Politics
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Perlstein on Sanders
To me, this history reveals the frustrating paradox at the heart of Sanders’s success. The very thing that makes it so exciting—a Democrat dreaming big dreams and who’s rewarded with burgeoning political success beyond anyone’s prediction but his own—is also what makes for such a stark contrast with the rest of the Democratic Party. The
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Trump and the Koch Money Party
From Chapter 12 of Mayer's Dark Money, "Mother of All Wars, the 2012 Setback": While amassing one of the most lucrative fortunes in the world, the Kochs had also created an ideological assembly line justifying it. Now they had added a powerful political machine to protect it. They had hired top-level operatives, financed their own
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The Disaster of 2010
From Chapter 10 in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, "The Shellacking: Dark Money's Midterm Debut, 2010" Lifting the donors' [Koch donors' network] spirits further was the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down on January 21, [2010], two days after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, and shortly before the Kochs' summit. Brown's race
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Bernie and Wishful Thinking
Chris Matthews had a fairly aggressive interview with Sanders last night, and Sanders did ok, but I was disappointed that Sanders had an opportunity to answer an important question, and he really didn't, at least in terms that didn't come across as wishful thinking: How is he going to do a better job than Obama in
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It’s Primarily about Judgment; Secondarily about Experience
The American Conservative ranks the candidates in terms of foreign policy sanity:
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The Obama-Clinton Status Quo
Obama campaigned as a Progressive, but governed as a Neoliberal in economic policy and as a Neoconservative in national security matters. Bill Curry reminds us about what he said and what he actually did in an article today. In recalling the 2008 election– Voters knew the problem wasn’t “partisan gridlock” but a hammerlock of special interests. They
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A Couple of Questions for Bernie
Many people criticized Obama after his election for not mobilizing the support he got during his campaign. Instead he pivoted to an insiders game where the concerns of his base were mostly irrelevant for both shaping and supporting his agenda. Assuming that you generate the same groundswell of support that Obama did in 2008, how
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David Bromwich’s Obama Assessment
Obama’s warmest defenders have insisted, against the weight of his own words, that such hopes were absurd and unreal — often giving as evidence some such conversation stopper as “this is a center-right country” or “the American people are racist.” But the same American people elected an African American whose campaign had been center-left. He inherited
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Quote of the Day: Bill Curry
Many of us–see Paul Rosenberg’s wonderful article right here in Salon–have long argued that the old categories are defunct and that much of what the old order calls radical has long since gone mainstream. Soon everyone will see it. For now, let me suggest a rule: any policy enjoying majority support in every poll must henceforth be
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Jim Webb for President
There are things that Jim Webb has said and done over the years that have rubbed me the wrong way, but better him than Hillary. He's an economic populist who is to the left of Hillary's foreign policy and someone who resides in Glenn Greenwald's Hall of Fame for integrity. That alone makes him preferrable