No One Touches Hunter

Hunter of the Daily Kos is my favorite writer, and here's why (from "The Chronicles of Mitt"):

Today is apparently "Labor Day," according to my advisers. I had never heard of it, but from what I understand it is a day in which all the people of America cease their activities and live only on the earnings in their stock portfolios. I have done that with frequency, but I was never aware there was a special day to honor the practice.

Left v. Right: The Worldviews

Hunter at the Daily Kos writes pithy, vivid posts that typically address the hypocrisy of the Right and the completely fantastic picture they paint of the world we live in, which has mighty little to do with the reality of the world we do live in. He writes sharp, scathing posts that connect the dots between seemingly unrelated but deeply interconnected actions and statements that arise on the Right day after day. But his latest post is different. It's not as scathing; it's profound and sad, and it captures better than many of his other excellent posts the nature of the debate that divides the Left from the Right.

Much has been written about how the liberals and conservatives are divided by a failure to communicate effectively using a common language. That is also the contention of Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who recently appeared on Moyers and Company to discuss his soon-to-be released book titled The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt's book tackles the problem of how different moral intuitions and compasses shape our world view and how the failure to empathize leads to a breakdown in communication between political factions. It all sounds very refined, scholarly, and even convincing.

I like Moyers, and I  usually like the points his guests make. I will probably buy Haidt's book and read it with curiosity, but I suspect that I will be disappointed by its premise, and by its conclusions as well. It seems to me that Hunter does a better job of capturing the essence of the divide that separates the Left from the Right: It's not one about failure to speak a common language, to understand the different but equally valid point of the opposition that causes politics to break down and fail its people. It's really about a battle about disappearing opportunities; about how the America of the present, with all its huffy and haughty pretenses at still being the land of opportunities and just rewards, is a nation that more and more picks winners and losers by birth right, by heritage, and by heirdom. It is a nation where the promise, let alone the achievement, of upward mobility has been on the decline for decades, and where birth places and conditions tend to determine the outcome in life more than anywhere else in the advanced world.

George Will, Thomas Sowell, and all the other conservative pundits that strike a pose of supremacy of knowledge and intellect, cannot explain--as Hunter points out--why there are such disparities in our society if the goal of the Left, with all its assumed power over the ignorant masses, is to create equal outcomes. Ineptitude? Or is it because the premise that the Left is constantly seeking to establish equal outcomes is an invention of those whose mission in life is to conserve and preserve the inequality that has played to their advantage? Hunter's post, in all its quiet desperation, can be summed up in this paragraph (Hunter's):

[...] three stories sit on my computer desktop, all of which were written in the span of a few January days. A story about the damn redistributionists; a story about how America measurably fails its poor; a concrete case around which to question ourselves on what, as a society, we believe equal opportunity to mean. [Emphasis added]

I added emphasis to the sentence "[A] concrete case around which to question ourselves on what, as a society, we believe equal opportunity to mean." because nations are not shaped by debates; they are shaped by how debates are translated (or not) into action. We have a concrete case to deal with. How we deal with it defines not only our idea of what future we want to build, but future itself.

Stop The Presses

Here's an interesting statement for my (10) Republican/Libertarian friends to ponder:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

The statement was made in Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators, a Bloomberg op-ed by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, who "founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion [and] was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)."

Go read, and ponder.

David Michael Green Is At His Very Angriest Best

Read We Are Not Your Human Resources, David Michael Green's latest rant on The Regressive Antidote blog.

Here's a taste of it:

Our solutions no longer reside, if they ever did, in the ballot box. The Republicans are a sheer criminal enterprise, whose entire function is to redistribute wealth from the rest of us to already wealthy elites. But the Democrats are actually worse, because they do exactly the same thing, while trading on the party’s past reputation for representing the public interest. For my money (which, along with yours, is precisely what is at stake), Obama and Clinton and their ilk in Congress have betrayed me and the country more than, say, any of the Dicks – Cheney, Armey or Nixon. You expect the asshole kid on the playground to live up to his reputation. It hurts a lot more when your best friend is the one sticking in the knife.

On The NBA Lockout

Though I have nothing intelligent to say about the NBA lockout, I can still recognize an intelligent article about it by someone else. Enter Bill Simmons's Business Vs. Personal.

Writes Simmons: "We were coming off of one of the top-five NBA seasons ever, now it's November, the league isn't playing … and nobody really cared. Imagine the outrage if pro football disappeared for an entire month. Where's the clamoring for regular season pro basketball?"

Though I like basketball, I'm really in the "and nobody really cared" camp. After reading Simmons's take on the whole debacle, I'll admit my interest has been aroused..

Why The Founding Fathers Were Wiser Than You Know

"Ridiculous veneration for the Constitution of the United States." Those are the words of Sanford Levinson, constitutional scholar, who has written a wonderful book that I highly recommend, both to those who understand its greatness and its limits and--particularly--to those who regard it as a sacred document, on par with Scriptures.

The book is Constitutional Faith, and you should buy it and read it as soon as you can.

And by the way, I wrote a post almost 4 years ago wherein I made many of the points that Levinson makes about the Constitution.

Hunter Is Quickly Becoming My Favorite @ The Daily Kos

Always on target, always acerbic, with a keen eye for the absurdity of the all situation, Hunter is quickly becoming my favorite blogger at the Daily Kos (with the excellent Joan McCarter).

Today, Hunter took it upon himself to dismantle a) the intellectual (?) confusion at Fox News over Halloween, and b) for the twofer, the apocalyptic stupidity and shamelessness of Republicans in Congress, in a story you have to read to believe: House to vote on reaffirming 'In God We Trust' motto: All other problems apparently solved

Weekend Reading: Do It For Democracy

It's a beautiful day and, yes, you might think you have better things to do. Barbecue, go to a pool, go to a National Park, to a ballgame or to the mall. The choices are many. The couch potatoes will just stay home and blast the A/C and the TV instead.

Of course, that is kind of how we got to the predicament we're in. We stopped caring about the things that matter. We stopped reading, we stopped trying to find out what goes on in the world around us. We misinterpreted the role we play in a healthy democracy by reducing it to voting every two or four years (if at all) for people who are supposed to represent us. We became numb to the talking points of the few and inured to the pain they inflicted on our lives, as if inevitable.

Someone said that democracy is not a spectators' sport. It isn't, it shouldn't be. Not only we let it become a spectators' sport, we let it become a victim's activity. That's the prevailing thought of many, that we are all victims of an incessant stream of conspiratorial activities at the hands of the powerful is so dangerous and so destructive; because, if you believe that the world is run by a small number of conspirators that cannot be stopped, you stop fighting for what you, in theory deserve.

That is also why religion has such a devastating effects on the lives of Americans: because if you get used to submitting yourself to a higher, unquestionable authority in matters of spirituality, you will most likely retain that attitude in all facets of life. George Carlin put it best, when talking about the Ten Commandments, he said this about the 4th (or 5th, depending on which flavor of Christianity you submit to): "Obedience, respect for authority. Just another name for controlling people. The truth is that obedience and respect shouldn’t be automatic. They should be earned and based on the parent’s performance. Some parents deserve respect, but most of them don’t, period." You can quibble with some aspects of Carlin's routine, but not with the central point: obedience and respect should not be automatic; not for parents; not for any authority, be it governmental or of any other kind.

But it's hard to question authority without being able to grade its performance, not based on belief or unsupported personal convictions, but on facts and logic. Of course, we have also been trained to believe that one man's facts are another's man fallacious opinions. That is not so: everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. It is true that facts and data are subject to interpretation; but the interpretation should rely on a consistent world view. Only when logic is twisted beyond recognition, do facts also lose their essential truth.

I hope that you will forgive me for this long preamble. To make a long story short, there are many things you could be doing this weekend. In truth, they are not all mutually exclusive, and that is precisely why I invite you to read these posts which I found engaging, illuminating, and--to a great extent--convincing.

How to Think About Standard and Poor's Downgrade
America in Decline
30 Years Ago: The Day the Middle Class Died

By all means, don't stop at these; they are just recommendations. If you don't like them, find your own reading. But, as surely as you must feed your body and your spirit, don't forget to also feed your mind. Your well-being, and the well-being of those you care about, depends on it, all the more so in an ailing democracy.

The Age Of Greed

The Age of Greed is the title of a new book by Jeff Madrick. It comes with the recommendation of Michael Winship, senior writer on the now defunct Bill Moyers Journal.

At a minimum, Winship's review of it. The book itself sounds like a good read, too.

Ezra Klein Hits The Nail On The Head

Shortly before President Obama hopefully put the birther controversy to rest by making his original birth certificate public (but don't count on it, more conspiracy theories will surface), Ezra Klein correctly identifies the birthplace of Obama's policies in an astute analysis of the President's work in his first two years at the White House.

Ross Douthat's Intelligent Take on the Egyptian Crisis

If you read this blog often enough, you might have the distinct impression that I am unnecessarily harsh with conservatives. I am harsh, just not unnecessarily. The reason is that there are few sincere conservative thinkers around, and by sincere I mean that they are expressing their honest personal opinion, instead of the opinion of their puppet masters. The conservative world is full of hacks, like Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Hannity, Boehner, McConnell; or of innocently misguided individuals, who regurgitate the Right's talking points without understanding them or appreciating the gravity of what they are saying and the dangers inherent in the world view they propose.

So when a conservative says something intelligent, it is worth highlighting it. It shows other conservatives that you can be a conservative without being either a puppet-master or a puppet; and it shows liberals that we can have a civilized conversation about policy and the direction of the country, even though we certainly will disagree on many things, if not most of them.

Enough of the introduction. Ross Douthat is a conservative, he is intelligent, and he is often a good read, so kudos to the New York Times for bringing him into their fold to replace the stunningly incompetent and dishonest William Kristol. The piece I am recommending to you is The Devil We Know. Rather than giving a knee-jerk and ideological assessment of the situation in Egypt, as conservatives are wont to do in pursuit of an ever more manifest imperial foreign policy, Douthat acknowledges that U.S. meddling in foreign crises often leads to undesirable and unintended results. "History", he says, "makes fools of us all."

A Splendid Call To Action for U.S. Liberals

William Greider wrote an extraordinarily profound analysis of the current political situation titled The End of New Deal Liberalism. In it, he exposes Barack Obama and the Democrats' fecklessness--even better, their complicity--with the ruling class, denounces their allegiance with corporate interests to the detriment of society, and insists that change must come from the bottom, from the disenfranchised and exploited, from those whose future opportunity is being hijacked, destroyed. He warns that substantive change will be a long time coming, that it will be a decades-long project, and that it will almost certainly involve connecting with groups (like the Tea Party) who are enemies of liberalism, at least conceptually, but whose base and whose grievances have more affinity with the bottom of society than with the top.

Greider's article is insightful and intelligent, and it should be essential reading for those who want to build a different America and a different, better future for the generations that will follow ours.