Politics
-
Bacevich on Moyers
Bacevich is somone I've admired since reading his New American Militarism. (Links to posts I've written about him can be found here, here, and here.) A self-described conservative, he, along with some of the writers for American Conservative Magazine, is among the few conservative public thinkers who fits the description principled conservative. If there were
-
Lind on Realignment
Interesting article in Salon today by Michael Lind about the evolution of the Democratic Party from the party of Jefferson/Jackson to the party of Roosevelt to the party of McGovern, and now looking forward to the possibility of a realigned party of of Obama. This post links to themes I developed in my post last
-
Quote of the Day: Tom Frank (Updates 1 & 2)
From his June 18 WSJ column: Yes, things look good for Democrats this year. Poll after poll indicates excellent prospects for Barack Obama. And the dispatches from House and Senate races are even better. The comfortable course of action for Democrats will be merely to pocket the coming windfall, to burble about how they have
-
Weak-Kneed Liberalism
Interesting post here by Sara Robinson in which she uses D.H. Fischer's Albion's Seed as a tool to explain how voting patterns follow cultural patterns that are rooted in the four colonial-era English cultural groups: Puritans, Cavaliers, Scots-Irish, and Quakers. My early 2006 post entitled The Spirit of Whiggery covers much of the same ground.
-
Buccaneer Government
Tom Frank makes the point that we've been making, but it's worth repeating: And for all their peculiarity, these people — Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, and the whole troupe of activists, lobbyists, and corpora-trons who got their start back in the Reagan years — have for the last three decades been
-
Playing the Game
I don't know about y'all, but I'm finding the campaign unbearably depressing, and I'm finding it very difficult to stay interested. The McCain campaign's just-say-anything m.o. was predictable in its cynicism and is predictably taken seriously by much of the MSM while Obama's not giving us much to work with. He has decided to play
-
Oust the Blue Dogs? (Updated)
Glenn Greenwald and DLC-spokesperson Ed Kilgore make their cases pro and con here and here. Basic argument pro: What good are Democrats if they collaborate or enable the GOP’s right-wing agenda? Other than (arguably) the resignation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and a very modest increase in the minimum wage (enacted in the first
-
Fein on Sunstein
My respect for Samantha Power’s judgment has just taken a serious hit. I’ve only now learned she has recently married Cass Sunstein. Here’s Bruce Fein’s opinion about Sunstein: Sunstein is perceived as a serious candidate for appointment to the Supreme Court in an Obama administration. (h/t Greenwald)
-
The AT&T Democratic Convention
I’m a little slow on catching things this week, but in case you missed it: See Greenwald’s post about this here. Also Amy Goodman here talks about the whole financing of the conventions. As Greenwald says, “What’s most striking about the Convention bag — aside, of course, from its stunning design — is how the
-
Quote of the Day: M.J. Rosenberg
I worked on Capitol Hill for 20 years and I can tell the difference between a staff driven politician and one who knows what he’s talking about. The staff driven pol (McCain is an example) is always capable of the big blunder. He does not mix up Shiites and Sunnis because he “misspoke;” he really