E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—What Clinton and Sanders owe progressives:
Any doubt that Clinton and Sanders are fed up with each other was put to rest in Thursday’s debate. In big block type, the New York Daily News proclaimed them “Brooklyn Brawlers.” They went at each other as if there would be no tomorrow after New York voted. That’s pretty much true.
You sensed from Sanders’s aggressiveness that he knows he’s on the edge of effective elimination. If he does win on Tuesday, he’d throw the Democratic race into turmoil and make Clinton’s path to the nomination much rockier. A Clinton victory in New York, which polls suggest is more likely, would all but seal the deal for her.
Jill Abramson at The Guardian writes—HBO's Confirmation shows how women were treated in Washington. Has anything changed?
The tableau of the lone woman testifying before a congressional committee of white men has become iconic. It is the dominant image in Confirmation, the gripping HBO film about Anita Hill’s testimony in the Clarence Thomas hearings before the Senate judiciary committee in 1991, which premieres on Saturday. [...]
I was in the room when the real Anita Hill testified. At the time, I, too, was struck by the contrast between her vivid testimony about how Thomas described pornographic films, including one starring Long Dong Silver, and the formal setting, the crystal-laden, mahogany Russell Caucus Room where Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment against Thomas were heard. [...]
Although those hearings were a generation ago, Confirmation brought to mind more recent congressional proceedings with a lone woman witness facing a mainly white, male set of inquisitors, and another striking outfit, this time dark purple. Hillary Clinton was the star of this show trial, the Benghazi hearings last fall.
Both sets of hearings were billed as fact-finding exercises, but turned out to be poisonous displays of partisanship.
Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes—Bill Clinton's crime bill destroyed lives, and there's no point denying it:
When I was researching the 1994 crime bill forListen, Liberal, my new book documenting the sins of liberalism, I remember being warned by a scholar who has studied mass incarceration for years that it was fruitless to ask Americans to care about the thousands of lives destroyed by the prison system. Today, however, the situation has reversed itself: now people do care about mass incarceration, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and the intense scrutiny it has focused on police killings.
All of a sudden, the punitive frenzies of the 1980s and 1990s seem like something from a cruel foreign country. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton looks like a monster rather than a hero, and he now finds himself dogged by protesters as he campaigns for his wife, Hillary. And so the media has stepped up to do what it always does: reassure Americans that the nightmare isn’t real, that this honorable man did the best he could as president.
Allow me to offer a slightly different take on the 1990s. I think today (as I thought at the time) that there is indeed something worth criticizing when a Democratic president signs on to a national frenzy for punishment and endorses things like “three strikes”, “mandatory minimums”, and “truth in sentencing”, the latter being a cute euphemism for “no more parole”. The reason the 1994 crime bill upsets people is not because they stupidly believe Bill Clinton invented these things; it is because they know he encouraged them. Because the Democrats’ capitulation to the rightwing incarceration agenda was a turning point in its own right
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—
This regional ridicule is a bad play for Sanders.
First, it’s not clear which states Sanders is including in the “Deep South,” a phrase whose meaning is hard to pin down. As a son of the “Deep South” myself, I will assume the list often used: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
But Sanders has not only lost the “Deep South”; with the exception of Oklahoma, he’s lost the South as a whole.
It also must be pointed out that there is a racial dimension to Sanders’ dismissal, however inadvertent it is. [...]
Sanders simply has to own the fact that he didn’t sell his message well in the South, and those voters never warmed to his vision or his ability to execute it. [...]
Sanders must abandon this “Deep South” talking point immediately. He’s better than this, and he should know better.
The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times wonders—Who is going to pay for the bullet train to L.A.?
High-speed rail is supposed to be the backbone of a faster, cleaner, more modern transportation system that connects the state's major population centers. The new plan, however, provides a clear path to building the line just from downtown San Jose to the Central Valley, which it says it will complete by 2025. In fact, the authority hasn't secured the money to build the route between two sizable cities; instead, the funds and the rail line would peter out in some farmland near Shafter, about 20 miles north of Bakersfield. The authority is trying to get another $3billion from the federal government to extend the first segment to San Francisco and Bakersfield, which would boost ridership and make the line more appealing to private investors.
But the plan doesn't explain how the authority will come up with the estimated $43.5 billion needed to construct the rail line from the Central Valley to Los Angeles and ultimately Anaheim, which it had planned to do by 2029. High-speed rail officials have said it's common practice to break ground on major transportation projects without every dollar of construction costs accounted for. Yet most transportation projects aren't fraught with the complexity and political baggage of the bullet train.
Jon Healy at the Los Angeles Times writes—Hillary Clinton flunks the yes-no question test:
At the Democratic debate Thursday in Brooklyn, crusading Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders showed viewers just how squishy Hillary Clinton could be.
He did so by pushing Clinton to give yes-no answers to questions about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and shoring up the Social Security Trust Fund. And rather than sounding peevish by saying those topics defy simplistic approaches, Clinton tried to have it both ways, only to have Sanders call her on it.
She insisted that she was an early supporter of the "fight for $15" in cities across the country, then had to admit that she backs a more modest proposal in Congress. And when asked if she would increase Social Security taxes on middle- and upper-income earners, she said she was in "vigorous agreement" with Sanders -- after saying the government should be looking at other ways to achieve the same goal.
The maddening thing is, Clinton shouldn't be afraid to be less rigid than Sanders. Her position on the minimum wage, for example, aims lower but is a lot more reasonable.
Sandy Tolan at TruthDig writes—Prodded by Millennials, Bernie Sanders Reboots the Conversation on Israel and Palestine:
By American standards, it was a breathtaking moment, played out in a converted Brooklyn warehouse. On national television, a major presidential candidate was sharply criticizing Israel’s “disproportionate” attacks in Gaza, and his opponent Hillary Clinton’s slavishly pro-Israel speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in which she “barely mentioned … the needs of the Palestinian people.”
If this were almost any other nation, Bernie Sanders’ call for a more “even-handed role” on the issue of Israel and Palestine would come off as centrist and unremarkable. After all, he’s only calling for fairness, and even that is couched carefully in the obligatory rhetoric that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
But, of course, this is the land of the “dishonest broker,” the United States, and the New York presidential primary, for crying out loud. And by those standards, the Sanders call for “justice” on Israel and Palestine, his insistence that “we are gonna have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity” (with what?), and his direct criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in front of millions of American viewers—is unprecedented, at least in recent decades of prime-time presidential elections.
Edward Morris at the History News Network writes—Why Bernie’s Right About Glass-Steagall:
Most observers think Sanders is on a quixotic quest and, with Wall Street's political power, the chances of any revival of Glass-Steagall are, like his election to the presidency, slim. Yet Sanders has a strong argument, one that can be effectively made using Citigroup, the two-century old bank that, along with other Wall Street banks, has a history of wreaking havoc on itself and the economy when it mixes commercial banking with investment banking. [...]
Bernie’s probably right on this one. Even Sandy Weill—who once was proud to be referred to on Wall Street as the “Shatterer of Glass-Steagall”—now seems to agree. In a 2012 interview on CNBC he said, “What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking form banking. Have the banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”
Esther Breger at The New Republic writes—The Washington That Failed Anita Hill:
Clarence Thomas is portrayed with empathy by Wendell Pierce (The Wire,Treme) as a husband and father; a black man terrified that powerful, hypocritical white men will ruin his career. In advance publicity for the film, the director and screenwriter have been frustratingly insistent that the film takes no sides. “It’s hard to know what the truth is,” Famuyiwa told Mother Jones last week. Even after repeated probing, no one involved with the film has just come out and said, “I believe Anita,” even though it’s hard to watch the film and come to any other conclusion.
This equivocating hasn’t prevented Confirmation from being attacked by some conservatives as liberal propaganda. That’s ironic, since the film’s real villain isn’t Thomas, who is presented as almost a figure of pity; nor is it Senator John Danforth, Thomas’s close friend who led the charge to smear Anita’s name; nor odious Republican senators such as Alan Simpson and Strom Thurmond; nor Kenneth Duberstein, a White House aide played ineffectually by Eric Stonestreet. The most infuriating character in Confirmation is Joe Biden, not because he’s hostile to Hill (he isn’t), but because the figure of male power he represents—benign, feckless, incurious—is one that’s still so familiar to women, especially within liberal circles.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—Bernie Sanders Won’t Go Quietly Into the Night—Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, should be grateful that he's sticking around.
The ninth Democratic primary debate revealed almost no new daylight between Clinton and Sanders. It mainly just revealed that Sanders won’t go quietly into the night. Sanders was withering in his criticisms, but the criticisms were almost all familiar. Occam’s razor suggests his strategy is intended to avoid a blowout defeat in New York’s presidential primary on Tuesday, which would probably constitute a fatal blow to his candidacy.
And yet despite the campaign’s bitter turn, despite the fact that Sanders’s Hail Mary tack is much more likely to damage Clinton in the general election than to secure the nomination for himself, supporters should maintain a fondness for him as a fundamentally decent rival who has left Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the country better off. At the stage where all kindness has drained out of a campaign, most candidates find themselves tempted to sacrifice their remaining integrity to win. Sanders, by contrast, reminded skeptics why his supporters have been so loyal: With everything on the line, given the opportunity to obfuscate at Clinton’s expense, Sanders held firm even to views that promise to damage him in the state that could seal his fate.
Elizabeth Zach at In These Times writes—More and More Women are Farm Operators: Who Are They?
In trying to get a handle on the bigger picture of my stories, and the people behind them, I spent one afternoon dutifully reading a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report based on the 2010 census and in connection with it, an overview of the Farm Bill passed by Congress in February 2014. In this report, I came across two sentences, as brief and matter-of-fact as you would expect to find in, well, a USDA report on census numbers. They were, in essence, this: In the past three decades, the number of women-operated farms has increased substantially in the nation. Between 1978 and 2007, according to the agency’s Economic Research Service, the number of women-operated farms in the United States grew from 306,200 to nearly a million.
My interest was instantly piqued: “Who are these women?” I wondered.
My mind’s eye filled with sepia images. They were of Willa Cather’s lonely and moody heroines on the endless Nebraska plains. There was the iconic Isak Dinesen, my own heroine: betrayed and bankrupt and yet silently, painstakingly detailing the crucible and hope of her Kenyan coffee plantation, alone. I thought about what would motivate a woman to take on an enterprise like a farm today, in America, knowing full well the financial risk and unavoidable, back-breaking work.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—Robber Baron Recessions:
There are, then, good reasons to believe that reduced competition and increased monopoly power are very bad for the economy. But do we have direct evidence that such a decline in competition has actually happened? Yes, say a number of recent studies, including one just released by the White House. For example, in many industries the combined market share of the top four firms, a traditional measure used in many antitrust studies, has gone up over time.
The obvious next question is why competition has declined. The answer can be summed up in two words: Ronald Reagan.
For Reagan didn’t just cut taxes and deregulate banks; his administration also turned sharply away from the longstanding U.S. tradition of reining in companies that become too dominant in their industries. A new doctrine, emphasizing the supposed efficiency gains from corporate consolidation, led to what those who have studied the issue often describe as the virtual end of antitrust enforcement.
True, there was a limited revival of anti-monopoly efforts during the Clinton years, but these went away again under George W. Bush. The result was an economy with far too much concentration of economic power.