Sean Wilentz and his employers at The New Republic take the measure of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange and finds them wanting. Should we even question the headline ‘The Heroism of Fools’ as anything but polemic? Continue reading →

‘One of the great turning points in 20^th-century American history was the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which overturned on constitutional grounds the 19^th-century Plessy v. Ferguson case that had upheld legal segregation. This decision was the starting point for the civil rights movement, which, over the following decade, succeeded in dismantling the formal barriers to racial equality and guaranteed the rights of African Americans and other minorities. The courts had cut their teeth earlier over union organizing rights; new social rules based on those rights provided a model for subsequent social movements in the late 20^th century, from environmental protection to women’s rights to consumer safety to gay marriage. Continue reading →

The ability of Mr. David Brooks to inflate political situations, like the malfunctioning A.C.A. web site issue, into a convoluted and utterly overblown meditation on ‘The Legitimacy Problem’ is predictable. Given Mr. Brooks penchant for manufactured political hyperbole and his intellectual reductionism:his fascination with more easily manipulated platonic ideas, abstracted from their historical/political contexts.
Given this is it fascinating to read his readers responses to his high flown chatter, solidly based in the readily available empirical evidence, to even a casual observer/reader. Mr. Brooks’ rhetorical strategy has become shopworn and predictable after so many uses. Yet the rhetorical misdirection of the propagandist remains the weapon of choice in the war against the reality based community.
Political Observer

While at the library yesterday I picked up a copy of the New York Times and with each turn of the page I was surprised even puzzled by these three news stories; why it almost looked like the good grey Times had grown a backbone, in the face of the authoritarian American state and the Neo-Liberal Obama administration. Was I mistaken? the evidence: Continue reading →

Michael Barbaro reports in the December 14, 2013 edition of the New York Times, in a story titled Bloomberg Focuses on Rest (as in Rest of the World), on the future plans of Mayor Bloomberg. Call Mr. Barbero’s essay a public relations piece, a parting gift from the Times to Mayor. The opening sentence is instructive:

Michael R. Bloomberg, determined to parlay his government experience and vast fortune into a kind of global mayoralty, is creating a high-powered consulting group to help him reshape cities around the world long after he leaves office.

The Mayor has the money and the vision to alter urban municipalities into what?

For Mr. Bloomberg, the project is the first concrete phase of a post-mayoral life that aides said would remain intensely focused on cities, long viewed by him as laboratories for large-scale experiments in public health, economic development and environmental sustainability.Above all, the new endeavor reflects a profound confidence — never in short supply with this mayor — that it would behoove dozens of municipalities to replicate the ideas that defined his tenure: turning busy roads into pedestrian plazas, posting calorie counts in fast-food chains, creating a customer-service hotline for citizens.

The Mayor has what one might call a utopian conception for the future of urban municipalities, and the interventions his group will make:

The organization, to be called Bloomberg Associates, will act as an urban SWAT team, deployed at the invitation of local governments to solve knotty, long-term challenges, like turning a blighted waterfront into a gleaming public space, or building subway-friendly residential neighborhoods.In a twist on the traditional business model of consulting, clients will not be charged.

‘Urban SWAT team’ has the utterly negative connotation of brute force, of unchecked police power, the last resort in fighting violent crime and criminals. Should we make a connection between this founding attitude of the Mayor’s post mayoral plans , unmentioned in Mr.Barbaro’s reporting, but glaring failure in the tactic known as ‘Stop and Frisk’? One need only consult a story in BloombergBusiness of May 21, 2013 titled NYPD’S Low Arrest Rate From Stop-and-Frisk Troubles U.S. Judge:

A federal judge told a lawyer for New York City she was troubled by the number of stops police made that failed to result in arrests, summonses or seizure of illegal weapons.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan yesterday asked the lawyer about data showing that 90 percent of people stopped and questioned or frisked by city police aren’t found to have done anything illegal.

“What troubles me is the fact that the suspicion seems to be wrong 90 percent of the time,” Scheindlin said during the city’s closing argument at a trial challenging the so-called stop-and-frisk policy. “That’s a high error rate.” Continue reading →

Everyone to the Left of Mr. Lowry in his world is on the Left! Call that political territory expansive. If anything Mr. Krugman, the target of Lowry’s ire, is a Social Democrat or simply a Liberal in the old sense of the word. Oh my god! he might even be a New Dealer, audible gasp from the Mr. Lowry’s corner.

Never say die on the ACA, Single Payer or Medicare for all the actual ‘Left’ position. Unemployment Insurance equals coddling the layabouts in pure Randian parlance: the battle between the Producers and the Drones, Ayn’s ghost dominates rhetorically, except Rep. Ryan gave that up, it upset the Religious Fundamentalists.The availability of jobs that can support a comfortable life in America don’t exist: the failure of Capital is a reality, but not to our author. Forget ‘moral drama’ and substitute the unending political hysteria manufactured by Mr. Lowry. It may be amateurish and decidedly petty but it keeps his audience happy.

Political Observer

‘We don’t need bigger government. We need more unified authority. Take power away from the rentier groups who dominate the process. Allow people in those authorities to exercise discretion. Find a president who can both rally a majority, and execute a policy process.’
The American Interest and Francis Fukuyama are hardly reliable sources for policy that one might call Centrist, or even Moderate.(Perhaps Right Wing Neo-Liberalism?) But Mr Brooks has found a spokesman who makes the Unitary Presidential political fantasy of Mr. John Yoo seem almost rational. If one, like Mr. Brooks, willfully erases the last thirteen years of American history, or at least the politically inconvenient parts. In Brooks World the persistent Republican Nihilism is elided from our collective historical memories, as inconvenient truth. What is left is the alignment of platonic ideas by Mr. Brooks, carefully arranged so as to make authoritarianism seem a rational political destination, as bulwark against ‘rentier groups’,’institutional decay’,and ‘vetocracy’ . Long live the Republic!
Publius