The Call Up

June 9, 2013 10:47 pm

"I do not see how Obama can talk his way out of this one. Snowden is not Bradley Manning: he’s not a disturbed disco bunny but a highly articulate network security specialist who has left behind a $200,000 salary and girlfriend in Hawaii for a life on the run. He’s not a sleazy opportunist like Julian Assange, either. As he says: “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

It will be very difficult for the Obama administration to portray Snowden as a traitor. For a start, I don’t think US public opinion will allow it. …

Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn’t seem overblown. And I do wonder: can a president who’s presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?"

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Damian Thompson, The Telegraph - Edward Snowden has blown the whistle on this presidency. You have to wonder: Will Obama see out his full term?
(via brooklynmutt)

I’m shocked, shocked! that illegal surveillance is being perpetrated by our government.

Look, I get that this is bad. But is anyone surprised? The patriot act isn’t new. The NSA isn’t new. We’ve known for years that they’ve been working with mobile companies to pull wireless data without warrants. That they would do the same with email is no revelation.

I’m not saying we should happy about this. But this is the world we signed up for when W was elected and Congress lost its collective mind. Let’s all stop pretending we’re shocked. Maybe we’re disappointed Obama is no better than that ego-maniacal redneck. But we’re not shocked.

April 17, 2013 9:00 am

Skip to about 2:45 to hear some nicely stated thoughts on this matter (from a Republican). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but when your right to bear arms infringes upon the rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of thousands of Americans every year, then I stop caring about the 2nd amendment.

Moreover, let’s think about the second amendment a little — forming a militia and the right to bear arms made sense when you had a fledgling nation facing an uncertain future. But guess what, we’ve basically got this whole democracy thing down. Does anyone really think that the second amendment would allow for some well-meaning defenders of freedom to overthrow a government taken over by zombies or (even worse) Mullahs? And the idea that some wackadoo with an assault rifle could gun down our most powerful leaders — or voters at the polls, or protestors — poses a greater threat to the stability of our nation than the possibility of some sort of military junta.

It’s absolutely asinine.

April 9, 2013 8:34 pm

"She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s."

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Leader of an opposition research meeting held with MITCH McCONNELL (R - Kentucky), about McConnell’s prospective opponent, actress Ashley Judd; she would later announce she would not run for McConnell’s Senate seat.

Listen to the whole recording, obtained by Mother Jones, and hear a gleeful, cackling Republican political teardown operation in all its sickening glory.

(via inothernews)

Look, this is clearly pretty despicable. But I have a hard time believing the DNC leadership would have reacted any differently if they stumbled upon a cache of information about the mental health struggles of some GOP challenger.

April 5, 2013 11:27 am

"Not all black conservatives see it as their job to tell white racists that they embody the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. It is certainly possible to oppose Obamacare in good conscience. No one knows this more than Ben Carson. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he may have been the most celebrated figure in the black communities of Baltimore…But white conservatives were never interested in them, and they were never as interested in Ben Carson as they are right now. When the presidency was an unbroken string of white men, there were no calls for him to run for the White House. And then he put on the mask."

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TNC laying down some truth, as usual.

(Source: The New York Times)

Comment

March 26, 2013 4:14 pm

"While North Dakota long has had stringent abortion regulations — and lawmakers opposed to the practice regularly have tried to impose further restrictions over the years — abortion-rights advocates here have felt particularly on the defensive this year because of the sheer number of bills introduced and their sweeping scope."

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God dammit. I wish women were in charge of things. I would counter every anti-abortion proposal with anti-masturbation, anti-adultery and anti-pornography measures. Because if you’re that interested in what I do with my body, I’m gonna get real interested in yours.

(Source: The New York Times)

March 6, 2013 6:15 pm

"It's not enough to talk about social justice and equality. When one is privileged, taking responsibility for equality means sharing some of what you have with those who have less. But in today's Israel, none of this is happening. In Israel, everyone is fighting over who's more deprived, who suffers more, who's the most wretched and who's the bigger victim. And as this competition over victimhood intensifies, so too does the incitement against competing victims. ... Israel as (a) state also does not take responsibility for its strong and privileged position vis-a-vis our neighbors-cum-enemies, the Palestinians. As the strong and rich state, the one that exists. Instead of grasping this advantage and offering real peace, based on trust and cooperation, Israel hunkers down in a defensive-aggressive posture. Instead of extending a hand to our neighbors -- who have lived for so long in extremely difficult conditions -- due to their own fault and ours -- and helping them build a future that will benefit all of us, Israel the strong continues to fight the Palestinians for the title of victim."

inothernews:

Watch this speech to the Knesset by Israeli activist Merav Michaeli (in Hebrew, translated to English), via Andrew Sullivan.

Nope. Sorry but this is false equivalency. First of all, who is talking about social justice? I think we’re talking about survival first. Second, in instances where this sort of model has worked — Post WWII Europe or Japan, Post-Iraq even — there is a general consensus that the victor is…the victor! That they are in a position of dominance, superiority…that they are established as being the one that holds the cards and is classified as the strongman in whatever contest has been settled.

In the case of Israel and Palestine, there is zero consensus around who has won what. Israelis take a defensive-aggressive stance because they quite plainly do not see themselves as the “strong and rich state.” And quite frankly, though Palestinians might claim poverty, they certainly do not claim submission or defeat. And you can’t be all magnanimous and social justicey if the receiver views the outstretched hand with condemnation, suspicion and resentment…much less rocket launches.

While I don’t know if I would classify Israelis as victims, that doesn’t necessarily make them tormentors by default. As long as the boundaries of a state are in dispute, as long as there remains a disagreement about what belongs to whom, there can be no victory. And until there is a victor (and a loser), no one will take the high road.

(via aatombomb)

February 22, 2013 10:00 am

"Yes, the life of politics and the life of the myth had diverged too far. There was nothing to return them to one another, no common danger, no cause, no desire, and, most essentially, no hero. It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow."

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Norman Mailer on JFK in 1960, in one of his earliest pieces of political journalism. The guy was absolutely merciless. His lens had no filter, no buffer…it was like an assault of ethos.

(Source: esquire.com)

February 12, 2013 6:56 pm

A list of what Republicans support, so far:

Wars (starting them, not ending them)

That is all.

UPDATE: That is still all they support.

6:37 pm

To John Boehner’s visible eye-rolling during the climate change section:

2:38 pm

"Scholars, policy professionals, and journalists respect him, as do a handful of fellow wonks in the West Wing. “His voice matters a lot,” says a White House official. “The president talks to Ezra.” “I’ll put it this way,” says Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, “when I’m trying to get a quick handle on some currently hot policy, on the facts and the numbers, I very often find that I’m going to Ezra’s blog."

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This is the part about Ezra Klein that I think people willfully ignore (and which this article doesn’t pay enough mind to): He’s good at what he does. That’s what has made him successful. He’s not baiting people or scooping people or posting snark or pandering. He simply knows what he’s talking about and conveys his thoughts in a readable, compelling way.

I jumped on his bandwagon in 2008 when I was working on health care policy and he was consistently the only sane voice in the room. I regularly went to his blog for clear-headed analysis of the policy options. He’s just…smart. The fact that he parlayed his blog work into a sort of old/new media empire is just more evidence to that fact.

(Source: newrepublic.com)

February 4, 2013 10:00 am

"It’s been nearly 6 years since the series finale of The West Wing, and more than 12 since the one-hour drama, which Sorkin created and largely wrote, first walked and talked its way through NBC’s Wednesday-night lineup; and yet you might think the series never ended, given the currency it still seems to enjoy in Washington, the frequency with which it comes up in D.C. conversations and is quoted or referenced on political blogs. In part this is because the smart, nerdy—they might prefer “precocious”—kids who grew up in the early part of the last decade worshipping the cool, technocratic charm of Sorkin’s characters have today matured into the young policy prodigies and press operatives who advise, brief, and excuse the behavior of the most powerful people in the country."

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That show…so right. And now you can watch the whole series on Netflix. AMERICA!

(Source: vanityfair.com)

January 31, 2013 10:00 am

"We are Americans,” she said. “We stop being the world’s greatest country when we allow our most vulnerable citizens to be slaughtered because we might offend people by taking away their guns. We stop being something to be proud of when we love our guns more than we love our children."

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Susie Ehrens, whose daughter, Emma, escaped from Sandy Hook, appealed to the legislators to act as if it were their own children who did not come home alive that day.

(Source: The New York Times)

January 30, 2013 6:28 pm

"I’ve been shot at dozens of times. I would suspect that not many members of this panel, or even in this room, for that matter, have been in any kind of a firefight. It is — it is chaos. I think there are really some very effective things we can do. And one is, Senator, the background check. Let’s make it difficult for the criminals, the terrorists, and the mentally ill to get a gun."

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MARK KELLY, gun owner, ex-Navy captain, former NASA astronaut and husband of Gabby Giffords, testifying before a Senate committee on reducing gun violence.

Gun owner: check. Shot at: check. Suggesting rational gun control measures: check.

Probably hated by NRA: check.

(via the New York Times)

This guy. Holy smokes.

January 22, 2013 1:00 pm

"We’re in the old, fat Elvis phase of our life, as America. We’re crazy and we have guns."

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Bill Maher

January 17, 2013 11:44 am

"The fact that Obama has given so few truly great Presidential speeches didn’t turn out to be politically fatal, but it’s not irrelevant. It’s made him more vulnerable, put him more on the defensive than he should have been. He’s never given himself a phrase or sentence to wield in the crunch, conveying an idea that’s simple and yet profound enough to embed itself in the public’s mind, and that truly defines his political vision. Obama is too complex, too nuanced, too elusive, and too careful, for words that stick."

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This got me thinking about what I’d want to hear from my President as he gets sworn in for a second term this weekend. I want to hear Obama stand up and say that we can do better. That we need to stop accepting mediocrity and defeat because of gridlock and bullshit. We are better than that. We are capable of more, we want more, and we can achieve more. Gun control is possible. Tax reform is possible. Immigration reform is possible. Fiscal constraint is possible. And these are not things we can live without. We will be better because we must be better. There is no choice. And frankly, I don’t want to live in a country willing to accept anything less.

(Source: newyorker.com)