Say it, AOC!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says something that I too have been saying for ages and should be repeated over and over again.

“We don’t have a left party in the United States,” the congresswoman said. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or center-conservative party.”

“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for All. Not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party,” she told interviewer, journalist and best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I doubt that the political establishment and its media supporters will change their framing of the parties. They have a vested interest in limiting the range of political debate in the country and the best way is to pretend that the two parties represent full left-right range of acceptable political views, rather than what it is, a center-right, crazy-right spectrum.

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Hillary Clinton goes full-on ‘never Sanders’

It looks like Hillary Clinton is determined to inject herself into the election campaign and in the most negative way. She has issued a scathing attack on Bernie Sanders, showing once again that the Democratic party establishment is pulling out all the stops to prevent him from becoming the nominee, as the Iowa caucuses approach. She has even “refused to commit to endorsing Sanders should he win the primary this year”, which is pretty shocking. She is essentially saying that she would rather have Donald Trump win than Sanders.
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Matt Taibbi on media stupidity

The utter failure of mainstream media in the US provides a source of never-ending articles as new debacles quickly follow the old. Matt Taibbi analyzes the role that the media played in aiding Donald Trump’s rise and that they are doing the same thing now to Bernie Sanders.

When prominent media voices compare the Trump and Sanders movements, it’s always the same insult: Trump sucks and is evil/wrong, and Sanders is like Trump. The establishment fantasy is that both are illegitimate opportunists.

The diagnosis of Trump is that he rode to power appealing to a collection of humanity’s darkest impulses, in particular racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Few other explanations, importantly even negative ones (like that Trump took cynical advantage of both racism and legitimate economic grievances), are accepted.

The explanation for Sanders is naiveté. Neither the politician nor his followers understand how the world works. They want expensive things for free and blame billionaires when their actual gripe is with reality. Oh, and theirs is also a movement for sexists and anti-Semites and people who refuse to accept the unique role of racism in America.

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New York Times endorses Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar

Let me say right off the bat that I don’t think newspaper endorsements matter that much anymore. Given the proliferation of sources of information, I don’t think that support of a newspaper, even one that has such a wide reach as the New York Times, carries much impact. What such endorsements give us is a window into the thinking of the political establishment. So the endorsements tell us more about the newspaper’s interests than the virtues of the candidates. They say that there are two visions being put forward by the Democratic party, the realist and the radical and that Klobuchar represents the former and Warren the latter.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson had Alan Dershowitz’s number

Ralph Waldo Emerson once memorably wrote: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons”, at a time when spoons were often made of silver and thus valuable and the target of thieves. Emerson was likely adapting a sentiment attributed to Samuel Johnson by his biographer James Boswell. The sentiment expressed a warning about those who spoke too much about their own virtues, that it should make their claims to virtue suspect. It is similar to the Shakespearean “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in Hamlet to signify that one loses credibility by being too insistent.
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Fact-checking in science

In science, collective judgments by credible experts that have passed through institutional filters are what make up reliable knowledge. These should not be confused with ‘facts’ which is the term given to the things that are directly measured. And yet, the media often conflate the two and in this article in Scientific American, Naomi Oreskes warns that doing so does a disservice when it comes to ‘fact-checking’ politicians concerning climate change warnings.
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Another secret deal between a city and a corporation

The giant paint company Sherwin-Williams has had its headquarters and its main research facilities in the city of Cleveland since its founding in 1866 and has often boasted about how proud it is to be there and what a good corporate citizen it is, donating to the arts and charities and the like.

But like all major corporations, it has decided to shakedown the city it has long called home and which is under financial stress in the usual way, by threatening to move its headquarters elsewhere unless it gets a good deal in the form of tax and other incentives. And in a familiar move, the city and the corporation are not divulging the details of the deal being worked out.
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Describing Donald Trump and his supporters

I tried to collect in one place all the adjectives that describe Donald Trump’s qualities and so far have come up with the following list, not in any particular order:

Ignorant
Petulant
Narcissistic
Vain
Irrational
Reckless
Misogynist
Racist
Xenophobic
Swaggering
Law-breaking
Venal
White supremacist
Corrupt
Paranoid
Cruel
Lying
Abusive
Cowardly
Vulgar
Petty
Greedy
Boastful
Spiteful
Preening
Vindictive

I am pretty certain that I have not exhausted the possibilities and am open to suggestions to add to the list
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The puzzling appeal of mementos

Once again we have an utterly absurd fuss ginned up by Republicans over the fact that speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi had handed out to various people the pens used to sign the articles of impeachment. I had known that at formal signing ceremonies in the US, the pens that are used to sign the documents become important trophies that are given out as rewards. Barack Obama used 22 pens to sign the Affordable Care Act and Lyndon Johnson used 75 to sign the Civil Rights Act. Donald Trump also gave away dozens of pens after signing the trade pact with China, an event that no one will remember after a few weeks. But I wondered how you could have more than one pen and the above linked article explains what happens.
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