Land of the free

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

occupy
I wonder when people are going to fix this:

The NYPD wants to take away your right to vote if you don’t obey them. It sounds extreme, but the recent push from the New York City Police Department to reclassify “resisting arrest” as a felony amounts to just that.

On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton had the audacity to urge state legislators to increasing the penalty for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony.

He argued that this is necessary, because New Yorkers need to be reeducated so they can “get around this idea that you can resist arrest. You can’t.”

But police routinely slap the “resisting arrest” charge on anyone and everyone they don’t like. Some of our reporters have documented this at an array of protests we have covered. The Beavercreek, Ohio police even backed a police SUV cruiser into an elderly woman and then brutally twisted her arm, bent her over a second cruiser and continuously yelled “stop resisting” like a mantra, even though dozens were witnessing and filming the compliant woman who never once offered the least bit of resistance to the officers.

Law enforcement expert and retired University of Nebraska-Omaha criminal justice professor, Sam Walker, explained the situation to local WNYC as follows:

“There’s a widespread pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of cover – and that phrase is used – the officer’s use of force,” said Walker, the accountability expert from the University of Nebraska. “Why did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest.”

Reclassifying resisting arrest as a felony would mean depriving those convicted of this charge of the right to vote.

The United States is one of the strictest nations in the world when it comes to denying voting rights to those who have felony convictions. Nearly 6 million people in the United States have been denied the right to vote in some of the most recent elections, due to felony disenfranchisement. That means if you have too much of a certain leaf in your possession, you can’t vote any longer. If you bounce a check for $501 then you can’t vote any longer. But bounce one for $499 and you’re good, you can still vote. Now, if you are slapped with the dubious “resisting arrest” charge – which is often about as vague and undefinable as the charge of “disorderly conduct,” then the NYPD would also see you stripped of your right to vote.

Joan Walsh reads my mind

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Joan Walsh

Yeah, it’s just getting weird. I know people who work with Warren, and they say she’s not running, too. So what is the point?

So I’m coming to find the “draft Warren” juggernaut a little bit perplexing. I know the participants have wonderful motives and genuinely would welcome a Warren candidacy. But with every email I receive, I get a tiny bit more cynical. It doesn’t feel so much like groups are using their organizational strength to help Warren, but enlisting Warren to help build their organizational strength.

Don’t get me wrong, I think MoveOn and Democracy for America have done important infrastructure and leadership building on the left of the Democratic Party. But I’m not really sure that the “Draft Warren “effort does much more for progressives than encourage a cult of personality – and risk member disillusionment when Warren all but certainly declines to make the race.

I confess my misgivings about all this crystallized Sunday night, when I heard the news that the Working Families Party had joined the “Draft Warren” movement. I admire WFP; I think they’re doing exactly what progressives should be doing: Working within the Democratic Party and pulling it to the left, not standing outside the party and declaring it no better than the GOP.

But it was hard not to contrast their “Draft Warren” move, which looks symbolic at best, and contains an implicit challenge to Hillary Clinton, with their cave-in to Gov. Andrew Cuomo last year — which was not merely symbolic but had real ramifications. At that time, they had a terrific progressive female candidate, Zephyr Teachout, ready to challenge Cuomo – and they backed Cuomo. So to recap: With a willing progressive woman challenging a politically centrist Democratic man – the progressive didn’t get the WFP endorsement. But now, with a centrist but more liberal (than Cuomo) Democratic woman, Hillary Clinton, (probably) running for president, WFP is courting a challenger — who (probably) isn’t running anyway.

Predictably, other “Draft Warren” groups hailed the WFP news. Move On emailed to invite me to share a graphic on Twitter and Facebook that thanks WFP for joining the movement. “It’s important that we show them this morning that the number of people who think they absolutely made the right decision far outweighs the nay-sayers” – that would be me, I guess.

In addition to advancing the assumption that the Clinton campaign won’t be progressive enough, before she’s even declared her candidacy, the hype about Warren serves to obscure the depth and breadth of the new populist movement afoot among Democrats in Congress. Why not draft Sen. Bernie Sanders, who says he’ll run if he believes he has organizational backing? Or other progressive senators like Sherrod Brown or Al Franken or Kirsten Gillibrand? Elizabeth Warren is a star in her own right; she doesn’t particularly need this kind of help.

It’s also past time to observe that in addition to saying she isn’t running, Warren hasn’t done anything to build an organization in any of the early primary or caucus states. Now, presumably “Draft Warren” could help with that in the unlikely event she changes her mind – but Warren’s failure to make any of the moves associated with building a campaign is just one more reason to believe she won’t run.

I’d love to see a campaign that popularizes Warren’s “eight point plan to build the middle class” and encourages all Democratic candidates – including Clinton — to back it. Building a movement around a single political leader rather than around issues seems like a recipe for disappointment, especially when that leader has made it so clear she’s not looking to run for president.

The return of the chained CPI

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Oh, here we go again. Obama just can’t rest without his Grand Bargain. Why are Democrats so fricking gullible?

“Meet the new prez, same as the old prez.”

That bastardization of an old lyric by The Who promptly popped into my head upon learning this week that the White House is again floating the “chained CPI” as a means to whittle down its benefits obligations, through Social Security as well as other programs. Little more than two weeks earlier, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had been working closely with the White House on its fiscal-2016 budget, said President Obama had assured him that the budget would not contain the controversial change, which would apply a stringier formula to the cost-of-living adjustments Washington makes every year.

Yet here’s what White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday: “We’re certainly open to that conversation with Republicans if they want to have a genuine conversation about strengthening Social Security. But frankly, we’ve not gotten a lot of serious willingness on the part of Republicans to engage in that conversation.”

Maybe not—and in any case, the chained CPI is mentioned nowhere in the budget that the White House submitted to Congress this week. But the fact that Obama told Sanders one thing about this very sensitive matter, which could greatly reduced benefits for everyone from Social Security recipients to military and civil service retirees to food stamp recipients—some 80 million people, all told—and then apparently put it back on the table, illustrates an important point about presidential budgets: they are bargaining chips, not blueprints.

The budget is the only matter before Congress that lawmakers—and the president—really have to act on every year, even if they do so in a chaotic and piecemeal fashion. But the numbers and the principles behind the budget, once they hit the hard reality of closed-door conferences where decisions finally get hammered out, are malleable. Anything goes.

Obama’s budget, like every president’s, tells us what he would like us to think he wants—and no more. This year, his party’s progressive wing of his party is applauding him for producing a budget that, the White House says “lays out a strategy to strengthen our middle class.”

The storyline here is that, with no more elections to fight, Obama is liberated from the need to pacify the deficit hawks and can now fight for the progressive vision he always held. The proof is that the chained CPI isn’t in the budget (oops), and that it calls for rescuing the trust fund for Disability Insurance by shifting funds from Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance fund, rather than attacking benefits, as congressional Republicans would prefer. In fact, Obama makes no proposals to “reform” Social Security at all. Obama is, at last, “un-chained.”

Not exactly. “It’s a mixed bag,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, says of the president’s budget. “The irony is that the elements that are the most bold and progressive are the ones with the dimmest chance of passing, while the weakest stuff is where there could be some negotiation with the GOP.”

Breaking news: Politicians lie to win elections!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The Daily Beast is a publication that far too frequently makes me cringe. They’re kind of a pretentious, high-brow version of the National Enquirer:

One of President Obama’s closest advisers said he lied to the country for his own political benefit when he publicly stated his opposition to same-sex marriage in 2008. David Axelrod writes that he knew Obama supported gay marriage in 2008 in his new book, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics. He quotes Obama as saying “I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” after a campaign event where he stated his opposition. Obama later announced his support for gay marriage during his second presidential campaign, claiming he had “evolved.”

Living in the past

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Corona pix

I don’t know why, but for the past year or so, I’ve been trying to replace various things I remember from my past: A bottle of Tweed cologne, because it reminds me of my mother. The ’69 Toyota Corona that was my favorite car, ever. (God, I loved that car!) A bulky Peruvian sweater my husband bought me for my birthday, a pair of earrings I got from a friend. Sometimes I think I would actually kill for this dress I owned with I was 15, a blue dress with caped sleeves and white stars all over it.

And of course it’s not the things themselves. It’s the memories attached to them. Why are they so important now? I guess because I’m old enough now that I’m in the part where I’m looking back.

‘This is personal’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Governor Cuomo Discusses 2015 Opportunity Agenda in Suffolk County

The NY teachers of the year let Gov. Andrew Cuomo know what a jerk he is and how much they despise his education policies:

Dear Governor Cuomo:

We are teachers. We have given our hearts and souls to this noble profession. We have pursued intellectual rigor. We have fed students who were hungry. We have celebrated at student weddings and wept at student funerals. Education is our life. For this, you have made us the enemy. This is personal.

Under your leadership, schools have endured the Gap Elimination Adjustment and the tax cap, which have caused layoffs and draconian budget cuts across the state. Classes are larger and support services are fewer, particularly for our neediest students.

We have also endured a difficult rollout of the Common Core Standards. A reasonable implementation would have started the new standards in kindergarten and advanced those standards one grade at a time. Instead, the new standards were rushed into all grades at once, without any time to see if they were developmentally appropriate or useful.
Continue reading “‘This is personal’” →

Moderation

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

20150206Paul-StumpSource-014

According to the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, these are Republican “moderates”:

DES MOINES — Less than a year before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, it appears that every Republican contender is making a serious play to win the state, setting up what is likely to be one of the most active, competitive campaigns here in recent memory.

Political observers in Iowa say that the field is wide open and that numerous candidates have a legitimate shot to win or do well enough to come out with momentum. That is partly because moderates in the Iowa Republican Party, led by Gov. Terry Branstad, have reasserted themselves into the caucus process after watching social conservatives dominate in 2008 and 2012.

The GOP hopefuls, who at the moment number around two dozen, are already battling one another for supporters and potential staff members amid regular visits to the state.

Chris Christie is a “moderate.” (Even though he’s pitching Joni Ernst voters.) Rand Paul is a “moderate.”

Uh uh.