Month: November 2013

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) may have presidential aspirations but he’s created a major problem for himself. He was busted by Rachel Maddow for plagiarizing a Wikipedia entry for the movie Gattaca, then busted by BuzzFeed‘s Andrew Kaczynski both for plagiarizing a Wikipedia entry for the movie Stand and Deliver and for plagiarizing a Heritage Foundation study in his book Government Bullies.

He’s trying to argue that his critics are nitpicking him, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t write his own material. If he can’t write, that’s fine, but why doesn’t he hire someone who can?

Plus, he’s giving his rival, Chris Christie, a run for his money in the thin-skinned department. I mean, take a look at this:

Asked about the accusations on Sunday, Mr. Paul, a man of normally courtly demeanor, appeared to grit his teeth. The senator is considered a top Republican presidential prospect for 2016, and such charges can do harm.

“I take it as an insult, and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting,” he said, dismissing his critics as “hacks and haters.” Presumably in jest, Mr. Paul added: “If dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, it’d be a duel challenge.”

I don’t know Rachel Maddow or Andrew Kaczynski, but neither of them appear to have done anything out of the ordinary for reporters. Are they willing to stop looking for more plagiarism in Rand Paul’s published speeches and writings or face the prospect of a duel?

Can it be a duel at dawn?

Donald Rizer doesn’t know it, but I put everything I had into electing President Obama so that Mr. Rizer could have access to affordable health care. And he would have it, as Kevin Drum points out, if not for Bush-appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, and the Republican-led Georgia legislature.

Donald Rizer is a 58 year old man with an aching shoulder that limits how much he can work. And he just lost his job that was paying him only about $800 a month. The cheapest health care plan he can find on the federal exchange is $200 a month, which he clearly cannot afford.

He blames the president.

“Obama,” he said, “he thinks that he’s helping things, but he ain’t.”

The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, as written, would have provided 100% of the money needed for the state of Georgia to put Mr. Rizer on Medicaid, and he could have gone and had a doctor take a look at that shoulder. If he made a little more money, the law, as written, would have given Mr. Rizer a subsidy to buy that $200/mo. plan, leaving him to pay no more than 2% of his income. We’re talking about a bill that would probably be less than $30 a month.

But Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the states cannot be compelled to expand Medicaid. And Gov. Nathan Deal decided that he wouldn’t accept free money to expand Medicaid. And the Georgia legislature was just fine with that, even though it means that they’ll have a much harder to time making ends meet and balancing their budget.

Finally, if Mr. Rizer wants to complain about the workability of HealthCare.gov, he can blame Georgian Republicans for that, too, because he wouldn’t have to use it if his own state government had agreed to set up their own exchange.

Donald Rizer is angry, but his anger is misplaced. Rather than complaining about the president who tried to help him, he should be angry with the people who prevented him from being helped.

It doesn’t surprise me to learn that President Obama was mystified when he learned that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) had been selected as Mitt Romney’s running mate. I could never understand the reasoning behind it, either. For starters, I thought that after the debacle with Sarah Palin, Romney would want to pick someone with obvious stature on the world stage. He’d want someone that everyone could instantly envision being commander-in-chief. Maybe Dick Lugar was too old, but there had to be someone with foreign policy chops that he could choose. Secondly, if he wasn’t going to go for foreign policy experience, he should have stayed away from Washington DC entirely and found a governor to run with. Thirdly, if he was going to pick someone from Washington DC, he should have found someone who wasn’t the very symbol of gridlock and austerity. The Ryan Budget plan wasn’t all that well known by the general public, but it polled about as well as an outbreak of cholera.

And one last point. Four years earlier, John McCain had looked at his problems with the conservative base of the party and concluded that he needed to reassure them and get them fired up with his selection of running mate. While it’s true that Sarah Palin wasn’t sufficiently vetted and turned out to have more problems than Team McCain could have ever imagined, she did fire up the base. Yet, it didn’t even come close to winning them the election.

If for no other reason than having some respect for Einstein’s definition of insanity, Romney should have tried to reassure the middle rather than repeating McCain’s strategy of trying to reassure the base. I don’t even think Paul Ryan did much to fire up the base, because he’s a fairly unassuming guy. Most people didn’t know who he was, and the people who were familiar with his budget and liked his ideas were already politically engaged and very likely to vote. At best, the selection of Ryan helped increase the numbers and morale of Romney’s volunteers. Perhaps he got a little boost in political contributions. But, that’s it.

It was a very strange choice made by a very strange man.

Republican senators are making an extraordinary argument that the DC Circuit of Appeals, despite having three vacancies, does not need any new judges because their workload is low. Congress determines how many judges each circuit should have, and they have determined that the DC Circuit should have three more judges. President Obama has made those three appointments. Two of the three have already been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But the Republicans are going to filibuster all three of them and prevent the Senate from even having a debate about their qualifications. Their qualifications are not even a small part of the dispute. The individuals who have been nominated are being blocked, not because they are unqualified, but because the Republicans don’t think any judges should be put on the DC Circuit. The president is in the first year of a four year term, and the Republicans plan on blocking these (or any) judges this year, and for the next three years, and for the next 100 years, if it comes to that.

There has been a lot of discussion about, and a good bit of momentum for, doing away with the filibuster for Executive Branch nominations. There has been less support for doing away with the filibuster for judicial nominations because most judgeships are lifetime appointments. But the Republicans’ extreme position on the DC Circuit is forcing the Democrats to consider something that they do not want to do. They cannot accept the precedent that the Senate can deny them the right to appoint judges without any regard for the qualifications of the nominees. They just can’t.

So, if the Democrats don’t go “nuclear” over this issue, they will have caved in on something that they absolutely cannot cave in on. The Republicans are giving them no real choice. It’s a shame and it isn’t a good development, because if the filibuster makes sense for anything, it’s for lifetime appointments.

There are three snippets from Marc Fisher and Laura Vozzella’s pre-post-mortem of the Ken Cuccinelli gubernatorial campaign that I want to share with you.

Here’s the first:

Four years ago, McDonnell’s largest single donor other than Republican Party organizations was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $973,000 on his campaign. This year, the chamber gave Cuccinelli nothing.

Asked to explain that decision, a spokesman for the business association, Blair Latoff Holmes, said only that “the chamber is not involved in the Virginia governor’s race.”

Here’s the second:

Of the 43 donors who contributed $50,000 or more to McDonnell four years ago, 27 made no major gifts to Cuccinelli this year, The Post found…

…The 27 missing donors gave a total of $2.3 million in 2009. Most of those contributors gave to Republicans in other races this year. The Virginia Association of Realtors and Premium Distributors of Virginia, one of the state’s largest beer wholesalers, switched sides and gave to McAuliffe.

Here’s the third:

Mark Kington, an Alexandria venture capitalist who gave $83,000 to McDonnell in 2009, said he steered clear of Cuccinelli because “his position on climate change to me was a real non-starter, and I told him as much.”

Kington, a former member of the University of Virginia’s board of visitors, donated $1.5 million with his wife to endow a professorship in climate change research. Cuccinelli, a longtime skeptic on climate change, spent two years as attorney general investigating whether a U.Va. professor had manipulated data to show rising temperatures on Earth. The university fought back, and the Virginia Supreme Court ruled for the school.

Kington, a moderate Republican and former business partner of Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), said he would not have supported Cuccinelli even if climate change weren’t an issue. “It may be time to vote for the third-party candidate,” he said, “if only to send a message to the Republican Party that we need pragmatic solutions, not positions that are unbending.”

Now think back to the first piece I wrote today about how business-minded Republicans have no reason to align themselves with a party as socially conservative as the modern GOP. Think back to how I said that business leaders were already concluding that moderate Democrats were a better investment than conservative Republicans. Think back to how I said that business-minded Republicans are pining for a third party. And think back to how I said that most business-minded Republicans have no use for the silliness of climate change denialism.

Every single one of those points came up as partial explanations for why Ken Cuccinelli couldn’t raise enough money to compete in this race. It’s true in Virginia. It’s true in Georgia. It’s true in California. It’s true basically everywhere. The world has changed almost overnight. Something different is coming.

The question of what the NSA should do and should be able to do in foreign surveillance is an interesting one, and I’d love to discuss it. It’s a debate that is distinct from what they should be able to do to American citizens. The release of all these sensitive documents has the potential to lead to reforms that protect our privacy and make the Agency’s legitimate activities more efficient and sensible. But reading Scott Shane’s article in the New York Times, I can’t escape the feeling that I should not have most of this information.

There is so much detail on the NSA’s capabilities that, while it’s legitimately scary, it also enables people to evade surveillance or to learn how to feed us bad and misleading information.

I have very mixed emotions about the whole topic. I feel very clearly that the NSA has been overstepping its bounds and has been very wasteful with resources. I think they need to be reined in. There should be a top to bottom review of everything they’ve been doing and a lot of transparency. But, at the same time, I think a lot of damage is being done to our country that, while it may be necessary, I certainly am not enjoying.

Ordinarily, I would post a link to what follows on my Tumblr, and go from there. However, with the possibility to have access to thousands of pairs of eyes, as opposed to a few hundred, and with the general understanding that there are a few commonalities in worldview and value systems among those who self-label as liberals/progressives and those of us who may be considerably further left, the issues brought up in the following post should seem worth all of our consideration. Silva’s book is, based on the description below, now on my short list for my next scheduled book buy. And now, Read Coming Up Short by Jennifer Silva:

Jennifer M. Silva’s Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2013) contributes to our understanding of the impact of forty years of neoliberalism on poor and working people in the US, the extreme perniciousness of the individual form, and the erosion of solidarity. Silva writes: “experiences of powerlessness, confusion, and betrayal within the labor market, institutions such as education and the government, and the family teach young working-class men and women that they are completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help at their peril. They are learning the hard way that being an adult means trusting no one by yourself.”

Silva frames her book in terms of adulthood: what are the markers of adulthood for the post-industrial working class? This is an important question: since 2009, about half of people between the ages of 18-24 live with their parents. Ever-increasing numbers of working people are postponing or forgoing marriage. Ever-more are pushed into “flexibile” work-lives such that they move in and out of the paid work-force under conditions increasingly disadvantageous to labor. The markers of successful adulthood have thus changed since the 50s and 60s when adult life was characterized by a set of basic, achievable steps: finish high school, get a job, get married, get a house, have kids. Contemporary capitalism has pushed even these basic milestones out of the reach of most working-class people. So, how do they narrate their lives? Silva argues that they focus on themselves, telling a story of personal triumph over adversity. They position themselves as isolated and alone, betrayed and abandoned by all the institutions around them. Absorbing a narrative that integrates neoliberal individualism with therapeutic self-discovery and self-help (“no one can help me but me”), they make the self the primary locus of struggle and achievement. Failure is no one’s fault but your own. Success is successful grappling with one’s inner life, the trauma of neglect and abuse, and the ability to overcome that by working on oneself. The failure of others is thus their own fault. As one informant said, the biggest obstacle she faces is her own self.

The book comes from interviews with a hundred young working-class people in Massachusetts and Virginia from 2008-2010.  Silva’s analysis is attentive to race, gender, and sexual orientation, astutely observing “that without a broad, shared vision of economic justic, race, class, and gender have become sites of resentment and division rather than a coalition among the working class.” Interview subjects (“informants”) were men and women between 24 and 34. Most work in the service sector. About a third live with their parents or other older family member. Not quite half have high school degrees; a little over a quarter have some college. Most have significant debt. Most have trouble locating or keeping a job capable of sustaining them (paying rent, expenses, debt).

Silva outlines an emerging working-class adult self that has “low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health.” They don’t think about their lives in collective terms. They think about them in terms of recovery from painful personal pasts. Absent work as a source of self-respect and self-worth, they “remake dignity and meaning out of emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation.”

The primary characteristics of the emerging working-class adult self are rugged individualism and distrust. People are reluctant to pour time, emotion, and energy into relationships that are risky. Although Silva emphasizes the impact on romantic relationships, we can extend this to a broader unwillingness to attach oneself to groups and causes. An inability to commit is an effect of economic insecurity that makes political organization as challenging and precarious as romantic association — it’s hard to know whether or not it’s worth it; for many, past experience suggests that it won’t be, that they most likely outcome is betrayal. Silva notes the foundational  belief in self-reliance among African Americans in her study as they narrate their experiences in terms of their own individual experiences rather than in terms of the structural impact of racism. Solidarity, social trust, and community engagment plumment as the primary worldview conceives rights in terms of “‘I’s’ rather than ‘we’s’, with economic justice dropped out of their collective vocabulary.”

Neoliberalism configures the working class self. Oprah, self-help books, therapy world — these provide tools for people faced with pressures of flexibilization to cope with frequent change. Silva effectively illuminates the material conditions underlying contemporary culture’s preoccupation with making and remaking one’s individual identity. She writes, “The need to continuously recreate one’s identity–whether after a failed attempt at college or an unanticipated divorce or a sudden career change–can be an anxiety-producing endeavor.” Therapy offers a culture resource for ascribinging meaning to one’s life in a world in flux. The individual self is both constant and maleable, a site for both continuity and change, made possible through a therapy culture that locates problems in individual pathology, inserts these pathologies into a specific individual past, and makes bearing witness to one’s own suffering into a ground for a transformation confined to the self. “The sources of meaning and dignity–hard work, social solidarity, family–found in previous studies of the industrial working class had been nearly eclipsed  by an all-encompassing culture of emotional self-management.” The way working class people deal with upheaval, recession, and unemployment is by fostering flexibility within themselves, making themselves into adaptable beings detached from the outer world.

In a powerful and disturbing chapter on the hardening of working class individualism, Silva describes interview subjects’ defense of big business and hostility toward affirmative action. The emotion underlying their neoliberal subjectivity is betrayal. These working class people feel the market to be impersonal, a matter of risk and chance. When government intervenes, it does so in ways that rig the game so that they can’t compete. Furthermore, since so many have had to struggle on their own, by themselves, in contexts of poverty and diminishing opportunity, they take the fact of their survival as itself the morally significant fact: making it on one’s own is what bestows dignity. Socialists like Obama thus take away their last best thing, the special something that is all they have left (this is my language), namely, the dignity they have precisely because they are completely self-reliant. Indeed, Silva’s account suggests that solidarity is a problem because to embrace it would be to acknowledge one’s insufficiency as an individual, one’s inability to survive alone. Hence, working people are hostile to those below them on the food chain who need help from others because this hostility enables them to project neediness onto others thereby enabling themselves to shore up a fragile and impossible individuality.

Silva argues that young working-class people have learned that they can’t rely on anyone. They try to numb their sense of betrayal by affirming the worst cultural scripts of individualism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance, hardening themselves to the world around them and thus becoming precisely the subjects neoliberalism needs insofar as they are hostile to various forms of government intervention, particularly affirmative action. It might be, then, that the sorts of critical exposes we on the left write and circulate, the stories of governmental corruption and the university failure, aren’t helping our cause at all. Instead, they are affirming what the working class already knows to be true: they are being betrayed.

Silva’s insight into the link between neoliberalism and individualism points to both the challenge for communist organizing and the possibility of a way forward:

autonomy should be understood a a by-product of an uncertain, competitive, and precarious labor market that forces individuals to navigate their life trajectories on their own in order to survive. That is, the more our futures seem uncertain and unknowable, and the more individualistic we are forced to become, the greater our need to find and express our authentic selves. Paradoxically, the more we are required to construct ourselves as individuals, to write our own biographies, the more we realize our utter inability to control the trajectories of our lives.

This ‘utter inability’ is a key locus of communist organizing. We have to realize together strength in numbers. And, we have to be able to be for each other not an audience for performances of authentic individuality but a solidary collective where meaning comes from common struggle. If people feel isolated, we have to build connections that prove they are not.

I welcome Jason Thigpen into the Democratic Party. I actually agree with him about a lot of things. But, on policy? Not so much.

Mr. Thigpen was a Republican candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat in North Carolina before the party shut the government down. Now he is a Democratic candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat in North Carolina. He’s a veteran who served in Iraq. He’s a staunch defender of the 2nd Amendment, although he does express an interest in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. He supports a strong national defense and believes America has a duty to do humanitarian and nation-building missions. He wants us to get serious about entitlement reform and he wants to lower government spending and reduce taxes and regulations, although he supports smart investments in infrastructure. He wants higher standards in our education system, although he appears to oppose charter schools.

He seems to me to be a conventional Republican of the Bush Era, with a little bit more overall common sense.

“Enough is enough,” says Jason R. Thigpen – formerly a Republican candidate seeking election to the U.S. House in North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. “After discussing it with my wife and family, I’ve decided to run as a Democrat rather than a Republican. I simply cannot stand with a Party where its most extreme element promote hate and division amongst people. Nothing about my platform has, nor will it change. The government shutdown was simply the straw that broke the camels back. I guess being an American just isn’t good enough anymore and I refuse to be part of an extremist movement in the GOP that only appears to thrive on fear and hate mongering of anyone and everyone who doesn’t walk their line. We’ve received some wonderful support by numerous leaders and members within the NC GOP, as the vast majority of Republicans are wonderful, hard-working people that don’t agree with those radical nut-jobs either but unfortunately the extremists in the party, with their ‘burn it all down’ philosophy, appear to be the ones turning out the majority of voters in the primaries and mid-term elections. And I want the people to know there is a choice.”

And a bit more of his diatribe:

Thigpen further explains, “I didn’t go to war to defend the liberties and freedoms of one Party, race, sex, or one income class of Americans. Whether white, black, Hispanic, Asian, man, woman, gay, lesbian, straight, rich, or poor – we fought together as equals, side-by-side for the benefit of every American in the same. So, to come home from serving our country and see North Carolina legislators using their super-majority status to gerrymander districts and pass a law to deliberately suppress and oppress the voting rights of Democrats but more specifically minorities and college students, is absolutely deplorable. This same group of spineless legislators piggybacked a motorcycle safety bill with legislation intentionally geared to shut down women’s health clinics because of their ‘right righteous’ beliefs on abortion, while then cutting funding to the programs which help feed and provide healthcare to the babies they invariably forced the same women to have. Sounds like the Christian thing to do, huh? These legislators, acting under the guise of the religious right and morality believe themselves to be the divine judge but according to the Bible, there is only one judge. They say they’re for a smaller government and individual rights while pushing legislation for more government intervention and regulation usurping our right to choose for ourselves. They take money away from the public school system so they can call it broken, only to give the money to their charter schools that are really private schools, just so our kids don’t go to the same school as theirs all the while giving some great speech trying to convince us it isn’t segregation. Right. But all along, they seemingly want you to believe that you have a choice – like ‘cake or death.’

He’s running against Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones, who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party back in 1994. So, that’s kind of interesting. Rep. Jones had an epiphany about his early support for Dick & George’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq and is now very disinclined to support the kind of nation-building efforts that Thigpen thinks we must undertake as part of our national duty. That’s an interesting contrast, too.

I’m not sure what the Congressional Democrats will do with Mr. Thigpen if he actually wins this race, but I do see some areas of sincere agreement. He doesn’t like racialized politics; he respects the right to vote; he sees charter schools as a proxy for segregation; he sees the hypocrisy in denying assistance to young mothers at the same time that you oppose abortion rights; he wants to make smart infrastructure investments; he can probably support immigration reform, and he might go along with expanded criminal background checks for gun purchases. On the other hand, there are several areas related to foreign policy and surveillance where I am probably more aligned with Rep. Jones.

Nothing is simple. I’ll be keeping an eye on North Carolina’s 3rd District. And I’ll be looking for other examples of solid Republicans leaving their party in disgust.

I agree with Steve M. that this version of history provided by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza is deeply strange:

[New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie is increasingly seen as the one candidate who might be able to bridge the divide between the establishment and the tea party that is in the process of ripping the party apart. In that way, Republicans are hoping that he can do for their side what Bill Clinton did in the early 1990s for a Democratic party that was similarly divided — heal what looks to be an un-healable wound through force of personality and a demonstrated record of success as a governor.

The Democratic Party in the 1990’s was not particularly rigid ideologically. They had controlled the House of Representatives since 1955, and for all but two Congresses since 1933. They had held the Senate for most of that time, too, and had controlled it since 1987. It’s true that the party had suffered three consecutive brutal presidential defeats and was casting around for a candidate or a strategy that could turn the tide, but they were used to running Capitol Hill and almost felt it was their birthright. As Steve M. points out, the major Democratic candidates were not cookie-cutters. Paul Tsongas was a deficit hawk, Jerry Brown was pushing a flat-tax, and Bill Clinton was talking about welfare reform. Not only were the candidates different from each other, but they were using major planks of the platform to annoy and separate themselves from the liberal base. But these heterodoxies didn’t so much indicate that there was some major split on the left as they showed the left’s willingness to be flexible in light of the drubbings they had taken in the preceding twelve years.

I’m sure that Bill Clinton’s unique political gifts helped paper over some divisions on the left, but it would be a major exaggeration to say that he healed a rift on the scale of what the Republican Party is facing today.

Gov. Christie might be able to do for the right what Clinton did for the left, but that’s a different argument. In 1992, it was common wisdom that only a southern Democrat stood a chance of winning the presidency. The gigantic losses of Minnesota’s Walter Mondale in 1984 and Massachusetts’ Michael Dukakis in 1988 had cemented that belief. In 1992, Bill Clinton won in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. It may be that the Republicans need a presidential candidate who can do something similar for them in the North, and Christie could fit that bill. But it’s hard to see how he can simultaneously appeal to Northerners and win the nomination of a southern party. I know Mitt Romney managed to pull it off the latter, but he did it at the expense of the former. In any case, Christie would be a good candidate for the Republican Party, but I don’t see him healing any divisions.

I agree with Steve M. that this version of history provided by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza is deeply strange:

[New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie is increasingly seen as the one candidate who might be able to bridge the divide between the establishment and the tea party that is in the process of ripping the party apart. In that way, Republicans are hoping that he can do for their side what Bill Clinton did in the early 1990s for a Democratic party that was similarly divided — heal what looks to be an un-healable wound through force of personality and a demonstrated record of success as a governor.

The Democratic Party in the 1990’s was not particularly rigid ideologically. They had controlled the House of Representatives since 1955, and for all but two Congresses since 1933. They had held the Senate for most of that time, too, and had controlled it since 1987. It’s true that the party had suffered three consecutive brutal presidential defeats and was casting around for a candidate or a strategy that could turn the tide, but they were used to running Capitol Hill and almost felt it was their birthright. As Steve M. points out, the major Democratic candidates were not cookie-cutters. Paul Tsongas was a deficit hawk, Jerry Brown was pushing a flat-tax, and Bill Clinton was talking about welfare reform. Not only were the candidates different from each other, but they were using major planks of the platform to annoy and separate themselves from the liberal base. But these heterodoxies didn’t so much indicate that there was some major split on the left as they showed the left’s willingness to be flexible in light of the drubbings they had taken in the preceding twelve years.

I’m sure that Bill Clinton’s unique political gifts helped paper over some divisions on the left, but it would be a major exaggeration to say that he healed a rift on the scale of what the Republican Party is facing today.

Gov. Christie might be able to for the right what Clinton did for the left, but that’s a different argument. In 1992, it was common wisdom that only a southern Democrat stood a chance of winning the presidency. The gigantic losses of Minnesota’s Walter Mondale in 1984 and Massachusetts’ Michael Dukakis in 1988 had cemented that belief.