"April's Fool" - Cotton Mather
Ah, we say goodbye to what has been an inordinately gloomy last couple of weeks of March -- just cold and drizzly and damp. (Of course April has started the same way.) Spring is desperately wanted in these parts. The lawyer things been a bit out of control too -- it's been a little bit more than a full time job the last week or so. I feel a little out of touch with what's going on.
- I loved the awesome turn out of tea partiers yesterday in DC. You would think that this is sort of thing would finally get the media to start questioning the alleged power and appeal of this tiny group of marginal cranks. And yet the tea partiers still get front page treatment while organized labor, which has shown an ability to turn out tens of thousands of people in multiple states, sometimes day after day as in Wisconsin, is treated as a kind of passe non-entity in much of the press.
- Maybe though, if organized labor defeats this odious bill in Ohio via referendum and succeeds in the Wisconsin recall battles, a different narrative will begin to emerge. And it can't happen too soon with general right-wing nuttiness breaking out all over the country. I am waiting for Thirteenth Amendment repeal to start catching on in Republican circles.
- The only thing that seems more in danger than the right to bargain collectively is the right to reproductive freedom. This stuff is just odious. .
- Michelle Rhee has been a scamstress for a long time it would seem. Some of the work by DC high school math teacher G.F. Brandenberg really highlights this fact. She's an insufferable grifter who will no doubt find a comfortable niche in right wing Republican circles and become wealthy in the process.
- Speaking of shameless grifters, I somehow missed this deft dismantling of David Brooks by Chris Lehman, wonderfully titled "The Babbitt of the Bobos." It's almost as devastating as this.
- The war on everyone who is not a Republican is consistent with the right's ethos, which is that politics is war by other means. It would be helpful if people on the Democratic side of the aisle understood this better and acted accordingly. And to a certain extent imitated it. In a world in which strategic political thinking were more a part of the legislative process when Democrats are in power, things like immigration reform and a jobs program for unemployed young people would have been at the very top of the to-do list, both because they were substantively good policy, but also because they would be likely to render significant electoral advantage -- probably for decades to come. Winning elections is the essential factor in getting policies you want adopted. It seems like an obvious proposition, but one which has not always been acknowledged in establishment Democratic circles.
I hope it's sunny where you are. What's happening?
