I was a conservative from roughly 2004 - 2011. At only 29 years old, that was a very significant amount of time and a very critical point of time for forming intellectual ideas.
I was on a bunch of drugs most of that time too, as many of the readers and founders of this blog know well. That may very well have had an impact. Nevertheless, I read a great deal of conservative literature and genuinely believed in it.
Black Lives Matter organizers have launched Campaign Zero as part of their fight against police violence. At their website, they grade several of the Presidential candidates on a 10-point scale. Bernie Sanders rates highest with a score of 8. Hillary Clinton received a 2.
The world economy still suffers from a global lack of demand. That's what caused the market correction in China that sparked a (temporary?) contagion in the rest of the world. When it comes to the economic basics -- energy, grains and metals, everything's in a bear market. The Daily Beast asked me to write about the markets and I took my stab. Basically, I think that China is deflating too early.
The Republican Party does not like Trump. Strategists for the GOP are saying he will not be the nominee. The conservative friends I have have called him a "carnival barker" and an "embarassment." Yet that embarrassing carnival barker is drawing the poll numbers and the crowds while they, with all their good intent, have candidates who are in the doldrums as far as numbers. The basis of what conservatism is is apparent and it's not pretty. As I said in my first piece, Trump taps in to voters' hearts and minds while the rest of the party and its propaganda outlets are left flabbergasted and disoriented. He has been channeled very roughly by Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Rand Paul only to keep standing, nodding his duck face and his toupee (or whatever that rodent on his head is) in smug arrogance.
I am not sure how many Dagblog readers are aware of Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg is the modern conservative intellectual heavyweight, if there can be such a thing. He replaced William F. Buckley in heading the conservative magazine National Review and he has written a number of silly books including Liberal Fascism, a strange book that features a happy face with a Hitler mustache on it. (He's not very original so he probably got that idea from Alan Moore's Watchmen graphic novel.)
Civil Rights Activism is tricky it takes courage to challenge the status quo and change social parameters. Far too many of your contemporaries see your efforts as crass, and your motivation as self serving. It will probably be 10 years before the critics understand your movement, and 20 years before the establishment tries to rebuild the images of you they're currently tearing down. I support the measures you've used to keep your message from being ignored by the corporate media. #blackbrunch, die-ins, blocking traffic, and even hijacking political events have all been effective. My message to you is to continue practicing the kind of non threatening passive violence that has kept your movement relevant for over a year. Passive aggression takes longer, but what other options do you have? There are militant voices on the edges of your movement calling for an escalation that has the potential of starting an unwinnable war. Anyone who tries to convince you that armed insurrection should be part of any strategy to resolve the problems you're articulating is trying to co-opt your movement.
Over the past few days an awful lot of bad news about and for Hillary Clinton has come out. First the polls: In New Hampshire, she may well be behind Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders. CNN and Fox polls of Democratic primary voters, released within the past few days show her support below 50% for the first time in this election cycle, including in must-win states Pennsylvania and Ohio. In two short weeks, Sanders halved her 36% lead nationally over him.
Although "Doctor Cleveland" is my nom du blog, I've been splitting time between two cities for years. Like many academics in my generation, I've struggled with the "two-body problem" as part of a couple with teaching jobs at universities in different places. We've had homes in both places, but I've been the primary commuter and my spouse has held down the home front.
Here's a question: If you were a state lawmaker (male, married) known for sniffy, holier-than-thou, just awful Tea Party politics and you were having an affair with another sniffy holier-than-thou Tea Party lawmaker (female, married) and you realized you were about to get caught, how would you handle it? Would you think, seriously, that the best way to deflect from the real affair was to invent a phony story about being accused of a liaison with a male prostitute and then get really pissed at the person spreading that story, even though that person was you?
Fox News got record-breaking ratings for its Republican debate in Cleveland. It got one of the top-ten highest cable TV ratings of all time; the other nine are sporting events, mostly big bowl games on ESPN. So Chris Christie and the boys got better ratings than Tony Soprano, and if you'd like to make your own Mad Men joke, here's the place for it. On the other hand, thousands of Fox viewers have denounced Fox's moderators as biased and unfair.
My parents always reminded us growing up that August 14 was the end of WWII, the day Japan had surrendered. I almost forgot about it until I just looked at the date on the computer as I made my internet rounds before I went to bed. For my parents this a very important date, and they wanted us to understand how it shaped their lives.
My mother said that day everyone was waiting to hear if Japan was going to surrender. The two atomic bombs had been dropped the week before and Japan was given an ultimatum to surrender or we would drop more. My dad was on Saipan so my mother was glued to the radio for days. She was listening to WKDKA from Pittsburg because that was the big station in her area, helping with the clean up after dinner when the news came from CBS New York. She and her sisters dropped everything they were doing and jumped in the Dairy truck and headed to town to celebrate. My grandparents had a dairy and vegetable farm. Gas was rationed then so they only used the dairy truck because they made daily deliveries with it and was able to have more gas for it.
Over on another site, I instinctively defended the premise that the Black Lives Matter protesters were foolish, at best, for protesting at Bernie Sanders events. No real need to recap the arguments here, but I've since read some convincing explanations for why BLM should, in fact, target progressive events where they want to emphasize the importance of their message in the line-up of priorities being discussed. Heck, while I immediately took the "don't shout him down, free speech doesn't work that way," stance, Sanders went back to the drawing board on his own policies and priorities.
Over at TPM, I wrote a piece about my enjoyment of Trump's using pro wrestling style rhetorical tactics against his fellow Republicans. While I would, of course, like to see a steel chair, lead pipe or figure four leglock involved...
In Wherefore the Gender Gap, I noted irony in the fact that women greatly prefer Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders given Hillary Clinton's initial reaction to deceptively edited video purporting to show Planned Parenthood conspiring to sell fetal parts. Clinton called the dishonest video “disturbing” and refused to rule out government hearings into Planned Parenthood's practices.
Yesterday, some 16 months before the next presidential election, the Republicans launched the first in a l-o-o-n-g series of candidate debates. Four hours later, the second one took place.
The pundits are all over the map. The NYT's Nate Cohn picked Rubio, Walker, and Kasich. He thinks Bush flubbed it, and Trump "had the weakest performance." But the Atlantic called Trump's performance "one of the standouts of the night," lauding him for turning "weaknesses into strengths" and says Jeb made "a strong impression." CNN and WaPo opinionators agree with Cohn that Rubio was the winner, but Josh Marshall calls him "all but invisible." Ann Coulter weighs in, "Every GOP I'm talking to hated Rubio & Kasich, " but Laura Ingraham at Fox News tweets "@GovMikeHuckabee and @JohnKasich." A Republican focus group in Pella, Iowa described Ben Carson as "ready for prime time," "brilliant," and "someone you can really trust."
A Fox poll released August 3, shows a remarkable gender gap among Hillary Clinton supporters. 60% of women who say they will vote in the Democratic primary prefer Clinton over her closest competitor Bernie Sanders who garners a mere 16% of the female vote. By contrast 38% of Democratic men support Clinton's candidacy and 32% support Sanders. What's interesting about this is that Sanders is stronger than Clinton on the issues that women say matter most to them. This became obvious in their different responses to a secretly filmed and deceptively edited video of Planned Parenthood representatives that falsely purports to show them plotting to profit from abortions.
In two short weeks, Sanders halved her 36% lead nationally over him.
My parents always reminded us growing up that August 14 was the end of WWII, the day Japan had surrendered. I almost forgot about it until I just looked at the date on the computer as I made my internet rounds before I went to bed. For my parents this a very important date, and they wanted us to understand how it shaped their lives.
