But centrism inside a consensus that is steadily eroding civil liberties, doing away with checks and balances, and increasing executive power is nothing to support, never mind something to celebrate.
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22 January 2012
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28 October 2011
What does Third Way bring to table? They bring no activists, no door knockers, no phonebankers, no silo of issue supporters. They don’t speak for Democrats. They don’t even bring in much money for candidates who back their corporate agenda. And the tide of public opinion is obviously against them right now, to say nothing of political momentum. So why are they and their media flacks relevant, again?
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11:18
I grew up in the Washington area and went to school with lots of children of government and media types. Then I went to Yale, which is also full of such offspring. What I saw was that the corporate media—places like the New York Times, Washington Post, the networks, etc.—and government figures are blatantly, brazenly in bed with each other. And not just metaphorically; it’s often literally true.
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27 September 2011
Speaking in general, if he-said-she-said reporting is one of the lowest forms of journalism in existence, then the resort to the ‘We get attacked by both sides’ is the lowest form of justification or defense when a piece of reporting is questioned.
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29 August 2011
I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that if he goes out on the trail with more of this Grand Bargain bullshit, this state of affairs is going to get worse. Democrats aren’t buying it — and they aren’t impressed with the excuse that the President of the United States has no power and must accede to whatever the looniest teabagger decides is his bottom line.
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9:11
Tea Partiers and progressives have radically different theories of politics and governance, and radically different explanations for why Friedman and friends are wrong, but each camp definitely agrees that the demise of this sort of sophomoric neoliberal commentary would be a great thing for democracy.
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18 August 2011
The criticism isn’t that Obama tried but failed to stave off austerity policies, a public-option-free entrenchment of the private health insurance industry, the preservation of indefinite detention or similar “centrist”/right/corporatist policies; it’s that his lack of fight against them (or his affirmative fight for them) shows he craves those outcomes.
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14 August 2011
The truth is that Iowa CCI isn’t stabbing the President or the Democratic Party in the back through their criticism of the Grand Bargain. If anything, the President and the Party are stabbing them in the back, even as they continue to do the sort of work that helps get Democrats elected—even if that work doesn’t necessarily come in the form of phonebanking or door-to-door canvassing.
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7 August 2011
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue.
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28 July 2011
The American press establishment isn’t just dead weight in failing to expose the corporate takeover of the country’s politics and the sheer lunacy of its right-wing flank. As with the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is playing an actively complicit, damaging role in our democracy. The entire industry might as well shrivel up and die for all the good it does in informing the public.
