The Mittens plan on health care: repeal the PPACA, make it much harder to obtain private insurance without providing public insurance, gutting Medicaid, ending Medicare. And how could I forget TORT REFORM, the solution to all life’s problems. Well, those contradictions won’t heighten themselves!
See also Serwer, Bernstein, and Kilgore.
Does this National Review article about how conservatives are the real supporters of civil rights even mention the National Review’s contemporaneous position on civil rights? I think you know the answer. Of course, if you define civil rights so that Jesse Helms can be a supporter, it’s a pretty big tent…
Purportedly, these gigantic purple onesies for University of Washington athletes were designed by a UW student. But I am privy to inside knowledge suggesting these were clearly designed by a student or alum at the University of Oregon. I mean, we Ducks know our horrible looking athletic clothing, but even Ducks reject some designs. And when they are rejected, Uncle Phil sends them up to north to those who don’t quite meet the status of “human.”
I’m glad the highly principled Lanny Davis has come to the defense of helpless Cory Booker and against Democrats’ mean attacks on both the mayor of Newark and Mittens’ experience at Bain Capital.
It turns out Harold Ford also agrees. So Booker is in the finest company one can imagine!
This is a few weeks old now, but David Greenberg’s assessment of the continued attempt to canonize Dwight Eisenhower is quite good.
The histories we write say as much about our own times as about those we study. The current polarization in Washington has prompted a nostalgia for parties that were less ideologically uniform and more prone to compromise. Fashionable “pragmatism” has similarly infected thinking about foreign policy, as the fallout from the Iraq war lingers in the air a decade on. Unnamed Pentagon sources doomsay any proposed use of American force (but don’t you try to cut their budget!), while the left, tinged by guilt over its decades-long estrangement from the services, holds up medal-bearing military realists as paragons of wisdom.
These conditions have combined to inspire a rehabilitation of Dwight Eisenhower. Indeed, every few years another fat biography tries to do for Eisenhower what David McCullough did for Harry Truman and Edmund Morris did for Theodore Roosevelt—that is, to canonize him. Geoffrey Perret’s 685-page Eisenhower (1999), Carlo D’Este’s 848-page Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (2002), Michael Korda’s 779-page Ike (2007), Jim Newton’s 451-page Eisenhower: The White House Years (2011)—all were well-researched, well-written, and utterly worshipful.
It certainly seems to me that the Eisenhower canonization is a reaction to the crazy Republicanism of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. Activist Republican presidents destroying the Constitution, tearing down the safety net, and engaging in half-baked wars makes liberals long for the right kind of Republican, one with a limited view of executive power and smart, realist foreign policy. And if you squint, you can make Dwight Eisenhower into that kind of Republican. Obviously, we should be thankful that Eisenhower was elected in 52 and not Bob Taft, but in our haste to remember a “good” Republican leader, let’s not overlook his reticence on civil rights, his destabilization of Guatemala and Iran, his actions in Cuba and Vietnam, and his cowardice in taking on Joe McCarthy. I have no particular hate for Eisenhower, but he’s hardly a Great Man.
I’m also glad that Greenberg finds the Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall as utterly absurd as I do.
Josh Eidelson has a provocative piece at In These Times exploring the possibility of killing the National Labor Relations Act. Quoting several union leaders who note that the labor law enacted in 1935 now restricts labor terribly, Eidelson makes a plausible case. Partially because employers have both found ways around the law and lobby to not enforce its prohibitions on their actions and partially because the NLRA made illegal the very acts (like workplace occupations) that provided the momentum to pass the act, labor law does little for workers today.
Eidelson goes on to discuss how labor activists are starting to get around the law in their own right–by not organizing into “unions,” but rather to create organizations that do what unions do without the title. He also interviews labor scholars who think getting rid of the NLRA is insane.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel on the question. It does feel dangerous. On the other hand, even when unions successfully use the NLRA to crack down on unionbusting tactics, it often takes years for a court to decide in their favor and becomes nothing more than a cost of doing business for employers. Obviously, the ideal would be to have a government that actually enforced the law vigorously, but we are a long ways from that in 2012. And because the NLRA helped bring unions into the government and respectability during the 30s at the price of ending their radical disruptive tactics, when unions are no longer respectable pieces of government coalitions, we are left only with the labor restrictions.
At the very least, it’s an interesting discussion to have.
My take on the lawsuits challenging the contraception requirement is up. The short version is that 1)in a rational universe the idea that religious affiliated institutions performing secular functions with taxpayer money have a constitutional or statutory right to impose their religious views on employees who don’t share them would be considered somewhere between “implausible” and “frivolous” but 2)that doesn’t mean the actually existing federal courts won’t buy the argument.
The proliferating conservative meme that criticizing legal arguments you disagree with is some kind of unethical intimidation is probably too stupid to require an elaborate rebuttal, although Mark Tushnet does the job very effectively.
Although, in fairness, can anyone remember a conservative criticizing a Supreme Court decision they disagree with? I find it hard to imagine Republicans engaging in such incivility. I think even the most detailed search would fail to find the slightest criticism of Roe v. Wade or Kelo v. New London.
So if the Pakistani doctor who helped the United States find Osama bin Laden gets 33 years in prison for treason, does this mean the Pakistani government has explicitly tied itself and its national interests to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda?
I recognize the complexity of Pakistani life and internal politics, but this seems like a really stupid move on their part. It also seems like a priority of the U.S. needs to be getting the Pakistanis to let him go into exile (and in fact Clinton and Panetta are on the case). Which could be the part of the point–if the Pakistanis can make the doctor a bargaining chip, they win something.
As MacGillis says, Obama certainly could lose in November, but weak performances in meaningless primaries in states he has no chance of winning aren’t evidence of anything.
The 1930s: a decade where you could have mainstream cartoons about children going hungry that would resonate with people’s experiences.
Good times.
Another day, another post on the 1884 presidential election. 
I found this county map of 1884 election results pretty interesting because it shows southern “redemption” in progress. Whites may have controlled all the southern states by 1884, but on the county level, it’s interesting to note a lot of counties voting for Blaine. Some of this came from the white Republican areas of the South like east Tennessee. But look at southeast Louisiana or the Arkansas side of the Mississippi Delta. These are heavily black areas where enough African-Americans are still voting to swing the counties toward the Republican. Of course, you hardly see any of that in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia.
Just worth remembering the piecemeal process of white supremacy.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
