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‘Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them.’
When it comes to the messaging battle over BP, Wall Street, and the rest, says George Lakoff, Obama’s problem isn’t swinging and missing–it’s that he isn’t swinging at all.
Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them. This was a grand opportunity to pull together the threads — BP and the spill, Massey and the mine disaster, Wall Street and the economic disaster, Anthem BlueCross and health care, the Arizona Immigration Law, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — even Afghanistan. The press threw him fastballs straight down the middle, and he hit dribblers every time.
It’s not that he said nothing to tie them together. But there was no home
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Popularity: 2% [?]
Sooner Or Later You’re Gonna Get Cut Down
Jonathan Chait positively disembowels Charles Krauthammer’s latest excuse of a column.
Popularity: 2% [?]
They Can’t Immigrate If We Blow Them Up
Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor, has written a letter to President Obama asking that he send unmanned armed vehicles to patrol (and presumably fire upon) potential immigrants entering the United States illegally. I guess that makes sense. After all, unmanned drones are widely known to kill innocent civilians in their present theaters, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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I usually abstain from making moral comments on this blog. Best to let people make their own value judgments from the facts presented; they can usually suss the undergirding by the way you present the argument anyway. But I just have to say: what kind of nation would treat the illegal immigrant’s crime of necessity–almost always taken up to find honest work to provide for their family–tantamount to terrorism?
I think to call it a morally bankrupt one is an understatement. There’s an active wickedness driving the course …
Popularity: 2% [?]
Peril Before Promise?
David Leonhardt charts the pros and cons of the Democratic majority’s agenda, which, by focusing on structural issues like education, healthcare, and fundamental-level regulation, is both heavy on the long-term, both technically–whether the policies work–and politically–if they’re rewarded electorally, it will be in the year-terms counting double digits. That leaves a big, uncertain chasm, one especially poignant in an election year in which Repulicans are scrambling to find any short-term inconveniences policies, both passed and unpassed, might present to wavering voters. To recap:
First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation’s educational system and vastly expand scientific research. Then President Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill
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Popularity: 2% [?]
Even After Arizona?
Adam Serwer compares the consequences Republicans faced after selling out black voters post-Reconstruction to that of Democrats with Hispanics, should they let the anti-immigrant crowd set the debate:
The emergence of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB 1070, has prompted some political analysts to predict doom for the Republican Party. The reasoning is that by targeting Hispanics so explicitly, the GOP will place them firmly in the Democratic column the way that President Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights brought black Americans into what was once the party of Dixie. In 2010, where the older whites that make up the GOP’s base are a shrinking part of the electorate, this path is risky. In the projected America of 2042, where minorities will outnumber whites, it’s political suicide. But history suggests that if the Democrats simply decide to allow the GOP to alienate Hispanics without making a strong
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Popularity: 5% [?]
