Sam Roberts notes the apparent end of identity politics in the New York mayoral primary.
Last week, after Bill de Blasio finished first in the Democratic mayoral primary, students of New York politics were already pronouncing identity politics dead. After all, half the black voters abandoned the black candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., to back Mr. de Blasio (he and Mr. Thompson each got 42 percent among blacks, according to an Edison Research survey of voters leaving the polls). Ideology trumped race as even the Rev. Al Sharpton, more impressed with Mr. de Blasio’s policy agenda, remained publicly neutral instead of reflexively endorsing the black candidate. Mr. Thompson carried Italian and Irish Catholic districts in Staten Island and Breezy Point, Queens, which, in the past, have not routinely embraced black candidates, as well as several Orthodox Jewish and Russian enclaves.
Women abandoned Christine C. Quinn, who would have been the first female mayor (Mr. de Blasio carried white women 36 percent to 26 percent and black women by a crushing 47 percent to 6 percent). So did gay voters (he led 47 percent to 34 percent over Ms. Quinn, who is openly gay and who married her partner, a lawyer, last year). Only 4 percent of Jewish voters went for Anthony D. Weiner, the only Jewish candidate. While Asians heavily supported John C. Liu, a Chinese-American, they appeared to have turned out in smaller numbers than four years ago when he was elected comptroller.
Which... apparently signals that identity politics aren't dead after all.
Bruce N. Gyory, a political consultant working for Mr. Thompson, said the returns “suggest not an end to identity politics but a more nuanced version. The good news is that de Blasio exceeded expectations from the beginning of this campaign among minority voters and Thompson exceeded where pundits thought his white support would end up, especially among Jewish voters and from labor households. Actually, the increased diversity within the minority community suggests we may be returning to the Al Smith-Fiorello La Guardia model, where ethnic politics is played best via issues which unite rather than race cards which divide.”
Which certainly sounds like... Non-identity politics. After all, if voters are uniting around shared positions rather than race or gender, that's just plain... good.
Come on in, let's see what other punditry is afoot.
The New York Times embraces the cool weather by marking the opening of the fresh Republican crazy season.
The fiscal year is about to end, so the annual awakening of Tea Party Republicans in the House and Senate is about to begin. Most of the time they sit around and do virtually nothing but gripe (they have made the current Congress the least productive ever), but a new fiscal year finally gives them a chance to govern the only way they know how: by creating a false crisis in order to tear down a piece of the government.
This year, as has been the case so often in the past, their target is President Obama’s health care reform law. If it is not repealed or defunded or delayed or otherwise left bleeding in the public square, they will not pass a spending bill needed to keep the government open past Sept. 30. And if that doesn’t cripple the health law (which it won’t), they will resort to the far more serious threat of default, refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, no matter the catastrophe that would cause.
But hey, making sure that government can't function is what the GOP congress does. Sure, forever wrecking the international economy and starting a spiral of distrust and fiscal collapse might seem like a bit much just to make sure Barack Obama has a bad day, but don't think that Republicans won't go there.
Dana Milbank rips his shirt off to reply to show that he can be at least as condescending as Putin.
Dear President Putin...
I know I speak for many American people when I congratulate you on your English. It was flawless, with none of those dropped articles that plague so many of your countrymen. Please don’t be offended, but I have to ask: Did Edward Snowden help you with your letter?...
Although some of us think it’s a good idea to have the U.S. military strike Syria, most of the American people agree with you that it would be a bad idea. (President Obama, you may have heard, is on both sides of the issue.) Your arguments against attack were creative, which is why it’s such a shame that, at the very end, you kind of stepped in it. When you told us that Americans are not “exceptional” — well, that hurts all of us American people.
And... there's more, but if you just think of it as Dana Milbank does Maureen Dowd, only aimed at Putin instead of MoDo's weekly snide shots toward "Barry," you'll have the idea.
Ruth Marcus on the GOP's ongoing war for poverty.
Democrats look at the food-stamp program and see an essential piece of a fraying safety net. Republicans see entitlement spending gone wild. This fierce debate is to be joined soon in the House, where Republicans plan to take up a mean-spirited measure that would cut spending on the program by a whopping $40 billion over the next decade — twice the original House proposal and 10 times the trims envisioned by the Senate.
The raw numbers offer some explanation for conservative concern. Spending on food stamps (technically, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) has mushroomed from $35 billion in 2007 to $83 billion. In an average month, nearly 48 million people — one in seven U.S. residents — receive benefits.
But those figures demonstrate a program working as intended in an economic downturn. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the weak economy was responsible for 65 percent of the cost growth between 2007 and 2011; 20 percent was because of a stimulus-funded boost in benefits that is set to expire in November. The remainder reflected factors such as higher food prices and lower income among beneficiaries.
By working as intended and providing safety net, SNAP is already in process of
cutting its own impact.
Indeed, the CBO projects that, as the economy recovers and the labor market slowly follows, enrollment and costs will drop to 34 million recipients and $73 billion by 2023. Unlike federal health-care programs, under the twin pressures of an aging population and costs rising faster than inflation, food stamps are not a long-term driver of the budget deficit.
A few other tidbits: Benefits are modest, averaging $1.40 per meal. Three-fourths of households receiving benefits include a child, a person age 60 or older or someone who is disabled. The average household receiving benefits in 2010 had annual income of $8,800.
But don't expect any of that to stop the GOP's story of the food stamp surfer. Good GOP mythology is never dented by mere facts, speaking of which...
Heraldo Muñoz provides a needed balloon popping of one of the right's whitewashed "heroes."
After the coup in Egypt in July, a Wall Street Journal editorial argued that “Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet,” who, it said, “hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.” Some years ago, Jonah Goldberg made a similar argument in a Los Angeles Times column titled “Iraq needs a Pinochet.”
As an established Pinochet opponent, I can affirm that he personified a disturbing contradiction. He won praise for transforming the economy, operated by the “Chicago Boys” (Chilean students of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago), into the most prosperous in Latin America. He encouraged export growth, removed trade barriers, established an independent central bank able to control interest and exchange rates, and privatized social security and state companies. Chile became the Washington Consensus model for countries seeking to put their house in order.
The main problem for Pinochet’s apologists was his brutality and corruption. This is why, although the U.S. government intervened to destabilize Allende before and after he came to power and initially backed Pinochet, the dictator never found lasting friendship in Washington. If only he had modernized Chile’s economy without assassinating, torturing and exiling tens of thousands of dissidents and getting caught hiding offshore bank accounts. What seems to matter for some Pinochet defenders is that, much like Mussolini, he made the trains run on time.
It's also worth noting that the things that Pinochet did to improve the Chilean economy were not the deregulatory, free-for-all that the Chicago School has unleashed in America, but a highly structured, centralized program that, if it wasn't officially government controlled, was backed by government torturers and government's corporate partners. And Pinochet's vaunted miracle was a miracle restricted to a few. In short, it was the miracle of fascism.
The return of democracy in 1990 started to remedy the social costs of the Pinochet era. In the next two decades, Chile grew at more than 5 percent per year, almost doubling its growth rates of the three previous decades. Meanwhile, Chile’s poverty rate plummeted from 40.8 percent in 1990 to 9.9 percent in 201...
It was only long after Pinochet left that most of Chile joined in the miracle, by removing most of the corporatism that Pinochet imposed.
Sebastian Junger struggles with the dilemma of appropriate action in Syria.
I have worked as a war reporter since 1993, when I sent myself to Bosnia with a backpack, a sleeping bag and a stack of notebooks. The first dead body I saw in a war zone was a teenage girl who was sprawled naked outside the Kosovar town of Suha Reka, having been gang-raped by Serbian paramilitaries toward the end of the war in 1999. After they finished with her, they cut her throat and left her in a field to die; when I saw her, the only way to know she was female — or indeed human — was the red nail polish on her hands.
I grew up in an extremely liberal family during the Vietnam War, and yet I found it hard not to be cheered by the thought that the men who raped and killed that girl might have died during the 78-day NATO bombardment that eventually brought independence to Kosovo.
Every war I have ever covered — Kosovo, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Liberia — withstood all diplomatic efforts to end it until Western military action finally forced a resolution. Even Afghanistan, where NATO troops stepped into a civil war that had been raging for a decade, is experiencing its lowest level of civilian casualties in more than a generation. That track record should force even peace advocates to consider that military action is required to bring some wars to an end.
It's understandable that Junger has been personally shaped by what he's seen of the horrors of war, and I don't for a moment pretend that I, who haven't seen it, has anywhere near the knowledge of those who have, but Junger's principle argument in the piece -- that the United States has build a military-corporate complex as the center of our economy, so we shouldn't be afraid to use it -- strikes me as, well, way less than compelling.
Doyle McManus says we're not looking at an era of renewed isolationism, but a skepticism against all things government.
President Obama and his aides were surprised this month by the strength of public opposition to their call for military action against Syria. They shouldn't have been.
Americans have almost always been reluctant to go to war. In 1939, polls showed that most Americans not only wanted to stay out of war against Nazi Germany, they weren't even sure they wanted to send military aid to Britain — fearing, perhaps, a slippery slope.
Today, Americans have additional reasons to be skeptical. There's the toll of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's the fear that any war in the Middle East will inevitably become a quagmire. And there's also a fundamental change in American attitudes toward their leaders.
The traditional center in American foreign policy — the rally-around-the-flag reflex presidents could once rely on — has eroded. One reason is partisan polarization: Many conservatives who might have supported military action under a Republican president are disinclined to help Obama in his hour of need. But it's not all partisan; public confidence in the federal government's ability to do anything right has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup Poll released last week.
We might see that as the result of the BS leading us into Iraq and the breakdown of the GOP-led congress, and be thankful that this time around Americans are at least thinking before striking, but in as much as both things have led the average American to doubt the utility of government, there's another way we should see it: the Republican plan is working. As long as people insist on electing people who tell them government is bad, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Leonard Pitts looks at lives that might have been.
This is for four women who are not here.
It is for grandchildren who never existed and retirement celebrations that were never held. It is for Sunday dinners that were never prepared in homes that were never purchased. It is for children who were never born and fathers who never got to walk daughters down the aisle. It is for mortarboards that were never flung into the air, for first kisses that were never stolen, for dreams that ended even as they still were being conceived.
This is for four little girls who died, 50 years ago today.
John Timmer explains why the US won't honor scientists by naming a Science Laureate.
You may not be aware of it, but the US has an official poet. Named by the Librarian of Congress, the Poet Laureate is meant to increase the public's appreciation of poetry and the arts in general. Inspired by this example, a bipartisan group of Representatives introduced a bill that would create a Science Laureate to indicate to the US public the value placed on science. Unfortunately, that plan has hit a snag, as lobbyists freaked out over fears the Science Laureate could introduce the US public to reality on the topic of climate change.
According to Science Insider, when the bill was first introduced, it had bipartisan backing in both the House and Senate—including from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who is not consistently on friendly terms with the US government's science bodies.
Only that bipartisanship didn't last. Why? Because right wing oranizations actually
fear the idea of giving any scientist the opportunity to address the public.
Science Insider also talked to someone from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who basically said that his group didn't want to see scientists talking to the public. "There’s no way to make it work,” the person is quoted as saying. “It would still give scientists an opportunity to pontificate, and we’re opposed to it.”