Warren announces candidacy

In fact, on issues of middle-class quality of life, she’s miles ahead of Obama, whose acquaintance with economic principles is, let’s say, minimal and whose grasp of the problems facing the middle class is at best abstract. More to the point, Obama has done virtually nothing to fulfill his promise about reining in the influence of lobbyists in the national capital.

Many promises broken, many disappointments delivered.

For the coming year, at least, Warren has a new platform to preach her message of restoring the middle class, and it’s one this country desperately needs to hear.

Someone has to start making sense. But the same old pap won't cut it.

Hudson Utopia

Of Governor Andrew Cuomo, Maureen Dowd writes: Andrew calls himself “an aggressive progressive” and thinks liberals have to reorient themselves toward a government with goals and effective service, rather than big government. 

Hear, here. I agree.

Leftie attacks Koch brothers

At the forefront of the movement [to 'out' the Koch Brothers as the bankers of the Tea Party] is the unlikely figure of Hollywood director Robert Greenwald, 65, who brought the world the Olivia Newton-John dance movie Xanadu. Greenwald reinvented himself as a leftwing documentary maker, and has his focus on the Koch brothers. His Brave New Foundation group organised the Lincoln Centre film show.

"The least we can do is ring their doorbell. What they are doing is hurting people's lives. Ideology has consequences."



Their money helped start Americans For Prosperity, a Tea Party-linked organisation that has campaigned vociferously against Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. It admitted helping to organise anti-union moves by the controversial Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, which led to some of the largest protests in recent American history.

The supposed grassroots movement is not that, at all, but an elite-financed political opposition movement aimed at undercutting the working and middle classes for the benefit of the wealthy, ironically using to disaffected working and middle class individuals by appealingto their fears and hates.

The Kochs have also given millions to thinktanks and groups that fight environmental legislation, especially to oppose the scientific consensus on global warming and try to lift regulations on air pollution and potentially dangerous chemicals. They believe in drastically cutting the role of government and slashing benefits such as social security.

And Larry Kudlow and his ilk support the ideology, wrapping it in the mantle of Reaganism, a failed set of political and economic tenets that remain as an ideological lair of the right wing.

The Kochs share the Tea Party view that Obama is a threat to the American way of life. Last week David Koch made a rare comment to a reporter from New York magazine, calling Obama "a hardcore socialist". "He's marvellous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He's scary to me," he added.

Obama is the same sort of socialist as FDR: a conservative liberal seeking to change capitalism only gradually and in a very limited way, to smooth out a few rough edges.


There is nothing illegal about the Kochs' political activities. Greenwald concedes they have every right to fund whatever organisations they like.

Especially not with the assent of the Roberts Supreme Court.


Some groups have said however that their business practices are sometimes the opposite of their public campaigns. A non-partisan Washington watchdog group, the Centre for Public Integrity, reported last month that Koch Industries' ethanol business enjoys high incomes thanks to government subsidies, despite their disapproval of such policies. Equally, while they oppose a cap-and-trade system in the US to control carbon emissions, the trading arm of Koch Industries makes millions in Europe from such a system.

So much for ideological purity.

In the middle

From the left: Howard Dean endorses Daley for chief of staff, rips White House. At a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, Dean refused to single out any administration officials for criticism, but said Obama would be better served by staff that has not spent so much time in Washington. Noting that many officials are "either out of the White House or going," Dean blasted Obama's current officials who he says have treated the left wing of the Democratic Party with "contempt." Seems the Doctor's feelings are quite hurt.

From the right: Bachmann mum on presidential run Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann won’t say whether she’s running for president, and insists the focus should be on making sure President Barack Obama isn’t elected to a second term in 2012. This wingnut run for President? Oy vay. Yet, she has supporter, as unbelievable as that seems, to me.

So the left castigates him, the right castigates him; seems he's doing okay.

Obama gets intense

It is about time. After the Election Day debacle, following Republican gloating and continued recalcitrance, the President struck a tax deal with the Republicans. It extends the Bush tax cuts for two years, cuts the payroll tax, and a few other things. Liberals are apoplectic.


If that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then, let's face it, we will never get anything done," Obama said. "People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people, and we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are

Exactly. What liberals continue to fail to see and understand is that this country can not governed from the left. They thought they had their guy in Obama, and can not accept he is not doing their bidding. Katrina vanden Heuvel is one of the lefties that is upset: Obama: On the way to a failed presidency? This isn't about conventional politics. This is simply about the fate and future of our country. This president has a clear and imperative historic mandate. If he shirks it, he risks more than failing to get reelected. He risks a failed presidency.

She details the liberal agenda that she charges the President has abandoned, and the conservative agenda he has adopted. But, in his first two years the President (almost) had 60 votes in the Senate; in one month he won't. How is he supposed to accomplished the liberal agenda?

New York Liberal (yea!)

Elena grew up to become dean of Harvard Law School and President Obama’s solicitor general, and if the Senate confirms her after hearings that begin on June 28, she would be the 112th justice of the United States Supreme Court. But before all that, she was the middle child in a New York family whose intellectual dynamism and embrace of liberal causes provide a window onto the social milieu and culture that shaped her.

2 opposed views

It never ceases amazing me how differently two people can see the same event. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., one of the resident right wingers in the Wall Street Journal editorial board (that is an oxymoron), and Thomas Frank, the token liberal write on the President and the Oil Company BP.

Leading off on the right, the message begins at the headline: Obama vs. BP (and You) and continues with the subheading: The government holds a company's stock price hostage.

The lefty takes a different approach: Britain Cries Foul Over BP and continues in the subheading: Thatcher's heirs may be the only people on the planet to regard Obama's response as swift and effective.

Frank only had to read the column at the top of the page where his appeared to see Thatcher's heirs are not the only ones.

In BP's case this week, the company's stock price hasn't just been taken hostage by Washington, it has been wrapped around management's neck and progressively tightened. The sight hasn't been an edifying one, not least because the target isn't just BP.

BP has authored one of the country's great industrial accidents and expects fully to pay through the nose. You could wish, in this light, Washington's politicians didn't seem quite so much like muggers standing on a street corner waiting for a vulnerable passerby. For one thing, it doesn't benefit the victims, who will continue to line up for years to come, if BP can't reinvest to sustain and grow its business.

Turns out they are not all muggers: here is a Republican representative:

GOP leaders forced Rep. Barton to retract apology to BP

Washington Post - Aaron Blake, Paul Kane - ‎2 hours ago‎

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, accused the White House of conducting a "$20 billion shakedown" by requiring oil giant BP to establish a fund to compensate those hurt by the Gulf Coast oil spill.

Video: Biden: Barton Criticism of BP Fund 'Outrageous' The Associated Press

US Gulf Oil Spill BP's Ally The Associated Press

 

Flight of the Intellectuals

Paul Berman’s new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” plural, might as easily have been titled “The Flight of the Intellectual,” singular. It is essentially a booklong polemic against one magazine article: a profile of the Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan, written by Ian Buruma, the Dutch academic and journalist, and published in The New York Times Magazine in 2007.

Mr. Berman’s book has already made some noise. Writing in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum compared its stinging ambience, nostalgic to some, to one of “those old Partisan Review smackdowns,” in which Dwight Macdonald or Mary McCarthy cracked some unsuspecting frenemy over the head with a bookcase and a tinkling highball glass. And for sure, everything about “The Flight of the Intellectuals” feels old school, from Mr. Berman’s tone (controlled, almost tantric, high dudgeon) to the spectacle of one respected man of the left pummeling another while the blood flows freely, and no one calls the police.


Those Partisan Review fights got serious, and so does this book. Mr. Berman accuses Mr. Buruma, in his Times Magazine profile, of not scrutinizing Mr. Ramadan’s family, associations or writings closely enough, of presenting him in a respectful light. Presenting him, that is, as the kind of moderate and charismatic Islamic thinker in whom the West might find a useful intermediary.


Mr. Berman’s book, portions of which first appeared in The New Republic, is a patient overturning of the rocks that, he argues, Mr. Buruma failed to look under. He writes about historical figures Mr. Ramadan professes to admire and notes the tiny degrees of separation that link them to Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. He points out Mr. Ramadan’s ambiguous comments about things like 9/11, the stoning of women in Muslim countries and violence against Jews. Mr. Berman detects a kind of seventh-century barbarism lurking behind Mr. Ramadan’s genial smile.

Mr. Berman branches out in his book’s final third to condemn liberal intellectuals (nearly all of them but especially Mr. Buruma and the British historian Timothy Garton Ash) and their house organs, including The New York Review of Books, on another, related, account. He writes that while they have admired Mr. Ramadan, they have been inexplicably critical of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch intellectual who has become a major critic of Islam and, as a consequence, will probably have a large security detail for the rest of her life. Ms. Hirsi Ali’s critics, who include Mr. Buruma and Mr. Garton Ash, find her personality “strident” and humorless, he writes, and feel she isn’t as important as she might be because having renounced Islam, she no longer speaks to or is in touch with the Muslim hive mind.

Strident? Humorless? And what are they? Self-appointed experts.

About these criticisms of Ms. Hirsi Ali, Mr. Berman is incredulous. “A more classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual does not exist,” he notes about her. And yet, he writes, she is treated differently from Salman Rushdie, another writer who was subjected to death threats. “How times have changed!” he declaims. “The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, contrasted unfavorably in the very best of magazines with Tariq Ramadan,” who had ties to an organization that was known to be anti-Rushdie. “Here is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world — led by people who, until just yesterday, I myself had always regarded as the best of the best.”

He seems disappointed in his former friends.

He is withering about why this might be. Quoting another writer, he calls this “the racism of the anti-racists.” As self-hating Westerners, he suggests, Mr. Buruma and Mr. Garton Ash can be seen “groveling to Ramadan, who berates the West” while attacking the Somali dissident who embraces its values.

Fear is at work too, he says. About the chill in the intellectual climate, Mr. Berman writes: “Two developments account for it — two large new realities that, condensing overhead, have altered the intellectual atmosphere down below, almost without being noticed. The first of those developments is the spectacular and intimidating growth of the Islamist movement since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second development is terrorism.”

Liberals are so tiresome at times.

Mr. Berman can be bleakly funny. He criticizes Mr. Garton Ash for pointing out in The New York Review of Books that Ms. Hirsi Ali had been awarded the “Hero of the Month” prize from Glamour magazine, as if this were proof that she couldn’t be taken seriously. Mr. Berman responds, in one of this book’s more memorable utterances: “I can’t help observing that here may be proof, instead, that Glamour magazine nowadays offers a more reliable guide to liberal principles than The New York Review of Books.”
Touché.

“The Flight of the Intellectuals” is anything but diffident, and watching Mr. Berman pursue his philosophical prey is a bit like playing an academic version of a first-person-shooter video game: Modern Warfare: Bandit Pundit Edition. One’s goggles begin to steam up. Being inside Mr. Berman’s head can occasionally grate. As a writer he’s alternately emotive and pedantic, an emo-wonk. He’s self-congratulatory about his coups of reading and synthesis, his turning up of important details in other people’s footnotes. Yet his own book has no foot- or endnotes at all.

Alternately emotive and pedantic.

His litany of charges against the elusive Mr. Ramadan is largely circumstantial, although it must be said that the pile he amasses is plenty damning. Finally, Mr. Berman believes in straight talk and insists that we use words like “fascist” to describe some Islamist ideas rather than “totalitarian.” Why? “It is because totalitarian, being abstract, is odorless. Fascist is pungent. To hear that emphatic f-sound and those double different s’s is to flare your nostrils.”

Mr. Berman’s nostrils have flared before about fascism. He is a liberal hawk who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, about which he deployed that particular f-word as well. “If only people like you would wake up,” he wrote in Dissent magazine in 2004, “you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism.” He may very well be right. Yet fascism is a radioactive word that requires careful handling. It can lead some people — and here’s my own diffident cough — to impulsive action.

There’s a good deal of inside baseball in “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Scores are settled that many readers won’t know or care about. But this bracing and volatile book is an important one and devastating in its conclusions about the secret history of some Islamists and especially about the reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. “It was obvious that Hirsi Ali had received a dreadful treatment from journalists,” Mr. Berman writes, “who ought to have known better.”

Kirkus Reviews
In this sequel to the groundbreaking Terror and Liberalism (2003, etc.), political writer and New Republic contributing editor Berman analyzes the rise of the Islamist totalitarian movement and the Western media's troubling inability—or unwillingness—to identify and investigate its implications.The author begins with Islamic history as defined by its major players, including Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing from documents stored in government archives in the United States and Cairo, Berman untangles the legacies of Islam and Nazi Germany. Al-Husseini's fervent anti-Semitism met neatly with Hitler's campaign, and al-Banna was al-Husseini's most ardent supporter, a camaraderie that would have profound influence on the future of Islam. The bulk of the narrative concerns the effect that these political events have on modern-day Islam—in particular, on well-known philosopher Tariq Ramadan, who is al-Banna's grandson and whose writings are often cited as part of a progressive Muslim movement, yet whose deeper, more conservative meanings often elude the journalists eager to embrace such rhetoric. As a "Salafi reformist," Ramadan openly reveres his forebears yet purports to stand against violence and oppression. Scrutinizing Ramadan's writings and speeches, Berman writes that his "modern rhetorics invariably turn out to be translations, in one fashion or another, of Koranic concepts," and that Ramadan's opinions carefully provide a "double ambiguity" that draws Western admirers even as his Muslim followers view him as a defender of old-world Koranic ideals. Berman identifies one accomplished Western writer in particular, Ian Buruma, whose glossy treatment of Ramadan represents the exact "flight" from intellectualism that the title implies. The author concludes, glumly, that "the spectacular and intimidating growth of the Islamist movement" in the last ten years, coupled with the rise in terrorism, are the culprits, effectively suffocating deep journalism with "squeamishness and fear." Despite the complexity, history and nuance of these subjects, the author probes each issue with elegant, incisive language.A stunning, riveting commentary.First printing of 30,000 Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Berman's article: Who's afraid of Tariq Ramadan?

Left, or right?

So I get home after work, and turn on the telly to watch something, relax a bit. Not a good movie on, so I make the mistake of putting on politics and news.

Two big stories are in the ether right now: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the failed bomb in Times Square.

Right wing nuts have started to say that perhaps the radical left caused the spill by sabotaging the platform 30 miles offshore. How that could be done dosn't need to be explained or substatiated, because the purpose of that preposterous statement is to get people who are already extremely displeased with the President and the Democratic Party even more riled up (and if along the way some other people are caught in the net of bombastic stupidity, so much the better).

Now Michael Brown, who was head of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina, is being given air time: he is charging that either the Obama administration is allowing the oil to reach shore for political purposes, or is using the calamity of oil reaching shore to suspend offshore drilling and other policy points part of their strategy to pass cap-and-trade. And if that wasn't preposterous enough, he's charging the Administration with slow response. This is Brownie, who didn't respond to Katrina. Now he's charging that he couldn't respond becuase the federal government, the Bush administration, didn't give him the tools he needed to respond properly.

An arrest has been made in the failed Times Square bombing. The left is extolling the quick response of law enforcement authorities, the right is castigating the fact that the charged perpetrator has been read his Miranda rights. Major General Paul D. Eaton, retired, appeared with Keith Olbermann, and ripped Republicans for undermining the work of police, the FBI and the armed forces. I've not seen him before, but he was angry, and obviously not a rightie. He works for the National Security Network, a left organization: The National Security Network (NSN) was founded in June 2006 to revitalize America's national security policy, bringing cohesion and strategic focus to the progressive national security community.

Earlier, I watched a few minutes of Sean Hannity's show, and was amazed at the depths this twerp plumbs: he has a yahoo,  Aaron Klein, whohas co-authored this book: The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's ties to Communists, Socialists, and other anti-American extremists. Really. Hannity was ecstatic.Aaron Klein has written three other books: The late great state of Israel : how enemies within and without threaten the Jewish nation's survival (2009);  Schmoozing with terrorists : from Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists reveal their global plans-- (2007); this latest tome; and  Deion Sanders, this is Prime Time (1995). He writes for an outlet called World Net Daily (one of its banner ads is for a book entitled The Nazi connection to terrorism).

Time to turn it off, and go read. Oy.

Level playing field?

President Obama mentioned a recent Supreme Court decision that, he asserted, would allow corporate special interests to flood the election landscape with their money. Now, legislation has been proposed to counter that.

The proposed legislation, meant to address a recent Supreme Court decision that eased the rules on political television advertisements, would require groups that run campaign attack ads to disclose the names of the businesses, labor unions and other groups that fund the efforts.

However, that provision cuts both ways: the "left" is opposed, for its own special reasons, or, rather, reason: the money it gets.

advocacy groups on the left, such as the Sierra Club environmentalist group and the Alliance for Justice, a coalition of liberal organizations, are lobbying to weaken the central element of the proposed bill. They worry that it could hurt their ability to raise money.

Dilemma.


The liberal groups, along with conservative and business organizations, are concerned that wealthy individuals and entities wouldn't donate to their organizations if their names had to be disclosed. "It's a significant issue," said David Willett, a spokesman for the Sierra Club. He said that the environmental group was working to change the legislation. It was too soon, he added, to say whether or not the Sierra Club would oppose the bill. Abby Levine, deputy director of advocacy programs at the Alliance for Justice, said the group shared the Sierra Club's concerns.

Wealth should not be able to hide behind anonymity as it seeks to influence policy and elections.

LIberal?

Gary Wills reviewing David Remnick's The Bridge, discusses Barack Obama: Later, when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School, he won the respect of conservative professors there, including Richard Posner — “especially,” as Posner tells Remnick, “after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at The Harvard Law Review, told me that he wasn’t even all that liberal.”

llustration by Joon Mo Kang;
photograph by Pete Souza
Barack Obama in 2004.

Obama Betrays the Left Again

As if he owes them anything. He has to govern for all Americans. Lefties and righties just don't get it. Still.


Obama Betrays the Left Again. Eric Alterman. March 31, 2010 | 10:41pm

The left is raging about the president’s new plan to jump-start offshore drilling. Eric Alterman on why liberals just don’t get who they’re dealing with.

The first person quoted in John Broder’s New York Times story on President Obama’s decision, announced Wednesday, to start drilling for oil and gas, beginning in 2012, along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska was Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. His statement read: “Drilling our coasts will doing nothing to lower gas prices or create energy independence. It will only jeopardize beaches, marine life, and coastal tourist economies, all so the oil industry can make a short-term profit.” Actually, that the Sierra Club opposes offshore drilling is not exactly news. If the Sierra Club liked a plan to drill offshore for oil and gas, now that would be news!

Like his decision to double down on the war in Afghanistan, together with his embrace of nuclear power, Obama is reminding doctrinaire liberals and progressives that while he likes them just fine, and hopes they like him too, he is not one of them; not when it’s politically inconvenient anyway. Liberals were all set to paint Obama as “their Reagan.” But this is deeply misguided. Yes, deep down he’s a liberal, but an intensely pragmatic one. As David Remnick demonstrates in his masterful new biography, The Bridge, Obama is unlikely to hold on to deeply ideological views with a goal of reordering American politics from top to bottom. He prefers to take what’s on the table.

So if the Sierra Club is unhappy, that’s OK with Obama. So too the environmental group Oceana. (“We’re appalled that the president is unleashing a wholesale assault on the ocean”) or Environment America (“It makes no sense to threaten our beaches, wildlife, and tourism industry with spills and other drilling disasters when we’re about to unleash the real solutions to oil dependence—cleaner cars and cleaner fuels."). Let alone Greenpeace (“Is this President Obama's clean energy plan or Palin's drill baby drill campaign?").

Amazing how pissed off doctrinaire liberals such as these bozos and doctrinaire right-wingers sich as the WSK bozo Henninger bothare at the same President for the same thing. He must be doing something right (er, correct).

Much more interesting to Obama is a plan that splits Republicans and leaves them wondering what to do next. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), sensing a trap, wanted to know if “the administration [would] actually take concrete steps to finish the studies, approve the necessary permits, and open these areas for production?” His counterpart in the House, John Boehner (R-OH) was having none of it, and played to perfection the “Dr. No” role in which Obama undoubtedly sought to cast him.

"At the same time the White House makes today’s announcement,” Boehner complained, “the Environmental Protection Agency is plotting a new massive job-killer that the American people can’t afford: a cascade of new EPA regulations that will punish every American who dares to flip on a light switch, drive a car, or buy an American product. Americans simply don’t want this backdoor national energy tax that will drive up energy and manufacturing costs and destroy jobs in our states and local communities." (He forgot to mention the new Obama regulations on frogs, vermin, pestilence, and the death of Republicans’ first born.)

McConnell might be right. This could be a trap. As the Times explains, “the Interior Department will spend several years conducting geologic and environmental studies along the rest of the southern and central Atlantic seaboard. If a tract is deemed suitable for development, it is listed for sale in a competitive bidding system. The next lease sales—if any are authorized by the Interior Department—would not be held before 2012.” In the meantime, Senate Democrats can define the debate in a way that works best for them. Right now the administration’s “cap and trade plan,” inadequate and corporate friendly as it is, is deader than Jimmy Hoffa. If this jump-starts that bill by peeling off a few oil-and-gas sensitive conservative Democrats and possibly even a Republican or two (Lisa Murkowski looks like a maybe), then Obama might be able to create the conditions for a deal to revive it—particularly if Republicans start to grow nervous about their “No, No Nanette” electoral strategy going into the fall. (Obama has repeatedly said that lifting the ban would always be considered part of an overall energy and conservation strategy.) And if not, well, the permits are four years away and Obama and the Democrats can at least claim to have defanged the issue of rising gas prices going into November.

But if that’s the plan, then why pre-empt with a concession? Where’s the strategy of giving away something and getting nothing? With no hope of challenging Obama from the left, liberals are, once again, left with unenviable choice of trusting that Obama has figured out something they haven’t and has a plan for how to get it.

In other words, “Hope.”

Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and a professor of journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author, most recently, of Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Important Ideals.