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Friday 16 April 2010
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A few weeks ago this blog took note of it when Republican Senator Tom Coburn said something snotty about Fox News. Turns out Coburn got Bill O'Reilly fired up, so Billo took it upon himself to set the record crooked.
You must watch the video you'll find on this page. It's four minutes, but worth it.
It's hilarious. Except then you remember that this is a "news" network, whose "journalists" get press passes and enjoy all the usual benefits and appurtenances, and who can say anything that comes into their heads (from Roger Ailes' memo pad) and pass it off as reporting.
Then it gets even better for them, of course, because whatever it is they happen to be howling about -- in this case, this preposterous notion that anyone is actually going to be jailed if they fail to buy health care -- they can say that no one network is talking about it because they're all part of some massive liberal conspiracy. Well, no. The other networks aren't talking about it because it's insane and is not "news" in any remote sense.
Take a look. Just remember: No one ever said it. Bill O'Reilly says so!
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Clegg was awfully good yesterday, but as of this morning he faces this problem. For most of those watching last night, I'd imagine, it was the first time they really saw him. So he was fresh. A novelty. But you can only be a novelty once.
If I were advising him, I'd say: for the second debate, you need to pull a surprise out of your hat. Announce a new policy of some kind that's fairly big, that catches Gordon and David off guard. Steals the headlines. Makes you the focus of attention again. That will keep you as the main topic of conversation.
As for what it could be, I have no idea. Fortunately, I'm not actually advising him. Anyway, Brits, enlighten the rest of us. Are the Lib-Dems a serious party, really?
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Let it not be said that I don't listen. I heard your complaints last week about the quiz being on the difficult side. I noticed that many of you who seem like smart people got only five or six. I think you should have a sporting chance, with a combination of knowledge and intuition and luck, to go 10 or 10. So I've softened it up a bit.
It may be too easy for some Americans. About six of these you ought to have learned in school if you were paying attention. As for the rest of you, it'll be interesting to see what translates beyond our shores and what doesn't.
Topic: American literature. Enjoy!
1. George and Lennie are the co-protagonists of what famous American novel?
a. Joseph Heller's Catch 22
b. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
c. Saul Bellow's Ravelstein2. What literary figure famously said of Lillian Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'"?
a. Mary McCarthy
b. Lionel Trilling
c. Diana Trilling3. The notable characteristic of Gore Vidal's character Myra Breckenridge is that:
a. She was a bank robber
b. She was a transsexual
c. She disguised herself as a man and became a Catholic priest4. What surly American protagonist, in a famous scene in the novel featuring him, gets in trouble for losing the fencing team's equipment?
a. Holden Caulfield
b. Rabbit Angstrom
c. Nick Carraway5. Whose novel Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of the struggles of African Americans in early 20th century Florida?
a. Langston Hughes
b. Eudora Welty
c. Zora Neale Hurston6. Which Henry James novel was made into the excellent 1949 film The Heiress, starring Olivia de Haviland and directed by William Wyler?
a. The Portrait of a Lady
b. The Bostonians
c. Washington Square7. What 19th century novel features several memorable scenes with characters who pass themselves off as an English duke and the lost dauphin of France?
a. Huck Finn
b. The House of the Seven Gables
c. Omoo8. Who said: "It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway"?
a. Richard Wright
b. Norman Mailer
c. Philip Roth9. Which novel has sold the most copies?
a. Stephen King's The Shining
b. Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls
c. Michael Chrichton's Jurassic Park10. What American poet wrote these lines:
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seala. Sylvia Plath
b. Elizabeth Bishop
c. John AshberyAnswers below the fold.
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It now looks as if Charlie Crist, the Republican Florida governor, is going to bolt the party and run for Senate as an independent. The subject at hand is an education bill he just vetoed. Here's what happened, from today's NYT:
Passions have not run so high in Florida, the governor said, since the controversy over ending the life of Terri Schiavo in 2005.
This time, the point of contention was eliminating tenure for Florida public school teachers and tying their pay and job security to how well their students were learning.
On Thursday, Mr. Crist picked a side, vetoing a bill passed last week by the Florida Legislature that would have introduced the most sweeping teacher pay changes in the nation.
The veto puts Mr. Crist, a moderate Republican, at odds with his party base in the Republican-controlled Legislature. His decision has also renewed speculation that he might drop out of the Republican primary for a United States Senate seat and run in the general election as an independent. For months, he has been trailing the more conservative Republican candidate, Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, in polls.
Polls generally have been showing Rubio beating Crist in a GOP primary, but Crist running well or even leading in a three-way general election running as an independent against Rubio and putative Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek.
If the Democrats know what's good for them, and I think in this case they do, they'll move heaven and earth to defeat Rubio. He is, without question, the biggest long-term electoral threat to the Democrats that exists in the entire country. Read that sentence again. The. Biggest.
Assuming a recovered economy in 2012, I don't see any of these current Republicans beating Obama. A poll just came out Wednesday showing Obama at least eight points up on every one of them. And this is at a point when Obama is losing a little ground in his approval ratings, slipping nearer 45 than 50, as voters say they don't yet see the turnaround the papers are talking up.
Rubio, however, is a potential game changer and map changer. If he gets to the Senate, he instantly becomes a presidential contender, and not a Scott Brown presidential contender -- silly overheated pundit-talk -- but a real one.
While Brown doesn't seem to be that bright a bulb, Rubio is. He's also young and smooth and handsome and --ding ding ding -- Latino. By 2012, he will have been in the Senate for two years -- less than Obama's four when he ran, but not so much less that it would make a material difference. I think the GOP, or at least some factions within it, would immediately start grooming him for a national run the day after he won.
I think ultimately he's too right-wing for the entire country. He's a straight down-the-line tea party person on about every issue as far as I can see. But he's probably smooth enough to hide that. Democrats need to grasp this. If it means secretly backing Crist over their own candidate, then that's what it means.
By the way, substantively, Crist's veto of the education bill places him to the left of Obama administration education policy, in crude terms. He's pretty obviously pitching for teachers' union phone banks during the election. And he might get them.
Weekly quiz coming later this morning east coast time. We're going literary this week.
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Thursday 15 April 2010
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This vile Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, by an accountant from La Jolla, puts virtually every selfish and ignorant thought right out front:
I'm in the 32% federal and 10% state income tax brackets. I pay a 1.2% property tax on very expensive California real estate. I am subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax. I am self-employed and subject to a 15% payroll tax on the first $100,000 in income and an 8.75% state sales tax. If I have a gain from investing, I pay a minimum of 15% federal and 10% state tax but can only write off $3,000 per year if I lose.
And now the government wants me to pay more?
As a child I mowed lawns, shoveled snow, had a paper route, sold sandwiches at school, and cut up dead trees and split them for firewood to sell during spring break. I have worked every summer since I turned 14. I took out student loans for college and worked 35 hours a week, at night, to pay for the rest...
...Why then does the government feel so entitled to take my money and give it to others? Why should I have to carry so many people on my back? Call me cruel. I don't care. I give to whom I choose—but since so much is confiscated (and wasted in the process) I have little left I wish to give...
...Life is hard. You learn when you fail and you make changes when things hurt. Why then is the liberal agenda trying to make sure nobody feels any pain? And why does the government feel so entitled to steal from many in order to give it to others.
Jesus lovers. Yglesias has already sliced this idiot to ribbons, thus:
I always go back to the case of the Salvadoran guys who moved all my furniture into my current apartment. I certainly make more money than those guys. But whether or not I work longer hours than they do (which is definitely possible, I work pretty long hours), you'd have to be clinically insane to think that writing my blog entails working harder than they do. In the real world, the reason I earn more than Salvadoran movers is the same as the reason I work less hard—I have more valuable skills, and people with valuable skills can demand both more money and cushier working conditions. But it's not as if those guys were too lazy to become American political pundits, they were born in El Salvador in the middle of a civil war and never had a chance to obtain the relevant skills.
The narcissism of these people astonishes me, and I'm sorry to say it, but this selfishness is in fact a central part of the conservative world view. I got mine. Why can't everybody be like me? The completely inability to step outside one's own skin and see the world through other eyes is mind-bending.
Obviously, there are people who work hard, and there are people who don't. But that's one of many factors, as Matt's vignette suggests, that enable people to become high earners. Loads of people work awfully hard for $40,000. Maybe Donahue should trade places with them for a few days if he doesn't think so.
I also like the way he doesn't specify either what he makes or what precise confiscatory governmental grab he's referring to. Since the only things on the table right now are aimed at households above $250,000, I'm guessing he falls in that category but doesn't want to come out and admit it, at which point a percentage of his sympathy vote, even among Journal readers, would deplete.
In the 33% bracket, he would seem to live in a household between $209,251 and $373,650.
I am lucky to be a fairly high earner. I wrote a check to the IRS this week, and I wrote it happily. Taxes pay for my security, and they clean the air and clean the rivers and invest in innovation and -- yes -- they help people who could use a hand up who were born into less fortunate circumstances than I was (in historical terms, being born white and male to a semi-upper-middle-class family in the United States of America in 1960 is about as lucky as an aborning human soul can get). And they pay for a hundred other things that I could not do, services I could not perform, by myself. It's really a bargain when you think about it, if you can think beyond your own selfish wants and needs for five seconds.
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Here, you can read my musings on this evening's Brown-Cameron cage match, which I believe appeared in today's print edition.
It's a simple list of do's and don't's based on American experience.
How do you see things? Let us know.
Housekeeping note: Wik, sincere apologies about my confusion on the gender question. I know better. And obviously, I did not mean to say that I was suspicious that you were capable of hard work. I meant to say that I am suspicious of hard work in general. Which was supposed to be a joke, but was perhaps infelicitously phrased.
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Lots of Middle East developments worth noting lately.
The news broke two days ago across the region about Syria supplying Hezbollah with Scud missiles. Syria denies but it seems to be true, and if true it raises the stakes there considerably, because Scuds have a longer range than anything Hezbollah is now assumed to have. What that statement really means, boiled down to its essence, is that they can reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Simon Tisdall has a sharp analysis here.
Writing on HuffPo, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation got a leak from someone attending a meeting of King Abdullah with supporters of Jordan (there are some, I guess!) in the US Congress. This is troubling:
According to one attendee in the session, "the King's message was sobering."King Abdullah seemed significantly concerned that conflict was about to break out again between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
One congressional source told me that the word the King used was "imminent" with regard to the potential outbreak of war.
Finally, the NYT has a thorough piece this morning on the Obama team's Middle East policy that has the administration redoubling its efforts to get the parties to do something:
When Mr. Obama declared that resolving the long-running Middle East dispute was a "vital national security interest of the United States," he was highlighting a change that has resulted from a lengthy debate among his top officials over how best to balance support for Israel against other American interests.
This shift, described by administration officials who did not want to be quoted by name when discussing internal discussions, is driving the White House's urgency to help broker a Middle East peace deal. It increases the likelihood that Mr. Obama, frustrated by the inability of the Israelis and the Palestinians to come to terms, will offer his own proposed parameters for an eventual Palestinian state.
Mr. Obama said conflicts like the one in the Middle East ended up "costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure" — drawing an explicit link between the Israeli-Palestinian strife and the safety of American soldiers as they battle Islamic extremism and terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Putting forward its own plan would amount to putting a lot of political capital on the table. Would it force Bibi's hand? I'm not so sure. I'm obviously not over there but it doesn't seem like there's enough domestic pressure on him to play ball yet.
With regard to Syria, the administration's attempted engagement with Assad has so far been one of its genuine failures. If US overtures to the country are met with responses like this, they're pretty clearly not working. And it gives Syria more influence in Lebanon, which breaks explicit promises Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton made in early visits to Beirut. The poor Lebanese are used to this, alas, and their country typically bears the brunt of these failures -- a war will likely scar its landscape more than Israel's or Syria's.
I understand what the administration is trying to do -- tie it all together: Israel, the Palestinians, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria and Lebanon. Logically it's the right idea. But logic doesn't typically apply over there. If it did, Assad would just listen to Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy magazine and join the West:
The insane thing about all this is that Syria would be much better off by joining the pro-Western camp. It could get the Golan Heights back, get the sanctions lifted, and attract foreign assistance and investment -- while fending off pressure to open its deeply authoritarian system, just as Egypt has. It could reap billions in tourism revenue, thanks to its incredible archaeological and cultural riches. And it could finally bury the hatchet with other Arab states, which have long been frustrated by Syria's close ties to Iran, its support for militant groups, its meddling in Lebanon, and its intransigence on all things Israel.But it ain't that simple.
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Wednesday 14 April 2010
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I see that my post yesterday on the Billboard charts had the desired effect. It was quite a lovely comment thread. No one disagreed, called anyone else an abusive name, wagged an imperious rhetorical index finger at anyone else. All right, the first guy, a Jengie newbie of some sort, called me a jerk in essence. But he was the only one. That's a lot better than usual.
It was a moving thread, rich in reminiscences like Wikipedia's about all that suspiciously hard work he used to do. That's what we need more of around here. Reminiscences, not hard work, that is.
And so, today's question. What was the first album you ever bought? One of you in that thread mentioned this, saying Let It Be and a J5 album, which gave me the idea.
Do you remember? Do you remember holding it longingly in your hands, staring at the baleful sticker price; imploring a withholding parent, who then figured out a way for you to water the plants or something so that you could earn the $4 or 3 pounds (sorry, I have an American keyboard) and rush back to the store and buy it?
Alas, I don't. I mean, I have those memories, but I don't really remember what was first. There was a record store on High Street in Morgantown (yes, High Street, not Main Street; we were very British) that sold albums in about 1968 for $2.99 -- even in those days, a bargain. I'm guessing the first things I bought were some comparatively second-rank Beatles records, like Beatles '65 and Beatles VI, since my sisters, older than I, would already have owned the big ones.
Of course, I was a little kid, so I'm not going to pretend that I was grooving to Axis: Bold as Love when I was nine. I bought some really bad ones too. I remember now being excited about buying a Bobby Sherman record, which came with an "actual half-life-size poster" of Bobby. No, I'm not even going to link to him. The less said the better, thanks.
We'll accept CD submissions from you youngsters, as long as you understand that, as an item to be caressed and worshipped, a CD isn't a patch on a vinyl record. Share your stories. Bring us together.
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The more it became conventional wisdom in Washington that financial regulatory reform was going to pass the Senate on a bipartisan basis, the more I went hmmm. And now we read in the Politico:
The chances of a bipartisan compromise on financial reform took another significant hit Tuesday as top Senate Republicans accused the White House of derailing a deal on derivatives trading and bashed the Democratic legislation as perpetuating Wall Street bailouts.
The Republican attacks drew a quick rebuke from the White House and pushed an issue long viewed as ripe for bipartisan agreement deeper into partisan territory. The sharp turn in the tone of the debate suggests Democrats might have to struggle to peel off more than a handful of Republican votes, if that.
After meeting with his members, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he had "naively" assumed the bill would move forward on a bipartisan basis, and he predicted the overhaul legislation written by Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) would face "overwhelming Republican opposition."
Gee, that's novel. Now, in truth, there's a little blame to go around here. It's not really the White House that's derailing the derivatives deal. It's Blanche Lincoln. Lincoln was happy to do a deal on derivatives -- basically, making them public; see pages 2 and 3 of the Politico piece for more detail -- that Republicans could live with.
Then she got a credible primary challenge (she's up for election this year) from her left, and she took a sterner line. So to the extent that she is walking away from agreed-upon language, the GOP has a point (even if, it should be noted, that substantively the new language is better).
But somehow, you don't really get the feeling that the Republican opposition is all that substantive. Read this hilarious blog post from Time's Swampland:
The crux of [Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell's] criticism is that the bill "institutionalizes... taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street banks." He knocked the expansion of power at the Fed and Treasury, while sounding the alarm on Wall Street accountability. If the outline of his speech sounds familiar, it's because it is the exact argument pollster Frank Luntz urged Republicans to make earlier this year in a widely publicized memo. Compare the excerpts below (emphasis mine):
Luntz: "The single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout."
McConnell: "We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that's why we must not pass the financial reform bill that's about to hit the floor."
Luntz: "Taxpayers should not be held responsible for the failure of big business any longer. If a business is going to fail, not matter how big, let it fail."
McConnell: "[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions.... We won't solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail."
Luntz: "Government policies caused the bubble and its ultimate crash. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and the Community Reinvestment Act all had a role in the catastrophe. The government inflated economic bubbles with easy credit policies."
McConnell: "It also directs the Fed to oversee 35 to 50 of the biggest firms, replicating on an even larger scale the same distortions that plagued the housing market and helped trigger a massive bubble we'll be suffering from for years. If you thought Fannie and Freddie were dangerous, how about 35 to 50 of them?"
In other words, their language guru gave them talking points, and by gum they're sticking to them. The actual substance of the matter is that the bill would create a $50 billion fund, paid for not by taxpayers but by the banks, to cover possible bailouts. It is possible the general treasury (i.e. taxpayers) would be hit with a tab beyond that, but the legislation supposedly makes it clear that all that money would have to be paid back.
The Luntz memo, needless to say, isn't about what's good for the country or anything like, but about how to defeat the bill. Oh. And McConnell met with two dozen top Wall Streeters before coming out against the reforms.
Meanwhile, for the record, TARP is doing rather well. Previous estimates of it costing $250 billion have been recently revised down to $89 billion. Some experts I've read think the tab will go even lower.
There's still a chance one or two Republicans in the Senate will buck McConnell. And one or two may be all the Democrats need. But policy making by political-death-match strategy memo continues.
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You'll recall the other day that I had a post about the new right-wing meme about the 47% of Americans who have "representation without taxation" because they pay no federal income tax. That's the post where I threatened to move to Sussex.
Well, the NYT's David Leonhardt smartly debunks this nonsense in his column today. First of all:
Given that taxes are likely to be one of the big political issues of the next few years — and maybe the biggest one — it's worth understanding who really pays what in taxes. Once you do, you can get a sense for our country's fiscal options. How, in other words, will we be able to close the huge looming gap between the taxes we are scheduled to pay and the services we are scheduled to receive?
The answer is that tax rates almost certainly have to rise more on the affluent than on other groups. Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation.
Ah. Now that's some context, no? There has been a massive redistribution of wealth in this country. It's been to the top 1%. It is what the numbers say. As much as it infuriates people (just watch the comment thread), it is true.
More:
The 47 percent number is not wrong. The stimulus programs of the last two years — the first one signed by President George W. Bush, the second and larger one by President Obama — have increased the number of households that receive enough of a tax credit to wipe out their federal income tax liability.
But the modifiers here — federal and income — are important. Income taxes aren't the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and capital gains taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.
Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.
Oh. Well, that is a little different, innit?
Conservative lying is certainly inventive. Endlessly so. But when a crackerjack columnist like Leonhardt has to devote a column to debunking utterly spurious nonsense from some other solar system, in a way they've already won.
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This was only a matter of time:
OKLAHOMA CITY — Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea-party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a volunteer militia to help defend against what they say are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.
Tea-party leaders say they've discussed the idea with several supportive lawmakers and hope to introduce legislation next year to recognize a new volunteer force.
Most elected Republicans have balked at this, in fairness. But one gubernatorial candidate, Randy Brodgon, an air-conditioning major from Oklahoma State University, has endorsed the idea:
The Founding Fathers "were not referring to a turkey shoot or a quail hunt. They really weren't even talking about us having the ability to protect ourselves against each other," Brogdon said. "The Second Amendment deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government."
All that talk of "reloading" and so forth was bound to lead in this direction. I think it's probably unlikely that this will really become law. But the mere idea that people are sitting around thinking about the specifics of how it would work.
Well, if it does happen, we will at least be able to call the tea-party movement clearly and plainly fascist, since that will be what it will have beyond dispute become. Or totalitarian if you prefer. But political parties in fully functional democracies don't have their own armies, last I checked.
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Tuesday 13 April 2010
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I've been thinking we need a little break from the bad news and incessant struggle. Something that will unite us, not divide us. So, with this post, we begin an occasional feature titled "Fun with Music."
I have before me on my desk a book listing the Top 10 Billboard chart songs (in the US) for every week from 1958-1995. It's a great book -- strong characters, terrific narrative hook, build-up, peak, denouement.
The game is this: I will open a page (more or less) at random and list the Top 10 from that week, and you will supply the artist. Extra credit points for the serious junkies who can name the label (you may remember more of these than you think, if you owned the record).
Since it's my blog, most of the chosen weeks will be within my wheelhouse, which is to say 1964 to about 1987, when my obsession with new records started to flag and I started (concurrent with the CD explosion) buying more classical music, standards, jazz, old R & B and so forth.
So let's let 'er rip. The week is May 10, 1975. Where were you? The songs:
1. He Don't Love You (Like I Love You)
2. Before the Next Teardrop Falls
3. Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song
4. Jackie Blue
5. Shining Star
6. Walking in Rhythm
7. Philadelphia Freedom
8. Only Yesterday
9. Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)
10. I Don't Like to Sleep AloneI knew seven artists. How about you? I'll be really impressed by those who know 6 -- I know and love the song, but couldn't place the artist.
Look below the fold after you've made your choices.
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Matt Yglesias has an excellent post up on Mississippi's Confederate History Month declaration for this year, the wording of which was evidently kept secret for a while by the governor's office from the press, until a chaplain in some kind of sons of the Confederacy movement faxed it to a reporter. This man, a Mr. Fayard, was quoted thusly:
"The War Between the States was fought for the same reasons that the tea party movement today is voicing their opinion. And that is that you have large government that's not listening to the people, there's going to be heavy taxation," Fayard said Monday from his home in Duck Hill, Miss. "And the primary cause of the war was not slavery, although slavery was interwoven into the cause, but it was not the cause for the War Between the States."
Then it seems Matt got hold of the original secession statement by Mississippi, which reads:
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Sounds as if slavery meant more than "diddly" to them, to use Haley Barbour's word.
One of the accomplishments of an effective propaganda machine concerns not just the framing of the present-day debates but the revising of past ones. Just say over and over that it wasn't really about slavery, and enough people will believe you.
Ulysses S. Grant was similarly clear. Someone I know sent along a quote from Grant on the occasion of Lee's surrender: "My own feelings... were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse..."
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What do we make of the announced resignation of Andy Stern, the longtime head of the Service Employees International Union and America's best-known union president?
This comes from Ben Smith, who broke the news:
The SEIU has emerged as a central political player and has grown rapidly under Stern's tenure, and some close to him had expected him to resign during the first term of the president he helped elect, and after the achievement he'd spent years focusing on, widening access to health care. But he's also waged a series of bitter battles inside the labor movement, one of the nastiest of which turned in SEIU's favor with a California court ruling last week. Stern also won a victory when Obama named his union's lawyer, Craig Becker, to the National Labor Relations board over Republican objections in a recess appointment last month.
Stern, even without the union presidency, would remain on, among other things, the board of President Obama's deficit commission, to which he was appointed in February.
The lawsuit Smith refers to is this one, although if you look a little deeper it wasn't such a great SEIU victory.At any rate, in the bigger picture, Stern brought a new face to the US union movement. He's no one's stereotype of a rough-hewn union guy. He was a student leftist in the 60s, has a BA in urban planning, says -ing instead of -in' when he utters a gerund or participle, that kind of thing. There were once lots of "New Face of Labor" kind of profiles.
He made a major decision several years ago to break his union out of the AFL-CIO. I believe the basic divide was, the AFL-CIO wanted to stick with the main strategy of getting new members, while Stern wanted to put more money into political activity, on the theory that only a change in the political environment could really improve the union movement's numbers.
I've always found him impressive in conversation and really intelligent. But the movement's problems are a lot bigger than any one man. The decimation of unions in America is one of the right's biggest success stories and isn't usually accorded the importance it deserves.
For starters, getting workers out of unions means they vote more Republican. Take working class white men.Working-class white men who are union members vote Democratic, and those who aren't vote Republican, the latter by massive numbers. One piece of evidence, from an old Salon piece by Tom Schaller:
Tens of millions of white men still vote Democratic, of course, and not just Prius drivers, eggheads, grunge-band leaders or Warren Beatty's Hollywood buddies. Most notably, working-class white men who are current or retired union members cast their votes for Democrats, in the stubborn belief that only Democrats will protect and promote their economic interests. "The 2004 CNN exit poll data shows that [John] Kerry lost white males by 31 points if they weren't in a union, but won them by seven points if they were -- a 38-point difference," says Mike Podhorzer, deputy political director of the AFL-CIO. "It's no accident -- union members understand that their votes make a difference, for their wages, their healthcare and their pensions. If, as they say, 'there's something the matter with Kansas,' there's nothing the matter with union members."
I'll check later on Obama's numbers, but my memory is that they weren't dissimilar. It's an extremely dramatic difference of which most people are completely unaware. You can bet Republicans are. More union members equals more Democratic voters plain and simple. That's just one reason things have gotten so difficult.
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In 48 of these great states, including some pretty reactionary jurisdictions, felons have their voting rights restored automatically when they finish serving their time, or when they've finished parole or probation. And why not? After all, what's the old cliche -- they paid their debt to society. Once it is paid, they become full citizens again.
The two outlier states are Kentucky and Virginia. In Kentucky, ex-felons have to go through a lengthy petition process. In Virginia the process is similar, and there's a distinction between violent and non-violent felons, or at least there's an effort to make one: the state legislature for years has been considering a bill to make the restoration of nonviolent offenders' voting rights automatic.
Now, our friend the governor of Virginia has not only rebuffed those efforts but added a step over the weekend. Now, under Bob McDonnell's proposal, a nonviolent ex-felon has to write a "letter" to the governor explaining why he should be able to vote again -- how he is contributing to society etc.
But don't buy that liberal propaganda about how this is punitive, how it smacks vaguely of the old "literacy tests" of the old postbellum south. You're thinking of this all wrong:
McDonnell's administration said the essay requirement is designed to put a human face on each applicant and to help staff members better understand each person's situation."It gives all applicants the opportunity to have their cases heard and have their full stories told," said Janet Polarek, secretary of the commonwealth, whose office handles the requests. "It's an opportunity, not an obstacle."
Ah. How nice. An opportunity! Orwell himself would not have dared invent dialogue that transparent and caricaturable.
Confederate History Month. An extra hassle of a step to be able to vote again. See a common thread here, in terms of what kinds of people are likely to be most bothered by history month and disproportionately affected by this thing?
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