Joe Scarborough has an op-ed in Politico premised entirely on the false premise that left-wingers who once “condemned [President Bush] as an immoral beast who killed women and children to get his bloody hands on Iraqi oil” have now “meekly went along” with President Obama’s Libya intervention.
Now, there are all kinds of things wrong with this argument. For one, there are some massive differences in the two cases. Scarborough describes the Libya intervention as an “invasion,” but that’s quite a stretch given that no ground troops are involved. Libya is a multilateral response to an imminent massacre, while Iraq was neither. Third, and worst of all, those who most fervently opposed the Iraq invasion — the blood for oil folks described by Scarborough — are all opposed to the Libya intervention. Has he not been following the debate on this?
The whole failure of Scarborough’s argument points to one of my professional hobbyhorses, which is the need for opinion journalists to quote the people they’re criticizing. It’s a really simple step, but it’s absolutely vital, one that allows your readers to see if the belief you’re attacking is actually held by anybody influential. If Scarborough decided to find some examples of lefties who were wildly denouncing Bush as a wanton murderer of civilians driven by a lust to steal Iraqi oil who also supported the Libya intervention, he’d have quickly discovered that there aren’t any, and that his whole argument is based on a false premise.
Indeed, at the end of his op-ed, Scarborough does cite one real life-example — Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who he calls “one of the few liberals to take a principled stand.” But she’s not the exception. She’s just the one actual case study he bothered to look at.
Now, calling people out by name is sort of rude, and the most prestigious outlets of opinion journalism tend to shy away from it. I believe New York Times columnists are actually instructed not to argue with each other in print, which leads to these weird “Tell Joe I won’t pass the salt until he apologizes” indirect debates. It’s probably no surprise that a chummy guy like Scarborough would only want to name liberals he praises, while leaving the targets of his criticism unnamed. But this is a habit of opinion journalism that leads to terrible, straw man arguments.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, March 29, 2011
March 29, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Ideologues, Iraq, Libya, Middle East, Neo-Cons, Politics, Right Wing | George Bush, Joe Scarborough, Journalists, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Left Wing, New York Times, Opinion Journalism, Politico |
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The battle for the Midwest is transforming American politics. Issues of class inequality and union influence, long dormant, have come back to life. And a part of the country that was integral to the Republican surge of 2010 is shifting away from the GOP just a few months later.
Republican governors, particularly in Wisconsin and Ohio, denied themselves political honeymoons by launching frontal assaults on public employee unions and proposing budgets that include deep cuts in popular programs.
Democrats in the region are elated at the quick turn in their fortunes. A few months ago, they worried that a region President Obama dominated in 2008 was turning against him. Republican triumphs in Wisconsin and Ohio, as well as in Indiana, Michigan and Iowa, all pointed to trouble for the president.
Now, for reasons having more to do with decisions by GOP governors than with anything the president has done, many voters, particularly in the white working class, are having second thoughts.
“We certainly addressed the issue of Reagan Democrats,” said Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, referring to the blue-collar voters who began drifting Republican in 1980. Barrett lost to Gov. Scott Walker in November by 52 percent to 46 percent, but recent polls suggest he would defeat Walker if the election were rerun. In Ohio, the approval rating of Republican Gov. John Kasich, who won narrowly in 2010, has fallen to as low as 30 percent in one poll.
In telephone interviews last week, Democratic politicians across the Midwest avoided premature victory claims. “I don’t think we’ll know until November of 2012,” Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota replied when asked if the Republican moves against public employee unions would turn out to be a major error.
It’s a political irony that Republicans clearly believed unionized public employees were so unpopular that taking them on would play well with voters.
“It was part of an intentional strategy on the part of the right-wing Republican ideological machine to split private-sector workers from public-sector workers,” said Dayton, a Democrat who beat back the 2010 Republican tide. After decades involving “a giant transfer of wealth to the very top,” Dayton said, the campaign against public unions was “a way to distract attention” by creating “a fight over who is getting a dollar an hour more or less.” The effort, he added, “has not worked as well as they thought it would.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, said that even union sympathizers were surprised at the degree to which the Republicans’ approach “blew up in their faces” and that “the poll numbers of support for collective bargaining for public-sector workers are stronger than even most labor supporters expected.”
Another surprise: the extent to which Democrats, long wary of being accused of “class warfare,” are now more eager than ever to cast the GOP as the party of the privileged.
Barrett recounted a parable making the rounds among Wisconsin Democrats, telling of a room in which “a zillionaire, a Tea Party person and a union member” confront a plate of 12 cookies: “The zillionaire takes 11 of the cookies, and says to the other two, ‘That guy is trying to steal your cookie.’ ”
Still, Democrats are aware that the flight from the Republicans is also a reaction against ideology. Dayton saw the GOP’s heavy-handed methods in Wisconsin as playing badly in a region proud of its tradition of consensus-building and good government.
And Brown said that while joblessness was the most important issue in last year’s election, one of the most effective Republican arguments was the claim that “Obama was governing by ideology.” That charge has been turned on its head because “now, they are so overdoing governing by ideology.”
Sen. Al Franken said he saw this reaction against ideology playing out in Washington’s budget battle as well, citing the example of leading Minnesota business people, including Republicans, who have been appalled at cuts in effective job-training programs.
The first electoral tests of the new class politics will come in Wisconsin. David Prosser, a conservative state Supreme Court justice, is facing a surprisingly tough challenge April 5 from JoAnne Kloppenburg, who has strong backing from anti-Walker forces. Later this year, several Republican state senators could face recall elections.
The tests for the longer run will be whether echoes from the heartland’s struggles over economic justice are heard as Congress debates budget cuts — and the extent to which Obama, who has already benefited from fights he did not pick, decides to join the battle.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 27, 2011
March 28, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Jobs, Middle Class, Politics, Populism, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Unions, Wisconsin | Blue Collar, David Prosser, Gov John Kasich, Heartland, Ohio, Public Employees, Sen Al Franken, Sen Sherrod Brown, Working Class |
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The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.
The historian, William Cronon, is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and was recently elected president of the American Historical Association. Earlier this month, he was asked to write an Op-Ed article for The Times on the historical context of Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. While researching the subject, he posted on his blog several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states.
In particular, he pointed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group backed by business interests that circulates draft legislation in every state capital, much of it similar to the Wisconsin law, and all of it unmatched by the left. Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms. (The Op-Ed article appeared five days after that.)
The party refuses to say why it wants the messages; Mr. Cronon believes it is hoping to find that he is supporting the recall of Republican state senators, which would be against university policy and which he denies. This is a clear attempt to punish a critic and make other academics think twice before using the freedom of the American university to conduct legitimate research.
Professors are not just ordinary state employees. As J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative federal judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, noted in a similar case, state university faculty members are “employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives.” A political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues. And it makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, March 25, 2011
March 26, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Politics, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Unions, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Academic Freedom, American Historical Association, American Legislative Exchange Council, Freedom Of Information Act, Kenneth Cucinelli, University Of Wisconsin, Virginia, William Cronon |
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The former speaker, currently wiping his online record, is forgotten or disliked by many in his former home state.
The Associated Press has a scoop: Newt Gingrich, who has not been in office for more than a decade after resigning from Congress in what could be construed as disgrace, has no real political support in his home state of Georgia, where he has not actually lived for years.
Gingrich lives in a Washington, DC suburb, because your average ambitious politician would rather be in Washington than in whatever ugly backwater he or she “represents” in Congress. Gingrich hasn’t voted in Georgia since 2000, the year he and his third wife bought a presumably lovely house in McLean, Virginia. But because the Republican party platform is explicitly anti-elite and anti-Washington, the longtime member of the Washington establishment is having to pretend to be an outsider in order to maybe pretend to run for president. But no one in Georgia remembers or cares about him.
“He’s yesterday,” said state Rep. Earl Ehrhart, a veteran Republican state lawmaker, vocalizing a key vulnerability for Gingrich.
Linda Douglas, a Republican from Gingrich’s former congressional district in Cobb County, shrugged at the mention of Gingrich’s name and said: “Newt was great in the ’90s but really, his time seems like it’s long gone.”
And here is a great quote from a former Gingrich staffer:
Lee Howell, who worked as a Gingrich campaign press secretary, won’t be casting a ballot for his old boss if he runs.
“If I was giving a cocktail party and wanted to have good conversation … I’d want Newt to be there,” Howell said. “I’m not sure that he would be the kind of person, would have the skills necessary to be president.”
And if Newt Gingrich got a little tipsy at that cocktail party and started Tweeting, the public may not be able to enjoy his witticisms for long! Gingrich apparently deleted every single Twitter update he wrote before July 22, 2010, presumably in case he decides to wildly change positions on something he Tweeted about last year or earlier.
It is much wiser to just selectively delete a few sensitive Tweets, if you are so worried about things you hammered out on your BlackBerry last June, but Gingrich apparently decided that the nuclear option would minimize the damage to his ridiculous farce of a campaign.
To sum up: No one in America likes Newt Gingrich and he has no base of support and his personal flaws are uniquely horrible and public. So please, everyone, remember to take him very seriously as a presidential candidate, because he is so smart and experienced.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon War Room, March 25, 2011
March 25, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Congress, Conservatives, Elections, Ideologues, Neo-Cons, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing | Ga St Rep Earl Ehrhart, Georgia, Lee Howell, Tweets, Twitter |
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Maine Governor Paul LePage has ordered state workers to remove from the state labor department a 36-foot mural depicting the state’s labor history. Among other things the mural illustrates the 1937 shoe mill strike in Auburn and Lewiston. It also features the iconic “Rosie the Riveter,” who in real life worked at the Bath Iron Works. One panel shows my predecessor at the U.S. Department of Labor, Frances Perkins, who was buried in Newcastle, Maine.
The LePage Administration is also renaming conference rooms that had carried the names of historic leaders of American labor, as well as former Secretary Perkins.
The Governor’s spokesman explains that the mural and the conference-room names were “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.”
Are we still in America?
Frances Perkins was the first woman cabinet member in American history. She was also one of the most accomplished cabinet members in history.
She and her boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to office at a time when average working people needed help – and Perkins and Roosevelt were determined to give it to them. Together, they created Social Security, unemployment insurance, the right of workers to unionize, the minimum wage, and the forty-hour workweek.
Big business and Wall Street thought Perkins and Roosevelt were not in keeping with pro-business goals. So they and their Republican puppets in Congress and in the states retaliated with a political assault on the New Deal.
Roosevelt did not flinch. In a speech in October 1936 he condemned “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”
Big business and Wall Street, he said,
had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.
Fast forward 75 years.
Big business and Wall Street have emerged from the Great Recession with their pockets bulging. Profits and bonuses are as high as they were before the downturn. And they’re spending like mad on lobbying and politics. After the Supreme Court’s disgraceful Citizens United decision, there are no limits.
Pro-business goals are breaking out all over. Governors across America are slashing corporate taxes as they slash state budgets. House and Senate Republicans are intent on deregulating, privatizing, and cutting spending and taxes so their corporate and Wall Street patrons will do even better.
But most Americans are still in desperate trouble. Few if any of the economic gains are trickling down.
That’s why the current Republican assault on workers – on their right to form unions, on unemployment insurance and Social Security, on public employees, and even (courtesy of Governor LePage) on our common memory – is so despicable.
And it’s why we need a President who will fight for workers and fight against this assault — just as Perkins and FDR did.
By the way, Maine’s Governor LePage may be curious to know that the building housing the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington is named the “Frances Perkins Building.” He can find her portrait hanging prominently inside. Also portraits and murals of great leaders of American labor.
A short walk across the mall will bring Governor LePage to an imposing memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, should the Governor wish to visit.
Governor, you might be able to erase some of Maine’s memory, but you’ll have a hard time erasing the nation’s memory – even if it’s not in keeping with your pro-business goals.
By: Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley, March 23, 2011
March 24, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Big Business, Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Corporations, Democracy, Dictators, GOP, Gov Paul LePage, Governors, Ideologues, Maine, Middle Class, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, States, Unions | Business, Corporate Taxes, FDR, Frances Perkins, Rosie the Riveter, U.S. Dept of Labor, Wall Street, Workers |
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