The Editorial Board at The Guardian concludes The case for a first Madam President is inarguable. The case for a second President Clinton is still to be made:
Symbolically, then, a second Clinton presidency would have much to recommend it – although this does need to be weighed against what it would indicate about the narrowing of the American political class. With Jeb Bush running prominently in the Republican field, hoping to become the third president of the last five to spring from a single family, the eventual choice in 2016 could be between a presidential brother and son on the one hand, and a former first lady on the other. The American dream would not be well served by rival dynasties taking the reins in turn. That prospect has a good deal to do with privileged access to big money thwarting equality of opportunity, and the Clinton campaign’s reported ambitions to spend an extraordinary $2bn persuading the people to embrace their woman only underlines the plutocratic threat to the world’s proudest democracy.
The more substantive prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration is harder to gauge – and to a remarkable extent, given that she is by far the most prominent and the most widely predicted of Democratic candidates for next year. On the economy, she emphasises the importance of middle-class wages, but then no politician who wants to win is going to dismiss them. Fewer are confident about how to reverse the four-decade-long stagnation in middle America’s pay, and in the particular case of Mrs Clinton, there are few hints even as to how far – or not – she is ready to rethink the free-market thrust of her husband’s third way. On foreign policy, her spell as secretary of state leaves her with a somewhat clearer record – she is associated with a rather more interventionist approach than Mr Obama.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Hillary Clinton’s role model? Bush 41.:
David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime adviser, has noted that voters are always looking for the corrective to whatever they didn’t like in the previous administration. Clinton will present herself as both a realist when it comes to the intransigence of the Republican Party — it took Obama time to acknowledge this — but also as someone with a history of working with Republicans. It will be an intricate two-step. “Tough enough to end polarization” may seem like an odd slogan, but something like it will be at the heart of her appeal.
And she will have to go both to Obama’s left and right. Clinton needs to run hard against economic inequality, pledging to get done the things Obama couldn’t on issues including family leave, pre-K and higher education. She will have to be strong on expanding the bargaining power of the lower-paid. Trade will be the tricky issue here.
Her video made clear that middle-class populism will be her dominant key, even as she nodded to the improvements during the Obama years.
More links and excerpts can be found below the fold.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes Why Hillary Clinton's Campaign Frightens Democrats:
It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.
If you’re faithful to the odds, then most of this anxiety is misplaced. Clinton may have slipped in the polls by virtue of an email scandal and her return to the partisan trenches more generally. But she's still more popular and better known than all of the Republicans she might face in the general, her name evokes economic prosperity, rather than global financial calamity, the economy is growing right now, and Democrats enjoy structural advantages in presidential elections, generally.
But all candidates are fallible, and most of them are human, which means every campaign labors under the small risk of unexpected collapse. The one real advantage of a strong primary field is that it creates a hedge against just such a crisis.
Kevin Alexander Gray at
The Progressive writes
Rolling Back the Police State:
[H]iring more black officers isn’t necessarily a cure all for a police department with a pattern of discriminatory race relations. Black officers can and do adopt the practices of their white counterparts. The first cop to arrive at the scene after Scott’s killing was black. The first official police report said that the officers performed first aid. They did not. The black officer arrived to assist Slager, not the dying man. And he participated in an attempted cover-up if he seconded Slager's initial report in any way.
Racists harbor the illusion that it’s just black people getting killed and they deserve it. Just read the comment sections of the various news reports on such incidents. Some folks will always believe that black people are inherently criminal. So when police and media mention drugs, guns, gang-related activities, or prior arrests, it validates their beliefs. Worse are those who don’t consider themselves racists, black and white, who hear the indicting buzzwords, turn a blind eye, and tune it out.
Some things are clear. Police shoot at blacks more often than they shoot at whites, and they disproportionately kill them.
Micah Uetricht at
In These Times Rahm Emanuel Won—But Chicago Progressives Actually Have Much to Be Happy About:
Despite his flaws, as Ben Lorber argued last week, Garcia's campaign should not have been dismissed by the Left. Masses of activists were put in motion by the campaign; to ignore them would have been foolish. Given this, Garcia's loss and Emanuel's reelection is a real blow to the city's grassroots movements, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Those movements attempted to unseat an incumbent mayor and failed.
That loss, coupled with the effects of what will likely be another four years of brutal neoliberal governance—more privatization, more attacks on unions, more defunding public institutions while funneling public resources to the already wealthy—may discourage and demobilize union and community activists, some perhaps permanently.
All that said, Chicago's grassroots movements may have more reason to be optimistic than ever before.
This isn’t just post-election spin to try to make progressives and leftists feel better: It's undeniable that Chicago progressives have made serious headway on multiple fronts.
Paul Rosenberg at
Alternet How to Defeat the Science Deniers: Even Wingnuts Learn That Reality Is Good Business:
[A] wide range of recent developments are altering the policy landscape around climate change—everything from falling profits (even outright losses) in the fossil fuel industry to falling costs and booming investments in renewables. There’s the growing salience of extreme weather climate-change impacts on people’s everyday lives, from Hurricane Sandy to California’s record-breaking drought, and a rapidly-growing climate divestment movement. [...]
This ongoing shift is far from a done deal, and there’s still plenty of confusion and denial out there, reflected in a recent Media Matters report that most major media ignore global warming’s role in recent severe winter snowstorms, but the trends are more in synch than not, and as with the unexpected Indiana RFRA firestorm, the cumulative impact of those multiple trends has the potential to surprise. Considering how depressing the decades-long gridlock on climate-change has been, that can only be viewed as a sign of great hope. The long-term climate impacts remain grim, and there are no guarantees here, but there is hope.
Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm recently drew a direct parallel (“Boycotting States: The Future For Climate Activism?”) focusing specifically on the necessity of the state-level struggle. He highlighted Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s mendacious threat to the global community, invoking state-level opposition to EPA greenhouse gas regulation—and the key role of casting it as a moral struggle. [...]
The LGBT community didn’t win by asking by for people to “accept gay marriage by holding their moral noses,” he pointed out. They won because “they set out to change change people’s minds about what is moral,” and that’s “the lesson that the gay revolution holds for any progressive movement,” particularly the climate action movement to save our planet’s future.
Heather Digby Parton at
Salon writes
The NRA’s open-carry clustermuck: How its annual convention highlights the hypocrisy of the pro-gun movement:
New laws that allow the open carry of loaded guns in public places — and such laws are springing up all over the nation — have resulted in even more terrifying confrontations: For example, parents are forced to deal with gun activists brandishing their firearms in front of their kids in a public park, shouting: ”Look at my gun! There’s nothing you can do about it!” Likewise, workers in businesses serving the public are forced to deal with customers blithely slinging loaded semi-automatic weapons over their shoulders, or casually leaning firearms up against tables. These owners have little recourse but to pray they don’t become the victim of one of the thousands of firearm-related accidents that occur all over the country every year. [...]
But never let it be said that the gun rights zealots are totally rigid in their thinking and have no common sense at all. I have written in the past about the odd hypocrisy of gun proliferation advocates in Republican state houses who refuse to people the right to carry firearms in their work places, even as they pass laws making everyone else work in a world where an angry person with a gun might very well lose his or her temper and decide to make their point with a bullet. [...]
Still it’s somewhat amusing that the National Rifle Association does not allow working firearms at their own convention, and that they would hold it in a state which requires gun permits and allows the banning of guns in public places. One would naturally assume from their propaganda that they would go someplace with looser gun laws under the assumption that their gathering would be the most polite convention in history, what with all the “good guys with guns” there to stop any “bad guys with guns.”
The Editorial Board at the
Los Angeles Times concludes
A court ruling could wash away incentives to conserve water :
Several years ago, though, property owners in San Juan Capistrano, another wealthy city, rebelled against tiered pricing and argued that government must provide every gallon to every user at a rate that reflects only the cost of delivering it, without built-in incentives to conserve and without punishment for waste. They won their lawsuit in the trial court based on Proposition 218 — a taxpayer protection measure adopted in 1996, now in the Constitution as Article XIII D — and a ruling upholding or overturning that court's decision is expected from the Court of Appeal in the coming week.
A screenwriter or a novelist couldn't have timed it better for drama. With a worsening drought and an unprecedented statewide mandate from the governor to cut use around the state by 25% announced early this month, the court could invalidate tiered pricing, leaving Californians to their individual water-using consciences just when a little inducement is most needed.
Urban dwellers and farmers, northerners and southerners, rich neighborhoods with big houses and lush lawns and mid-level neighborhoods with apartment blocks and laundry rooms — all are already pointing at each other as water-wasters, infusing the drought with a layer of anger and suspicion that undermines much needed cooperation. Imagine how much worse it will become if water agencies may no longer provide an economic incentive to conserve.
David Sirota at
Creators Syndicate writes
Companies' Pro-Equality Rhetoric Belied By Their Campaign Donations:
Last week, corporate America appeared to take a rare stand on principle. After Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed a law permitting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, various companies expressed outrage and tried to position themselves as bold defenders of social justice.
There was just one little problem: Many of the same companies have been donating to the public officials who have long opposed the effort to outlaw such discrimination. That campaign cash has flowed to those politicians as they have very publicly led the fight against LGBT rights.
William F. Laurance at
The New York Times Roads to Ruin:
If you want to see how differently economists and ecologists view the world, just ask them about roads. Many economists love roads; they see them as one of the most cost-effective ways to encourage economic growth and provide social benefits. But roads truly scare ecologists — especially roads that penetrate into wilderness areas, nature reserves, and the remnants of rare ecosystems. Why? In such circumstances, roads often open a Pandora’s box of environmental evils. [...]
Roads are just part of the problem. Everywhere one looks, new infrastructure is proliferating in the world’s last wild places, often provoking serious environmental harm. Brazil’s Balbina Dam flooded 240,000 hectares of rainforest — an area larger than Buenos Aires. Plans are afoot to build another 150 major dams in the Amazon — each of which will flood expanses of forest and require networks of new roads for dam and power line construction.
At least as scary from an environmental viewpoint is the contemporary avalanche of mining and fossil-fuel projects.