Our Job is Harder

Because building is harder than destroying.

Political Animal:

Beyond that, I am reminded of something Barack Obama wrote way back in 2005 when he was still the junior senator from Illinois.

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives’ job. After all, it’s easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it’s harder to craft a foreign policy that’s tough and smart. It’s easy to dismantle government safety nets; it’s harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It’s easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it’s harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that’s our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

The Same Sorry Reason

Via Political Animal:

 

I met her twice, and got her to sign all six of her books for me - every one of them worn from constant re-reading. I stopped dog-earing the pages to mark the best stuff when I realized I was dog-earing all the pages.

 

I think she would tell us two things today: First, that we've been here before, and we'll be here again, and we just have to keep fighting and laughing.  And second, to stop saying we need her back, because everything she knows is in her books.

 

You're right as always, Molly, which is why we miss you so much.

The Possible Tomorrow

David Atkins at Political Animal:

Politics isn’t just the art of the possible today. It’s also about shaping the realm of the possible tomorrow. When the opposition is willing to compromise, pushing the envelope might come at the expense of real gains in the moment. But when the opposition is intransigent, advocating for the impossible might just be the most productive thing a president can do to lay the groundwork for gains in the future.

Impossible Dreaming

Divine Irony:

Reversing Extremism

What appears to be a final conservatard/freakazoid victory is inevitable only if we let it happen without a fight.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

Those of you who read my book on the 2014 midterms might find this argument from the esteemed political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson kind of familiar:

SNIP

They conclude with this sobering thought, which like most of their analysis I would emphatically endorse:

We are under no illusion about how easily or quickly our lopsided politics can be righted. But put yourself in the shoes of an early 1970s conservative and ask how likely the great right migration seemed then, when Richard Nixon was proposing a guaranteed income and national health insurance and backing environmental regulations and the largest expansion of Social Security in its history. Reversals of powerfully rooted trends that threaten our democracy take time, effort, and persistence. Yet above all they require a clear recognition of what has gone wrong.

Move Over, Robert Penn Warren and Harry Caudill: Wendell Berry Is Here

You can't be a liberal in Kentucky unless you read poet/author/philosopher/activist/farmer Wendell Berry. Because there is little in your bag of issues that Wendell Berry has not already subjected to his populist wisdom.

He's a lodestone but also a challenger. His speeches on how to wrest Kentucky's land away from the Big Coal, Big Gas and other corporate forces stealing and destroying it are radical enough to take your breath away.

He shouldn't be as unique as he is.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

As the first living author inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, Wendell Berry lamented that many fine books the state’s authors have written about Kentucky issues have had little impact on public discussion or policy.

In most ways, Kentucky is too fragmented a state, Berry said in remarks at a ceremony (last week) at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, where he and five writers from the past were inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“This fragmentation is made possible, and continually made worse, by a cloud of silence that hovers over us,” Berry said. “We have in this state no instituted public dialogue, no form in which a public dialogue can take place.

“This public silence ought to be a worry, especially to writers,” he said. “What is the effect or fate, Kentucky writers may ask, of Kentucky books devoted to urgent public issues — Night Comes to the Cumberlands or Lost Mountain or Missing Mountains or The Embattled Wilderness?”

Lt. Gov. Crit Luallen, who spoke earlier at the ceremony, said afterward that Berry underestimates the impact of those books and others like them. They may not have led to solutions for Kentucky’s many problems, she said, but things would be worse without them.

Entertainment

Divine Irony:

thereisnogod:

Frank Fucking Zappa.

(Source: questionall)

QOTD

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge, on the 40th anniversary of Gerald Ford's inexcusable pardon of Richard Nixon.

But the idea that “too big to fail” institutions are too fragile to handle honest reckoning with the truth is not courage. It is civic cowardice. Better, much better, that we keep the faith: that our Constitution can work, that our great republic is a government of laws and not men, and that here, the people rule.

The Politician of Joy

Wonkette favorite Old Handsome Joe Biden was his usual irresistible self at Netroots Nation last month, as Charlie Pierce writes:

He's one of the last politicians I know who really enjoys getting up and doing this, who really enjoys jumping through the preposterous hoops that are set up for every national candidate. The general feeling here is that Biden will not run for president if Hillary Clinton does. This is unfortunate. If there was ever a contrast to be made with the dour, mechanized, winning-through-effort style of the former Secretary of State, it is Biden's Humphrey-esque joie de pancake breakfast. As much as he deplored the politics of division in this country, which he did throughout the last third of his speech, Biden finds in politics the kind of joy and the kind of outlet for the goofier angels of our nature that have been bred out of our politicians by four generations of political consultants. Biden is Lyndon with his beagles, and FDR with a cocktail shaker. He is the last real eccentric, and he knows it, and he plays it to the hilt because it is so much of what he is. Tattered and worn and old as it is. Joe Biden's freak flag still flies high and proud.

 

Also, he swims in the nude. If he runs against Hillary, I will quit my job to work on his campaign.

Orwell vs. Huxley

Under the Mountain Bunker:
 

kateoplis: Huxley vs. Orwell

The Curse of the Pioneer Society

Via Divine Irony:

The bias against science is part of being a pioneer society. You somehow feel the city life is decadent. American history is full of fables of the noble virtuous farmer and the vicious city slicker. The city slicker is an automatic villain. Unfortunately, such stereotypes can do damage. A noble ignoramus is not necessarily what the country needs.

Isaac Asimov (via azspot)

Explains a lot.

Rational Warning

Steve M. at No More Mister Niceblog:

But I actually think fascism could eventually be what Americans turn to.

I say this not because Americans have an insatiable spiritual hunger for community that's being crushed by a mechanized ethos, or whatever the hell Douthat is saying. I think fascism might, someday soon, appear to offer a way out to a society for whom traditional politics and economics have offered absolutely nothing. We have a major party that allows the have-nots to keep losing (including, now, the middle class) and another major political party that wants the have-nots to lose much faster. Our economic overlords now consider any gains by the middle class and poor to be thoroughly unacceptable. If traditional politics offers most Americans nothing forever, sooner or later the guy who wants to send intellectuals or certain ethnic groups or certain sexual minorities to camps might start to seem pretty appealing. That's my fear, not an unsatisfied thirst for belonging.

Every time a Democratic candidate goes mealy-mouthed on Democratic values or runs away from Democratic accomplishments (I'm looking at you, Alison Lundergan Grimes), every time a Democratic voter sits at home on election day because no one on the ballot is standing up for her, every time liberals fail to call out the repug motherfuckers for fucking their mothers, we get one step closer to fascism.

Quote of the Day

Steve M:

Anger is a perfectly appropriate emotion to express at a right wing that won't accept the legitimacy of Democratic and liberal politicians and that describes liberals and Democrats as inhuman monsters bent on America's destruction.

This Is Terrorism In America Today

"Attempting to obtain political goals through threats to and attacks on civilian populations."

Yep, that's what this is.

Digby:

Let's say you are having a political meeting. And the people who disagree with your point of view show up and stand around like this:

Does that look like a civilized democracy to you?

A person would have to be an idiot to stand up and exercise his or her right to free speech and free assembly in the face of that. Political arguments get heated. People get upset. I'd guess the ones with the guns are the more dangerous in that situation, wouldn't you? I don't think those people inside the building will be meeting in public anymore, do you? In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they stop meeting. And that's the point.

Basically, what these men are all saying is that when you get right down to there's only one right in the Bill of Rights. The second amendment will always trump the others won't it?

Here's the story.

Send every one of those motherfuckers to Guantanamo.

Bette Noir and Juanita Jean do the work of ridiculing these pieces of shit.

70 Years of Capitulating to the Far-Right Wingnuts

Rick Perlstein has been studying and writing about the history of American conservatives for decades. No one understands them better.  When he explains why they can't be negotiated with, you should listen.

This week he wrote in The Nation:

Every time the government acts to expand the prerogatives of citizenship and economic opportunity to formerly disenfranchised groups, a racism-soaked backlash ensues. Defeatism—or ideological accommodation—only makes it worse.
Ironically, liberals of previous generations understood this better than we do now, despite decades more experience watching how the right’s game is played. For a Partisan Review symposium in 1962, Harvard sociologist David Riesman advised that the Kennedy administration “can gain the leeway on the domestic front…only by combatting the radical right rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground—an illusory operation since the right can always go still further right and will.”

Well, we’re on rightist ground now. Listen to Norquist in a recent interview with The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “We won in 2011 and then again with the president making 85 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent. We really did get caps and sequestration that limits government spending. If we just went home and put the government on autopilot, it would be a win. This Republican Congress has made a fundamental shift in the size of government equation.”

SNIP

Scary times. At least we have a road map to navigate it. It’s the right’s own history, which doesn’t change much. They’re maximalists. They want it all. And the bigger our democracy deficit, the more they’ll be able to get.

If you haven't read Perlstein's Nixonland, do it now.

No, Ashley: You're Not Tough Enough to Beat Mitch McConnell

I was wrong. A Democratic candidate who can beat Mitch McConnell has to be the kind of Democratic candidate who takes one look at the clusterfuck that is the U.S. Congress and says, "let me at 'em!"

That candidate is probably not Alison Lundergan Grimes, but it absolutely is not Ashley Judd, and never will be.

Mark Vanderhoff at the Courier:

Singer Naomi Judd said Saturday she believes her daughter Ashley became distraught by the political climate in Washington, D.C., during visits there to assess a run against U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.

“She’d come in and curl up in bed with me and just sob and talk about how ‘We can’t get anything done; people’s hearts aren’t in the right place at all,’ ” the elder Judd said. “Ashley has such a pure heart and she can’t lie, and my sense was that Washington was sociopathic.”

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying crying means Judd's not tough. Crying about injustice or stupidity is fine if the result is righteous anger and determination.

But crying that in Congress "people's hearts aren't in the right place at all" strongly indicates that Judd is fatally naive.

Hollywood may be full of sharks, but this is politics, honey, where people kill you just to watch you die.

Americans "Just Want the Fighting to End" Only If Our Side Wins

James Carroll should know better than to cite polls that ask broad questions with multiple interpretations.

There isn't a single sentient person in this country who "just wants the fighting in Congress to end."

Everybody wants her side to win. 

I defy James Carroll or anybody else to find a Democratic voter who wants the fighting to end by President Obama surrendering the presidency to a minority of the repug minority in Congress.

I defy anybody to find a republican voter who wants the fighting to end by repugs in Congress surrendering to President Obama on Obamacare and the budget.

The polarization in Washington perfectly reflect the polarization in the nation as a whole. There are no independents, no swing voters.  Just repugs and Democrats who always vote the party line, and repugs and Democrats who vote the party line when they are sufficiently inspired to get out and vote at all.

I think that is a good thing.  Polarization clarifies issues and where politicians stand on those issues. Polarization forces elected officials to fight for the laws and policies their voters want.

But polarization makes politics a zero-sum game.  For one side to win, the other side has to lose.

The fighting won't end until somebody loses. And nobody wants that somebody to be them.

How to Drive a Political Activist to Suicide

Used to be they just pulled this shit on low-level drug users - the impoverished, dusky-skinned ones, that is. Now they're coming after the kids who dare to cross Big Computer.

DSWright at Firedoglake:

Aaron Swartz was an American success story. A talented kid he worked on developing the RSS feed when he was 14. Swartz latter became – what every sanctimonious politician of both parties proclaim is the ultimate achievement – an entrepreneur, founding Infogami which would later merge with reddit in 2006. In 2007 Swartz left reddit and became a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics while also founding Demand Progress a progressive activist group focused primarily on online organizing. Perhaps Swartz’s most famous activism was his role in helping to stop the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

In 2011 Swartz was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. The crime? Downloading academic journals from not-for profit JSTOR on a guest account without permission. JSTOR would later provide free access claiming it already had a program in the works when Swartz committed his crime. In other words, Aaron Swartz did to JSTOR what Mark Zuckerberg did to Harvard’s Facebook – gained unauthorized access to data which lead to offering a service the university said it was already working on. And in the state of Massachusetts no less!

Like Harvard with Zuckerberg, JSTOR was able to settle the issue with Swartz outside of a court room. Unlike with Zuckerberg, the US Attorney for Massachusetts pursued criminal charges which meant Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollar fine. Maybe if Zuckerberg had been a political activist…

On Friday January 11th Swartz was found dead in his apartment. The cause of death is believed to be suicide, with a family member confirming death by hanging.

This is a straight-up murder by federal law enforcement and prosecutors persecutors. The feds don't have to take your guns. They don't even have to send a drone to blow you to smithereens. All they have to do is prosecute you to death.

Must-See Weekend TV

If you're not watching Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry every weekend, you're missing the most intelligent, informative and inspiring politics on television or off.

 

This past weekend, Melissa's Saturday show (voter suppression) and Chris' Sunday show (the Supreme Court) were the first ones I'd seen that didn't make me endure blatant lies from the token repug on the panel (drop that shit, MSNBC - it just makes you look stupid.)

 

I was glued to the tube every minute.

 

So set the DVR to MSNBC every Saturday and Sunday morning and watch, dammit.

Why Karl Rove is No Machiavelli

Via  PZ Myers, who has never been to Florence but wants to go there. I have been to Florence, and I say to PZ and to all of you: Go. Go now. You will never regret it.

 

Don't believe me? Read this. It's not what you think it is from the first paragraphs, and it's not what you think it is from the middle paragraphs, and it's not even what you think it is from the near-the-end paragraphs.

 

Read it.