… so do yourself a favor, check out this brewing company website, but the first time, click that you aren’t 21. And if you’re a beer fan, maybe you could reward them financially for their awesomeness.
Freddie deBoer wrote for Balloon juice from 2011-12.
reality check: state legislator recall election history
From the “this is excellent news for Republicans!” file, early indications are that the media are going to spin Wisconsin as a big failure for Democrats and their base. This is about as surprising as Mark Halperin saying something stupid, so I’m not shocked, but to inject a little reality into the discussion– here is a website that contains a list of recall elections in state legislatures. There have only been twenty attempts in American history. Recalling state legislators is really, really rare. Getting two in one night, in a rebuke of a governor who won by a 6 point margin less than a year ago, is a big deal. Yes, we all wanted the Democrats to get the majority, and yes, two Democrats stand a chance of being recalled and making it a wash. But to cast this as this major disappointment is– well, it’s the media doing what the media does. I genuinely think every reporter at Politico has some version of “this is excellent news for Republicans” saved as an AutoText.
The liberal media knows that Everything is Always Good for Republicans, because of their dastardly liberal bias.
Update: Some commenters are making fair points about reasons to be discouraged by these results. A point I meant to make here: sure, there is room for debate in this instance. But there isn’t a national forum for that debate in our media. Since everything is always good for Republicans and bad for Democrats in the Beltway media, parsing these kinds of distinctions is impossible. If Politico was ever willing to call any close issue a win for Democrats, I could take Politico more seriously when it runs its same old “good for the GOP!” story. But they aren’t willing to do that, the media in general isn’t willing to do that, and so there’s no space to look at the issue openly. Nor is there any context presented about how very rare recalling state legislators really is.
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liberals elected Obama, and they can fix the country too
Round about late 2004 or early 2005, when things seemed bleakest, a friend of mine got an “Obama ’08” sticker. You might not remember, but those were, in fact, novelty stickers at the time. The idea that Obama might run in ’08 was a sort of earnest dream, a sort of sighing, “if only” kind of a dream.
And a liberal dream, if you’d care to remember. I am reading daily about how horrid liberals are to criticize Obama, and I want to laugh. When Andrew Sullivan launches into another screed against liberal critics, in defense of Barack Obama, I want to ask him if he’s really forgotten who laid so much of the groundwork for Obama’s election. Who was Barack Obama’s key constituency? Are people who are now talking about the responsibility of the moderates and centrists really going to pretend that Obama was the moderate presidential candidate in ’08? Can three years really explain that kind of poor memory? I will remind you that the mainstream media initially treated Obama as a joke, and one of their favorite axes to grind against him was that he was the favored constituency of the looney left. In those crucial early days, when people in power refused to take his candidacy seriously, it was the left that organized, the left that donated money, the left that went door to door, the left that wore t-shirts and buttons. It was the enthusiasm factor that made a huge difference, the enthusiasm of liberals. Hilary voters proclaimed endlessly that Obama was too liberal to elect, that the sensible response to the Bush presidency was to nominate the more moderate and experienced candidate. To now turn around and make Barack Obama out to be some centrist hero is a joke. It takes a special kind of ingratitude to blame people for criticizing your hero while ignoring the fact that they did such a huge amount of work to put him in office in the first place.
liberals elected Obama, and they can fix the country tooPost + Comments (510)
Christian compassion
Here’s Catholic conservative Tim Carney showing that Christian compassion we all know and love, regarding the financial, emotional, and family devastation that is having your home foreclosed on:
Remember that part in the bible? It’s like my favorite verse: “Thou shalt increase human suffering if it helps your cousin make money.” I think it’s from Acts. But Freddie, you say, he’s just telling a joke. I’m sure that’s not his primary objection to not helping American families deal with the consequences of the greed and corruption of banks that created the mortgage crisis. Aside from the questionable Christianity of joking about a crisis that is devastating the American family, sure. It’s just that the rest of his rationale for opposing homeowner assistance is also, for all intents and purposes, a joke.
Enjoy the sabbath, everybody! Keep it holy.
in search of concrete teaching statistics
Check out this Twitter exchange from Matt Yglesias.
Let’s answer snark with substance.
in search of concrete teaching statisticsPost + Comments (135)
credit where due
I’ve been criticized for failing to recognize the liberal victories of the Obama administration, and it’s a well-taken criticism. Here’s a good piece from NPR that highlights the Obama administration’s considerable and righteous efforts to make the American federal judiciary a more diverse institution. A justice system can only remain truly fair and impartial if it is made up of professionals who accurately reflect the composition of the nation. The Obama administration has to be commended for making this a priority.
Of course, there’s a Republican dicknose concern trolling.
“The Obama administration doesn’t have a coherent judicial philosophy so it’s not surprising that it’s falling back on diversity, which I think it sees among other things as appealing to its various political constituencies,” says Ed Whelan, a prominent conservative who used to work in the George W. Bush Justice Department.
Unless, of course, you happen to think that increasing diversity to be better representative of this country is a coherent judicial philosophy. That equality under the law was denied to so many classes of people for so long doesn’t change the fact that centuries of jurisprudence have proven the value and inherent justice of giving all constituents adequate representation among the judicial class. This kind of statement is classic GOP dreck, by the way; the idea that democratic republics such as ours have a legitimate interest in promoting the cause of equal representation is just dismissed out of hand. It’s got to be playing to political constituencies, the dread “special interests” that are code for “anybody Republicans don’t like.”
Note that the same Bush administration tool expresses the really important takeaway, to my mind: there is more diversity in large part because “There’s a much bigger pool of minority candidates with lots of legal experience….” It’s depressing, but not surprising, that he can’t see the disconnect here. There’s a much bigger pool of minority candidates with lots of legal experience precisely because of efforts like the one Obama is undertaking. Diversity breeds diversity. Years of affirmative action and other policies designed to give opportunities to underrepresented groups at all levels– law school, clerkships, in DA and public defender offices– have led directly to talented and experience minority candidates who can fill these vacancies and make the courtroom a more equal and fair institution.
Why, you might even say that those programs are helping America to more fully embody its best commitments.
theories of politics
The long term success of the Tea Parties is yet to be decided. As the man said, though, in the really long run, we’re all dead. I think it is fair to say that they have, for all of my distaste for them, been quite successful in moving politics to the right and in getting the Republican party to represent their interests.
How did they do it? I would argue that they created a serious threat to incumbent Republicans that compelled them to move to the right or risk losing a primary. They succeeded in removing many moderate Republicans, at many levels of government, and more, they succeeded in pushing Republicans who held their seats to more conservative positions. The blogosphere made a great deal of noise about races where Tea Party-approved candidates ended up splitting the vote and giving races to Democrats, but these were notable in large part because they were so rare. There are far, far more sitting candidates that have been pushed to the right than those who lost safe Republican seats due to primary challenges. Note too that even if right wing protest candidates don’t unseat sitting Republicans, the threat inevitably moves the candidate to the right, particularly in Congressional races and others where terms are quite short.
This, I want to put to you, is a model for how left-wing politics in America could be revitalized. It wouldn’t be easy. We face a hostile media environment, the power of entrenched and moneyed interests, and a lot of structural impediments. But change comes slowly and gradually, and I would point once again to the example of Barry Goldwater and conservatism: both were a joke, and then they weren’t.
You’ll note, too, that this would not just be a benefit to the further left, but also to establishment liberals. Tea Party politics is good for Republicans (in the strictly electoral sense) even when Tea Partiers don’t get exactly what they want. Extremes define the center; the more that the Tea Partiers push to the right, the more conservative Republicans find their positions accepted as mainstream by the media and the public. This could help no one more, I think, than a politician like Barack Obama, who has very moderate views but because of the cultural branding of being black, from Chicago, having a “foreign sounding” name, and being an academic, is constantly represented in the mainstream media as a radical. What we regard as the American political center now is not the same as it was ten years ago and will not be the same ten years from now. The effort to define that center will mean everything for electoral victory for years to come.