Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 869
February 9, 2016
Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump projected to win New Hampshire primaries: Associated Press
The polls in New Hampshire just closed, but the Associated Press is already calling the primaries for Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican: https://twitter.com/AP/status/6972235... The most interesting development of the evening, however, is the total implosion of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose poor debate performance -- capped off by his New Hampshire campaign manager's beat-down of a Rubio-robot today -- snowballed into what is appearing to be a truly terrible evening. Watch Rubio's campaign manager beat a Rubio-bot below via Americans United for Change. The polls in New Hampshire just closed, but the Associated Press is already calling the primaries for Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican: https://twitter.com/AP/status/6972235... The most interesting development of the evening, however, is the total implosion of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose poor debate performance -- capped off by his New Hampshire campaign manager's beat-down of a Rubio-robot today -- snowballed into what is appearing to be a truly terrible evening. Watch Rubio's campaign manager beat a Rubio-bot below via Americans United for Change. The polls in New Hampshire just closed, but the Associated Press is already calling the primaries for Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican: https://twitter.com/AP/status/6972235... The most interesting development of the evening, however, is the total implosion of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose poor debate performance -- capped off by his New Hampshire campaign manager's beat-down of a Rubio-robot today -- snowballed into what is appearing to be a truly terrible evening. Watch Rubio's campaign manager beat a Rubio-bot below via Americans United for Change. The polls in New Hampshire just closed, but the Associated Press is already calling the primaries for Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican: https://twitter.com/AP/status/6972235... The most interesting development of the evening, however, is the total implosion of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose poor debate performance -- capped off by his New Hampshire campaign manager's beat-down of a Rubio-robot today -- snowballed into what is appearing to be a truly terrible evening. Watch Rubio's campaign manager beat a Rubio-bot below via Americans United for Change. The polls in New Hampshire just closed, but the Associated Press is already calling the primaries for Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican: https://twitter.com/AP/status/6972235... The most interesting development of the evening, however, is the total implosion of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose poor debate performance -- capped off by his New Hampshire campaign manager's beat-down of a Rubio-robot today -- snowballed into what is appearing to be a truly terrible evening. Watch Rubio's campaign manager beat a Rubio-bot below via Americans United for Change.
White woman walks ahead: Jessica Chastain starring in a film about Sitting Bull is everything that’s wrong with prestige films
Activists have long pointed out that Native Americans get short shrift in just about every aspect of American life. The police kill Natives at the highest rates of any group, yet #NativeLivesMatter has generated virtually no attention. Numerous tribal water supplies are “worse than Flint,” with no corresponding public outcry; and if no Asian, Latino or black actors have been nominated for Oscars in acting categories for two years running, Native actors have a very slim track record of nominations throughout the history of the awards (Graham Greene received a supporting actor nomination for "Dances With Wolves," as did Chief Dan George for 1970's "Little Big Man.") Tellingly, it is far easier to name films where Native Americans have been stereotyped (the entire western genre), woefully misrepresented (“Pocahontas”; “Last of the Mohicans”), or played by actors who are understood as white (Johnny Depp as Tonto; Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily), than it is to name major motion pictures where Native characters are fully realized as human beings. These limitations apply to “Dances With Wolves,” “Avatar” and the entire “Star Wars” franchise, which stick to normative fantasies about colonizing indigenous cultures on behalf of the white savior who, as Teju Cole summed up with unsparing clarity, “supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” The past few months alone have seen Adam Sandler’s “Ridiculous Six“ and the art-house film “Of the North” heading straight for openly racist portrayals of Native and indigenous peoples, with their creators actually defending their dehumanizing positions in the face of withering criticism. Some would toss “The Revenant” into the company of that unenlightened dreck, as Native women have written that the Oscar-bait film left them feeling physically ill. Against this backdrop, Variety announced that Jessica Chastain is in talks--since confirmed—to star in the period drama “Woman Walks Ahead.” Immediately, I thought of Makes-Loud-Noise, the “Indian princess” name that my boyfriend’s then very young daughter had given him years ago; crossed with Roger Vadim’s 1956 sex romp, “And God Created Woman.” In other words, the concept is silly and retrograde from the start. If you think I’m being fatalist sourpuss hater, read the reviews for 2015's “Queen of the Desert,” a Nicole Kidman vehicle about real-life explorer Gertrude Bell as white (woman) savior. It was ripped by critics for its hubris, but mostly for casting the vampire Edward as Lawrence of Arabia. According to the report, Chastain will portray Caroline Weldon, a “19th-century Brooklyn artist and activist who moved to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull fight to keep the land for his people.” The basic problem is that “Woman Walks Ahead” is already being conceived and presented as a white-savior film, precisely because the narrative is being framed through Weldon's white feminist, righteous position of ally-ship with a dispossessed and marginalized people. The tragedy of history becomes a narrative shield that continues to legitimize the hideous fate of Lakota Sioux precisely because the story is mined for its tragedy ... and that's it. Must stories about Natives always take place in some mythologized past stocked with pintos and muskets? Is it so difficult to grasp that a fairy tale wrapped in museologically accurate buffalo robes is still a fairy tale? Frankly, the setup would be a lot more interesting if the film unfolded from the perspective of a young Lakota girl born and raised in the Standing Rock reservation, with a story line exploring her bafflement and anger at this random white lady who shows up to play interlocutor and scribe, while being utterly clueless about how to make poultices out of wild plants or anything that has to do with functioning as a whole person. What would it take to get the film written in this way? A female team of Sioux screenwriters, to start. But the bigger obstacle is Hollywood’s near pathological obsession with white-savior narratives, which become synonymous with the “prestige” film. “In the last quarter-century,” David Sirota wrote in 2013 for Salon, “10 White Savior films have received major Hollywood award nominations, with fully half of those coming in just the last five years.” No surprise, then, that since 2010, only two actors of color have garnered Oscars for acting, both times in "supporting" roles that position them as subservient to white authority: Octavia Spencer in 2012, playing a maid in “The Help,” and Lupita Nyong'o in 2013, as a slave in “12 Years a Slave.” In other words, as Kara Brown writes for Jezebel, “Hollywood has a problem with only paying attention to non-white people when they’re playing a stereotype.” Small victories do not fundamentally alter the structural racism of the industry. “The reality is that if no scripts or films are made that include roles for Native people, roles that call for extraordinary acting chops,” wrote Sonny Skyhawk, “then we are excluded from the opportunity to participate in the yearly considerations for Golden Globe Awards, SAG Awards, and Oscars.” It's not a chicken-and-egg problem so much as an exclusionary system pretending to reward merit. As long as Oscar-bait films privilege white-savior narratives, actors of color will find it difficult if not impossible to get nominated for awards — especially best actor or actress — inside a system designed to prevent this. Meanwhile, as Hollywood continues to treat Natives as plot devices in need of rescuing, television has given us one of the most complex, revisionist, defiant antiheroes in recent memory: Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon). The breakout star of season 2 of “Fargo,” Hanzee is a Vietnam vet, a war hero, a criminal and a survivor. Amazingly, the writers didn’t whitewash his alienation from the community, his PTSD or the racism hurled his way as a Native adoptee in North Dakota--not so very far from where Sitting Bull met his brutal end. In the end, Hanzee is the Man who Walks Away while stealing the show, a reminder, perhaps, that Natives were here first, and may outlast the sound and the fury‚ on-screen, as in life.
Robert Reich: Democrats can’t give in to defeatism
Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.” We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare. We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour. We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank. We shouldn’t try for free public higher education. As it is, Republicans are out to cut all federal education spending. We shouldn’t try to tax carbon or speculative trades on Wall Street, or raise taxes on the wealthy. We’ll be fortunate to just maintain the taxes already in place. Most of all, we shouldn’t even try to get big money out of politics. We’ll be lucky to round up enough wealthy people to back Democratic candidates. “We-shouldn’t-even-try” Democrats think it’s foolish to aim for fundamental change – pie-in-the-sky, impractical, silly, naïve, quixotic. Not in the cards. No way we can. I understand their defeatism. After eight years of Republican intransigence and six years of congressional gridlock, many Democrats are desperate just to hold on to what we have. And ever since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision opened the political floodgates to big corporations, Wall Street, and right-wing billionaires, many Democrats have concluded that bold ideas are unachievable. In addition, some establishment Democrats – Washington lobbyists, editorial writers, inside-the-beltway operatives, party leaders, and big contributors – have grown comfortable with the way things are. They’d rather not rock the boat they’re safely in. I get it, but here’s the problem. There’s no way to reform the system without rocking the boat. There’s no way to get to where America should be without aiming high. Progressive change has never happened without bold ideas championed by bold idealists. Some thought it was quixotic to try for civil rights and voting rights. Some viewed it as naïve to think we could end the Vietnam War. Some said it was unrealistic to push for the Environmental Protection Act. But time and again we’ve learned that important public goals can be achieved – if the public is mobilized behind them. And time and again such mobilization has depended on the energies and enthusiasm of young people combined with the determination and tenacity of the rest. If we don’t aim high we have no chance of hitting the target, and no hope of mobilizing that enthusiasm and determination. The situation we’re in now demands such mobilization. Wealth and income are more concentrated at the top than in over a century. And that wealth has translated into political power. The result is an economy rigged in favor of those at the top – which further compounds wealth and power at the top, in a vicious cycle that will only get worse unless reversed. Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than the citizens of any other advanced nation, for example. We also pay more for Internet service. And far more for health care. We pay high prices for airline tickets even though fuel costs have tumbled. And high prices for food even though crop prices have declined. That’s because giant companies have accumulated vast market power. Yet the nation’s antitrust laws are barely enforced. Meanwhile, the biggest Wall Street banks have more of the nation’s banking assets than they did in 2008, when they were judged too big to fail. Hedge-fund partners get tax loopholes, oil companies get tax subsidies, and big agriculture gets paid off. Bankruptcy laws protect the fortunes of billionaires like Donald Trump but not the homes of underwater homeowners or the savings of graduates burdened with student loans. A low minimum wage enhances the profits of big-box retailers like Walmart, but requires the rest of us provide its employees and their families with food stamps and Medicaid in order to avoid poverty – an indirect subsidy of Walmart. Trade treaties protect the assets and intellectual property of big corporations but not the jobs and wages of ordinary workers. At the same time, countervailing power is disappearing. Labor union membership has plummeted from a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today. Small banks have been absorbed into global financial behemoths. Small retailers don’t stand a chance against Walmart and Amazon. And the pay of top corporate executives continues to skyrocket, even as most peoples’ real wages drop and their job security vanishes. This system is not sustainable. We must get big money out of our democracy, end crony capitalism, and make our economy and democracy work for the many, not just the few. But change on this scale requires political mobilization. It won’t be easy. It has never been easy. As before, it will require the energies and commitments of large numbers of Americans. Which is why you shouldn’t listen to the “we-must-not-try” brigade. They’ve lost faith in the rest of us. We must try. We have no choice.
They’ll never give her a fair shake: Hillary coverage marred by rank misogyny
Searching for campaign infractions real and imagined, the media's etiquette police have been busy writing up Hillary Clinton for numerous violations lately. "She shouts," complained Washington Post editor Bob Woodward last week on MSNBC, deducting points for Clinton's speaking style. "There is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating, and I think that just jumps off the television screen." "Has nobody told her that the microphone works?" quipped Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, who led a lengthy discussion about Clinton's voice (the "tone issue"). Scarborough and his guests dissected Clinton's "screaming," and how she is supposedly being "feisty" and acting "not natural." Over on Fox, Geraldo Rivera suggested Clinton "scream[s]" because she "may be hard of hearing." CNBC's Larry Kudlow bemoaned her "shrieking." During last week's debate, Bob Cusack, editor of The Hill, tweeted, "When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses." (Cusack later deleted the tweet and apologized.) During a discussion on CNN about Clinton's volume, David Gergen stressed, "Hillary was so angry compared to Sanders." The New York Times' debate coverage pushed the same "angry" narrative, detailing "The ferocity of Mrs. Clinton's remarks," and how she appeared "tense and even angry at times," "particularly sensitive," and was "going on the offensive." (By contrast, her opponent "largely kept his cool.") Media message received: Clinton is loud and cantankerous! But it's not just awkward gender stereotypes that are in play these days. It's a much larger pattern of thumb-on-the-scale coverage and commentary. Just look at what seemed to be the press' insatiable appetite to frame Clinton's Iowa caucus win last week as an unnerving loss. Pundits also inaccurately claimed that she had to rely on a series of coin tosses to secure a victory. As I've noted before, these anti-Clinton guttural roars from the press have become predictable, cyclical events, where pundits and reporters wind themselves up with righteous indignation and shift into pile-on mode regardless of the facts on the ground. (And the GOP cheers.) The angry eruptions now arrive like clockwork, but that doesn't make them any less baffling. Nor does that make it any easier to figure out why the political press corps has decided to wage war on the Democratic frontrunner. (And publicly admit that they're doing it.) Sure, the usual nutty anti-Clinton stuff is tumbling off the right-wing media branches, with Fox Newssuggesting her campaign was nothing more than "bra burning," while other conservatives mocked her "grating" voice. But what's happening inside the confines of the mainstream media is more troubling. Rush Limbaughadvertising his insecurities about powerful women isn't exactly breaking news. Watching Beltway reporters and pundits reveal their creeping contempt for Clinton and wrapping it in condescension during a heated primary season is disturbing. And for some, it might trigger bouts of déjà vu. It was fitting that the extended examination of Clinton's "tone" last week unfolded on Morning Joe. As Think Progress noted, that show served as a hotbed for weird gender discussions when Clinton ran for president in 2008: "Scarborough often referenced the 'Clinton cackle' and another panelist cracked a joke that Clinton reminded everyone of their 'first wife in probate court.'" (The crack about probate court got lots of laughs from Scarborough's all-male panel at the time.) The toxic put-downs during the heated Democratic primary in 2008 were everywhere. (i.e. Candidate Clinton was a "hellish housewife.") At the time, Salon's Rebecca Traister detected among male pundits "a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise." And that was not an understatement. From Dr. Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University:
She was referred to as a "white bitch" on MSNBC and CNN; a blood-sucking "vampire" on Fox; the "wicked witch of the west" on CNN; and "everyone's first wife standing outside of probate court," a "she devil" and the castrating Lorena Bobbitt, all on MSNBC.That Clinton was unfairly roughed up by the press in 2008 isn't really a question for debate anymore. Even the man who campaigned against her, President Obama, recently noted that "there were times where I think the media probably was a little unfair to her" during their Democratic primary battle. I wonder if Obama thinks the press is once again being unfair with its primary coverage. For example, as the press continues to focus on the issue of Clinton's speaking fees as a private citizen, the New York Times reported, "The former secretary of state has for months struggled to justify how sharing her views on global affairs could possibly fetch $225,000 a pop from banks. " The former secretary of state can't justify her large speaking fee, even though former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, among others, have all pocketed large, six-figure speaking fees? Author Carl Bernstein said at CNN, "Now, you've got a situation with these transcripts, a little bit like Richard Nixon and his tapes that he stonewalled on and wouldn't release." Over the past week, media outlets have been trying to explain how Clinton's hard-fought win in Iowa wasn't really a win. During the run-up to the vote, Iowa was often described as a state that Clinton absolutely had to win (electorally, it wasn't). And so then when she won, what did some in the press do? They claimed she didn't really win Iowa, and if she did it was because of lucky coin tosses. False and false. "Even if he doesn't actually win, this feels like a win for @BernieSanders," tweeted Associated Press reporter Lisa Lerer the night of the Iowa vote, echoing a widespread media talking point. The New York Times repeatedly referred to her Iowa victory as a "tie." Note the contrast: In 2012, when Mitt Romney claimed to have won the Iowa Republican caucus by just eight votes, The New York Times announced unequivocally that Romney had, in fact, won Iowa. (Weeks later a recount concluded Rick Santorum won the caucus by 34 votes.) Why was Iowa dubbed a loss by so many for Clinton? Because Sanders "was nowhere a few months ago," as CNN's Wolf Blitzer put it the night of the vote. Actually, if you go back to last September and October, polls showed the Iowa race was in flux and occasionally veered within the margin of error. More recently, CNN's final Iowa poll before the caucus had Clinton trailing by eight points in that state. So the idea a close Iowa finish was "surprising," or constituted a Clinton collapse, doesn't add up. Meanwhile, did you notice that when the Clinton campaign accurately predicted that it had the votes to win the caucus, members of the press were quick to mock the move. Even after Iowa officials declared her the winner, the Clinton campaign was attacked as being "disingenuous" for saying she was the winner. And then there was the weird embrace of the coin toss story, which was fitting, since so much of the Clinton campaign coverage these days seems to revolve around a very simple premise: Heads she loses, tails she loses.Searching for campaign infractions real and imagined, the media's etiquette police have been busy writing up Hillary Clinton for numerous violations lately. "She shouts," complained Washington Post editor Bob Woodward last week on MSNBC, deducting points for Clinton's speaking style. "There is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating, and I think that just jumps off the television screen." "Has nobody told her that the microphone works?" quipped Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, who led a lengthy discussion about Clinton's voice (the "tone issue"). Scarborough and his guests dissected Clinton's "screaming," and how she is supposedly being "feisty" and acting "not natural." Over on Fox, Geraldo Rivera suggested Clinton "scream[s]" because she "may be hard of hearing." CNBC's Larry Kudlow bemoaned her "shrieking." During last week's debate, Bob Cusack, editor of The Hill, tweeted, "When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses." (Cusack later deleted the tweet and apologized.) During a discussion on CNN about Clinton's volume, David Gergen stressed, "Hillary was so angry compared to Sanders." The New York Times' debate coverage pushed the same "angry" narrative, detailing "The ferocity of Mrs. Clinton's remarks," and how she appeared "tense and even angry at times," "particularly sensitive," and was "going on the offensive." (By contrast, her opponent "largely kept his cool.") Media message received: Clinton is loud and cantankerous! But it's not just awkward gender stereotypes that are in play these days. It's a much larger pattern of thumb-on-the-scale coverage and commentary. Just look at what seemed to be the press' insatiable appetite to frame Clinton's Iowa caucus win last week as an unnerving loss. Pundits also inaccurately claimed that she had to rely on a series of coin tosses to secure a victory. As I've noted before, these anti-Clinton guttural roars from the press have become predictable, cyclical events, where pundits and reporters wind themselves up with righteous indignation and shift into pile-on mode regardless of the facts on the ground. (And the GOP cheers.) The angry eruptions now arrive like clockwork, but that doesn't make them any less baffling. Nor does that make it any easier to figure out why the political press corps has decided to wage war on the Democratic frontrunner. (And publicly admit that they're doing it.) Sure, the usual nutty anti-Clinton stuff is tumbling off the right-wing media branches, with Fox Newssuggesting her campaign was nothing more than "bra burning," while other conservatives mocked her "grating" voice. But what's happening inside the confines of the mainstream media is more troubling. Rush Limbaughadvertising his insecurities about powerful women isn't exactly breaking news. Watching Beltway reporters and pundits reveal their creeping contempt for Clinton and wrapping it in condescension during a heated primary season is disturbing. And for some, it might trigger bouts of déjà vu. It was fitting that the extended examination of Clinton's "tone" last week unfolded on Morning Joe. As Think Progress noted, that show served as a hotbed for weird gender discussions when Clinton ran for president in 2008: "Scarborough often referenced the 'Clinton cackle' and another panelist cracked a joke that Clinton reminded everyone of their 'first wife in probate court.'" (The crack about probate court got lots of laughs from Scarborough's all-male panel at the time.) The toxic put-downs during the heated Democratic primary in 2008 were everywhere. (i.e. Candidate Clinton was a "hellish housewife.") At the time, Salon's Rebecca Traister detected among male pundits "a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise." And that was not an understatement. From Dr. Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University:
She was referred to as a "white bitch" on MSNBC and CNN; a blood-sucking "vampire" on Fox; the "wicked witch of the west" on CNN; and "everyone's first wife standing outside of probate court," a "she devil" and the castrating Lorena Bobbitt, all on MSNBC.That Clinton was unfairly roughed up by the press in 2008 isn't really a question for debate anymore. Even the man who campaigned against her, President Obama, recently noted that "there were times where I think the media probably was a little unfair to her" during their Democratic primary battle. I wonder if Obama thinks the press is once again being unfair with its primary coverage. For example, as the press continues to focus on the issue of Clinton's speaking fees as a private citizen, the New York Times reported, "The former secretary of state has for months struggled to justify how sharing her views on global affairs could possibly fetch $225,000 a pop from banks. " The former secretary of state can't justify her large speaking fee, even though former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, among others, have all pocketed large, six-figure speaking fees? Author Carl Bernstein said at CNN, "Now, you've got a situation with these transcripts, a little bit like Richard Nixon and his tapes that he stonewalled on and wouldn't release." Over the past week, media outlets have been trying to explain how Clinton's hard-fought win in Iowa wasn't really a win. During the run-up to the vote, Iowa was often described as a state that Clinton absolutely had to win (electorally, it wasn't). And so then when she won, what did some in the press do? They claimed she didn't really win Iowa, and if she did it was because of lucky coin tosses. False and false. "Even if he doesn't actually win, this feels like a win for @BernieSanders," tweeted Associated Press reporter Lisa Lerer the night of the Iowa vote, echoing a widespread media talking point. The New York Times repeatedly referred to her Iowa victory as a "tie." Note the contrast: In 2012, when Mitt Romney claimed to have won the Iowa Republican caucus by just eight votes, The New York Times announced unequivocally that Romney had, in fact, won Iowa. (Weeks later a recount concluded Rick Santorum won the caucus by 34 votes.) Why was Iowa dubbed a loss by so many for Clinton? Because Sanders "was nowhere a few months ago," as CNN's Wolf Blitzer put it the night of the vote. Actually, if you go back to last September and October, polls showed the Iowa race was in flux and occasionally veered within the margin of error. More recently, CNN's final Iowa poll before the caucus had Clinton trailing by eight points in that state. So the idea a close Iowa finish was "surprising," or constituted a Clinton collapse, doesn't add up. Meanwhile, did you notice that when the Clinton campaign accurately predicted that it had the votes to win the caucus, members of the press were quick to mock the move. Even after Iowa officials declared her the winner, the Clinton campaign was attacked as being "disingenuous" for saying she was the winner. And then there was the weird embrace of the coin toss story, which was fitting, since so much of the Clinton campaign coverage these days seems to revolve around a very simple premise: Heads she loses, tails she loses.Searching for campaign infractions real and imagined, the media's etiquette police have been busy writing up Hillary Clinton for numerous violations lately. "She shouts," complained Washington Post editor Bob Woodward last week on MSNBC, deducting points for Clinton's speaking style. "There is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating, and I think that just jumps off the television screen." "Has nobody told her that the microphone works?" quipped Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, who led a lengthy discussion about Clinton's voice (the "tone issue"). Scarborough and his guests dissected Clinton's "screaming," and how she is supposedly being "feisty" and acting "not natural." Over on Fox, Geraldo Rivera suggested Clinton "scream[s]" because she "may be hard of hearing." CNBC's Larry Kudlow bemoaned her "shrieking." During last week's debate, Bob Cusack, editor of The Hill, tweeted, "When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses." (Cusack later deleted the tweet and apologized.) During a discussion on CNN about Clinton's volume, David Gergen stressed, "Hillary was so angry compared to Sanders." The New York Times' debate coverage pushed the same "angry" narrative, detailing "The ferocity of Mrs. Clinton's remarks," and how she appeared "tense and even angry at times," "particularly sensitive," and was "going on the offensive." (By contrast, her opponent "largely kept his cool.") Media message received: Clinton is loud and cantankerous! But it's not just awkward gender stereotypes that are in play these days. It's a much larger pattern of thumb-on-the-scale coverage and commentary. Just look at what seemed to be the press' insatiable appetite to frame Clinton's Iowa caucus win last week as an unnerving loss. Pundits also inaccurately claimed that she had to rely on a series of coin tosses to secure a victory. As I've noted before, these anti-Clinton guttural roars from the press have become predictable, cyclical events, where pundits and reporters wind themselves up with righteous indignation and shift into pile-on mode regardless of the facts on the ground. (And the GOP cheers.) The angry eruptions now arrive like clockwork, but that doesn't make them any less baffling. Nor does that make it any easier to figure out why the political press corps has decided to wage war on the Democratic frontrunner. (And publicly admit that they're doing it.) Sure, the usual nutty anti-Clinton stuff is tumbling off the right-wing media branches, with Fox Newssuggesting her campaign was nothing more than "bra burning," while other conservatives mocked her "grating" voice. But what's happening inside the confines of the mainstream media is more troubling. Rush Limbaughadvertising his insecurities about powerful women isn't exactly breaking news. Watching Beltway reporters and pundits reveal their creeping contempt for Clinton and wrapping it in condescension during a heated primary season is disturbing. And for some, it might trigger bouts of déjà vu. It was fitting that the extended examination of Clinton's "tone" last week unfolded on Morning Joe. As Think Progress noted, that show served as a hotbed for weird gender discussions when Clinton ran for president in 2008: "Scarborough often referenced the 'Clinton cackle' and another panelist cracked a joke that Clinton reminded everyone of their 'first wife in probate court.'" (The crack about probate court got lots of laughs from Scarborough's all-male panel at the time.) The toxic put-downs during the heated Democratic primary in 2008 were everywhere. (i.e. Candidate Clinton was a "hellish housewife.") At the time, Salon's Rebecca Traister detected among male pundits "a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise." And that was not an understatement. From Dr. Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University:
She was referred to as a "white bitch" on MSNBC and CNN; a blood-sucking "vampire" on Fox; the "wicked witch of the west" on CNN; and "everyone's first wife standing outside of probate court," a "she devil" and the castrating Lorena Bobbitt, all on MSNBC.That Clinton was unfairly roughed up by the press in 2008 isn't really a question for debate anymore. Even the man who campaigned against her, President Obama, recently noted that "there were times where I think the media probably was a little unfair to her" during their Democratic primary battle. I wonder if Obama thinks the press is once again being unfair with its primary coverage. For example, as the press continues to focus on the issue of Clinton's speaking fees as a private citizen, the New York Times reported, "The former secretary of state has for months struggled to justify how sharing her views on global affairs could possibly fetch $225,000 a pop from banks. " The former secretary of state can't justify her large speaking fee, even though former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, among others, have all pocketed large, six-figure speaking fees? Author Carl Bernstein said at CNN, "Now, you've got a situation with these transcripts, a little bit like Richard Nixon and his tapes that he stonewalled on and wouldn't release." Over the past week, media outlets have been trying to explain how Clinton's hard-fought win in Iowa wasn't really a win. During the run-up to the vote, Iowa was often described as a state that Clinton absolutely had to win (electorally, it wasn't). And so then when she won, what did some in the press do? They claimed she didn't really win Iowa, and if she did it was because of lucky coin tosses. False and false. "Even if he doesn't actually win, this feels like a win for @BernieSanders," tweeted Associated Press reporter Lisa Lerer the night of the Iowa vote, echoing a widespread media talking point. The New York Times repeatedly referred to her Iowa victory as a "tie." Note the contrast: In 2012, when Mitt Romney claimed to have won the Iowa Republican caucus by just eight votes, The New York Times announced unequivocally that Romney had, in fact, won Iowa. (Weeks later a recount concluded Rick Santorum won the caucus by 34 votes.) Why was Iowa dubbed a loss by so many for Clinton? Because Sanders "was nowhere a few months ago," as CNN's Wolf Blitzer put it the night of the vote. Actually, if you go back to last September and October, polls showed the Iowa race was in flux and occasionally veered within the margin of error. More recently, CNN's final Iowa poll before the caucus had Clinton trailing by eight points in that state. So the idea a close Iowa finish was "surprising," or constituted a Clinton collapse, doesn't add up. Meanwhile, did you notice that when the Clinton campaign accurately predicted that it had the votes to win the caucus, members of the press were quick to mock the move. Even after Iowa officials declared her the winner, the Clinton campaign was attacked as being "disingenuous" for saying she was the winner. And then there was the weird embrace of the coin toss story, which was fitting, since so much of the Clinton campaign coverage these days seems to revolve around a very simple premise: Heads she loses, tails she loses.
Paul Krugman has it backwards: Hillary supporters are the ones in a fantasy world
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman can’t stand that people are irrational; that working-class conservatives are duped into voting against their own economic interests. In a recent New York Times editorial called "How Change Happens," Krugman complained that liberal Bernie Sanders supporters are hopelessly waiting for the “better angels” in people to rise up and radically change our corrupt institutions. Real change, he argues, requires rational pragmatism and compromise. As a psychotherapist who writes about politics, I have a different issue: I can’t believe Krugman is bewildered by the fact that the quality and quantity of our political engagement is strongly shaped by powerful unconscious needs and fears that are relatively immune to rational argument. Forgetting for a moment that, as others have pointed out, he misrepresents Sanders’ view of change. Krugman’s own view reflects a wishful fantasy that fundamental social change results from incremental victories that reflect rational compromises between competing interests. But the fundamental issue facing progressives today is not one negotiated by policy wonks; it is how we can build healthy institutions that become a base for a radical social movement. The issue is how do we engage the passions of millions of Americans who view such a movement as connecting to their unrequited desires and unarticulated fears? To do so, we have to at least start with an accurate view of human motivation; that is, our picture of what people really need and fear, and therefore, how the institutions we build and the ideology we promote speak to these feelings at the deepest possible level. For example, people in our society are often isolated and lonely. People need a feeling of connectedness as much as they need economic justice. How does our “message” offer people a sense of community? (Sanders’ enthusiastic calls for a “political revolution” seek to do just that, while Clinton hangs her appeal on flat and technocratic notions of “competence.”) The right has certainly understood people’s frustrated needs for connectedness, although their offer of “community” is based in large part of demonizing some other (immigrants, gays, welfare recipients, etc.). Or consider the notion Krugman gently mocks that too many progressives are trying to conjure up the better angels of America’s nature. In fact, people do have a deep emotional longing for meaning and purpose. We want our better angels to be awakened and we want to see the same in others. All one has to do to see this need awakened is to note how communities react with altruistic and high-minded generosity in the wake of natural or man-made disasters. Politicians act when they are forced to or bribed to act. The compromises that so often result are due to the net effect of this play of forces. The job of progressives is to strengthen our side, increase our power, by engaging and inspiring people out of their passivity, not just by offering up reasonable policy alternatives but by inspiring them to be bigger and better than they typically see themselves. That’s what Obama did in 2008, and it’s what Sanders is doing now. Sanders’ appeal isn’t reducible to what Krugman calls “transformational rhetoric,” but is, instead, an antidote to the cynicism so prevalent today, a malignant despair that doesn’t arise from the stupidity of conservatives or the naïve idealism of progressives. Cynicism is the belief that the way things are is the way they’re supposed to be. It can’t be combatted simply by appeals to reason, but rather, by speaking to the hearts of our constituents, stimulating (not belittling) their belief in better angels and resonating with their needs for love, recognition, agency, community, and meaning. These apparently softer needs are every bit as powerful as rational economic self-interest or left-brain logic. Paul Krugman is the leading public intellectual in America today. He stands head and shoulders above the dishonest and small-minded wonks and politicians on the right. When he crosses swords with them, we are the better for it. But if he wants to talk about how change occurs and about political compromise, he needs to understand that Roosevelt was pushed to the left by labor, LBJ by the civil rights movement, Nixon by the anti-war movement, and the Supreme Court by the LGBT movement for same-sex marriage. Radical social change can’t be understood as the result of technical policy compromises between rational actors, but rather as the result of social movements that acquire power by engaging the whole person—including the more intimate regions of the heart and soul, as well as the parts in which reason resides. Contrary to Krugman’s assertion, we will need those "better angels of our nature” in order to win the power needed to be pragmatic from a position of strength. Otherwise, pragmatism for its own sake leaves us disengaged and makes politics seem irrelevant, rather than a place where our deepest needs can be expressed and fulfilled.
February 8, 2016
Iraqi woman charged with role in Kayla Mueller’s death
WASHINGTON (AP) — The wife of a senior Islamic State leader who was killed in a U.S. raid last year has been charged in federal court with holding American Kayla Mueller hostage and with contributing to the aid worker's death, the Justice Department says.
Nisreen Assad Ibrahim Bahar, also known as Umm Sayyaf, admitted after her capture last May that she and her husband kept Mueller captive along with several other young female hostages, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case. U.S. officials have said that while in custody, Mueller was repeatedly forced to have sex with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State group
The criminal complaint, filed by federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, charges Umm Sayyaf with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terror organization, resulting in death.
The case was brought one year after Mueller was confirmed dead by her family and the Obama administration, though it's not clear when or if Umm Sayyaf will be brought to the U.S. to stand trial.
The 25-year-old Iraqi woman, who was captured last year, is currently in Iraqi custody and facing prosecution there. Her husband, Abu Sayyaf, a former Islamic State minister for oil and gas, was killed last May in a Delta Force raid of his compound.
"We fully support the Iraqi prosecution of Sayyaf and will continue to work with the authorities there to pursue our shared goal of holding Sayyaf accountable for her crimes," Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, head of the Justice Department's national security division, said in a statement.
"At the same time, these charges reflect that the U.S. justice system remains a powerful tool to bring to bear against those who harm our citizens abroad. We will continue to pursue justice for Kayla and for all American victims of terrorism," he added.
Mueller, from Prescott, Arizona, was taken hostage with her boyfriend, Omar Alkhani, in August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria, where he had been hired to fix the Internet service for the hospital. Mueller had begged him to let her tag along because she wanted to do relief work in the war-ravaged country. Alkhani was released after two months, having been beaten.
Mueller was transferred in September 2014 along with two Kurdish women of Yazidi descent from an Islamic State prison to the Sayyafs, according to the FBI affidavit, which says the couple at times handcuffed the captives, kept them in locked rooms, dictated orders about their activities and movements and showed them violent Islamic State propaganda videos.
After her capture last year, the affidavit says, Umm Sayyaf admitted she was responsible for Mueller's captivity while her husband traveled for Islamic State business.
She said that al-Baghdadi would occasionally stay at her home and that he "owned" Mueller during those visits, which the FBI says was akin to slavery.
The Justice Department complaint echoes earlier assertions from U.S. intelligence officials, who had told Mueller's family that their daughter was repeatedly forced to have sex with al-Baghdadi.
"The defendant knew how Ms. Mueller was treated by Baghdadi when Ms. Mueller was held against her will in the defendant's home," the affidavit states.
A Yazidi teenager who was held with Mueller and escaped in October 2014 said al-Baghdadi took Mueller as a "wife," repeatedly raping her when he visited. The 14-year-old Yazidi girl made her way to Iraqi Kurdistan, where she talked to U.S. commandos in November 2014. Intelligence agencies corroborated her account and American officials passed it on to Mueller's parents in June 2015.
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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
Could Jeb-mentum be real?: The GOP’s “low-energy” candidate veers left — and New Hampshire loves it
SALEM, N.H. — During four days in New Hampshire, I have attended only two events that did not feel as if they were primarily constructed as media spectacles, and as if they were using actual citizens or prospective voters mostly as props or design elements. One of those was the big Bernie Sanders rally on Sunday afternoon in Portsmouth, where a boisterous crowd of more than 1,200 crammed into a community college gym to bask in the Bern. The other was a Jeb Bush town-hall meeting, held in this outer Boston suburb at 10 o’clock in the morning. I’m not remotely kidding. As much as this sounds like the kind of campaign-trail wishcasting you’ve read over and over in the New York Times, Jeb has Jeb-mentum. There is a Jeb-aissance happening on the ground in the Granite State. Jeb! Is! Surging! Now, I want to caution myself, and you, about the nature of this perception. Four days is more than enough to get swept up in the media epistemology of New Hampshire, in which events that don’t much matter are ascribed immense significance and those of us covering the campaign come to believe not just that we understand what is happening but that we are shaping or deciding the outcome. Although the whole New Hampshire ritual feels antiquated and this state of 1.3 million people (more than 90 percent of them white) is certainly not representative of the country as a whole, the famously ornery character of the New Hampshire voter ensures that such delusions are almost always wrong. What I can tell you for sure is that more than 600 people showed up at the middle school on Salem’s main drag on Sunday morning, at an hour when respectable Republicans ought to be in church, and a whole lot more were outside peering through the doors. It was a distinctly different demographic from the audiences that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz get here, conspicuously middle-class to affluent and with a general mood closer to bafflement than anger. They came to see a guy who has been repeatedly mocked and belittled by the Republican frontrunner and the media since the beginning of this electoral season, the scion of a political dynasty who has spent tens of millions of dollars with no discernible results and who barely registered in the Iowa caucuses. They came to see the son and brother of former presidents argue for a return to what he calls “regular-order democracy,” and they ate it up. John Kasich of Ohio, the other moderate afterthought in the GOP race, is also drawing big crowds here, although I haven’t seen him in action. Even the people who are good at parsing statistics and polling data have no idea what will happen here on Tuesday, but it wouldn’t take much for Bush and Kasich to outperform expectations well enough to stay in the race. (By finishing ahead of Ted Cruz, for example, and about even with Marco Rubio.) But the question of whether Bush can still win is arguably less important than the fact that he has identified a political and cultural vacuum abandoned by the rest of the GOP, and sought to fill it. After repeatedly being confounded by the more-conservative-than-thou politics of the Republican race, Bush has made the counterintuitive decision (at least for now) to run to the left of his entire party, with the possible exception of Kasich. That’s a highly relative term in 2016, to be sure. But in terms of the policy positions I heard him talk about on Sunday morning, the differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton on a broad range of issues are more a matter of tone than substance. He said he was done badmouthing Barack Obama, and that Republicans could never win unless they convince voters they care about the poor and the disadvantaged. “I don’t think liberals are bad people,” he said, a sentiment you will not hear from Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. More extraordinary still, Bush agreed with a questioner that climate change was a genuine threat to human society and said that “man has to have some influence” in that process. (That got a heartfelt round of applause.) He answered a young girl’s question about immigration by observing that it was more of a political issue than a real economic concern, since there has been a net outflow of undocumented migrants back to Mexico in recent years. (Then he introduced us to his Mexican-born wife, Columba, and told the admittedly charming story of meeting her in her hometown in Guanajuato.) He did not want to agree with one woman’s observation that Obamacare had provided benefits to middle-class families, but ultimately admitted that his own version of “repeal and replace” would incorporate some of its elements, such as guaranteed coverage for preexisting conditions. As far as Republican apostasy goes, that’s a deadly trifecta, or at least it would be for a candidate who had anything left to lose. After absorbing months of Trumpian mockery, Jeb has essentially embraced it and reinvigorated himself as a tree-hugging climate wimp who literally loves Mexicans and has gone squishy on Obama, who according to the other candidates is either the second coming of Stalin or a bored, golf-playing Muslim princeling who can’t be bothered with governing. What’s next? Is Jeb gonna Hot Tub Time Machine himself all the way back to his dad’s era, when many Republicans were pro-choice and pro-immigration and favored some degree of gun control? In political terms he might as well, because he lost the Republican primary voters who are obsessed about that stuff a long time ago. But even in this zany dice-rolling mode, no, I don’t think he’ll go there. Whether this newly moderate Jeb 4.0 can still be a factor in the GOP race remains to be seen. (On Monday morning Bush told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he likes campaigning in New Hampshire because “people actually let you complete a sentence in the English language,” which is not what you say if you imagine going back to Iowa for a general-election campaign.) To clarify what I said earlier, I’m not claiming there are no important political differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, or that they would be interchangeable as president. Jeb wants to “voucherize” public education, for instance, and you won’t catch him talking about reregulating Wall Street, even in vague Clintonite terms. But the moment Jeb is capturing in the New Hampshire snows is real, and reflects two interrelated phenomena. Many middle-class Americans who consider themselves moderate or conservative, first of all, feel alienated from the hateful and belligerent tone of the Republican campaign. Secondly, despite the populist upsurge that has destabilized both major parties, a whole lot of Americans — probably a majority — actually prefer the stable “regular-order democracy” represented by the Bush and Clinton dynasties. Even beyond that, most people simply do not consider politics an apocalyptic, life-or-death affair, and feel disoriented by those who do. I'm not saying those are good things, or that they are immutable truths that can never change. But any theory of politics or society that ignores the conundrum of the non-discontented middle is inherently flawed. I met a 60-ish local couple named Ken and Donna at the Bush rally, polite but taciturn New England people out of some low-key realistic novel who preferred I not use their last name. They were both wearing the “Jeb!” buttons handed out at the door, but he might not get either of their votes. Donna said she had always been a conservative Republican and now felt torn between Bush and Kasich. None of the other candidates was an option. “What I’m looking for, first and foremost, is some degree of sanity and normalcy,” she said. Trump’s focus on immigrants and Muslims makes her uncomfortable. “I don’t like that at all,” she said. “It doesn’t make me feel good about his judgment.” Ken said he definitely wasn’t voting for Bush, and after some prodding admitted that he was a liberal Democrat who “just got dragged along to see the show.” They had been married more than 30 years and raised adult children, so the fact that they held different political views and were likely to vote for different candidates was nothing new. They listened attentively to Bush’s answers and applauded the ones they liked. On their way out I asked Donna how Bush had done. “He did good. He did well.” Was she inclined to vote for him? She would wait till Monday to make her final decision. Ken leaned over the railing of the press enclosure and said, “He seems like a good man. But I’m voting for Bernie.” Then he took his wife’s arm and headed out into the brilliant winter sunshine, just in time for lunch.SALEM, N.H. — During four days in New Hampshire, I have attended only two events that did not feel as if they were primarily constructed as media spectacles, and as if they were using actual citizens or prospective voters mostly as props or design elements. One of those was the big Bernie Sanders rally on Sunday afternoon in Portsmouth, where a boisterous crowd of more than 1,200 crammed into a community college gym to bask in the Bern. The other was a Jeb Bush town-hall meeting, held in this outer Boston suburb at 10 o’clock in the morning. I’m not remotely kidding. As much as this sounds like the kind of campaign-trail wishcasting you’ve read over and over in the New York Times, Jeb has Jeb-mentum. There is a Jeb-aissance happening on the ground in the Granite State. Jeb! Is! Surging! Now, I want to caution myself, and you, about the nature of this perception. Four days is more than enough to get swept up in the media epistemology of New Hampshire, in which events that don’t much matter are ascribed immense significance and those of us covering the campaign come to believe not just that we understand what is happening but that we are shaping or deciding the outcome. Although the whole New Hampshire ritual feels antiquated and this state of 1.3 million people (more than 90 percent of them white) is certainly not representative of the country as a whole, the famously ornery character of the New Hampshire voter ensures that such delusions are almost always wrong. What I can tell you for sure is that more than 600 people showed up at the middle school on Salem’s main drag on Sunday morning, at an hour when respectable Republicans ought to be in church, and a whole lot more were outside peering through the doors. It was a distinctly different demographic from the audiences that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz get here, conspicuously middle-class to affluent and with a general mood closer to bafflement than anger. They came to see a guy who has been repeatedly mocked and belittled by the Republican frontrunner and the media since the beginning of this electoral season, the scion of a political dynasty who has spent tens of millions of dollars with no discernible results and who barely registered in the Iowa caucuses. They came to see the son and brother of former presidents argue for a return to what he calls “regular-order democracy,” and they ate it up. John Kasich of Ohio, the other moderate afterthought in the GOP race, is also drawing big crowds here, although I haven’t seen him in action. Even the people who are good at parsing statistics and polling data have no idea what will happen here on Tuesday, but it wouldn’t take much for Bush and Kasich to outperform expectations well enough to stay in the race. (By finishing ahead of Ted Cruz, for example, and about even with Marco Rubio.) But the question of whether Bush can still win is arguably less important than the fact that he has identified a political and cultural vacuum abandoned by the rest of the GOP, and sought to fill it. After repeatedly being confounded by the more-conservative-than-thou politics of the Republican race, Bush has made the counterintuitive decision (at least for now) to run to the left of his entire party, with the possible exception of Kasich. That’s a highly relative term in 2016, to be sure. But in terms of the policy positions I heard him talk about on Sunday morning, the differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton on a broad range of issues are more a matter of tone than substance. He said he was done badmouthing Barack Obama, and that Republicans could never win unless they convince voters they care about the poor and the disadvantaged. “I don’t think liberals are bad people,” he said, a sentiment you will not hear from Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. More extraordinary still, Bush agreed with a questioner that climate change was a genuine threat to human society and said that “man has to have some influence” in that process. (That got a heartfelt round of applause.) He answered a young girl’s question about immigration by observing that it was more of a political issue than a real economic concern, since there has been a net outflow of undocumented migrants back to Mexico in recent years. (Then he introduced us to his Mexican-born wife, Columba, and told the admittedly charming story of meeting her in her hometown in Guanajuato.) He did not want to agree with one woman’s observation that Obamacare had provided benefits to middle-class families, but ultimately admitted that his own version of “repeal and replace” would incorporate some of its elements, such as guaranteed coverage for preexisting conditions. As far as Republican apostasy goes, that’s a deadly trifecta, or at least it would be for a candidate who had anything left to lose. After absorbing months of Trumpian mockery, Jeb has essentially embraced it and reinvigorated himself as a tree-hugging climate wimp who literally loves Mexicans and has gone squishy on Obama, who according to the other candidates is either the second coming of Stalin or a bored, golf-playing Muslim princeling who can’t be bothered with governing. What’s next? Is Jeb gonna Hot Tub Time Machine himself all the way back to his dad’s era, when many Republicans were pro-choice and pro-immigration and favored some degree of gun control? In political terms he might as well, because he lost the Republican primary voters who are obsessed about that stuff a long time ago. But even in this zany dice-rolling mode, no, I don’t think he’ll go there. Whether this newly moderate Jeb 4.0 can still be a factor in the GOP race remains to be seen. (On Monday morning Bush told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he likes campaigning in New Hampshire because “people actually let you complete a sentence in the English language,” which is not what you say if you imagine going back to Iowa for a general-election campaign.) To clarify what I said earlier, I’m not claiming there are no important political differences between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, or that they would be interchangeable as president. Jeb wants to “voucherize” public education, for instance, and you won’t catch him talking about reregulating Wall Street, even in vague Clintonite terms. But the moment Jeb is capturing in the New Hampshire snows is real, and reflects two interrelated phenomena. Many middle-class Americans who consider themselves moderate or conservative, first of all, feel alienated from the hateful and belligerent tone of the Republican campaign. Secondly, despite the populist upsurge that has destabilized both major parties, a whole lot of Americans — probably a majority — actually prefer the stable “regular-order democracy” represented by the Bush and Clinton dynasties. Even beyond that, most people simply do not consider politics an apocalyptic, life-or-death affair, and feel disoriented by those who do. I'm not saying those are good things, or that they are immutable truths that can never change. But any theory of politics or society that ignores the conundrum of the non-discontented middle is inherently flawed. I met a 60-ish local couple named Ken and Donna at the Bush rally, polite but taciturn New England people out of some low-key realistic novel who preferred I not use their last name. They were both wearing the “Jeb!” buttons handed out at the door, but he might not get either of their votes. Donna said she had always been a conservative Republican and now felt torn between Bush and Kasich. None of the other candidates was an option. “What I’m looking for, first and foremost, is some degree of sanity and normalcy,” she said. Trump’s focus on immigrants and Muslims makes her uncomfortable. “I don’t like that at all,” she said. “It doesn’t make me feel good about his judgment.” Ken said he definitely wasn’t voting for Bush, and after some prodding admitted that he was a liberal Democrat who “just got dragged along to see the show.” They had been married more than 30 years and raised adult children, so the fact that they held different political views and were likely to vote for different candidates was nothing new. They listened attentively to Bush’s answers and applauded the ones they liked. On their way out I asked Donna how Bush had done. “He did good. He did well.” Was she inclined to vote for him? She would wait till Monday to make her final decision. Ken leaned over the railing of the press enclosure and said, “He seems like a good man. But I’m voting for Bernie.” Then he took his wife’s arm and headed out into the brilliant winter sunshine, just in time for lunch.
O.J.’s yes men and the celebrity echo chamber problem: “People come to believe that their version of the truth is correct”
Celebrities and politicians have a number of things in common. Among other things, they often surround themselves with people who agree with them: Whether O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” or Donald Trump’s legion of admirers, famous people often get very heavy praise from the people they run with. You can see it in the presidential debates, you can see it in starstruck characters in “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” You can see it every time Trump yells about the people who “love me.” Sometimes it leads to confidence. Sometimes excessive praise from sycophants changes them and produces monsters of narcissism. How does it happen, and what are the consequences? How do yes men collect around a famous or anonymous person? Do women collect flatterers as often as men do? Salon spoke to clinical psychologist Art Markman, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. What does it do to the human ego when our self-image is reinforced? There are a lot of people who are narcissists, who surround themselves with people who are only going to reinforce their beliefs about themselves. Some of this is a mutually reinforcing thing: If you’re the kind of person who can’t tolerate people with different opinions from you, you eliminate those people from your life. The more power you have, the more power you have to influence that environment. We don’t really know what happened in 1994, but revisiting the O.J. Simpson murder trial reminds me what a weird kind of hero worship collected around him, from Kato to his fans to his “dream team.” What happens when a celebrity like Simpson has yes-men all around him? When anyone – O.J. included -- is surrounded by people who reinforce a story being told, that story comes to have a reality, regardless of the truth. People come to believe that their version of the truth is correct or that their actions were justified based on the repeated support they get from the people surrounding them. Even in cases in which someone actually committed a crime, they may ultimately come to believe in their innocence (or at least in the justification of their actions) when surrounded by others who agree with them. So, someone wants to be surrounded by people who agree with them, they go out and do it, and it makes them more absorbed into their own egos? One of the things we know about human communication is that to communicate, you have to think about the world the way they do, even if you disagree, because you need to be able to respond to them. And one of the things that does is that people exit conversations thinking more similarly than they did when they entered the conversation. So if you engage in a conversation you disagree with, you are forced to grapple with and represent the world the way they do. If you only engage with people who agree with you, you create an echo chamber. It pushes you toward more polarized views. Social media is often called an echo chamber. Is that fair? That has to do with the way we consume social media. Most of us are most comfortable engaging with people we agree with. There are so many viewpoints, and we pick and choose which one we choose to engage with. But you could choose to engage with people you agree with, and can find common ground with them and even moderate your views. Personally I was in a situation where I found myself with someone who disagreed with me [on handguns]. We ended up having a somewhat uncomfortable lunch, followed by our writing an Op-Ed piece together in which we said: We sit on opposite sides of the fence; here are a few things we agree on. If you open yourself up to people you believe you disagree with on the surface, you find you often moderate the way you talk about things. Does this work out differently for women? Do they surround themselves with sycophants as often? I think that almost anyone who ends up in fame ends up surrounded by people who agree with them. A lot of it has to do with personality: There are plenty of narcissists who are men, and plenty who are women. One of the things is that to control your environment you need both the narcissistic tendency and you need to have that power. All things being equal, we’re still in a society where men have more power than women, so we’re more likely to see this in men. There are some tendencies of women to be more interdependent in their self-concept. If you ask people to come up with 20 things about themselves, on average, men tend to answer that question with independent descriptions. Like, “I am smart,” “I am tall,” “I am powerful.” Women tend to be more relational —“I am a colleague,” “I am a friend” — women tend to engage the relationship between the person and the world. The more that you think of that relationship between yourself and others, the more likely you are to open up to a variety of opinions rather than assuming that your own capacities ought to govern what people think. Besides celebrities and inflexible politicians, who else surrounds themselves with yes men? Who else tends to be narcissistic? CEOs maybe? People who seek out leadership roles tend to have some qualities of narcissism. Part of being narcissistic is having a high value of your own opinion and thinking that people should listen to you. Some of those qualities are not bad ones. They become bad qualities when you absolutely refuse to be challenged – when your self-concept is being torn down by dissent. But yeah, people who engage in business leadership do that. There’s a caricature to that: Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” has a business leader in an office building shouting out things that are supportive. We see that kind of behavior. We know it’s valuable to have people who are willing to disagree and force you to be really certain of the bases of your decision. What’s the best balance to have? I think that everyone needs to have at least one or two trusted friends or advisers who are willing to hold your assumptions up to the light. And engage in those kinds of difficult conversations routinely. If you find yourself primarily with people you agree with, that’s time to go out looking for some people who are willing to disagree with you.
Don’t mourn “The Good Wife”: A great show should be allowed to go out with its head held high
Network TV’s best—and most criminally underrated—show will bang its last gavel at the end of this season. In an unexpected move, CBS announced during this Sunday’s Super Bowl that it would be pulling the plug on “The Good Wife” after seven acclaimed seasons. In a 30-second spot, the network promised “the biggest ‘Good Wife’ surprise yet” for the twisty legal drama: “This is the final season. The final nine episodes begin next Sunday.” Despite the bold proclamation, the cancellation was hardly unexpected. Showrunners Robert and Michelle King previously confirmed that they would be departing after the current season to work on a new show for CBS—”Braindead,” a Beltway satire about aliens who come to earth and start feasting on the brains of D.C. politicians. There was talk that because “The Good Wife” remains the network’s critical darling—winning five Emmys throughout its run—that CBS would find a way to continue on without the Kings. It’s not unheard of: “The Walking Dead” has replaced its showrunners twice and still scores over 15 million viewers a week. But as the Washington Post’s Emily Yahr points out, the result was more likely to be akin to the misbegotten final season of “Gilmore Girls.” Following a contract dispute during the sixth season, the CW dramedy’s creative team—showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Dan Sherman, who served as the executive producer—left the show. “When the Palladinos left, it simply wasn’t the same—no one could capture the Gilmore universe like Sherman-Palladino did,” Yahr writes. “[M]any viewers refuse to even watch the last season under showrunner David Rosenthal.” If Yahr warns that “The Good Wife” without the Kings will lack their distinctive auteur stamp—and “feel like a completely different program”—there are other reasons to bow out after the seventh season. Seven tends to be a magic number for veteran programs looking to end their runs: In addition to “Gilmore Girls,” “Mad Men,” “The West Wing,” “Buffy,” “The Golden Girls,” and “Futurama,” all wrapped in seven seasons, as did every “Star Trek” spinoff. Shows like “Pretty Little Liars” and “Game of Thrones” will likely follow in their footsteps—even though “GOT” co-creator D.B. Weiss also left the door open for an eighth season. HBO reportedly wants “Game of Thrones” to last forever, but there are numerous reasons to follow TV’s “Rule of Seven.” The first comes down to the simplest explanation of all—money. Although television shows only need 100 episodes to be eligible for syndication, Reddit user zwonker explains that shows that amass seven seasons are uniquely positioned to make bank:
“As it happens, seven seasons is the sweet spot for running reruns of a show on daytime TV. That allows them to show a different episode Monday-Friday for long enough that when they restart, it won't seem too repetitive. “The suits in charge of paying the production costs will therefore push for seven seasons, and usually they have the clout to get it, even if the writers/actors/showrunner feel the show can only support six seasons properly, or that the show needs an eighth season. “From a monetary perspective, the amount of profit per dollar spent goes down in seasons eight and beyond, and hasn't yet reached maximum potential until after season six.”That decline in profitability following long-running programs’ seventh seasons has to do with contract issues. When actors sign onto a television show, their contracts usually only cover seven-season runs, meaning that if the show continues on, they will have to be renegotiated. If a show is successful enough for executives consider that proposition (see: a ratings-smash like “M*A*S*H”), the actors are likely to ask for hefty pay raises. Unless the network is pulling in “Friends”-size numbers (whose Season 7 finale pulled in 30 million viewers), it simply doesn’t make financial sense. In addition, it’s extraordinarily difficult to maintain consistent quality throughout a lengthy run. There are exceptions to the rule: “Cheers” ran 11 seasons without ever jumping the shark. However, those cases are extremely rare. Far more common are shows like “Weeds,” “The Office,” “Smallville,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “Dexter,” “Supernatural” and “Bones,” each of which continued on well past its expiration date. “Dexter” famously ended its eighth season by having its titular killer sail off to be a lumberjack, while “HIMYM” finally introduced “The Mother” just to immediately kill her off and get Ted back together with Robin. Shakespeare once wrote that brevity is the soul of wit, but it can also be a boon to veteran shows—in order to prevent fatigue in the writers’ room. “The Good Wife” has never quite recovered from losing Will Gardner (Josh Charles) and Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi) in Seasons five and six—two of the show’s most compelling characters. Last season featured a state’s attorney campaign plotline widely considered by fans to be the worst thing the show’s ever done (Yahr calls it the “Luke’s daughter” of “The Good Wife,” to go back to "Gilmore Girls" for a second), while the show shoehorned in Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo) this season as a makeshift Kalinda replacement. If “The Good Wife” peaked in season 5, when Alicia’s (Julianna Margulies) firing from Lockhart/Gardner rejuvenated an aging show, setting an end date helps the show end on a relative high note, rather than becoming a shell of the show fans once loved. Many critically acclaimed shows barely last a few seasons before they are axed by a ratings-starved network, but at this point, what has “The Good Wife” gotten to say about moral and systemic corruption that it hasn’t already gotten a chance to say? As difficult as it might be to say goodbye to a show fans have loved for the better part of a decade, what’s the point of continuing on? Should it be any consolation to grieving superfans, Robert and Michelle King say that they always intended “The Good Wife” to run for seven seasons—following a season when Alicia is forced to decide between a loveless P.R. marriage to her husband, Peter (Chris Noth), and her budding attraction to Jason, the sexy investigator played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Can Alicia finally choose to be happy? Fans should be thankful they only have to wait nine more episodes to find out.
