Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Bolshevik Revolution takes place; America’s 2000 presidential vote faces limbo; Nixon loses Calif. governor’s race; Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses; Evangelist Billy Graham and singer Joni Mitchell born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Under every stone lurks a politician. Aristophanes
I’m a great believer in positive thinking. Everything works for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.
Sigh, Candide. Published in 1759 by François-Marie Arouet its subtitle is “The Optimist” but it might as well be “The Leibnizian Optimist” since the character Dr. Pangloss with his motto of “Everything works for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds,” personifies that Philosophy (so the tuition wasn’t wasted!). Leibniz was also a noted Mathematician, take that useful Sciences!
What makes it funny in a Classically Ironic way (the protagonist has a fatal flaw which leads to their ultimate doom that is known to the audience but not the characters, funny guys those Greeks) is that, raised a Leibnizian, her life is terrible. She suffers about every possible indignity known to mid-18th Century France (that’s the satirical part, why are there these problems with society?).
Periodically Dr. Pangloss turns up to say, “Everything works for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.”
Spoiler Alert!!!
In the end Candide dies a painful lingering death from Tuberculosis. And that is irony.
I read it once for class, probably never again. I have memories and Wikipedia It’s incredibly depressing. Maybe that’s why Leonard Berstein turned it into an Operetta-
My point is that if I ever tell you, “Everything works for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.” it translates to- “We’re all Doomed!”
Don’t say that’s not a positive attitude, should I miss the last opportunity I might ever have at being right?
Don’t stare at me like that either. I have a Classical education. I suppose you may be excused Voltaire but as a disciple of Clio I must despair if something as recent as Ghostbusters elicits the same vacant look.
You’re gonna endanger us, you’re gonna endanger our client – the nice lady, who paid us in advance, before she became a dog…
Not necessarily. There’s definitely a VERY SLIM chance we’ll survive.
I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! LET’S DO IT!
Yeah. We’re doomed.
Still, instead of a Republican blowout that leaves Democrats farther behind in the House and Senate, the Pundit money is all on a Democratic House while the Senate margin stays the same or slightly worse. At the very least it gives Democrats Subpeona power.
I tell you I’m an optimist and I think the Senate is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Pretty surely we’re going to pick up some Governorships which will help with the Gerrymandering/Voter Suppression problem and make some Statehouse gains. It would be hard to do worse.
So I’m practicing my French and hoping I won’t have to use it.
Developments below. Really big developments in updates.
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception– the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change–in a perpetual peaceful revolution– a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions–without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
Be advised: “Democrats are in danger of going too far left in 2018.” So warn Republicans like Mitt Romney and ex-Democrats like Joe Lieberman and public personae as diverse as James Comey and Howard Schultz. In recent months, the pundit class has determined that the party’s leftward lurch heralds the rise of a “liberal tea party”—a movement that could very well unmoor Democrats from their longstanding center-left traditions, in close imitation of the spiral of events that caused the Republican Party to turn sharply to the right in recent years.
I want to stop right there and note that none of these people are Democrats. Not one.
Then again it is Politico.
What’s fueling this argument? For one, more Democrats have rallied, either noisily or cautiously, around such policy innovations as “Medicare for all,” universal college and a universal basic income. That a smattering of Democratic candidates have elected to call themselves “democratic socialists” has only fueled the claim that such programs are “socialist.” “The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington,” warned New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently. (Debs and Harrington were self-identified socialists.)
Also, not a Democrat. To continue-
But there’s something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought.
What’s more, to label these programs “socialist”—which is to say, far outside the center of the political spectrum—reveals a constrained worldview. For over six decades, center-right parties in Europe—in Britain and France, Germany and Austria, and almost everywhere between—have either participated in or acceded to the very same policies.
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What pundits today decry as a radical turn in Democratic policy and politics actually finds its antecedents in 1944. With the country fully mobilized for war, President Franklin Roosevelt called for “a second Bill of Rights … an economic bill of rights” that would entitle all Americans to a “useful and remunerative job,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” the “right … to a decent home,” “the right to adequate medical care” and the “right to a good education.” His speech found partial inspiration in a report by the National Resource Planning Board, which advanced the necessity of a “socially provided income.”
In effect, FDR proposed to jumpstart the New Deal, a vital and inventive program of economic and social reform that necessarily stalled after the start of World War II. His “Economic Bill of Rights” was bold in its contours and vague in its policy prescriptions, but it would effectively form the basis of the Democratic Party’s aspirations for the better part of four decades.
This was certainly true of health care policy. In the 1940s, Senators Robert Wagner and James Murray and Congressman John Dingell Sr. introduced legislation that would have established a national program for hospital and medical insurance. It was stymied by a coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, as was also the case with Truman’s efforts after 1949 to achieve the same result. But it was central to the party’s core ambition for many years after.
Only in the 1960s did Democrats abandon the concept of universal, single-payer health care and champion a narrower program of guaranteed hospital insurance and voluntary medical insurance for the elderly—the program that we now know as Medicare. They didn’t abandon universal coverage because they viewed it as too radical. Rather, they believed it was no longer necessary. After World War II, major employers began extending unprecedented benefits to workers, including annual cost-of-living adjustments to wages, defined benefits pensions and private health insurance. Given this reality, they turned their focus to a narrower subset of the population that, by definition, would not benefit from employer-based health programs: senior citizens.
The same trajectory was generally true of the party’s commitment to ensuring that every family enjoyed an adequate income. Roosevelt’s initial pledge seemed to augur a government-supported basic family wage. In 1946 the Democratic Congress passed—and Truman signed—the Employment Act, which codified the government’s responsibility to “foster and promote free competitive enterprise and the general welfare; conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment for those able, willing, and seeking to work; and to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” In its original form, the bill would have guaranteed all Americans remunerative work and required the government to create public-sector or private-sector jobs to meet this mandate. In this way, it would have met Roosevelt’s quality of living standard for many families. Conservatives blocked that provision.
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In this sense, it is true that many Democrats are moving back to their roots. And those roots lead to policies that commanded broad support—and to leaders who commanded broad popularity—in their day.
It’s also ahistorical to decry such policies as “socialist.” To be sure, conservative critics have used the term for the better part of 80 years. In 1936, the chairman of the Republican National Committee warned that America was on a path to become “a socialistic state honeycombed with waste and extravagance and ruled by a dictatorship that mocks the rights of the States and the liberty of the citizen.” In 1952, during his campaign for the presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a relative moderate in the Republican Party, denounced universal health care as “socialized medicine.” In 1961, while speaking on the circuit as a representative of General Electric, Ronald Reagan warned that a pared-down proposal to provide guaranteed hospital insurance for senior citizens constituted “a short step to all the rest of socialism.” “If you and I don’t do this,” he implored his audience, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children’s children what it was once like in America when men were free.” (Remembering Reagan’s days as an FDR and Truman Democrat, a liberal skeptic asked him, “How much are they paying you for this shit?”)
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European policies that American conservatives regard as staples of Scandinavian-style socialism—universal health care, government-provisioned child care, free or nearly free vocational and university education—were in fact born of a postwar accommodation between conservative and social democratic parties throughout Western and Central Europe. Having endured a half century of intense warfare, as much the product of ideological as ethnic conflict, mainstream politicians and voters from across the political spectrum were eager to fashion a more stable social order.
The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, Christian Democrats in Italy, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Popular Republican Movement in France are prime examples of center-right organizations that collaborated with socialist and centrist parties in establishing a welfare state that defined what historian Tony Jundt called the “‘European way’ of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations.” The contours of this welfare state varied from country to country, and to be sure, socialists, liberals and conservatives contested—and continue to contest—just how generous the state should be to its citizens. But by the turn of the 21st century, Jundt argued, the “European Way” had become “a beacon … and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life.’”
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So why are Democrats dusting off the policies and political rhetoric of FDR’s day? It could be because, in some ways, the United States more closely resembles the year 1932 than it does 1992, when Clinton pulled the party closer to the center. Income inequality has grown, fewer people enjoy employer-based health care, defined benefits pensions, a living wage or savings to cushions their families in times of bad luck or economic downturn.
But if the terms of debate are eerily familiar, our historical perspective is lacking. Almost alone among developed nations, we decry as “socialist” rights and protections that other people around the world regard as foundational to a well-functioning civil society—rights that have long commanded support from across the political spectrum. Our center has drifted further right, leaving Americans to view the world through a uniquely skewed prism.
We can have a vigorous debate about “Medicare for all,” a universal basic income and guaranteed college. We should have the debate. These might not be the right answers. But if we begin from the proposition that such ideas are alien to America’s civic tradition—that they are far outside the mainstream—that they are a political nonstarter, we’re not only constricting the terms of debate. We’re betraying the historical record in the process.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
President Trump and the Republican Party have run the most racist national political campaign since the 1968 presidential bid of segregationist George Wallace. We shall soon see how much the country has changed in 50 years — and in what direction.
I grew up in the South under Jim Crow, so I’ve seen and heard this garbage before. Trump claims that Democrat Stacey Abrams, who happens to be African American, is “not qualified” to be governor of Georgia because of her “past.” What past? Her degrees from Spelman College, the University of Texas and Yale Law School? Her work as a tax attorney? Her service as minority leader of the Georgia state legislature?
In Florida, referring to another African American candidate, Trump has said that “Andrew Gillum is not equipped to be your governor. It’s not for him.” He has also, apropos of nothing, called Gillum “a stone-cold thief.” Gillum has a degree from Florida A&M University and has been mayor of Tallahassee since 2014.
Trump chooses his attack words carefully. “Not qualified” and “not equipped” are of a piece with the “low-I.Q.” jibe he uses when he tweets about Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) — smarmy and unsubtle suggestions that these accomplished black Americans are intrinsically inferior to whites. Implying that Abrams has a shady past and that Gillum is a thief echoes the old segregationists’ claim that black people simply cannot be trusted.
Will the blue wave overcome the red undertow? As this is written, votes are still being cast and yet to be counted. Yet, in many ways, the striking results are already in. Republicans have become the party of President Trump — a party that has decided they must lie about the core of their gospel. Democrats, with an establishment defined by resistance to Trump and defense of what was , are increasingly driven by a progressive activism that is forcing a far bolder agenda. The market fundamentalism that for so long dominated our politics is exhausted. Beneath the paranoid posturing, blatant lying, shameless xenophobia and racism with which Trump roils our debate, a political sea change has begun, more important than the results of this year’s blue wave or red undertow.
What is stunning about the Trump GOP is that it is not prepared to defend or even fess up to its core principles. Ever since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have championed a market fundamentalism, pumping for cutting taxes on the rich and corporations, purportedly to stimulate investment, and slashing social support to motivate the poor to work and balance the budget. They were the party of free trade, balanced budgets and small government. Not surprisingly, Trump and the Republican Congress made top-end tax cuts and repeal of the Affordable Care Act the centerpiece of their agenda. When repeal failed in the Senate, they pushed lawsuits to have the ACA declared unconstitutional and administrative measures to undermine its protections.
Yet, in the campaign, Trump and other Republicans found they could not defend either initiative. On tax cuts, they initially promised that they would benefit the middle class the most and pay for themselves. When it was clear no one was falling for the con, they chose simply to stop talking about it. Even with the economy humming, they no longer made the case that the rich need more money and the poor less.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Abraham Lincoln wins four-way race for President as American Civil War nears; March music ‘king’ John Phillip Sousa born; Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky dies; Director Mike Nichols born.
Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
Anybody who thinks that ‘it doesn’t matter who’s President’ has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world– or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property– or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons– or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.
I haven’t harangued you about it because this is not that kind of site. Our readers are adults who know what’s best for themselves in their life and even the poor excuses of “My Vote is meaningless” or “My Party doesn’t represent my values anymore” or even “I’m too busy” may reflect your current situation and while they do you no credit you’ll not be shunned or shamed for expressing that.
Ok, maybe a little. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? That things will get better if you just do nothing?
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I will mention that I’ve never missed an election except once, when I had a car accident on the way to the polls.
I think you should vote, even if it’s not for the candidate I would choose, and I’m fairly confident TMC would echo that sentiment (though she might be a little more forceful about voting in your best interests and what those interests are).
For me voting is easy, it rarely takes more than half an hour unless there are ballot questions I’m not familiar with. Your experience may be different. Whatever time it takes, please make it, and don’t leave the line if the Polling Station is “Officially” closed, if you’re in line at the buzzer they have to let you vote.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
On Feb. 14, 2018, our lives were forever changed by a gunman who killed 17 of our classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. In just 11 minutes, our childhood ended. Our eyes were opened to a harsh reality: Mass shootings happen more frequently in America than any place else on the planet, and the gun lobby buys the silence of too many of our elected officials.
Over eighteen months before the shooting at our school, 49 people were killed at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Four months before Parkland, 58 people were killed at a concert in Las Vegas. And just last week, 11 people were killed at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. In all that time, not a single federal law has been passed that addresses gun violence. Not a single law. Our nation’s leaders have failed to protect citizens where they live, where they learn and where they pray. [..]
More than 40 percent of surveyed 18- to 29-year-olds say they will “definitely vote” Tuesday, according to Harvard’s National Youth Poll. This number represents a significant increase from 2010, when only 27 percent indicated they would. But we all need to show up.
How many more shootings must there be before our leaders listen to us?
During my first year as an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, I wasn’t allowed to use the word “lie.”
That first year coincided with the 2000 election, and George W. Bush was, in fact, being systematically dishonest about his economic proposals — saying false things about who would benefit from his tax cut and the implications of Social Security privatization. But the notion that a major party’s presidential candidate would go beyond spin to outright lies still seemed outrageous, and saying it was considered beyond the pale.
Obviously that prohibition no longer holds on this opinion page, and major media organizations have become increasingly willing to point out raw falsehoods. But they’ve been chasing a moving target, because the lies just keep getting bigger and more pervasive. In fact, at this point the G.O.P.’s campaign message consists of nothing but lies; it’s hard to think of a single true thing Republicans are running on.
And yes, it’s a Republican problem (and it’s not just Donald Trump). Democrats aren’t saints, but they campaign mostly on real issues, and generally do, in fact, stand for more or less what they claim to stand for. Republicans don’t. And the total dishonesty of Republican electioneering should itself be a decisive political issue, because at this point it defines the party’s character.
November 5 commemorates the failure of the November 1605 Gunpowder Plot by a gang of Roman Catholic activists led by Warwickshire-born Robert Catesby.
When Protestant King James I acceded to the throne, English Catholics had hoped that the persecution they had felt for over 45 years under Queen Elizabeth I would finally end, and they would be granted the freedom to practice their religion.
When this didn’t transpire, a group of conspirators resolved to assassinate the King and his ministers by blowing up the Palace of Westminster during the state opening of Parliament.
Guy (Guido) Fawkes, from York, and his fellow conspirators, having rented out a house close to the Houses of Parliament, managed to smuggle 36 barrels of gunpowder into a cellar of the House of Lords – enough to completely destroy the building.
(Physicists from the Institute of Physics later calculated that the 2,500kg of gunpowder beneath Parliament would have obliterated an area 500 metres from the centre of the explosion).
The scheme began to unravel when an anonymous letter was sent to William Parker, the 4th Baron Monteagle, warning him to avoid the House of Lords.
The letter (which could well have been sent by Lord Monteagle’s brother-in-law Francis Tresham), was made public and this led to a search of Westminster Palace in the early hours of November 5.
Explosive expert Fawkes, who had been left in the cellars to set off the fuse, was caught when a group of guards discovered him at the last moment.
Fawkes was arrested, sent to the Tower of London and tortured until he gave up the names of his fellow plotters.
Lord Monteagle was rewarded with £500 plus £200 worth of lands for his service in protecting the crown.
Guy Fawkes, Thomas Bates, Robert and Thomas Wintour, Thomas Percy, Christopher and John Wright, Francis Tresham, Everard Digby, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, Hugh Owen, John Grant and the man who organised the whole plot – Robert Catesby.
The conspirators were all either killed resisting capture or – like Fawkes – tried, convicted, and executed.
The traditional death for traitors in 17th-century England was to be hanged, drawn As he awaited his punishment on the gallows, Fawkes leapt off the platform to avoid having his testicles cut off, his stomach opened and his guts spilled out before his eyes.
Mercifully for him, he died from a broken neck but his body was subsequently quartered, and his remains were sent to “the four corners of the kingdom” as a warning to others.
Following the failed plot, Parliament declared November 5th a national day of thanksgiving, and the first celebration of it took place in 1606.
Following the plot, King James I sought to control non-conforming English Catholics in England. In May 1606, Parliament passed ‘The Popish Recusants Act’ which required any citizen to take an oath of allegiance denying the Pope’s authority over the king.
Observance of the 5th November Act, passed within months of the plot, made church attendance compulsory on that day and by the late 17th Century, the day had gained a reputation for riotousness and disorder and anti-Catholicism. William of Orange’s birthday (November 4th) was also conveniently close.
The Houses of Parliament are still searched by the Yeomen of the Guard before the state opening, which has been held in November since 1928. The idea is to ensure no modern-day Guy Fawkes is hiding in the cellars with a bomb, although it is more ceremonial than serious. And they do it with lanterns.
The cellar that Fawkes tried to blow up no longer exists. In 1834 it was destroyed in a fire which devastated the medieval Houses of Parliament. The lantern Guy Fawkes carried in 1605 is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
That night has been celebrated in England on November 5th as Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night ever since with bonfires and masks inspired by Guy Fawkes’ image. Straw effigies of Fawkes and modern day political figures are tossed onto the fires. The only place in England where it is not celebrated is Fawkes alma mater, St. Peter’s in York. They refuse to burn a guy out of respect for one of their own.
The holiday, the poem and, especially, the mask was made popular again by the 2006 motion picture “V for Vendetta.” Set in the future, “V” is an anonymous masked revolutionary working to destroy the fascist, totalitarian government with elaborate, violent, and intentionally theatrical campaign that kills the leaders of the government and inspires the people to take back self-rule.
The mask was adopted by the group Anonymous whose members wore the mask during a 2008 protest of the Church of Scientology. The group has been called “freedom fighters,” “digital Robin Hoods,” “a cyber lynch-mob” and “cyber terrorists.” Whatever you call them they were named of Time‘s “100 most influential people in the world for 2012.
It also became a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement that raised the awareness of the world to social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government, especially Wall Street. Their slogan “We Are the 99%” became the probably the best known phrase of the protest and the mask one of the most recognized symbols of the movement next to the dancer on the Wall Street bull.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
FDR wins unprecedented third term in the White House; Richard Nixon elected President; Former President Reagan says he has Alzheimer’s; George Foreman sets boxing record; Pianist Vladimir Horowitz dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
So the poem starts that commemorates the 