Cuo-No

I don't know if Andrew Cuomo ever had national aspirations, but I'd say if he did, they're toast now.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/andrew-cuomo-survives-primary-challenge

Zephyr Teachout is actually a very intelligent, credible candidate.  But she's named Zephyr Teachout.

And she got over 30% of the vote.

If You Build Your Case With Lies...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/how-propaganda-inflates-threats-against-police-officers

I guess it's a good thing Michael Brown wasn't armed with Skittles and Iced Tea.

Now THIS Is Interesting

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/ferguson-worst-governments.html

I've always felt that one of the abiding mistakes of Reagan Era conservativism is its focus on the federal government.  I know that this has roots in the cultural South that saw the national government as impinging on its racial prerogatives, but the real abuse of government is at the local level.

Interestingly, Madison felt the same way.  It's why he went to Philadelphia in the first place.

Obama vs Reagan

A buddy on Facebook posted contrasting videos of Obama saying he didn't have a strategy for dealing with ISIL and Reagan's announcement for bombing Libya.

He said Reagan projected a greater mastery of foreign affairs.  I argued that it was more projection than reality.

Reagan sent arms to Iran in return for vague and unfulfilled promises for help releasing hostages in Lebanon.  Reagan retreated from  Beirut after the Marine barracks bombing of 1983.  Reagan supplied arms to Saddam Hussein, including components of the chemical weapons he used against the Iranians and the Kurds.  Reagan supported brutal death squads in El Salvador.  His national security team turned a blind eye to narcotics traffickers (in the middle of Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign) in order to garner their help in supporting the Contras.

But he DID project certainty.  Reagan held a few simply truths that he hung all his actions on.  One - communism was impossible to function and survive - was a really good one.  Many of the others were disastrous or naive.

Obama is more contemplative.  He's less a "Decider" than a "Ruminator".  This is why they apparently foist John McCain and Lindsey Graham on us every Sunday morning to say we should "do something".  Of course, one year ago, "doing something" would have meant funneling arms to Syrian opposition groups, including ISIS.  Brilliant.  Doing something in 2003 meant invading Iraq.  Brilliant.

There is no good strategy for dealing with the Islamic State.  There is only containment and slowly trying to degrade it.  I have my own ideas, but they are likely to be as frustrating as anyone else's.

For a country that invented mass participatory democracy, we sure don't seem to want to grow up and rationally discuss policies.  Instead, we want to "feel" things about our policies.

Obamacare is working.  And its constituent parts are becoming more and more popular.  But we don't "feel" good about Obamacare, so...  We don't "feel" like the globe is warming, because it was a cool summer here in New England.

We are idiots and deserve the crappy government we will get if the Republicans win control of the Senate.

This Is What Racism Looks Like In 2014

Charles Blow has a blog piece about how crime and race are linked in the minds of most white Americans.

This linkage is a matter of perception and not fact, but that perception creates facts like the overwhelming belief that minorities are more responsible for crimes than they are.

Michael Brown (allegedly) shoplifted some cigars.  When I was a year older than Brown, I shoplifted a cassette tape.  Brown's criminal act made him a "thug" and "no angel" and was released by the Ferguson police as a non-sequitar defense of shooting him dead in the street.  I got a fine and the humiliation of a court hearing and that was pretty much that.

The biggest lines are these:

• “White Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime committed by African-Americans by 20 percent to 30 percent.”

• “White Americans who associate crime with blacks and Latinos are more likely to support punitive policies — including capital punishment and mandatory minimum sentencing — than whites with weaker racial associations of crime.”

The United State of Fear at work again, as white believe that minorities commit more crimes than they actually do and then condemn criminality because they associate it with "them."

But, Al Sharpton... blah blah blah.

Whaaaa?

I don't require tidy resolutions to my stories, but The Leftovers better have a season two.

Back To School

Putting on long pants this morning to greet the new students and their parents felt vaguely like putting on handcuffs.

Maybe a straight jacket.

Governing From A Defensive Crouch

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6114927/obama-s-immigration-delay-gives-ammunition-to-his-critics

As I've argued before, anything that Bob Schrum advises is probably stupid.

Obama's decision to delay immigration reform is a bad one.  But it's a bad one he set up himself by saying he would do something.

This is just terrible politics and terrible policy.

Slavery Was Racist, OK?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ed-baptist-responds-economist-review-slavery-book

The Economist published, then apologized for, a review of a book about slavery that criticized it for being, you know, anti-slavery.

In a way, this ties in to the conservative push against the APUSH exam redesign.  Slavery was a moral abomination.  Don't take my word for it, listen to slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison grapple with the incongruity of American ideals with the necessary economic power that slavery placed in their hands. Jefferson noted that slavery degrades the slaveholder as well as the slave by making him a tyrant.

Attitudes in the South were very conflicted about slavery until the introduction of cotton as a profitable crop.  While slavery had had appeal during the colonial period because of the chronic labor shortage during that time, as the US economy and white population grew, there emerged a strong movement to end slavery in states like Virginia and Maryland.

It is worth noting that these manumission movements wanted also to expel the freed African Americans from their country.  They presumed that people of African descent were incapable of citizenship (this despite the fact that enslaved African American had increasing amounts of European blood in them).  Jefferson actually wrote once that he thought European and Native Americans would intermarry seamlessly.  Ironically, he did not write this about African Americans, despite fathering several children with Sally Hemmings.

What made slavery ultimately impossible to eradicate short of war was the economic benefits it brought to the elites of the South and North through cheap cotton and the intractable racism that underlay the entire  institution.  Even those without slaves in the South took pride in their place above the slave in the social order.  Emancipation without deportation could deprive them of that.

Slavery drew its support from the racism of Americans.  Even many white abolitionists felt the weight of this racism. As Frederick Douglass noted, many abolitionists hated the slave as much as they hated slavery.

If there was one force that worked against this consistently, it was the slaves and former slaves themselves.  What Professor Baptist is part of an academic movement that is trying to restore the voice of anti-slavery blacks to their proper historical relevance.

For me, the central moment in America's pre-Civil War history occurs from 1829-1831.  In 1829, David Walker, a free black man living in Boston, published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.  Two years later, William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator and Nat Turner launched the bloodiest slave rebellion of the antebellum period.

Prior to these events, Southerners had been morally conflicted about slavery.  It's economic appeal was obvious, but slavery came with powerful undercurrents of fear, as slave owners lived surrounded by a people they, at best, deprived of liberty and, at worst, brutalized and killed.

After Garrison and Turner - who seem to have been influenced by Walker - the South moved from a passive defense of slavery to an active defense.  The Missouri Crisis and Compromise of 1820 had threatened to create a fevered sectional divide, but it wasn't until the 1830s that the rise of an abolitionist movement in the North was mirrored by a pro-slavery movement in the South.

And that pro-slavery movement based itself explicitly and consistently on racism.

Slavery was the great original sin of American history.  It is the sin from which so much other heartache and death rises from.  That The Economist couldn't see that is a profound problem.

The Economist is perhaps the last voice of reasonable conservatism in the US, perhaps because it's based primarily in Britain.  What Professor Baptist's work in this book does is simply to consolidate much of the current scholarship that has endeavored to revivify the voices of a people whom whites tried for centuries to silence.

Perhaps most embarrassingly of all, the magazine ran their review with a picture from 12 Years A Slave, arguably the strongest contemporary effort to give voice to the silenced millions who were enslaved.

No excuse, really.

Sleep

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/5/6105705/sleep-importance-why-do-people-need-humans-reasons

Interesting article on why we sleep.

But it's telling to me that the author suggests that we learn why we need sleep so we can get less of it.

This is part of the mania to "do more" and "be more productive."

As Gandhi said, "There is more to life than increasing its speed."  The idea that we should get less sleep makes sense if you see yourself as a cog in a machine that needs to  be "more productive."  But there is something to be said for the gentle peace of an afternoon nap or the luxury of eight hours of sleep.

We are so obsessed with doing, sometimes we lose sight of the pleasures of being.

Elephant In The Room

I like Sarah Kliff's writing on health care, but she seems to leave out an obvious factor.  The logic behind Obamacare was that it would slow the rising health care costs by imposing spending restraints in return for greater coverage.

Health care providers tended to overcharge people with insurance to cover those without insurance.  This typically happened at hospitals, but that set the standard across the board for the rest of the health care industry.  This is why an aspirin cost $5 when you had your appendix out.

So this sentence in the opening:
The federal government thinks we're entering a new era of slower-than-normal health care spending — even after Obamacare expands coverage to millions of Americans.

is somewhat misleading.  It's not "even after" but "because".

As Diamond Joe Biden said, "This is a big, f-cking deal."

Some Men Want To See The World Burn

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-rage-to-oppose

Josh Marshall makes a decent case that the preponderance of ethnic Europeans in ISIL, which is to say that a lot of ISIL fighters are ethnic Europeans who aren't Islamic by birth.  These people are the sort who tend to always ally themselves with revolutionary movements.

Basically, we need to bring back Marxism.  It would keep capitalism honest and give radicals something to do with their hands.

When Francis Fukuyama spoke of the end of history, he clearly underestimated the appeal of a countervailing ideology, whatever that ideology might be.

Way To Go, Bibi.

No one could've predicted....

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/poll-finds-hamas-popularity-increased-after-war-with-israel-among-palestinians

If there is anything that can be predicted it is this: If an external actor attacks a regime, it will strengthen the domestic support for that regime.

Democrats Suck At Politics

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/democrats-political-benefit-delay-obama-immigration-deportations

I can understand the thinking behind waiting on immigration.  As stated in the article, control of the Senate can come down to some close races in reddish states where Democrats have to win white votes.

Of course, that depends on whether white voters will vote for Hagan, Landrieu or Pryor anyway.

You can be sure that it's a dubious idea because Bob Shrum thinks it's a good one.  Shrum if the living, breathing voice of the '80s-'90s "defensive crouch" Democrat.  The embarrassing defeats of Carter, Mondale and Dukakis created in that generation of Democrats a reflexive fear of populist politics.  They are always on the defensive, always deferring to GOP narratives.

The reason to advance executive action on immigration is, yes, to mobilize Hispanic votes in places like Colorado (and there are a fair number of Hispanics in North Carolina, too).  But it is also designed to force the GOP's hand on impeachment.

If Obama issues an executive action that reduces deportations of non-criminal immigrants, the GOP can almost be counted on going off the deep end and impeaching him.

While the immigration move could mobilize Angry White Dude votes against Democrats, impeachment would nationalize the election around the issue of GOP craziness.

There is also the fact that Obama could limit his immigration actions to a few palatable moves that most people support.  Save the bigger actions for after the election, but simply stop deporting children who came here with their parents - the so-called DREAMers.

Shrum's basic idiocy is that he thinks that there is some cautious, careful way to win over whites who are scared of brown people.  That will NEVER HAPPEN.  Those people left the Democratic party and are not coming back.

Maybe it is the smart move to avoid immigration.  But if Shrum says it is, I'm inherently skeptical.

Enjoying Labor Day? Thank A Union

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-most-challenging-issue-facing-liberalism-today

"Liberals" are a strange group, because that word can mean a great many things.  But certainly the Clintonista Liberals are anti-union.

Income inequality is the second most important issue we face after climate change.  Unlike ISIS or Ukraine or the color of Obama's suit, these issues matter and have long term consequences.

The Democratic party has to care about income inequality.  And that means they have to care about unions.

UPDATE: This is about teaching, but it touches on teacher's unions.
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/1/6089041/teacher-wars-dana-goldstein-where-teacher-tenure-comes-from