How to administer a dope slap
Update: I didn’t know this but today is “Pay a Blogger” day. Jeez, is it that time again? It seems like it comes earlier and earlier each year. We now have a button in the left sidebar but it may disappear and reappear randomly. Zhat vay, ve vill train you to hit zhe bar vhen it appears. Ve haff found zhat habituation leads to disinterest. Yah? Zo, hit zhe button vhen you zee it. Proceeds will help me get to various events and will keep Katiebird in her technical manuals.
I haven’t criticized Paul Krugman for awhile now, and I don’t really like to do it. I feel like we’re almost neighbors, what with Paul living just down the road a-spell and all. Theoretically, I could run into him. {{Paul shivvers at the thought of that and considers hiring body guards}}
It’s not that I disagree with him in any way. In fact, I don’t. But one of his latest blog posts bugs the stuffing out of me. In Mission Not Accomplished, Krugman writes:
Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum say the right thing about revelations that big banks got very easy terms during the financial crisis: the real scandal isn’t so much that those banks got rescued as that the rest of the population didn’t.
For sure, the Fed and Treasury should have driven harder bargains. I think the political landscape would look different and better right now if the Obama administration had in fact taken at least one big bank into receivership. But in the crisis, money had to flow freely, and the truth is that the gifts bankers received are more a source of annoyance than a source of current problems.
What’s unforgivable is the way policymakers, both at the Fed and elsewhere, basically declared Mission Accomplished as soon as the panic in financial markets subsided and stocks were up again.
This is not news to any of us who have been paying attention. It’s certainly not news to Krugman either because I read his blog and column pretty regularly. No, what ticks me off is that we have another example of citing male bloggers as having had a great revelation, in this case Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum. Kevin, Paul? Kevin, “I trust Obama’s judgment because he’s smarter than I am” Drum? Or Matt Yglesias, who snickered in 2008 that if only the Clinton voters knew how the party powerbrokers were setting things up they’d go with their second choice and stop wasting everyone’s time (but they won’t do that because they’re not that bright)? Come to think of it, that post by Matt Yglesias in The Atlantic in 2008 has to be the most stunning example of what the Obama contingent was thinking when they decided to f^%& over the Clinton voters that I have ever seen. Let me cite it for you because it really is that breathtaking:
After all, consider the situation in Pennsylvania. All indications are that a clear majority of Pennsylvania Democrats would prefer for Hillary Clinton to be the nominee than for Barack Obama to be the nominee. But there are few indications that they understand the real structure of the race — that a miracle Obama comeback in PA would mean that Democrats enter May with a nominee and a financial advantage, whereas a sizable Clinton win in PA may mean that Democrats don’t get a nominee until August and that that nominee, who’ll almost certainly be Barack Obama anyway, will have a much tougher time winning in November. I think if voters better-understood the situation, they’d be much more inclined to vote for their second-favorite Democrat in the race, much less eager to do volunteer work for Clinton, much less inclined to donate money to her campaign, etc. But people won’t understand the dynamic unless it’s explained to them by credible party leaders.
Did you catch that? What Matt said was that he was talking to party movers and shakers and they told him that it didn’t matter if Clinton won Pennsylvania or any other state after that. The party had already decided that she wasn’t going to be the nominee no matter how many people voted for her and that continuing to vote for her wasn’t going to change this outcome. I cited this Yglesias post back in March 2008. MARCH.
So, Yglesias and Drum haven’t had the best judgment in the world and they’re late to the “bailing out the banks was only part of the solution” party. It doesn’t surprise me. Neither one of them live in the middle class of the research worker that my friends and I live in. They don’t know what it’s like to experience a devastation of their industry or see every one of their friends go through a layoff. They don’t know what it’s like to be unable to find anything but contract work with no bennies in spite of degrees in the hard sciences. Life is hard out here. Three days after Thanksgiving, there is no one at the Mall and the parking lots are not full. I haven’t seen Central New Jersey’s retail sector look like this since 2008. Matt and Kevin are somewhat insulated from that by what Elizabeth Bennett would call “their connexions”. Why are guy bloggers so much more likely to have “connexions” that lead to jobs that pay? Can you answer me that, Paul? Greg?
By the way, in a couple of years, will we be reading Matt and Kevin’s posts that say, “Golly! We don’t have a research infrastructure anymore. The finance guys and MBAs with executive hair at all of our research companies gutted their R&D departments in order to extract “shareholder value” and big bonuses. And now, there are no new therapeutic agents in the pipeline. Dadgummit! Why didn’t I know this until now? I thought President Obama, whose judgment I trust more than my own, said we needed more STEM workers. Why are hundreds of thousands of them destitute or working for Wall Street?”
In any case, Elizabeth Warren was a proponent for bailing out the middle class way back in 2009 in that notorious interview that she had with Adam Davidson on Planet Money, an interview that we and other bloggers have cited on more than one occasion to make the same point that Yglesias and Drum are just now figuring out. By the way, did you notice the dismissive contempt that Davidson had for Warren in that interview? I wonder if guys realize they sound like this to those of us who know they are full of it. And if it is true that Matt and Kevin are suddenly discovering that, “Hey! We should have given money to people who weren’t rich so they could keep their jobs and pay their mortgages. That way, we would have refilled our bank and treasury coffers from the bottom up!”, should Paul Krugman be using them as examples of bloggy enlightenment? Putting aside whether female voices are underrepresented in the more prestigious online opinion journals, how do Slate and Mother Jones justify putting on their payrolls two people who have been so disastrously behind the zeitgeist, with histories of suspending their own judgments to adopt the clueless or malicious opinions of others, especially now that we know that our own judgment was correct and theirs was wrong?
Over and over again, we have seen male bloggers used as voices of authority in online opinion pieces. Whether this is just a bad habit or preference doesn’t matter. It could be that Paul Krugman is surrounded by sycophantic, toe licking, ego-massagers and these people just happen to be male grad student types and Yglesias and Drum seem familiar to him. But if we want to make sure that voices like Christina Romer’s and Elizabeth Warren’s are not trampled on in meetings with the next president, we need to encourage Krugman and Sargent to go outside of their comfort zone. We have to make sure that the public gets used to hearing opinions from people other than the toady male grad student types as authority figures at the grassroots level so that future presidents have a harder time ignoring and dismissing them. Don’t whine about it three years later, Paul.
If Krugman is wondering why it took so long for the powers that be to realize that helping the middle class should have been a priority, he need look no further than Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Adam Davidson.
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A little off topic: I found this clip of John Dominic Crossan, scholar of early Christianity, on the dangers of fundamentalism. He sounds like what I have been trying to say about the malignant nature of fundamentalist Christianity. I guess you need to live with it up close and personal to understand how dangerous it is. When I say malignant, I am saying that fundamentalist Christianity spreads, it doesn’t contribute to the well being of society because it isn’t interested in the survival of that society, it’s harmful to other people that don’t follow its strict interpretation of scripture and the best you can do is suppress it and keep it in check. You will never be able to eliminate it. That’s why it has been such a disaster for the country to continue to treat fundamentalism so respectfully. We must challenge it a lot more strenuously because it is dangerous if it gets out of control.
Filed under: General | Tagged: baling out the middle class, debt relief, Dominic Crossan, dope slap, Elizabeth Warren, fundamentalism, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, mortgages, Paul Krugman, small business stimulus |
The Confluence 
Right on! I read this and thought “what planet are they on?’. (Maybe the same one that thought the Iraq war was a great idea).
Thanks for your awesome blog.
Obama is a servant of American oligarchs (Matt Stoller).
In forming his new “progressive” 2012 coalition, he has abandoned the white working class in favor of cementing a center-left base of voters who have succeeded through educational attainment, and lower income voters, AAs and Hispanics. After reading this post:
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/the-future-of-the-obama-coalition/
I had more doubts that the Democratic Party will survive Obama and what darkness the cretin fringe republican politicians, will throw us in.
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On a much lighter note, RD Krugman lives down the road a-piece (distance). One sits and talks for a-spell (time).
Thanks for the correction. Is that Appalachian?
Maybe, but it’s definitely southern.
I used to say on Hullabaloo before I got banned there that if the Legacy Democrats wish to save themselves as the kernel of a legitimate political party, that they should abandon the Democratic Party “en organized masse” and start a legitimate party of their own.
They could call it the Real Democrat Party or the Social Democrat Party or whatever they wanted to call it.
I then lamented that they won’t do it. They are loyal to the memory of a Democratic Party which was infiltrated and subverted by the Corporate BizFascists and Wall Streeters years ago. They will ride the Good Ship Party Unity all the way to the bottom of the sea.
Perhaps various State Democratic Parties still offer hope. Ohio Democrats and Wisconsin Democrats may have learned that State Policis is a Zero Sum Game where one side defeats the other side and keeps it defeated long enough to cement its own irreversible changes into unremovable place. if any State Democratic Parties seem to have learned that approach from their Worth Republican Opponents, then those State Class Defense Democrats could be the nucleus of a legitimate National lParty at some point.
why I am not a liberal. Your comment about K citing male columnists. If you cannot see why your obsession with race and gender is wrong, I can’t help you. But it is morally wrong to pay any attention to someone’s genitalia when discussing intellectual issues. In the case of race, the solution to any problems is to ensure that everyone gets an equal opportunity. Efforts to ensure equality of result run into the scientific fact that human beings are not fungible like dollar bills.
It’s curious that liberals pretend to believed in the theory (not a fact–the rocks are a fact; evolution is a theory to explain the facts) of evolution, yet won’t admit that after so many hundreds of milennia of separation, blacks and whites are genetically very, very different in ways that things like schooling cannot get at.
Similarly, once one states that all truth is relative. “Is the glass half full or half empty?; is grandmother alive or dead?. Your opinion is as good as any one else’s. There is no such thing as expertise.” Once one argues that for generations, then why be surprised that the Republican candidates for president believe in Creationism and think globaal warming is a fraud. Rejoice! You have done a good job in educating them into cultural relativism.
The ultimate attack on science possible is the denial that human life begins at conception. To deny that, one must deny all of the sciences of biology, physiology, and chemistry. Not to say the new science of DNA. (Of course, the DNA of the mother and of her baby are different–they’re two separate people.) Not that that would mean you would necessarily have to give up your obsession with abortion. It merely means that you would have to admit the obvious truth, the absoute truth that in the case of abortion, the woman is torturing to death an innocent human being, who is the child of its mother AND its father. I can see why you want to deny the truth. But in orderr to do so you must deny the possibility of science. you must insist taht there are no facts, only opinions.
Well, the economic idiocy of the Republicans means that I’ll have to vote Dem. But I shall remember that liberals are the sole and only cause of their idiocy by their decade long battle for cultural relativism and political correctness.
Not an obsession with race or as the case in RD’s arguments gender. It’s is why with 51% of the population being female Krugman only cites male writers. Same for congress and business, why are the percentages of women so low?
One way to look at the problem is that France, Germany, the Philippines and countless other countries have had women leaders. Three that haven’t are the United States, Russia, and China, what does that say about our government.
“Jan” is a manly-man club member. Notice his brilliance mansplaining the error in your ways!
Not to feed trolls, I just figured a name like “Jan” might mix the message, so I’m saving everyone a click on his link.
If it doesn’t impact Jan, it doesn’t exist. If it does exist, it’s certainly not important, because it doesn’t impact Jan.
Yes, I believe his education included developing a refined “sense of the important” and through that he has determined that *this* does not meet his stringent standards.
So nice of him to take the time out of his busy day to swing by and set us straight.
He’s employing the classic mansplaining MO, as detailed by commenter Nimravid over at I Blame the Patriarchy: “He has an easy rule [on when it’s appropriate to say anything about sexism]: it’s off-limits unless we’re specifically told otherwise.”
It’s not just that he goes exclusively to Penis-Americans for his examples. It’s that he goes out of his way, to ones without credibility in his determination to disregard women who were right – and vocal on the subject.
I don’t think that Krugman is determined to disregard women, at all. He went against the NYT tide to support Hillary. I think he’s just being careless.
Supporting a candidate is not the same as citing female writers. I agree that Krugman may not be aware of his bias, and he’s hardly the only one. Greg Sargent is much worse. But it’s worse than that. Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are the kind of new conventional wisdom that’s just as wrong as any of the old conventional wisdom. The react, not proact. It’s like, “Oh wow, why didn’t we even notice that someone should have bailed out the people in the middle class who through no fault of their own lost their jobs and may lose their houses??”
Why is this only now occurring to them? Was it just not popular before? Was examining the roots of the problem and the obvious solutions just not discussed for fear of upsetting the persons who hired them? And if that’s the case, why the f&^( are we reading them? I want to read people who know what’s going on and aren’t afraid to say it. So, not only are they the typical male blogger types, they’re the typical WRONG and boring male blogger types.
I’m not sure you understand the problem. You won’t know if women have good ideas or not if you never hear from them. And if they don’t gain “authority” in the media, their opinions won’t be taken seriously when they are asked to present them at policy meetings. That’s what has been happening. Since about 1999, there have been a string of women who have been warning the public about the problems of the finance industry. Some of them have been in very high positions of power. But they have been consistently ignored as Cassandras even though they were proven right. And part of the reason we don’t take them seriously is because for some reason, the men who hire them treat them as “tokens”. Isn’t this what you are arguing? That women who get to these positions are part of some kind of liberal central planning program?
As a woman who came of age in the late 70s-80s, I kind of resent that. I didn’t get educated and obtain my expertise in my field so that I could be seen as a token any more than you did.
So, I am not arguing for a quota or a token system. I am asking some of the more brilliant thinkers of our side, ie Krugman, to pay attention to the women at the blogger and grassroots level because giving them a platform for their opinions and ideas increases their authority and gets the public used to hearing from them. Then, when they move into positions of power, they will be able to influence policy.
As to whether life begins at conception, reasonable people can disagree with that but one thing reasonable people can not disagree with is that all of the laws in the world will not prevent a desperate teenager from raking her uterus with a sharp pointy object in order to expel an unwanted fetus. Nope, there is no way in the world you are going to prevent that. If you are willing to risk your own life to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy, it’s unlikely that a law and prison and fines and anything else you want to throw at them is going to deter an abortion. If you don’t believe that, then you aren’t remembering your history. So, I have to ask myself, what is it that anti-choice people REALLY want. And if I go with my mother’s reactions to this problem, I’d say that she feels comfortable with the idea of women being married and having children that they love. That is her ideal. She wants women to love being mothers no matter what. And you know as well as I do that some women just don’t. And making them have children they don’t want is not going to make them love them. Making it hard for them to have an abortion is not going to make them love them. Nah-gah-happen. So, you are asking the impossible.
You *should* want parents to love their wanted children when they are ready. But for some weird reason, you think that your idea of God is more interested in punishing women, and only women, for not loving the ill-timed and unwanted gifts he bestows on them. I just happen to disagree with you. But it doesn’t matter because you will never get what you want because….
… all of the laws in the world will not prevent a desperate teenager from raking her uterus with a sharp pointy object in order to expel an unwanted fetus.
Sorry, there’s no way around this except misery for everyone. What do YOU get out of that scenario?
By the way, I utterly reject in every way possible your assertion that the so-called “races” are “genetically very, very different”. In fact, the differences are superficial and the one that is most visible is a minor mutation that caucasians inherited for a reduction in melanin from melanocyte producing cells. Once we moved out of Africa, we didn’t need dark skin but we did need sunlight to help us make vitamin D. And that’s about it. We all started out as black. We all come from dark skinned Africans. So, this idea that there are differences between us intellectually due to a single skin color mutation is morally offensive as well as scientifically inaccurate.
A “historian” such as yourself should read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond if you want to know why some cultures have more “cargo” than others.
I’m not deleting your comment because I think examples of bad reasoning and bigotry should stand as a warning to us all.
In a just world, men like JK would either change their thinking or die as old virgins. 😈
JR, I meant. 😛
Would you like some cheese with that whine, JK? 😈
*sigh* JR, I meant.
I can haz edit feechur, plz? 🙄
“The ultimate attack on science possible is the denial that human life begins at conception.”
Fallacy right there. The ‘life’ that begins at conception is ‘human’ only by a semantical trick. The fertilized egg is no more ‘human’ in its functioning, has no more ‘consciousness’, than a fertilized egg of any other species.
Furthermore, that suggests that the sperm and egg are somehow dead, which they are assuredly not. Life is *transmitted*.
I think you and bemused reinforce my point in that people can argue this from a scientific POV or a philosophical POV or a theological POV. Everyone has a different take on this and no one will have a definite answer on when it begins.
BUT the one thing we can be absolutely certain about is the fact that when a female is pregnant with a fetus she is determined not to bear, not even the possibility of losing her own life will dissuade her from getting rid of it in any way possible. She is not interested in debates that amount to deciding how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This is something that the anti-choice crowd has forgotten. Long before they romanticized the fetus, giving it all kinds of warm and fuzzy characteristics, there were women perforating their uteruses with knitting needles and scraping their insides out with coathangers to get rid of their unwanted fetuses. Many of them died, many more suffered irreparable harm to their reproductive organs. And *still* not one female who wanted to get rid her unwanted fetus was deterred.
It wouldn’t matter if Roe was outlawed for every instance of abortion in any situation. There will still be abortions going on. It wouldn’t matter if every one of those unwanted fetuses were given a home. There will still be abortions. Women who do not want to be parents and don’t want to be pregnant are no different from men who do not want to be parents. Really. The only difference is that the state can make it inconvenient and dangerous. But it will never make it impossible.
So, anti-choice people are tilting at windmills. They think they will be saving some lives. But they will actually be causing some and making everyone else extremely miserable.
And women will hate them for it.
I predict that it would take less than a year for abortion to be reinstated.
I think, once outlawed, it would take a very long time to relegalize abortion. People won’t simply face facts and come to their senses; they will see in deaths from back-alley abortions what they want to see (God’s punishment of sinning women, whatever.) A new generation would have to be galvanized into action.
What a hoot! You’ll probably vote two or three times for your favorite GOP lunatics, Jan. There’s no way in hell you’re going to vote for Democrats considering the number of women and blacks in the party.
Jan said: “torturing to death an innocent human being”
That is manipulative emotionalism. The fetus becomes just as dead whether or not given anesthetic, euthanasia solution, or some euphoric.
Whether even a late -term fetus has consciousness comparable to an oyster is in doubt. Certainly at the most usual stages for abortion, the fetus has none. But anesthetic is available (though the requirement is currently being pushed as harassment of the patient and doctor).
If you really cared about pain of such non-persons, you’d be largely vegetarian and oppose animal testing. If you really wanted to stop pain, you’d promote contraception.
Here’s an overview of the issue:
http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/fetal-pain.shtml
Give Drum and Yglesias a taste of the uncertainty that comes from shaky or no job prospects, cancel your subscriptions to Mother Jones and the Atlantic. While you are at it show your appreciation to the so-called journalists and op-ed writers at the NYT and WaPo by doing the same.
The problem isn’t crooks and liars on Wall Street, it’s we are fooled into voting for the crooks and liars in the House and Senate by the crooks and liars in print and broadcast media who the give the former free reign.
OT: Barney Frank is stepping down after stinking up the joint for some 45 years, that’s a good beginning. Now if he takes Pelosi, Reid and Obama with him we might have a chance.
I couldn’t help but notice the article about the new democratic base was written by an Edsall.
Regarding Crossan’s video:
The danger of many fundamentalists is that they place all their hopes and dreams on the after-life and don’t do the work here in collaboration with God, as we’ve discussed previously, to end the persecution and suffering on Earth. Heaven is the result of focusing on this accomplishment. The fundamentalists I’ve known have only accomplished division and resentment among Christians by their authoritarian methods.
That’s part of it. I think the point that Crossan is trying to make, which I have been making for years now, is that fundamentalists can be deliberately careless. Here in the US, you won’t find too many fundamentalists who would argue for a holy war against the unbelievers, although they might fantasize about such a thing. They might want to severely punish homosexuals or have them reverted to heterosexuality against their will. We already know what they would do for women. But how many know that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t permit blood transfusions? Yep, when I was a kid, there was a distinct possibility that I would have died before my mother allowed a blood transfusion to save my life. It makes me shivver when I think about it. My dad probably would have objected but he was at sea during the Vietnam war…
More likely, fundamentalist try to hurry God along by voting for someone who they feel fulfills some prophecy or sign. And the Republicans have been very good at examining the religious right for their “signs” so that they can incorporate that kind of imagery and those words into their rhetoric. I have relatives who are blissfully unconcerned whether you get social security or whether there is a global war or whether poor children in American are malnourished. They don’t care because they “have no faith in the government of man, they only have faith in the government of the lord”. That is a quote almost verbatim. In fact, the worse things get, the more joyous they are. It *has* to get bad in order for the Rapture to come. They hate, hate, HATE this world and can’t wait to leave it. Everything and everyone in it is evil to the 23rd power. So, wiping it, and you, out, is not a problem for them. Of course, if you are a member of their family, they want you to be raptured with them. But if you see them as seriously dangerous and misled people who are helping perpetuate the evil in the world because they do nothing to stop it, they cut you out of their lives.
Yes, I think fundamentalism is a malignancy that must always be kept in check and that people should not be afraid to challenge fundamentalists on their horribly twisted worldviews. Being accommodating and tolerant is the wrong approach because they certainly will not return the favor.
Can’t one work here in collaboration with God and hope for a better afterlife?
Is Markos M. stil raking in the big bucks? Is he still considered a Dem mover and shaker, or did he go down with the Big O? His name seems to have disappeared.
Markos Who? 😈
Good smackdown. In recent posts, Kevin Drum was pushing the idea that unions could be strengthened if they agreed to narrow the scope of bargaining to topics management found palatable. And he’s doing this on the Mother Jones site, for crying out loud! The level of elite Blogger Boy incompetence and sellout-dom really can’t be fathomed.
Yeah, what’s up with that?? Why would Mother Jones hire a guy like Drum to write stuff you could easily read on the editorial pages of the Washington Post?
I’ll tell you why. They wanted a political blogger and for some bizarre reason that I never understood, Kevin Drum is a widely read one. When I used to read him more or less regularly at Political Animal, he struck me as kinda centrist, wishy-washy and not particularly imaginative or interesting to read. But that’s just me. I suspect that other male bloggers who had more name recognition and mojo pushed his numbers up, spoke to the right persons on his behalf and, voile!, Kevin Drum is writing for Mother Jones.
That’s the way the old boys network works.
Yeah, the old boys network. Wish they’d send me my damn checks and work on getting me my sinecure job.
Drum is there because he is reliable, he will say what he’s supposed to say. They want someone with his beliefs. Being male is a bonus, of course, but his usefulness is the point.
They don’t want people who are right, they want people who say what they’re supposed to.
Being male is requisite, in addition to be useful, it isn’t just a “bonus”.
I’m old and I’m a boy so how come none of these guys are knocking at my door?
Maybe i’m too old, I’ve been around long enough to know a shyster for what he is when he runs for president.
Offhand does anybody know the percent of women in the editorial departments and contributors at Mother Jones and the Atlantic?
Is it 51%?
What about the NYT and WaPo?
Good riddance to Markos – hopefully his 15 minutes are over.
Re: fundamentalism – I get the impression it is rejected by most of society. It’s a mystery why politicians bow to them. Here’s an example I found playing catch-up at Suburban Guerilla:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/11/20/white-house-admits-it-is-considering-caving-to-bishops-on-birth-control-coverage
Actually, I *don’t* think it is rejected by most of society. When I was a kid, my mother’s affiliation with the Jehovah’s Witnesses made us really outside of the mainstream. Their almost total obsession with Armageddon was bizarre. Nobody believed in that crap. Then there was their prohibition against holidays. Christmas was pagan, Halloween was demonic, even Easter meant that only a tiny few in every JW congregation could participate in communion and Easter baskets were absolutely forbidden.
Now, I see more and more “mainstream” churches indulging in apocalyptic rhetoric and ideas. More people are rejecting Halloween because of its ties to Celtic pagan festivities and even Christmas is being scaled down to puritan era levels regardless of commercialism or recession. Even the local Catholic church down the street from me is busy, busy, busy 24/7. There are a lot more people in chuch, going to bible studies, etc. Granted, when I was a kid, my grandparents Catholic church had a lot of activities too but they were kinda fun. This obsession with religion reminds me more of the JW’s “teaching/studying even per night” thing. If anything, they are getting to be more like the fundamentalists without even realizing it.
When times are tough people get superstition. The country is slowly being dragged to the Right, today’s Obama-crat is the 1960’s Moderate Republican. I heard that my 1960’s high school diploma is equivalent to today’s two year degree or a four year Liberal Arts at some schools. I can believe it when I see what is going on around me.
Lancaster county is one of the few places in PA where Obama got more votes than Hillary Clinton, when you consider that it is the home of Franklin and Marshall, Elizabethtown College and Millersville it should come as no surprise. He got the Young and(or) Foolish vote.
Millersville most recent claim to fame is they invited William Ayers to speak on education. That went over well with the grown-ups.
Allie, did Obama’s Alliance on Women and Girls have any input? (laughing) I thought not.
I like your blog and often read it even though I am not liberal and vote independent. So I always expect that liberal men and liberal media will be profoundly sexist and actually misogynist. At some point I think it would be beneficial if liberal women admitted this and expect it. Seriously how can you be surprised at sexism from the left?
I’m not surprised. But I don’t think that some of the men who are doing it are even aware of it. For example, I don’t think Krugman is doing it on purpose but that’s because he’s not really paying attention. But he was one of the first ones to complain when Christina Romer’s policy recommendations were passed over by Obama. There is a cause and effect relationship that he doesn’t see yet. If you don’t promote women’s opinions to the authority stage, they will not get listened to in policy meetings. All you’ll get are a bunch of young male asskissers who will turn into a bunch of old male asskissers. Men do not mentor women. It’s time we changed that.
Here’s a clear look at a bigger picture:
http://www.ianwelsh.net/whats-happening-in-europe-is-what-matters-rules-of-the-financial-rich/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IanWelsh+%28Ian+Welsh%29
The oligarchs have taken down two governments in the past two weeks – Italy and Greece. [….] Note that once again, neither an election nor a referendum was allowed.
[….]
Being rich is about being liquid when everyone else isn’t, so you can buy up assets on the cheap. When the rich are properly under control [….] they can’t create such buying opportunities, they have to wait for them, and the government makes it so that the rich can’t take too much advantage of them, because taking advantage of them means taking advantage of other people when they’re most vulnerable.
Right now the rich can and are crashing asset prices by forcing countries into austerity through attacks on their currencies and control of their elites. They then buy up assets for fire-sale prices.
[….]
These attacks on currencies are deranged. The countries are not in that much difficulty, certainly the idea that France is in enough difficulty to be under attack is crazy. These attacks are about power: the global rich were bailed out after the crash, now they are using their hot money in attack after attack, demanding austerity, which will cause semi-permanent depression in those countries which accept it. That allows them to buy up what they want, keeps their labor costs down, and lets them divert what money they spend on investment which creates actual real economic growth into developing countries which are cheaper for them.
That is also the position of Paul Craig Roberts of the Cato Institute. When the Left and Right agree, they may be onto something.
And at a lower level, when OWS protestors and TP protestors agree on something … it’s probably the same thing that Cato and … Krugman? … are agreeing on.
Constance, the truth cracked open and let in the light during the 2008 Democratic primary when Hillary and her supporters received such hateful treatment from Obama’s troops. Before then there was some hope that a party of progressives would be progressive. Now, I’m not surprised at sexism from the left, or right. The upshot is that Obama is clueless as to how he can win over more women voters and has had to appeal to Hillary for her participation in the 2012 campaign. Liberal women, Christina Romer, Anita Dunn, and others in the Obama WH have made such an admittance, but they are highly intelligent, experts in some cases, like Romer, and they don’t expect being shunned from meetings because of their gender. You don’t say, but are you surprised from sexism from the right?
Back to the Krugman post, all 3 of them whitewash the financial crisis for Obama. He was president yet allowed Geithner to do a stress test on the banks whether than putting the fear of God into the banksters. They are covering for Obama’s lack of control of the Treasury Secretary. The stories reek of Obama clean-up.
I offer a possible suggestion as to how to get male bodied bloggers more aware of female bodied authorities and experts. Keep shoving referrences to female bodied authorities and experts across the male bodied bloggers’s comments sections. Keep re-iterating versions of..
Catherine Austin Fitts has been saying this ever since 1990-whenever and here’s the link. Yves Smith had THIS to say about THAT way back
here and here’s the link. Maybe wearing the male bodied bloggers down with mention after mention after mention in their comments sections will dissolve holes in their armor plated unawareness.
Just a thought.
Your comments on fundamentalism are completely spot on. I’ve got a bunch in my family…or should I say, former family. My sister-in-law has over the last 25 successfully culled my mother and me from their herd.
They are complete strangers to us now….and they ignore us for the most part except for some occasional “duty” phone calls.
It really upsets me to have lost my only brother.