Month: June 2014

The left-flank push

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking In Austin,Texas on June 20th,2014 at the Long Center for the Performing Arts .

Can it really work? Discuss!

The 2016 Democratic primary will probably include a democratic socialist candidate for president. That would be Bernie Sanders, the irascible senator from Vermont, who has spent the past few months telling the press that he is considering entering the race.

Michael Kazin, himself a socialist and one of the old guard at Dissent, is positively jubilant. Sanders, he wrote last month, would provide Democratic nominee-apparent Hillary Clinton with a much-needed “shove from the left,” without which she “is likely to stick to mushy moderation.”

In a similar vein, The Week’s Ryan Cooper penned a column last week volunteering former senator Russ Feingold to be the 2016 primary’s anti-Clinton. Although he “would almost certainly lose,” writes Cooper, Feingold could still “make Clinton worry about her left flank” and force her into a more dovish posture.

It’s not hard to see why drafting progressive candidates into the Democratic primary has become a favored pastime on the left. (Pleas for Elizabeth Warren to run are practically their own sub-genre.) Clinton supported the Iraq War as a senator, signaled her support for Keystone XL as secretary of state, and sat on Walmart’s board of directors for six years. We don’t exactly know what her 2016 presidential campaign will look like just yet, but the left’s wariness isn’t unreasonable.

Nonetheless, any effort to drag her further leftwards by making her “worry about her left flank,” as Cooper put it, is almost certainly doomed. If Clinton is all but guaranteed to win the primary one way or another, as both Kazin and Cooper admit, then what could she possibly have to worry about? Why should she bother trying to mollify people who have rallied behind an obvious stalking horse?

It’s incomplete if you don’t read the rest.

Short-term memory

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

John Boehner

Notice how Republican principles only apply to Democratic presidents?

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker John Boehner (BAY’-nur) is talking about suing President Barack Obama for allegedly exceeding his constitutional authority when it comes to administering the laws that Congress passes.

Boehner has frequently accused Obama of picking and choosing what portions of laws to enforce, sometimes by issuing executive orders. That is particularly so for health care and immigration. Spokesman Michael Steel says the Ohio Republican told members of the GOP rank-and-file a lawsuit is possible, but didn’t provide details.

Steel also noted the House has passed legislation on two occasions attempting to rein in Obama’s actions, but the Democratic-controlled Senate has refused to act on them.

If you have any doubt there’s a class war, read this

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

With Former White House Advisor Robert Gibbs @ President's Circle Conference

I wish I could say I was surprised, but after all, they did work for the president who has done more to cripple public education than even George Bush:

Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.

The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead role in the public relations initiative.

The involvement of such high-profile Obama alumni highlights the sharp schism within the Democratic Party over education reform.

Teachers unions have long counted on Democrats as their most loyal allies. But in the past decade, more and more big-name Democrats have split with the unions to support charter schools, tenure reform and accountability measures that hold teachers responsible for raising students’ scores on standardized tests.

The national legal campaign is being organized by Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who told POLITICO that she has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent months to get the effort off the ground. She intends to start with a lawsuit in New York, to be filed within the next few weeks, and follow up with similar cases around the country. Her plans for the New York lawsuit were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Brown’s campaign will be modeled on the recent Vergara v. California trial, which dealt a major blow to teachers unions. In that case, a judge earlier this month struck down California’s tenure system and other job protections embedded in state law, ruling that they deprived students of their constitutional right to a quality education because they shielded even the most incompetent teachers from dismissal. Teachers unions have said they will appeal.

The Vergara trial cost the plaintiffs’ team several million dollars, most of that bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch.

An embarrassment of riches

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Crown-jewels / Lopezia coronata

So much good stuff in the Sideshow, I hardly know where to begin. Here’s an appetizer!

Lina Khan in The Washington Monthly, “Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can’t sue […]All this may seem like an archetypical story of our times, combining corporate misconduct, cyber-crime, and high-stakes litigation. But for those who follow the cutting edge of corporate law, a central part of this saga is almost antiquarian: the part where Target must actually face its accusers in court and the public gets to know what went awry and whether justice gets done. Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings – AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors – have deeply undercut these centuries-old public rights, by empowering businesses to avoid any threat of private lawsuits or class actions. The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point.” Khan discussed the article with Sam Seder on The Majority Report.