Why Were There No Lawn Signs for Hillary In My New Jersey Neighborhood?

My street.

There were no lawn signs for Hillary in my New Jersey neighborhood. Eight years ago there were plenty of Obama signs, and so it was four years ago. But not in 2016. Over 60 percent voted for the democratic ticket in 2008 and 2012, so it was strange that none of us bothered to get a Hillary sign. Maybe we would have if the house where the owner previously had put up McCain and Romney signs had displayed Trump signs, but he didn’t.

I think this lack of passion for the Democratic candidate lies at the core of the loss in 2016. We liked her policy and the idea of finally having a woman president, but we didn't necessary like or trust her. Yes, she was able and willing, but she also had lots of undeclared baggage. She was not like Elizabeth Warren or Michelle Obama, i.e. leaders you can love and trust. She was the candidate who the Democratic machine had pre-selected and helped win the primary over Bernie Sanders. 

She was the realistic choice over the rable-rouser from Vermont.

She was our best hope.

On 11/9, that hope vanished and out of the smoke stepped the Celebrity Apprentice President.

We couldn’t believe it. We had trusted the polls and the pundits and the Big Data gurus, but the unthinkable, unimaginable, and unpollable, happened. Donald Trump, a nefarious shapeshifter of a political Joker, won. Close to 60 million Americans voted for a candidate so unqualified that even a large part of the Republican establishment banded together in the “Never Trump” movement. They didn't want to touch him with a ten-foot pole. Some pollsters predicted a victory for Hillary ranging from 300 to 400 electoral votes.

I was not alone in hoping to open a bottle of champagne around nine or ten that night, but it was Trump who took the lead, and even when the Democratic strongholds were counted, Hillary was still down. It was a nightmare, but we were not dreaming. I went to bed knowing that Trump would win. It had been considered impossible, but it did happen.

It is true that Hillary did win the popular vote with a couple of hundred thousands votes, but the antiquated American electoral system still delivered 290 electoral votes to Trump and only 228 to Clinton. The Democrats superior and highly professional strategy collapsed.

Thomas B. Edsall, the brilliant New York Times columnist wrote this morning that:

“It appears that the Democratic campaigns modeled for turnout levels similar to ’08 and ’12, but when those groups didn’t materialize, they were essentially stuck, losing key battleground states due to low Democratic core group turnout,” Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, and other Public Opinion Strategies staffers wrote in a smart postelection analysis. “Simply put, Clinton did not perform like Obama and was unable to pull Democratic coalitional groups to the polls.” (Presidential Small Ball, New York Times, November 10, 2016)

Of course it isn’t fair that Hillary, who led the popular vote lost the election, but the real problem was that she didn’t win a landslide against such a weak and erratic opponent. He was so bad as a candidate that conspiracy theorists thought that he was in cahoots with the Clintons, but such theories are usually bunk, and so was this one.

One wonders if Sanders, who preached for a political revolution from his ethical and moral high ground, could have delivered more of the white working class vote that normally would have gone to the Democrats. Maybe, but he might on the other hand have driven away many suburbanites for whom socialism is an unknown and scary factor.

Why did Hillary not crush Trump? She had a long and strong record of doing good and she was qualified like few, and she easily won the three debates. She had the money (much of it from Wall Street) and the organization and all the stars that she could wish for. But something led millions of Americans to close their ears and eyes for Hillary, unless they stared at her in angry hatred whipped up by Republican demagoguery, as well as her own mistakes and general awkwardness.

I think that at the core of her failure to win big was the fact that she and the Democratic party had closed their minds for the suffering working class for decades, leaving them emotionally starved and vulnerable to demagogues. (It is true that President Obama did a lot to create jobs and provide aid for the unemployed and uninsured, but there was just so much he could do with the House and the Senate under Republican control, which they cynically used to block any help for those afflicted by globalization and the Great Recession. He did, and the Democrats backed him as much as they could, but overall they displayed a lack of interest and a lack of willingness to fight. Wall Street got their money and got away with their crimes against the people, but laid off workers and home owners with their mortgages under water got very little.)

What the white working class got instead was something completely different, according to Michael Lerner, a long-time progressive rabbi and editor of Tikkun magazine.

“It turns out that shaming the supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy,” he wrote in a post-election comment (Stop Shaming Trump Supporters) for the New York Times.

“Though job loss and economic stagnation played a role in his victory, so did shame. As the principal investigator on a study of the middle class for the National Institute of Mental Health, I found that working people’s stress is often intensified by shame at their failure to ‘make it’ in what they are taught is a meritocratic American economy.
The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).
Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.” 

From their perspective, the world is unfair and they feel lost in the new and globalized world that has left them behind. They are often ill-educated and ill informed, and they have a hard time making sense of the radical ideas projected by well-educated and often well paid liberal Democrats from the big cities, who “may be progressive on issues of discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism,” but “are blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.”

Conservatives are usually good at playing to those feelings, and so was Trump.

“The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals and radical activists.”

Lerner admonishes the left to “stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear” and “reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition.” The left should not assume that all of them are driven by “racism, sexism and xenophobia.”

“If the left could abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.”

Maybe that's a good place to start as we figure out how to save America from its dangerously ignorant and erratic President-elect.  

Shrinking Unions Leave Some White Workers Vulnerable to Demagogues Like Trump

Many white working-class men in the United States are attracted by the racist and misogynist messages purloined by the fake billionaire and real self-promoter Donald Trump. Why is that so, and more importantly, does it have to be so? That is the question the sociology professor Neil Gross raises in a recent New York Times article.

“Recent research in social science and history suggests that they [white working class men] might have been out front in the fight against Mr. Trump — if only the American labor movement weren’t a shell of its former self.” 

Gross reaches back to a 1959 article by the famous sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset where he pointed out an underlying authoritarian streak in the working class.

“Using evidence from surveys, Mr. Lipset found blue-collar workers to be less committed to democratic norms like tolerance for political opponents, preference for rational argumentation over charismatic appeals and support for the rights of ethnic and racial minorities.
These tendencies, he claimed, were a function of lower levels of education and the isolation of many workers (for example, coal miners) from people who were different from them. Authoritarian attitudes also owed something to the work itself. Controversially, he suggested that manual work was at odds with the abstract thinking required to appreciate complex, pluralistic solutions to political problems.
Yet in Mr. Lipset’s view unions had the potential to counter such tendencies. If infused with a democratic spirit — organized and run in a non-autocratic fashion with an eye to the greater good — a labor union might inculcate civic virtues in its members, pushing them to think and vote in a more enlightened way.”

Later research has questioned Lipset’s thesis and pointed to lack of education as a more important factor behind this authoritarianism. Another factor is the shrinking unionization in the U.S., since labor unions traditionally were able to guide its members to support progressive causes, which despite the fall in unionization played an important role in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory.

“In Europe, as in the United States, working-class men are a key constituency for the far-right political parties that are now ascendant. Yet in a study published last month of 16 European nations, the political scientists Christoph Arndt and Line Rennwald found that union membership helps inoculate workers against the far right’s message. While the far right has been able to gain ground even in countries like Sweden where unionization rates are high, in general employees covered by collective bargaining agreements feel less threatened by the social changes that agitate far-right ideologues. (It is not an accident of history that Hitler abolished German trade unions as part of his consolidation of power, or that farmers and small business owners were more sympathetic to the Nazi cause than were industrial workers reared on unionism.)”

This points to one reason for why many worker’s, especially older white workers with low education, have fallen prey to a windbag from New York. With unions out of the picture for many workers, they are on their own.

“There’s a lesson here for the future,” Gross writes. “American unions have a checkered history and are far from perfect. But as an institution, unions are an essential bulwark for democracy. We’ve allowed them to wither at our peril.”

Neil Gross: The Decline of Unions and the Rise of Trump (New York Times, August 12, 2016)

Read a couple of earlier posts about the white working class and authoritarianism:
What Whites with Broken Hearts can Learn from the Crow Indians
Does history repeat itself? Does this sound familiar? On the origins of Trumpism...

McCain Pops-Up and and Asks Obama to Show Putin All his Cards

Senator John McCain -- a Republican senator from Arizona, and predictable political pop-up doll that seldom misses a chance to call for our attention -- is "deeply concerned" that Putin's expansion could continue.

"President Obama said that Russia would face 'costs' if it intervened militarily in Ukraine," McCain said. "It is now essential for the President to articulate exactly what those costs will be and to take steps urgently to impose them." (CNN)

Yes, Mr. President, why didn't you put all your cards on the table immediately, and why haven't you evicted the Russian troops already?

Seriously, if Putin's aggression wasn't bad enough, now we will have to endure the Republican choir mocking the president, and we will hear calls for military mobilization and preparations for war from the neocons, who have felt rather lonely since W deflated. Not so sure though about the Tea Party. Will they embrace a new war even if it means more deficit spending (or more taxes)?

Elites Shiver, But Progressives Are Elated at Bill de Blasio's Primary Win

With Obama's hope wilting like last weeks roses, progressives are seeking solace in Bill de Blasio's victory in the New York City's democratic primary. Paul Krugman writes in today's New York Times:

Take, for example, the proposal by Bill de Blasio, who finished in first place in Tuesday’s Democratic primary and is the probable next mayor of New York, to provide universal prekindergarten education, paid for with a small tax surcharge on those with incomes over $500,000. The usual suspects are, of course, screaming and talking about their hurt feelings; they’ve been doing a lot of that these past few years, even while making out like bandits. But surely this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing: Taxing the ever-richer rich, at least a bit, to expand opportunity for the children of the less fortunate. Some pundits are already suggesting that Mr. de Blasio’s unexpected rise is the leading edge of a new economic populism that will shake up our whole political system. That seems premature, but I hope they’re right. For extreme inequality is still on the rise — and it’s poisoning our society.

Peter Beinhardt sees the victory as the expression of a new generational shift to the left in The Rise of the New New Left, a long and very interesting essay for the Daily Beast.

The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left.

The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left. - See more at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html#sthash.8AhRQzJP.dpuf

The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left. - See more at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html#sthash.8AhRQzJP.dpuf

It's Not the Deficit, Stupid!

"New data from the European Union, released on Monday and analyzed in The Times by Landon Thomas Jr. and David Jolly, show that countries that have most ruthlessly cut their budgets — Greece, especially — have seen their overall debt loads increase as a share of the economy.

The data provide objective support for what has been clear to just about everyone except pro-austerity German officials and deficit-crazed Republican politicians. Namely, deep government budget cuts at a time of economic weakness are counterproductive, complicating, if not ruining, the chances for economic growth."

New York Times' editorial on October 24, 2012: The Austerity Trap

It concludes:

"Mr. Obama is better positioned than Mr. Romney to deliver that agenda. Mr. Obama could make his jobs plan, introduced last September but blocked by Congressional Republicans, part of the budget package to be negotiated after the election, when politicians must agree on tax increases and spending cuts to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

Mr. Romney’s agenda is missing a direct focus on jobs, foolishly relying instead on high-end tax cuts and deregulation to help the recovery. And he and his party continue to insist on premature deficit reduction that, in a fragile economy, is the real road to Greece."

Republican's Real Problem With Obamacare: President Obama Stole Our Idea!

J.D. Kleinke, an author, a former health care executive and a resident fellow at the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a straightforward column in New York Times's Sunday Edition.

The Conservative Case for Obamacare

"Clear away all the demagogy and scare tactics, and Obamacare is, at its core, Romneycare across state lines. But today’s Republicans dare not own anything built on principles of economic conservatism, if it also protects one of the four horsemen of the social conservatives’ apocalypse: coverage for the full spectrum of women’s reproductive health, from birth control to abortion.

Social conservatives’ hostility to the health care act is a natural corollary to their broader agenda of controlling women’s bodies. These are not the objections of traditional “conservatives,” but of agitators for prying, invasive government — the very things they project, erroneously, onto the workings of the president’s plan. Decrying the legislation for interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, while seeking to pass grossly intrusive laws involving the OB-GYN-patient relationship, is one of the more bizarre disconnects in American politics."

Sounds so simple and true. Could it be?

The Orwellian Republican Convention

The Republican convention in Tampa 2012 could very well be a lost chapter in George Orwell's "1984". Slavery is freedom, war is peace and the truth is nowhere to be seen. It's bizarre, it's sickening and it is very dangerous to the world. A Romney-Ryan victory will drive the American economy over the cliff straight into a depression, which the clueless duo will respond to by launching new wars abroad and repression at home. It's easy to laugh at the Republican team, but it's no laughing matter. Remember George W. Bush, which people wrote off as a lightweight doofus. We know how that worked out.

Hope feels like a very far away place.
The forces of darkness are encircling the forces of humanity.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste

In Getting Away with It, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells discuss three books about President Barack Obama, the Democrats, the Republicans and the global economic crisis.

It's not an uplifting story, but it is a necessary one.

"But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and as the Booker and Clinton incidents showed, some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935.

These changes in America’s political parties explain both why there has been no second New Deal and why the policy response to the prolonged economic slump has been so inadequate."

          ...

"Obama’s innate centrism led him to adopt the preoccupation with the budget deficit of Geithner and Peter Orszag (his head of the Office of Management and Budget and another Rubin protégé) in opposition to vocal protests from both Summers and Romer that now was not the time to worry about deficits. As a result, Obama would never acknowledge that the original stimulus was not big enough, a position that left him boxed in when it became clear—as it already had by summer of 2010, if not earlier—that it had indeed been far too small."

The Rich are Cooling on Obama - How About Reaching Out to the Rest of Us?

Obama Sees Steep Dropoff in Cash From Major Donors

"President Obama’s re-election campaign is straining to raise the huge sums it is counting on to run against Mitt Romney, with sharp dropoffs in donations from nearly every major industry forcing it to rely more than ever on small contributions and a relative handful of major donors."     

This could be the best thing that has happened to Barack Obama. It's time for him to reach back to the people who brought him to power, and that was not Wall Street and Hollywood.

Obama better win, or else.

Barack Obama has done a lot to mitigate the effects of Bush-Cheney recession, but not enough. His timid stimulus package was way too small, and he wasted too much time making nice with the Republicans. No he is trapped, and even a political moron such as Mitt Romney attracts a crowd. The explanation is the so many Americans still feel severe pain.

"Nearly two-thirds of people are concerned about paying for their housing, the poll found, and one in five people with mortgages say they are underwater. Four in 10 parents say they have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford to send their children. More than one-third of respondents said high gas prices had created serious financial hardships."
New York Times: Doubts on Economy May Give Romney Opening, Poll Finds

If Romney wins, America is bust. What more is, the American democracy would be going down the drain.
Obama better win, or else.

How Mitt Romney Became the Underdog

Conservative Republicans and the Tea Party crowd don't like Mitt Romney much. It's probably not because he is a Mormon as much as that they suspect that he lacks a spine and has no fire in his belly. He was so rich and slick that people far out on to the right feared he couldn't fight hard and dirty.

There were many challengers to the nomination, and some are still hanging around, but something funny happened on the way to forum. Having fought off the weird and the crazy, and beating Newt Gingrich in Florida, Romney doesn't look so polite and preppy anymore. He is starting to look like a candidate that might even be able to satisfy the conservative Republicans' desperate hunger for a leader with a great L. It is as if they don't trust the God they have been praying to and want a stand-in here on Earth.

In periods of chaos and dislocation, people tend to look backwards, search for a Golden Age or a Savior. That has happened over and over again in human history, often with disastrous consequences (read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism for a chilling analysis.) Newt Gingrich fits the image of a maniac who could be really dangerous if given enough power, while Mitt Romney at the core is a pragmatic and cold businessman.

After Florida, he is starting to look like a winner. There is even something Reaganesque over him now that the battle has made us see him as an underdog, a dog that can bite.

I hope team Obama pays attention.

Dithering On the Brink Of Disaster

The tepid stimulus package got us out of the hole that Bush-Cheney dug, but we have since been dithering on the bring of disaster thanks to protracted Republican intransigency and Presidential naïveté.

The Bush-Obama unemployment story so far

Nouriel Roubini On the Economic Crisis

Krugman: It's Time To Get Serius



Paul Krugman at Princeton on the day that it was

announced that he would receive the Noble Prize

in Economics. Photo: Hans Sandberg

Paul Krugman writes in today's column for The New York Times:

"In case you had any doubts, Thursday’s more than 500-point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average and the drop in interest rates to near-record lows confirmed it: The economy isn’t recovering, and Washington has been worrying about the wrong things.       

It’s not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery. (...)

And why should we be surprised at this catastrophe? Where was growth supposed to come from? Consumers, still burdened by the debt that they ran up during the housing bubble, aren’t ready to spend. Businesses see no reason to expand given the lack of consumer demand. And thanks to that deficit obsession, government, which could and should be supporting the economy in its time of need, has been pulling back."

The Verdict On the Tea Party Solution Is In

Markets plunge on economic turmoil; fears of another recession

“If this economy were a bicycle, it would be about to topple over,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and formerly the top economic advisor to Vice President Biden. “We need to put pressure on those pedals, but the political system is pushing us in the other direction. The economy is crying out for help and the political system is deaf to those cries.”

(Washington Post, August 4)

Stocks Down Over 4% in Global Sell-Off

Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, said investors were selling risky assets like stocks “globally prompted by concerns about the weakening economic outlook, spreading contagion in Europe and insufficient policy responses.”

(New York Times, August 4)

Tea Party’s War on America

Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.

(Joe Nocera, New York Times)

The Lesser Depression

Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets. We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse. (...)

For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great. But, if the negotiations succeed, we will be set to replay the great mistake of 1937: the premature turn to fiscal contraction that derailed economic recovery and ensured that the Depression would last until World War II finally provided the boost the economy needed.

Did I mention that the European Central Bank — although not, thankfully, the Federal Reserve — seems determined to make things even worse by raising interest rates?

(Paul Krugman, New York Times, July 21)

The President Surrenders

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

(Paul Krugman, New York Times, July 31)

Wasn't the Debt-Ceiling Deal Supposed to Avert a 512-Point Dow Collapse?

If Obama does not reject the failed fantasies of the past and start promoting a jobs agenda that is based on federal government investment in infrastructure, education and the stabilizing of state and local governments so that they can continue to deliver needed services, the Tea Partisans will continue to control the discourse.

Obama must take the lead—with an absolute rejection of the extreme right's extremely wrong agenda—if he hopes to rally the popular support that is needed to define the debate and, ultimately, to start winning the fights that will determine the future of the US economy.

Obama has to climb into the bully pulpit and take charge. If he does not, the circumstance will just get worse.

Compromises do not build confidence.

Cuts do not inspire.

Tax breaks for the rich do not does not jumpstart a stalled economy.

Austerity does not create jobs.

And if Barack Obama continues to surrender to the peddlers of the austerity fantasy, if he continues to refuse to use the full strength of the federal government to advance a job-creation agenda, he will have a lot more to worry about than whether John Boehner will still go golfing with him.

(John Nichols, The Nation, August 4)

The Republican’s Double-Dip, and What Must Be Done

It was never a debt crisis. The debt crisis was manufactured. It’s been a jobs, wages, and growth crisis all along. And that reality has finally caught up with us.

Now that we’re slouching toward a double-dip recession, the only hope is voters will tell their members of Congress – who are now on recess back home – to stop obsessing about future budget deficits and get to work on the real crisis of unemployment, falling wages, and no growth.

We need a bold jobs bill to restart the economy. Eliminate payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income for two years. Recreate the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The federal government should lend money to cash-strapped states and local governments. Give employers tax credits for net new jobs. Amend the bankruptcy laws to allow distressed homeowners to declare bankruptcy on their primary residence. Extend unemployment insurance. Provide partial unemployment benefits to people who have lost part-time jobs. Start an infrastructure bank.

And more.

The jobs bill should be number one on the nation’s agenda. It should have been all along.

(Robert Reich on his blog. August 4) 

The Party Is Almost Over For the Republican Party

The clean-up is going to be very expensive, and they will as usually leave the bill on the table for the rest of us to pick up.
“Our problem is, we made a big deal about this for three months,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina told the New York Times.
“How many Republicans have been on TV saying, ‘I am not going to raise the debt limit,’ ” said Mr. Graham, including himself in the mix of those who did so. “We have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Hans Sandberg

Hollow Arguments For Immoral Acts

From the New York Times' editorial today:

The Torture Apologists
The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden’s death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.
...
Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.
This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?
...
The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly — in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.       

I couldn't agree more.

Hans Sandberg

Even If It Turned Out That Torture Worked - Does That Make It Right?

The right-wing was stunned by the fact that the guy who they don't even believe is a legitimate President succeded where his bumbling, fumbling predecessor failed. It didn't take long though before they found a way back in the debate:

Among them was John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who wrote secret legal memorandums justifying brutal interrogations. “President Obama can take credit, rightfully, for the success today,” Mr. Yoo wrote Monday in National Review, “but he owes it to the tough decisions taken by the Bush administration.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/us/politics/04torture.html

Yeah, right... Bush and Cheney were really good at making tough decisions...

But even if it was water-boarding or some other form of torture that led to bin Laden, does that make torture right? How come conservative "moralists" who usually purport to be good pro-life Christians are so eager to embrace torture?

Besides, the euphoria over the killing of bin Laden reflects a simplistic Hollywood-perspective of world politics. If only Rambo is unleashed on the bad guys, we will get our revenge, which equals a happy ending.

The truth is that bin-Laden had already been "buried" politically by the popular and secular uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries.

No Rambo was needed for that victory.

Hans Sandberg

The President's Speech: Did Barack Obama Draw A Line In the Sand?

Obama's speech about the long-term budget crisis was strong and effective. He came out as the national leader setting the agenda, and wiping off the irresponsible and immoral proposal Paul Ryan presented a couple of weeks ago.

The Republicans threw a hissy fit, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan faked outrage and Rush Limbaugh emerged from the relative obscurity where he has been found himself due to the oversupply of nutty conservatives.

Now, lets hope that hos words will be match with deeds, and not backtracking ahead of the battle.

Hans Sandberg

PS. Here is New York Times comment on the speech:

President Obama, Reinvigorated

Progressives Are Loosing the Patience with President Obama

Paul Krugman is one of the most influential progressive economists in the U.S. He initially supported Hillary Clinton in the campaign, but later switch to a cautious support of President Barack Obama. He has been nudging the president to be firm, and warned repeatedly that the Obama stimulus package was too small to have the desired effect, something we know only to well now that it was true.
In his latest NYT column, Krugman scolds President Obama for wimpering out instead of leading the fight against the Republicans and Tea Party zelots:

"What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?"

The President Is Missing

Hans Sandberg