Year: 2016

Artie:  “A little while ago, you linked us to an excellent article by Michael Arnovitz about Hillary Clinton. I forwarded it to a number of friends, and now he’s posted another, in part responding to feedback he had received. Like the original article, this one is both long and excellent. If you have not already seen it, here is the link.”

From the first:

. . .the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years. . . .

. . .I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.” . . .

From this second one:

. . . the beginning of my real education was the acceptance that many of the things I already knew I didn’t really know at all. And that’s a lesson I’ve tried never to forget. . . . For example, did you know that Elizabeth Warren was actually a Republican until she was well into her 40’s, and that the main reason she switched parties was because she no longer believed that the GOP was “principled in its conservative approach to economics and to markets?” No? Follow-up question: does that sound a little different than the progressive warrior you created in your mind? Yes? Well, people are complicated, and maybe you don’t know Senator Warren quite as well as you think you do. . . .

. . . take it from me, when you write a piece about Hillary Clinton you get a lot of people who are very excited to tell you she is awful, but considerably less interested in showing you how they know that. Indeed, the vast majority of the anti-Hillary commentariat function as if their accusations and conclusions are simply self-evident. For all of those people however, let me point out a general rule of thumb: the only thing truly evident about people who think that their positions are self-evident is their own intellectual laziness. . . .

. . . the right have essentially blamed everything on immigrants and brown people, and the left have blamed everything on bankers and rich people. Both of these positions are ridiculous and juvenile. And unfortunately, they are also dangerous. But they have the advantage of being simple. And for a depressingly large slice of the electorate, that’s what works.

. . . The antidote to this poison is not greater “purity” of doctrine, it’s not a demand for all-or-nothing policy positions and it’s certainly not a surrender to fear and anger. The cure is reason and pragmatism. And if it’s possible to propose a political stand that’s less sexy than that I can’t imagine what it is. But the truth is that politics isn’t actually sexy, and it doesn’t really look like an Oliver Stone movie. Usually it looks more like C-Span. Real politics is “the art of the possible”, which is a fancy Prussian way of saying you’re going to have to compromise. For years an increasing number of conservatives have insisted that compromise is a dirty word, a public display of submission, capitulation or even betrayal. But actually it’s just standard, competent governance. And the inability to acknowledge that is one of the key reasons the GOP can now barely function. Democrats and others on the left do ourselves no favors by following that lead. . . .

Try to find time to read this piece (and the first one!). You will learn a lot. I did. For example: Hillary’s years on the Wal-Mart board. That’s a paragraph we should all read. And the fracking issue we should all be concerned about.

Indeed, there is so much wisdom and good sense (and humor) in Arnovitz’s post, all thinking citizens should read it, whether on the left (well, especially they) or the right.

And yes, I am sending him a cheesecake.

Jim Burt: “Much of the Clinton e-mail kerfuffle concerns three e-mails [out of tens of thousands] which lacked classification headers but which had a “C” in parentheses in the text denoting that parts were classified.  In an ASCII text message, a ‘C’ in parentheses looks like this:  (c).  But in differently coded text messages, a ‘C’ in parentheses looks like this:  © .  The latter just indicates copyright.  And even the former indicates copyright, rather than classification, to people outside the corridors in which classified information is routinely handled.”

No one is saying the home server was a good idea.  But here is an extensive discussion of the issue.  Needless to say, it’s not nearly the disaster Congressional Republicans — who’ve held eight Benghazi hearings — would have the country think.  Ignoring climate change is a potentially existential disaster.  Delaying Zika funding could prove a disaster.  Blocking the American Jobs Act that would have put millions to work revitalizing our infrastructure was all but treasonous.  The three emails with (c) designations someplace in the text?  A concern, for sure, but hardly a disaster.  Nor something on which the course of history should turn, if we have any regard for our own self-interest as a nation.

So much of the debate is carried on with protesters holding up signs.  Three-word messages and maybe a chant.

This difficult but gripping account of a woman who recently had an abortion at 32 weeks provides a thousand times more insight — for those who might be willing to read it.

Neither will make you money, but both are amazing.  Bill Broder’s Red Notice is subtitled: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.  I listened to it on tape.  Sam Polk’s For the Love of Money is a riveting memoir.  I read it with my eyeballs.

Both are the stories of super-driven young men, one of whom became very, very rich; the other of whom could have.

Enjoy!

You know the Sondheim lyric — “Careful the things you say / children will listen.”  (Don’t know or remember it well? Listen.)

It turns out, kids are listening to Donald Trump.

‘The Trump Effect’: Hatred, Fear And Bullying On The Rise In Schools
A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center shines a light on a disturbing trend.

Summarized here on the Huffington Post or read the whole report here.

What kind of nation do we want to be?

Two Washington Post headlines tell it all:

Young Brits are angry about older people deciding their future, but most didn’t vote

Three-quarters of Brits aged 18-24 voted to remain in the E.U.  But only 36% of them turned out — versus 83% of those over 65.

Brexit leaders are walking back some of their biggest promises

Guess what: much of what the “leave” proponents promised simply wasn’t true.

As my mother used to say, “Let it be a lesson to us all.”

Register, kids. Turn out to vote.

Or you get Bush (“by far the vast majority of [my proposed tax cuts],” he lied, “go to people at the bottom of the economic ladder”).

Or Trump.

By way of exquisite contrast, here is President Obama, profiled in the New York Times. To say we’ve been fortunate to have him these past seven-and-a-half years is — to my mind — spectacular understatement.  My favorite anecdote: the “white / medium” story.

Finally, to return to Brexit, here may be the solution.  Parliament should say:

Though we are not legally bound by the referendum, we respect the will of the people and will follow it. It is for precisely that reason we are driven to a highly unusual — but we believe essential — course of action. Because the will of the people — now that more facts are out and attention has truly focused — seems strongly to “remain,” we feel an obligation to be certain the will of the people truly is to “leave.” If it is, as it may be — so be it. But too much is at stake not to be sure. If a significant majority of the population prefer to remain — especially the young, who will live with the consequences of this decision so much longer than their grandparents — then it is our duty to take that fully into account.

No?

Two Washington Post headlines tell it all:

Young Brits are angry about older people deciding their future, but most didn’t vote

Three-quarters of Brits aged 18-24 voted to remain in the E.U.  But only 36% of them turned out — versus 83% of those over 65.

Brexit leaders are walking back some of their biggest promises

Guess what: much of what the “leave” proponents promised simply wasn’t true.

As my mother used to say, “Let it be a lesson to us all.”

Register, kids. Turn out to vote.

Or you get Bush (“by far the vast majority of [my proposed tax cuts],” he lied, “go to people at the bottom of the economic ladder”).

Or Trump.

By way of exquisite contrast, here is President Obama, profiled in the New York Times. To say we’ve been fortunate to have him these past seven-and-a-half years is — to my mind — spectacular understatement.  My favorite anecdote: the “white / medium” story.

Finally, to return to Brexit, here may be the solution.  Parliament should say:

Though we are not legally bound by the referendum, we respect the will of the people and will follow it. It is for precisely that reason we are driven to a highly unusual — but we believe essential — course of action. Because the will of the people — now that more facts are out and attention has truly focused — seems strongly to “remain,” we feel an obligation to be certain the will of the people truly is to “leave.” If it is, as it may be — so be it. But too much is at stake not to be sure. If a significant majority of the population prefer to remain — especially the young, who will live with the consequences of this decision so much longer than their grandparents — then it is our duty to take that fully into account.

No?

Michael Arnovitz writes (“Thinking About Hillary — A Plea for Reason”):

. . .the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.

Also instructive is Jill Abramson’s recent piece in the Guardian. Abramson, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal as well as former Executive Editor of the New York Times, had this to say about Hillary’s honesty: “As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”

. . .In January of 1996, while Whitewater investigations were underway but unfinished, conservative writer William Safire wrote a scathing and now-famous essay about Hillary Clinton entitled, “Blizzard of Lies”.

. . . I am no political historian, but as far as I can tell this short essay was the birth of the “Hillary is a Liar” meme. Now to be clear, most conservatives already strongly disliked her. They had been upset with her for some time because she had refused to play the traditional First Lady role. And they were horrified by her attempt to champion Universal Health coverage. But if you look for the actual reasons people didn’t like her back at that time, you won’t see ongoing accusations of her being “crooked” or a “liar”. Instead, the most common opinion seemed to be that she was a self-righteous leftist who considered anyone with other views to be morally inferior. In short, the prevailing anti-Hillary accusation was not that she was unrelentingly dishonest, but that she was just intolerably smug.

After the Safire piece however, this all changed. Republicans, who learned from Nixon never to let a good propaganda opportunity pass if they could help it, repeated the accusations of mendacity non-stop to anyone who would broadcast or print them. And if you doubt the staying power of Safire’s piece, type the phrase “congenital liar” into a Google search along with “Hillary Clinton” and see what happens. To this day, that exact phrase is still proudly used by many on the right. This, even though Safire was eventually proven wrong about everything he had written. And despite the fact that he stated himself that he would have to “eat crow” if she were ever cleared, Safire never apologized or even acknowledged his many errors once that happened. Because as we all know, swift-boating means never having to say you’re sorry. . . .

☞ Ironically, to those who say Hillary is dishonest, the truth doesn’t matter.

There’s much more to the piece than this, so if you are anti-Hillary but have an open mind . . . or pro-Hillary but wish you liked her better . . . or a huge Hillary fan but need help persuading others . . . read the whole thing.

Have a great, long, patriotic weekend.  It’s okay to recognize that the previous eight Clinton years were a time of peace and all-boats-rising prosperity.  It’s okay to recognize that the last seven-and-a-half Obama years brought us back from the brink of depression and would have had us truly soaring if the Republican Congress had not blocked the jobs act that would have put millions to work revitalizing our infrastructure, had not blocked the minimum wage hike that would have decreased reliance on government welfare while increasing consumption, had not blocked the Senate-passed comprehensive immigration reform that economists agreed would have boosted our economy still further.

It’s okay to hold leaders like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and, yes, for sure, Hillary Clinton — none of them perfect, but each of them awesomely talented, their entire lives dedicated to making a better, fairer, more sustainable world — in the highest regard.  It’s not fashionable, but it’s okay.  And — especially when you grade them on a curve with folks like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, and (preposterously) Donald Trump — it’s spot on.

China is urging its citizens to halve their meat consumption — for a big climate impact. Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger and Avatar director James Cameron make the pitch.

Good for your health, good for your wallet, good for the planet.

(Thanks, Stephen.)

Michael Wolff’s Donald Trump Conversation in the Hollywood Reporter.  Deftly observed.

How did “blue” states come to be controlled by Republican legislatures and represented in Congress by Republicans?

This compelling New Yorker article, based on David Daley’s new book, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, explains.

. . . So skillfully were the lines drawn that in 2012—when President Obama carried Pennsylvania by three hundred thousand votes and the state’s Democratic congressional candidates collectively outpolled their G.O.P. rivals by nearly a hundred thousand votes—Republicans still won thirteen of Pennsylvania’s eighteen seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. . . .

LA Times correspondent Vincent Bevins nails nails it:

Both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for thirty years. . . . Since the 1980s* the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.

That’s it.

I can’t speak for other countries, but here in America . . .

If Gore had been allowed to serve instead of Bush, tax rates on the wealthiest would have not been slashed.

If the Republicans hadn’t blocked Obama’s American Jobs Act (and so much else), millions would have been put to work at good jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, the minimum wage would have been raised, federal student loans would have been refinanced at today’s low rates, Medicaid would have been expanded — all things that would have allowed average folks, and not just the elites, to do a little better.

*Reagan