E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes The right’s political correctness:
Accommodating right-wing primary voters poses real risks to the party in next year’s elections. Its candidates’ messages on immigration and gay marriage could hurt the GOP with, respectively, Latinos and the young.
But the greater loss is that none of the leading Republicans is willing to offer a more fundamental challenge to the party’s rightward lurch over the past decade. L. Brent Bozell III, a prominent activist on the right, could thus legitimately claim to The Post: “The conservative agenda is what is winning the field.” [...]
With occasional exceptions, they have been far more interested in proving their faithfulness to today’s hard-line right than in declaring, as conservatives in so many other democracies have been willing to do, that sprawling market economies need a rather large dose of government.
Trevor Timm at
The Guardian writes
McConnell can't save the NSA's surveillance program:
Senators were forced to work overtime well into Memorial Day weekend thanks to a manufactured controversy by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has known for years that the parts of the Patriot Act that allow the NSA to collect the phone records of millions of innocent people (known as Section 215) are set to expire on 1 June 2015, but decided to gin up an “emergency” and wait until the very last moment to try to extend them. He managed in the process to block the USA Freedom Act, a modest surveillance reform bill targeting the NSA that has overwhelming bipartisan support in the House, but he also failed by a large number of votes to extend the Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions for even one day.
So while Republicans managed to kill a bill that is supposed to stop the NSA’s bulk collection program, their ineptitude put the law underpinning it one step closer to extinction.
There are more pundit excerpts below the fold.
Michael W. Twitty at The Guardian writes Who held the first Memorial Day celebration?
African Americans have fought and died for America from its earliest days, from frontier skirmishes to the French and Indian Wars to the fall of Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, immortalized as “the first to die for American freedom”. And though most official histories of Memorial Day credit with its founding a white former Union Army major general, whose 1868 call for a Decoration Day was reputedly inspired by local celebrations begun as early as 1866, the first people who used ritual to honor this country’s war dead were the formerly enslaved black community of Charleston, South Carolina in May 1865—with a tribute to the fallen dead and to the gift of freedom.
The city of Charleston was, like many places in the South, physically devastated by the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy, which began in its harbor with the attack upon Fort Sumter in 1861. But Charleston was more than just the place where the war of brother against brother began: it was also the entry point for a quarter of all enslaved Africans in the colonial period, accounting for more than any other port. As the international slave trade faced its inevitable abolition, traders delivered more than 90,000 humans into enslavement through the port between 1803 and the (official) end of the American slave trade in 1808. Charleston was a center for the trading of enslaved people across the Deep South and the exit point for the valuable crops of rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton produced completely by enslaved labor – crops which made millions for the South’s wealthiest and most concentrated planter elite. [...]
On 1 May, “in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers”, 3,000 black children bearing roses led women bearing wreaths and men, marching together in a circle to honor the newly-buried war dead. Black troops were present at the commemoration – including some of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (who were later memorialized in the movie Glory). That the Gullah people performed a march and parade in a circle was no accident: movement in a circle—the Ring Shout—was the most sacred rite brought by the enslaved to North America. In a mixture of African and American custom, the Gullah put to rest the Union soldiers, who in part, lost their lives to ensure the freedom of those who later marched for them. Black people and white marched together, and the site was dedicated as a memorial burial ground. As the children sang “The Star Spangled Banner”, the men and women wept and prayed as they expressed gratitude that the long nightmare of slavery was over.
Charles M. Blow at writes
Restoring Memoriam to Memorial Day:
Blight concluded: “The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”
This is the history from which this holiday springs: honoring sacrifice. And honoring sacrifices can exist apart from endorsing missions. Many of our veterans have given life, and increasingly, limb for this country, and that must be saluted.
Some of our wars are those of disastrous execution, others of deceptive inception, some a bit of both, but they are all ours.
Yet we are drifting away from this tradition of honoring sacrifice.
Ron Kovic at
TruthDig writes that veterans have much to teach us in his essay reprised from 2013
Reflections on the Vietnam War: The Things a Warrior Knows:
No one knows peace or the preciousness of life better than the soldiers who fought in war, or those who have been affected by it directly—the mother of a son who has died, a wife who will never see her husband again, a child who will never have a father, a father who will never hold his son—for it is we who have lived with the physical and emotional scars of war, we who have lived with these wounds every day and felt every morning their weight and pain. It is we who have walked and wheeled through the streets of our country and watched children stare at us and wonder why. And it is we who cry out now for the future, for a world without war. We are the reminders of what war can do, of how it can wound and hurt, and diminish all that is good and human.
We struggle every day to believe in a life that was almost taken away from us. We know that even though we have lost, though parts of our bodies may be missing, though we might not be able to see or feel, we are important men and women with important lessons to teach.
Derek Thompson at
The Atlantic laments that
The Economy Is Still Terrible for Young People—The era of the overeducated barista is here to stay. College graduates are still spending more and more years (and money) to get worse and worse entry-level jobs.
Let’s start by singing the necessary praises. Last year was was the best for job-creation this century. We’re in the middle of the longest uninterrupted stretch of private-sector job creation on record. After creating mostly low-paying service jobs for the first few years of the recovery, the labor market is finally churning out more high-skill jobs. All of these things should be great news for young people.
Should.
But a deeper look at the Young-American Economy today suggests that, in contrast to the overall labor market, it is still sort of terrible.
To start with the camera lens zoomed all the way out: The majority of young people aren’t graduating from a four-year university. Rather they are dropping out of high school, graduating from high school and not going to college, or dropping out of college. Millennial is often used, in the media, as a synonym for “bachelor-degree-holding young person,” but about 60 percent of this generation doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree.
And how are they doing, as a group? Young people don’t seem to have a jobs problem—their jobless rate is a bit elevated, but not alarmingly so. Rather they have a money problem. The jobs they’re getting don’t pay much and their wages aren’t growing. A recent analysis of the Current Population Survey last year found that the median income for people between 25 and 34 has fallen in every major industry but healthcare since the Great Recession began.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times starts out with a bit of snark but then gets serious in
The Big Meh:
So what do I think is going on with technology? The answer is that I don’t know — but neither does anyone else. Maybe my friends at Google are right, and Big Data will soon transform everything. Maybe 3-D printing will bring the information revolution into the material world. Or maybe we’re on track for another big meh.
What I’m pretty sure about, however, is that we ought to scale back the hype.
You see, writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues — and an excuse for handling those issues badly. If you go back to the 1930s, you find many influential people saying the same kinds of things such people say nowadays: This isn’t really about the business cycle, never mind debates about macroeconomic policy; it’s about radical technological change and a work force that lacks the skills to deal with the new era.
And then, thanks to World War II, we finally got the demand boost we needed, and all those supposedly unqualified workers — not to mention Rosie the Riveter — turned out to be quite useful in the modern economy, if given a chance.
Of course, there I go, invoking history. Don’t I understand that everything is different now? Well, I understand why people like to say that. But that doesn’t make it true.
Suzi Khimm at
The New Republic writes
The Real Democratic Primary—Hillary Versus the Media:
The lack of competition in the Democratic primary has left Hillary’s most ardent supporters with the strange task of having someone to root for, without having someone to root against. Her Republican opponents are a distant challenge; the other Democratic candidates are mere speed bumps in the polls. Instead, the most visible threat to Hillary is her own public image, leaving her early supporters with the dual mission of ginning up enthusiasm for her campaign—and pointing fingers at the media for trying to drag her down.
Just a few Metro stops from the White House, the northern Virginia corner of Hillaryland is particularly well suited to the task of flacking for Clinton, full of political junkies, yellow-dog Democrats, media-savvy consultants, grad students, wannabe Hillary campaign staffers, and other ambitious professionals who are old enough to have grown up with Hillary but too young to have been burned out on anti-Clinton mudslinging.
Katha Pollitt at
The Nation describes the end of an amazingly effective five-year birth control experiment in Colorado that was paid for by a private foundation in her piece,
Birth Control That Works Too Well:
Given the opportunity to make an informed decision at no cost, around 30,000 participants in Colorado chose LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives). The results were staggering: a 40 percent decline in teen births, and a 34 percent decline in teen abortions. And for every dollar spent on the program, the state saved $5.85 in short-term Medicaid costs, in addition to other cost reductions and the enormous social benefit of freeing low-income teens from unwanted pregnancies and what too often follows: dropping out of school, unready motherhood, and poverty.
You would think Colorado had found the holy grail of compromise in the abortion wars: a plan that would unite Democrats and Republicans, pro-choicers and anti-choicers, social liberals and fiscal conservatives. A plan that was, moreover, well-run, backed by evidence, supported by the state’s health department—and, to repeat, worked astonishingly well. You would think that when the state legislature had to decide whether to pass a bill funding the program after the private money runs out in June, the choice would be, in the pungent words of its Republican cosponsor, Don Coram, “a no-brainer.”
But you would be wrong. When the program began, Colorado’s state government was in Democratic hands, and the initiative enjoyed some bipartisan support. This was one reason the foundation picked Colorado for its pilot program: Chances were good that if it showed positive results, the state would take it over. But last November, Republicans won control of the State Senate and are on a kind of victory lap. Optimists predicted that the bill would sail through the legislature; instead, after it passed the Democrat-controlled House, Senate Republicans maneuvered the bill into a budget committee, where GOP lawmakers killed it. So much for the party of fiscal responsibility. “It’s insane not to be supportive of high-quality family planning if you want to reduce spending on public health,” Dr. David Turok, a leading expert on the IUD, told me. But what’s money when a fertilized egg might be in danger?
David Helvarg at the
Los Angeles Times writes
Lesson of Santa Barbara oil spill—Leave petroleum in the ground:
Memorial Day marks the beginning of high beach season, but there are miles of coastline near Santa Barbara that will be out of commission this weekend thanks to a pipeline oil spill.
This is how most offshore oil works: You drill miles off the coast, pump the oil onshore to be processed and pipe it along the coast. On Tuesday, an underground pipeline that runs between Gaviota and Refugio State Beach ruptured, and the oil followed gravity into a culvert and back out to sea. [...]
The 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara galvanized a movement and effectively ended additional drilling leases off California's coast. The 2015 spill is a reminder that the work of that movement is far from finished. The dangerous prospect of offshore leases will be a factor in the presidential primaries on the East Coast. The protests against dangerous drilling for Arctic oil will continue. It's past time to “Get oil out.”
Chris Hedges at
TruthDig writes
Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse:
The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security. Those who cling to the myth of human progress, who believe that the world inevitably moves toward a higher material and moral state, are held captive by power. Only those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.
The yearning for positivism that pervades our corporate culture ignores human nature and human history. But to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that things are getting worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of the circle of magical thinking that defines American and much of Western culture. The left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and the ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all. [...]
The blundering history of the human race is always given coherence by power elites and their courtiers in the press and academia who endow it with a meaning and coherence it lacks. They need to manufacture national myths to hide the greed, violence and stupidity that characterize the march of most human societies. For the United States, refusal to confront the crisis of climate change and our endless and costly wars in the Middle East are but two examples of the follies that propel us toward catastrophe.