congress in 1996 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, the CRA law gave Congress 60 legislative days after a regulation was issued to block it by using an expedited procedure.

…

Aimed at taming the regulatory leviathan, the law proved almost entirely ineffective because presidents could — and did — routinely veto resolutions of disapproval against their own agencies’ rules. But under one circumstance, the CRA could be deadly. Late in a president’s final year, 60 legislative days (which extend much longer than calendar days) could carry over into another administration. A new president of the opposite party would be tempted to squelch a predecessor’s pet project.

Now, since then, there have only been two changes of administration: Clinton to Bush and Bush to Obama, so this is still new. Geroge W. Bush knew to protect himself. He was the first President to use the law, overturning a late-term Clinton regulation that instituted ergonomic standards to protect workers against the crippling problems of repetitive stress. It’s important to remember that Bush wasn’t a hapless doof thrust into global chaos; he was an evil boneheaded dork who ran a cruel administration from the jump.

Regardless, he understood the rules, and so did the same thing that President Obama is doing now. As Noah said, Obama is actually behind the Bush pace for pushing rules. Obviously, that means he’s a tyrant, because nothing that happened before Obama was elected counts, but that’s not really the point. I’m interested in Politico here.

I don’t know if Noah writes his own headlines. But the headline here is at clickbaity and incendiary odds with the rest of the piece: “Obama Rushes Out Rules To Guarantee Legacy.” To be fair, Noah’s first sentence includes the weighted and misleading phrase “shoveling out regulations nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three”, mentions the cost to business, and has a GOP congressman talk of a “regulatory onslaught” before any explanation, but the rest is sober and measured and comprehensive.

So a lot of this is on Politic, though some on Noah. If you read the headline, and skimmed the beginning, you’d think this was some kind of dastardly new scheme. “Rushing out rules” and “shoveling” at a clip nearly 1/3rd faster (which isn’t that much faster if you think about it- I don’t know how much heavy lifting “nearly” does there). It’s dramatic, and makes the continuation of the job he was elected to do seem nefarious.

But it’s the word “legacy” that really sticks. Journalists, especially of the Politico ilk, love to do this. The Climate Change accord was Obama shoring up his environmental legacy. The deal with Iran was his foreign policy legacy. Now, Presidents, as are people who aren’t in history books, are concerned with how they’ll be remembered. There’s no doubt about that. But the quest for a”legacy” is really them doing the job they were elected to do. The Climate Change and the Iran Accord were smart policy: progressive and important and a chance to make the world a better, more livable, and more peaceful place. Even if you disagree, this was policy. It was policy he was elected to enact.

But to Politico, all is artifice. The actions don’t matter; just the perception. It’s a TV show and a ratings grab, a garish tent of fools. It’s not just that they paint these pictures. They assume everyone is acting in equally bad faith, and that makes it easy for us to believe they are. It’s both cynical and credulous, and misses the point in every way.

Politico’s  main sin isn’t that it is a suck-up fest of conservative 3rd-wayism or that it is as shallow as it is insipid (writers like Noah notwithstanding). It’s that it wants you to be as dumb as it is. It believes that you want it. It degrades anything that is real because it can’t understand how someone can look beyond tomorrow’s headline. That’s the main reason Obama has always confounded them. He refuses to see the world in the same blinkered and pointless way that they do.

05.18.16
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Labor and The Environment: Ask And Ye Shall Receive

Yesterday I said I hoped that Eric Loomis at LGM would do a post on the “environmental/labor rift” that the Times said was threatening Dem turnout this year. And he did!  He frames it as a long-standing rift in the labor movement.

This is related to changes in the labor movement over the past four decades. What the CIO did was undermine the building trades’ domination over the labor movement. But even though the rise of public sector unionism has to some extent replaced it, the loss of the giant and generally progressive industrial unions like the UAW (now only the 11th largest union in the country) and USWA has left a vacuum that the building trades were more than happy to fill. So what you have in the labor movement, other than remnant industrial unions, are the often very politically conservative (although not universally so) building trades that have been conservative for a century or more and the public sector unions that really operate with very different classes (and races) of workers and that sometimes really have very little in common with a union like the Laborers.

That makes sense, and it really gets to the heart of what “unions” mean these days. We have the romantic notion of them being about helping people in the rough and dangerous trades, which they have, for the betterment of the nation. But those aren’t the only unions, and in a time when they are under assault, certainly not the most powerful, and obviously not the most progressive (those trades were the heart of the “Reagan Democrats”, who are now just called “Republicans” by everyone but the media). It’s probably time the media realized they aren’t the sole voice of unions.

05.18.16
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Sanders and the Kentucky Recount

(Note: I really wanted to do some kind of “Sanders” and “Kentucky Fried Recount” joke, but it’s one of those things that sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t, under any scrutiny. It’s just a collection of words that trigger the referential part of your brain. Scientifically, it’s the Family Guy Correlation.)

As The Guardian reports this morning, the Sanders campaign is “mulling” over calling for a recount in the Kentucky primary, an extremely close race. This is, simply put, narcissistic madness.

There is really no good outcome from this. Even if Sanders doesn’t demand a recount, even mulling one over makes the whole thing seem suspect, like the Hillary team and the crooked Democratic Party are trying to steal things, trying to put one over on Sanders and his supporters, the only ones who have a true passion. Everyone else is a hunchbacked pack of Ralph Steadman caricatures, lurching grotesquely hand-in-hand with blood-soaked billionaires, trying to erase the specter of real democracy.

In short, it’s getting ugly. The narrative that Sanders is now pushing- we’re the real voice of the people, despite being outvoted by the millions- has some validity, but not much. His wins are narrow, not just in delegates, but in total votes. And that’s fine: he’s doing amazingly well, and shouldn’t even still be here. But he has triggered something real and genuine, and something important. It’s why I voted for him. He’s highlighting the ur-issues of American politics, the role of money in distorting any electoral equity.

But this narrative comes with inherent dangers, mostly that anyone standing in the way is a counter-revolutionary. Anything that is messy about voting (and much of the system is bizarre and counterproductive) isn’t seen as a glitch to be fixed, but an enemy to be overcome. An enemy put in place to stop the Voice of the People, the popular tribune, the one man that can save us all. And the number one enemy is Hillary Clinton.

That’s why calling for a recount is dangerous. It doesn’t make sense electorally, as virtually no delegates will shift. But it highlights the dangerous game Sanders is playing. He’s trying to negate the votes of millions of people (largely older and minority) that genuinely want Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, by claiming that the real voters want him to be President. He wants to demonstrate that something is being stolen from him, and his most eager supporters are all too willing to believe it.

That isn’t right, and for such a populist campaign, it is weirdly tyrannical. The nomination is mine, because more people cry at my rallies. Their voters don’t count. Only mine do. Sanders should by all means continue his campaign, and keep pushing for genuine progressive policies. But it is possible to do so in a twilight, accepting that he isn’t being robbed, but that the voters of the Democratic Party chose Hillary Clinton. That’s what happens in elections.

As ugly as 2008 was, Hillary moved toward unity. I believe that Bernie can do so, and that he has to in the face of Trump. But this coalescing idea that if Hillary wins it is because she is a thieving harpy will make it harder to win. Remember, this isn’t about the lesser of two evils. It’s about the greater evil being a genuinely epochal disaster, a country-defining tragedy. Fighting the good fight doesn’t mean imagining yourself Spartacus, and demanding a revolt.

05.17.16
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Donald Trump Foreswears Getting Nasty

“Just getting nasty with Hillary won’t work,” Mr. Trump said. “You really have to get people to look hard at her character, and to get women to ask themselves if Hillary is truly sincere and authentic. Because she has been really ugly in trying to destroy Bill’s mistresses, and she is pandering to women so obviously when she is only interested in getting power.”  –Times

 

“Don’t you people think Hillary is gross?”

 

Donald Trump has openly outlined his campaign, which is going to revolve around:

  • Bill’s infidelities (and Hillary’s role)
  • All the crackpot conspiracies from the 90s (including cattle futures and probably Vince Foster)
  • Benghazi
  • Ties to Wall Street corruption.

The thing here is that while the first three are nonsense, they all tie in together to portray someone as essentially being sleazy. For Trump to focus on money-and-power grubbing or sexual pecadillos is obviously insane, but it might work. He’ll still lose, I think, as demographics make it very difficult, but the media loves stories about Hillary being crooked and the Clintons as being low and grubby farm people. Maureen Dowd is going to have no less than 11 columns between now and November that are transcripts of phone interviews with Trump (and another 5 which are saucily imagined conversations between Hillary and Bill. Every single one of these columns will mention Lena Dunham). It’s going to be as ugly as you imagine.

On the other hand, I’m not yet emotionally ready to talk about this labor/environmentalist article. I hope Loomis has something about it.

05.16.16
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The Right-Wing Martyr Complex, Nutshelled

Above: Glenn Beck

The brave, doomed, Lightweight Brigade  of the rightwing media charges on in the face of Facebook’s despotic decision not to promote the paranoid yippering of Newsmax as, well, news. Don’t worry. Mark Zuckerberg, showing more of an ability to stomach nonsense than I would have thought possible, is meeting with conservative thought leaders, including Glenn Beck, according to Re/Code.

Facebook has since argued, over and over, that the suppression charge isn’t true — or, at least, that it doesn’t have any evidence that it’s true — but the story continues to have legs.

See for example, Beck’s post, which says that Facebook has “the same problem that many in media and Silicon Valley face: suppression of conservative voices and ideas…How does a company who allowed voices to be heard in Iran and Egypt which sparked revolution silence voices of anyone here?”

I don’t think anyone who has been on Facebook would argue that conservative voices are “silenced”- Donald Trump’s fetchservant would probably agree- but this is absolute manna to the right wing. It allows them to try to distract from the Trump fiasco by turning their popguns on the most vulnerable targets: the media. The hated, disgusting, shameful media which refuses to ever let conservatives be heard, except literally all the time. You watch: they’ll figure out a way to tie this into the Rise of Trump, a grand scheme of how Facebook purposely silenced true conservatives and promoted Trump so that a New York liberal could pave the way for Hillary. This is just another thread in the tapestry of their minds, where they all envision themselves a mini-Churchill, fighting bravely against Saracen hordes. It all makes sense to them.

Also, don’t think Glenn Beck isn’t serious about getting something done. “Beck says he hopes that Carly Fiorina, ‘business icon and a woman with a spine of steel,’ will be joining.” I’m sure Zuckerberg can learn a lot about how to run a successful tech business from her.

 

05.13.16
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Political Quick Hits: Trump’s Butler, Facebook’s Journalism, and Mark J. Perrone on Paul Ryan

 

“I’ll remove my hand when Mr. Trump lets me!”

 

  1. I guarantee you right now there are people bemoaning the fact that Trump’s racist, unhinged sycophant of a butler is getting a call from the Secret Service for wishing President and Mrs. Obama to be hung for treason and saying he’d happily do it himself. Watch this turn into a rant about the 1st Amendment and Obama’s thuggish storm troopers, sent by (why not?) Eric Holder, who’s probably up to something nefarious, somewhere. The Secret Service, of course, has to do a perfunctory investigation of every threat to the President. That’s kind of their job, and it’ll probably entail a quick conversation wherein the establish that he’s simply a racist coward who spent an entire lifetime sucking up to other racist cowards, and move on. That won’t stop the complaining of course, but they have to do it. I’m sure at one point Leon Czolgosz was like “Oh, can’t a fellow even talk anymore? Don’t I have the right to express myself? When did this turn into Soviet Germany?” (Leon was pretty prescient).
  2. That said, I can’t imagine there will be too much wagon-circling around the Senecal (though “The Butler Said It” will be about 10,000 headlines). If you’re like me, you tread warily and reluctantly into comment sections on places like Newsmax or Breitbart or FOX. That, only more unhinged, are the sections of his Facebook page. When anyone says that the only racism is toward whites or that there isn’t something wild and loose and unchained in this country, point them to these. These are seriously unstable people, and they aren’t alone. For proof they aren’t, look at, say, the Republican Primary. (Warning: screenshot below from Mother Jones will probably make you sick and wail and gnash your teeth at the very thought that we live in the same country as people like this).
  3.                                    
  4. So yeah, it turns out that Facebook’s Newsfeed isn’t entirely algorithmic, and that human editors have some say. According to The Guardian, “Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority. “You should mark a topic as ‘National Story’ importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day,” reads the trending review guidelines for the US. “We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.” This of course has caused panic on the right, despite the presence of The Journal and Fox, because of reports that the editors would ignore stories from Breitbart or Newsmax. John Thune is screwing on his most handsomely concerned face to call for an investigation. Let’s ignore that Facebook is a private company. This is an important issue; millions get their news exclusively from Facebook, so what they decide is trending actually does matter. What Facebook does has an impact on our democracy. Which is why this is the best story ever about Facebook. I mean, come on: have you ever felt so positive about Facebook before? They actually use real news sources with fact-checkers and a sense of responsibility. Pushing stories from Newsmax, a place that Trump’s butler would think is “a little leftist”, would be wildly irresponsible. This is good citizenship by Facebook. This paints them in a much better light.  It’s not like you see Daily Kos or Shooting Irrelevance there either (although the latter would be fine). It’s a sign of modern conservativism that they see unholy bias in a publishing company not promoting the poorly-transcribed fever dreams from right-wing tidal swamps.
  5. A few days ago I ranted a bit about the Friends of the Parks in Chicago blocking the Lucas Museum, calling them “petty-tyrant pecksniffs”. However, and I’m honestly not quite sure how I missed this, I read that they are being represented in court by Thomas Geoghegan, a man whom I think is among the most honorable in the whole city, and who I admire greatly. This is a pickle, and it means that I failed as a blogger: reacting without doing enough research. I still think it is absurd, but I imagine the argument being that simply because a billionaire wants Rahm to jump doesn’t mean everyone has to say “how high”, which I respect, even if I think that ultimately the musuem is a GREAT idea. But Geoghegan vs. Rahm, man, it’s not even a question of which side you pick. Geoghegan vs. Father Pfleger? That’s much tighter. Their being on opposites sides of an issue is making my moral compass all loopy.
  6. Finally, Paul Ryan, and his vacant-eyed Hamlet vacillation on Donald Trump’s rough-palmed courtship.  I actually don’t envy Ryan his position at all, but he does deserve it. For an interpretation of the last few days, I’ll turn it over to friend of blog Mark J. Perrone, Private Eye. The title is “Thou Are Not False, But Thou Art Fickle”

 

“Maybe I won’t even go to the dance!”

 

Man, Paul Ryan is the Princess and the Fucking Pea.
 
I was watching MSNBC at the gym this morning, and his big “meeting” with Trump is today.  They’re covering it like these schmucks are dividing up postwar Europe. 
 
Reporter: “Trump arrived earlier to the building via car, a bold move.” 
 
Different Reporter: “We believe that Trump and Ryan are currently exchanging human words.” 
 
GOP Tool: “We think Paul Ryan will ultimately come to accept Trump as the nominee.  He just simply doesn’t know Trump, since his every utterance has only been covered ad nauseum for a year.”  
 
That Janesville Eddie Munster’s managed to turn this into Paul Ryan Mood Watch: “Oh Whatever Do I Feel?”  Paul Ryan 2020: LEADERSHIP!.

 

05.12.16
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“Until we find out what’s going on” Continues To Be Official Trump Policy

 

Pictured: John Kerry?

Remember when John Kerry was permanently labeled a “flip-flopper” thanks to a smart Bush team and an enabling press, who, with few exceptions, loved the label, adopted it, and breathlessly discussed it? It was fine to discuss his positions and character, of course, but any normal political act was instantly labeled another “flip-flop” by a press almost sexually enamored of a swaggering war President.

That’s normally how things work. Labels get stuck because the press is lazy and people easily accept quick caricatures in place of actual characterization. Bush was dumb (instead of arrogantly incurious), Gore was boring and a liar (instead of neither), McCain was grouchy (true!), Obama was aloof and arrogant (kind of true), etc. That’s the way it usually works.

That’s why one of the more genuinely frightening things about this election is that it has revealed, once and for all, the power of pure thuggishness in the face of any rationality. It’s why no labels have really stuck on Donald Trump. The rage he channels is enough to flatten the incredible contradictions, reversals, and sheer ignorance that underpins his campaign, like a boiling river leveling a hapless and god-beseeching floodplain town. His position on terrorism, or rather “terrorism”, makes this clear.

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05.10.16
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Identity Politics and The “Hunger for a Third Party”

 

Pictured: identity politics

 

The Atlantic has been writing a lot about whether their political coverage should include more about third parties, if that would be more fair and democratic. The initial reaction could be “of course not; that would be a waste of space. A 3rd-party has no chance.” The flip side is that of course they don’t have a chance, because no one writes about them. You can’t breathe without any oxygen.

Personally, I think The Atlantic, and other sources, should spend more time covering other political parties, but not because they have a chance. I think even with enough of a spotlight they wouldn’t be able to grow. Money and structure make it nearly impossible for our system to truly support a third party, and the latter reason isn’t necessarily negative. This is far from the first time in our history that people have looked to break up the duopoly, and even in times of turmoil- even when Whigs fall to the whayside- it coalesces again into two parties.

Still, though, there is the need to spend time focusing on what is happening on the outside, because it makes both parties more responsible (in theory, anyway) and allows for outsiders, like Bernie Sanders, to come in and shake things up. It might not matter electorally, but it matters in terms of policy, and it helps to showcase what people are thinking in this unruly nation.

Sometimes, that’s not very pretty.

Read more to find out what’s not very pretty! 

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05.05.16
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Bernie Sanders and the Limits of Non-Politics

 

How can you not love this guy? Well, there’s a way…

 

“I know that the Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over. They’re wrong,” Sanders said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from New Albany, Indiana. “Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment but the voters today in Indiana had a different idea.”

Here’s the problem with leading a revolution. Anything that is opposed to it is, by definition, counter-revolutionary. And it isn’t just that: opposition becomes the enemy of progress, it becomes and ill and evil thing. It falls short of perfection, and a revolution doesn’t want to live in a fallen world.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has been incredible. He has changed the tenor of the campaign, and pulled a cautious Hillary Clinton to the left. This is good for policy, of course, but it is also good politics. Forcing her to hedge on trade will be good in November, acolytes of “tacking to the center” be damned. Forcing her to the left on economic inequality will be an enormous boost in the generals, even if it makes pundits itch. Bernie has helped the country, and he has, so far, helped to make sure a Democrat beats Donald Trump.

But it won’t be him. All he can do now is make it harder for Hillary Clinton. And given what he’s done, that’s a damn shame. The legacy of this incredible campaign shouldn’t be the election of Donald Trump. The problem is that Bernie, and a lot of his supporters, seem to feel that math is damnably counter-revolutionary, and so it too must be fought against.

Read more on how Bernie can still help the fight for progress

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