Author: Jonathan Schwarz

I’ve uncovered conclusive proof that Joe Biden engaged in egregious plagiarism during his 2007 announcement that he was running for president. The extensive, horrifying details are available at my site.

McCain defends himself:

I am grateful for the fact that I have a wonderful life. I spent some years without a kitchen table, without a chair, and I know what it’s like to be blessed by the opportunities of this great nation. Cindy’s father, who barely finished high school, went off and distinguished himself in World War II in a B-17 and came back with practically nothing and realized the American dream, and I am proud and grateful for that, and I think he is a role model to many young Americans who serve in the military and come back and succeed.

I didn’t realize the American Dream included being a mobbed-up convicted felon.

But seriously, usually it’s the Democrats who are mobbed-up. Most Republicans have the money to engage in organized crime so high level that it’s called “foreign policy.”

I believe human civilization will likely—despite current appearances—manage to mitigate global warming and survive. I have about ten reasons for this. One of them is that this is one of the few political issues in which the Sane Billionaires are on the progressive side.

Almost all political conflict, especially in the US, boils down to a fight between the Sane Billionaires and the Insane Billionaires. It generally follows this template:

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: Let’s kill everyone and take their money!

SANE BILLIONAIRES: I like the way you think. I really do. But if we keep everyone alive, and working for us, we’ll make even more money, in the long term.

INSANE BILLIONAIRES: You communist!!!

So from a progressive perspective, you always have to hope the Sane Billionaires win. Still, there’s generally a huge chasm between what the Sane Billionaires want and what progressives want.

This is not the case with global warming. Take Thomas Friedman, who is a pure distillation of Sane Billionarism. (And he is literally a billionaire by marriage.) On trade, foreign policy, etc., Friedman—unlike, say, Dick Cheney—doesn’t want to kill everyone on earth. He’s intelligent enough to understand blood is a big expense. However, he wants to keep us all working to make even more money for him and his fellow billionaires, and is certainly willing to kill anyone who gets out of line. There’s a gigantic chasm between this and anything that could be termed progressive.

But with global warming, Friedman is to a large degree on the progressive side. He’s like Marriner Eccles, an industrialist who later became Chairman of the Federal Reserve under FDR. Eccles said this about the Great Depression:

“It became apparent to me, as a capitalist, that if I lent myself to this sort of action [by his fellow businessmen] and resisted any change designed to benefit all the people, I could be consumed by the poisons of social lag I had helped to create.”

Then there’s the example of the National Clean Energy Summit that was just held in Nevada. The attendees were people like T. Boone Pickens, Robert Rubin, a Google representative, and Michael Bloomberg—Sane Billionaires all. (Actually, Rubin may only be a Sane Semi-Billionaire.)

This doesn’t mean progressives will win on global warming. It’s a gigantic challenge in any case. And dealing with it might require so much change that some of the Sane Billionaires will flip back to the other side. But as with people like Eccles, the threat of the Sane Billionaires’ own personal destruction combined with huge social movements can push the SBs to places you might not expect. (Note that this conference got these SBs to the same location as the Vice President of United Steelworkers.)

Thus, we have more wind at our backs than it first appears. No one can know whether this will be enough, even with a huge social movement. And it certainly won’t be enough without a huge social movement. But we’re not necessarily doomed.

MORE GOOD NEWS: Giant evil utility Xcel is shutting down two coal plants in Colorado and replacing their output with newly-built solar and wind power.

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A Liberal Shock Doctrine
by Rick Perlstein

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.

That is a fact. A fact too many Democrats have trained themselves to ignore. And it sometimes feels like Barack Obama, whose first instinct when faced with ideological resistance seems to be to extend the right hand of fellowship, understands it least of all. Does he grasp that unless all the monuments of lasting, structural change in the American state — banking regulation, public-power generation, Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to join a union, federal funding of education, Medicare, desegregation, Southern voting rights — had happened fast, they wouldn’t have happened at all?

I hope so.

The rest.

When you read the New York Times, it’s often hard to tell whether we’re living in 2008 or during the Chester Arthur administration. For instance, Michiko Kakutani’s review of Thomas Frank’s book The Wrecking Crew apparently was xeroxed from reviews the Times was giving of similar books during the mid-Gilded Age:

…hectoring…highly partisan, Manichaean-minded…screed…comes across as a sort of parody…in love with big government…opposed to all manner of capitalism…strident, impatient…undermines the possibility of a sober, nonpartisan discussion…antiquated…dubious…

Also: god damn that Samuel Gompers!

But this is the best part:

Mr. Frank does not help himself by relying on fuzzy — and poorly documented — illustrations of his theories. He writes, for instance, that in 2004 “a group of the country’s largest companies reportedly paid some unnamed K Street firm $1.6 million to secure a tiny modification of the tax code; once the law was rewritten in accordance with their wishes — and with almost no public notice — they saved $100 billion in taxes, an amount which you and I will eventually have to replace in the public treasury.” He adds that if you do the math, “you will find that the rate of return these companies made on their lobbying investment was some six million percent”…He does not say, however, which companies paid which lobbying firm the money, nor does he describe which modification of the tax code was involved.

This is correct; Frank “does not say” any of these things. However, he does employ a literary convention known as a “footnote,” which directs you to a long front-page Washington Post article which includes all the exciting details.

Michiko Kakutani has an English degree from Yale. Whether her education was a catastrophic failure, or worked exactly as intended, is a judgment you’ll have to make yourself.