Syria isn’t Iraq and Obama isn’t Bush

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To be sure, President Obama will explain whatever decision he makes regarding Syria with a credibility problem, partly of his own making and partly inherited. The self-inflicted part can be summed up in a sentence: leakers of classified information to the press are in prison or hiding while war criminals are going unprosecuted. The general public might not care, but Obama’s base does, and he’s going to need our support for a potentially unpopular intervention. Continue Reading

House election bill: The good, the bad, and what’s missing

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The State House has passed an election reform bill that has some good stuff in it, though not all good, and there’s a big omission. Still, it’s an improvement, and the House DFL can’t be accused of entirely blowing their chance, which is something I was concerned about. Like many lefty bloggers, I expressed concern some legislators would get skittish and forget they won a mandate to do some things. Most such posts I’ve seen have been about marriage equality, which is reasonable since there is a screamingly obvious opportunity to make progress there, and choking at the crucial moment seems off the agenda. I was thinking more broadly in that post in early January, including a large portion devoted to election reform. The photo ID amendment, while a lousy idea, led to a broader discussion about our election system, and its defeat offered a chance to address some things, some of which did get addressed: Continue Reading

A surge of Iraq revisionism on the 10th anniversary

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Perhaps the effort on the right to make the second war with Iraq appear to be some sort of success is just a visceral refusal to acknowledge having brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people while being very wrong about 911, WMDs, the reception we’d receive, pretty much everything. Certainly having neocons mark the anniversary with a panel of the guilty talking about how great they were lends a sense of deliberateness to the efforts to spin the war as a success, or at least claim it ended well as a result of “the surge.” Whether it’s deliberate or just a reaction isn’t really the thing to be concerned about however. They’re trying to spin history. The story they hope is remembered is the war went poorly at first, but then the neocons came up with their brilliant “surge” and all came out OK. Can they really cover up one of the biggest blunders in US history? Yes. It’s been done before, after another contender for biggest blunder. Continue Reading

Democrats need to do better with white voters, part two

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UPDATE: a commenter came up with another variable

Last December I wrote about, counter-intuitive as it might sound given what Republicans are going through, why Democrats need to win a bigger share of the white vote. This follow-up is getting into how to win more white votes, but given that a month has passed since the first post, here’s the short version of why: Continue Reading

Giving away the Obama code base is a bad idea

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There is a dispute between the developers who worked on the Obama campaign and the political pros at the DNC over what to do with the tools developed for the Obama campaign. Essentially, the developers want to make the code open-source while the DNC wants to keep it proprietary.“Open-source” means anyone can use the code and develop their own changes to it. My first thought was that this essentially means giving it away to the Republicans, and my reaction was, “Are you kidding!?!?” After giving it some thought though, looking at both sides … are you kidding?!?! (reversing the order of the question marks and exclamation points makes it technically a different thought). Continue Reading

DFL legislators do indeed have a mandate

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The first session of the new legislature with DFL majorities opens tomorrow [Tues, 1/8]. Anyone following the coverage and commentary sees the media and DFL legislators fretting about being accused of overreach if they do what they were elected to do. My choice of the word “fretting” might imply I don’t take those concerns seriously, and, well, that’s mostly right. Too many have it in their heads that the reason the GOP majorities were so short-lived was that they overreached. “Overreached” implies that the voters liked the GOP agenda, but just wanted a bit less of it. However, the GOP agenda was pretty thoroughly rejected — there’s no other way to read it when it lasts just two years and the voters could have blamed the DFL governor, but chose instead to give him a friendly legislature. That message wasn’t, “You overreached.” It was, “Please go away.” Continue Reading

Go over the fiscal cliff

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I don’t take a decision to go over the fiscal cliff lightly. Economists think doing so will cause a recession. Since I’m advocating going over the cliff, I’d like to think the economists’ are, um, skewed— pardon the indulgence in a bit of post-election schadenfreude — but the case for the projections being wrong is that it would be convenient for me if they were wrong. Another recession would mean a drop in government revenues that makes the federal deficit and state shortfalls even worse, unemployment would presumably go up, and since real people will gt hurt, it’s just nothing to take lightly. Then why go over? Continue Reading

We have an opportunity to clarify and simplify voting rights for felons

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I know it looks like I’m just reposting “Move right away on marriage equality“, with “marriage equality” scratched out and “voting rights” scribbled in, but I assure readers I do get that these are two different issues, the “Vote NO On Both” campaign theme notwithstanding. They do have a common irony, however, in that the Republicans who put the amendments on the ballot revealed something and thereby offered an opportunity. The opportunity they exposed to advance voting rights isn’t as clear cut as marriage equality, but it’s still there. Continue Reading