Am. History & Culture
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Charisma Wasted; Opportunities Lost
If you were Barack Obama and were pursuing the policies that he ended up pursuing, would you want Dawn Johnsen in charge of the office which determines the scope of your legal authority as President? Greenwald Things going on in my real life have kept me from posting the last two weeks. There's just not
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Reich on New Deal vs. Reaganism
Robert Reich at TPM: Most Americans continue to be suspicious of government. That distrust is deeply etched in our culture and traditions. Our system of government was devised by people who distrusted government and intentionally created checks and balances, three separate branches, and almost insuperable odds against getting big things done. The period extending from
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Random Thoughts on HCR (Updates I & II)
It's remarkable how HCR has brought out the feverish dark side of the American psyche. First a couple of anecdotal bits. From TPM: And then from Ezra Klein: Jon Cohn spent part of Saturday wandering through the patches of protesters on Capitol Hill. What surprised him, however, was that the protests seemed less about health-care
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A Progressive/Populist Alliance?
Digby reposts a piece she wrote taking a long look at the problems with such an alliance, foremost among which is the inherent nativism that fuels the fires of populist political passion. Populists have a tendency to bash elites–not just the financial elites, but progressives, whom they perceive as elites because of their cosmopolitan sanctimony.
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Unprecedented
Ezra Klein: The fact that Democrats had to break more filibusters last year than in the 1950s and 1960s combined is, quite literally, unprecedented. . . . Congress needs to decide how the place is going to be run and then rewrite the rulebook so that it actually works that way. Otherwise, it's just going
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for
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Refusing to Be Bullied
I've been interested lately in how the outlines of the battle between the right and the moderate left at this time is a reflection of the battle as it took shape in the 19th century. The main outlines of the conflict are archetypal and as old as the Republic itself. The wonder is not that
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Portrait of a Tea Partier
This is not what it first appears, so read to the end. It's a vivid illustration–and an important reminder–about why what most of us think is secondary to what we actually do. From Jonathan Raban's NYRB report of his participation in the February Nashville Teaparty Convention: I was joined at a table by an intense,
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The Down Side of High Mindedness
Digby reposted a piece she put up in 2004 about the difference between conservatives and liberals and it reinforces my recent trope that we are still fighting battles from the 19th Century. She quotes the blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything who in turn quote an1820 essay by William Hazlitt: Conservatives and liberals play the game
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Glenn Beck: Man of the Seventies
. . . the 1870s, that is. From Robert H. Wiebe's The Search for Order 1877-1920: America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life