Of course the US government is freaking out, warning of blood on the streets. News flash: There's already blood on the streets. As Daniel Ellsberg has explained countless times, this is what they always say. And it's virtually always a false alarm. Besides, blood in the streets, that's pretty much what wars, espionage and such are all about, in'it?
We're supposed to worry that this massive leak will impede the ability of the US government to connive in secret behind everyone's back? Well, after the past 10 years in particular, who in the world honestly thinks that would be a bad thing?
Maybe if Barack Obama had changed that policy one iota, as his entire campaign was implicitly and explicitly based upon doing, folks might feel a little differently. But as things stand today? Not so much.
US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis
• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Hillary Clinton leads frantic 'damage limitation' David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 November 2010 17.50 GMT
The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.
At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables - many of which are designated "secret" - the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN's leadership.
These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistlebowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.
These include a major shift in relations between China and North Korea, Pakistan's growing instability and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.
Among scores of other disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:
• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme
• Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime.
• Devastating criticism of the UK's military operations in Afghanistan.
• Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family.
OMG! "Inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family"! It must be Tuesday. Or Sunday. Whatever. One of those days ending in "y".
Equally shocking/surprising was the revelation that US diplomats spy on people (!!!):
Beginning with this diary in memory of the great education research expert and commentator Gerald Bracey, I've been posting regularly about education policy on the frontpage of Open Left for a little over a year now.
I'm well aware that most of these posts have been harshly critical of the policies promoted by both President Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the crowd of neo-liberal, conservative, and corporate/foundation-backed ideologues who call themselves "reformers." However, it is very important to pause now and again and remind ourselves what the progressive community is fighting for in the education debate.
So it being a holiday weekend and all, I thought a quick re-cap of what's essential to a progressive view of education was in order.
My first treatment of this topic appeared here on Open Left in a diary focusing mostly on the writings of Alfie Kohn. But progressive thought about education certainly isn't limited to him. Nevertheless, I find the short checklist I paraphrased from his writings to be a useful launching pad for advancing a progressive view about education that truly is progressive.
What follows is a brief recap of those key points with an update of where we progressives are in advancing our cause:
Remember Bill-O and the "War Against Christmas" hallucination? Well, the other shoe just dropped. Once again demonstrating the Iron Law of Conservatism, that whatever conservatives accuse liberals of, they either do themselves or want to do themselves, this year has seen an outbreak of conservative hostility against a hallowed American holiday--and one with religious roots, no less. Yes, folks, I kid you not, the War on Thanksgiving has broken out, with salvos from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
Rush Limbaugh attacks Reagan's Thanksgiving message
November 24, 2010 4:11 pm ET by Karen Famighetti
Rush Limbaugh lashed out at President Obama today for recognizing "the compassion and contributions of Native Americans" and their "skill in agriculture" during his Thanksgiving proclamation. According to Rush, Obama was perpetuating a "myth" about Thanksgiving and implying that "we were incompetent idiots, we didn't know how to feed ourselves, so they came along and showed us how."
Oh, sure he may claim he's just attacking Obama, but he's actually attacking the presidential proclamation of Thanksgiving, which is an integral part of the holiday (George Washington issued a Thanksgiving proclamation decades before the holiday itself was officially recognized.) Want proof? Media Matters goes on to note similar language from Ronald Reagan:
Lost in Rush's rambling diatribe was that President Reagan made similar statements in his Thanksgiving proclamations.
For example, from Reagan's 1981 Thanksgiving proclamation:
On this day of thanksgiving, it is appropriate that we recall the first Thanksgiving, celebrated in the autumn of 1621. After surviving a bitter winter, the Pilgrims planted and harvested a bountiful crop. After the harvest they gathered their families together and joined in celebration and prayer with the Native Americans who had taught them so much. Clearly our forefathers were thankful not only for the material well-being of their harvest but for this abundance of goodwill as well.
Bill Clinton, in his 2000 Thanksgiving proclamation, also recognized the contributions of Native Americans.
Rush also took the opportunity of the Thanksgiving holiday to smear Native Americans, blaming them for deaths from tobacco and demanding "reparations," and claiming that they "scammed" the Europeans in the sale of Manhattan island.
Beck tells audience to ruin Thanksgiving dinner with misinformation about inflation
November 23, 2010 8:28 pm ET
While advising his Fox News viewers to talk about inflation at their Thanksgiving dinners, Glenn Beck falsely claimed that the government removed food and energy prices from its measure of inflation to hide rising prices, that a survey showed economists are "worried" about inflation, and that Social Security recipients are not receiving a cost-of-living adjustment because the government "changed the calculation."
....
BECK: Nonprofit food distribution agencies are struggling at record-breaking pace this year. Their demand is outrageous. This is a picture from Northwest Washington, D.C. There were 3,000 people that waited in line for grocery handouts. Three thousand people. Bread lines. Do you remember breadlines? They're back in America in 2010.
Reuters said over the weekend -- the Reuters said that economists is worried about U.S. inflation. Now, hang on just a second. Inflation? I've heard the Fed, Bernanke say that -- no, no, no, we're not worried - we're worried about deflation. But a national survey for the National Association for Business Economics [NABE] ranked inflation a bigger worry than deflation. Sure, your house may deflate in price, but everything else is going to go up.
Of course everything Beck said was a lie. Still, given the rich mine of racism at the core of Limbaugh's diatribe, I'm afraid Limbaugh has Beck beat six ways from Sunday in this War on Thanksgiving contest. It's not even close to being close.
"Unmarried women, 70% of unmarried women, voted for Obama, and this is because when you kick your husband out, you've got to have big brother government to be your provider," said Schlafly, president of Eagle Forum and infamous for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.
So 70% of unmarried women are on welfare? That's Archie Bunkeresque.
Family Fraud Council's Tony Perkins: If DADT Is Repealed, The Draft Will Be Reinstated
You have to hand it to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, as he just keeps trying out new reasons as to why Don't Ask, Don't Tell should not be repealed, with his latest being that if it is, so many current soldiers will leave that the military will be forced to re-institute the draft:
Barack Obama is opposed to the draft as a matter of principle, to be sure. So are most politicians in both parties. But the president's drive to repeal the ban on open homosexuality in the military could have this unintended consequence: It could bring back the draft.
...
The military is not a red state/blue state institution. It unifies our country. It draws its dedicated members from all regions. Still, it is no secret that the military is a socially conservative institution. It recruits heavily from rural areas in the South, the Midwest, and the Inter-Mountain states.
In our larger cities, black and Hispanic recruits are encouraged to consider the military - which has historically been a great ladder of achievement for racial and ethnic minorities.
These are the very areas and groups who have been most resistant to the demands of the homosexual lobby. These are the very regions and groups who have rallied to our side whenever we put a defense of marriage initiative on the ballot
If these regions and groups do not enlist in our all-volunteer force, President Obama will be driven to the place he does not want to go: the military draft.
An excerpt from Arne Duncan's comments in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, as recorded by Politics K 12:
Duncan is hoping that school administrators won't cut areas that directly impact the classroom, such as trimming instructional time, and scrapping art and music classes. And he doesn't want districts laying off "talented young teachers."
"Unfortunately this pattern of cutbacks has too often prevailed in the past," he said.
Instead . . . he urged districts to consider "modest but smartly targeted increases in class size."
Increasing class sizes? As if that won't "impact the classroom"!
Can you do as well or better this week? Only if you try!
"It is fair to say that 2010 was the year of older, rich people." That's the conclusion of a new research memo from Project Vote, "An Analysis of Who Voted (and Who Didn't Vote) in the 2010 Election," by Dr. Lorraine Minnite. It finds that wealthier voters and Americans over the age of 65 surged to the polls in 2010, and increased their support for the Republican party, while young voters and minority voters (who strongly favor Democrats) dropped off at higher rates than in 2006.
Two years ago, African-Americans, lower-income Americans, and young Americans all participated in the 2008 presidential election in decisive numbers, making it the most diverse electorate in history. In 2010, however, these historically underrepresented groups were underrepresented again, as they (in common with most Americans) largely stayed home. Non-voters were the majority in 2010, a fact that "throws cold water on any victor's claims for a mandate."
This new memo analyzes exit poll and preliminary voting data to give the first comprehensive picture of the 2010 electorate. While this election largely followed patterns typical of midterms, Dr. Minnite found a few distinct features of the 2010 electorate that help explain the results. Absent a national race to galvanize new and minority voters, fewer voters turnout and the populations that do vote tend to be older. The racial composition of the population that voted in 2010 closely mirrored that of 2006: 80 percent of voters were white, 10 percent were black, eight percent Latino, and two percent Asian.
However, several distinct features of the 2010 voting population stand out, and contributed to the results on November 3:
1. Senior citizens turned out in force, with the number of ballots cast by voters over 65 increasing by 16 percent. While making up only 13 percent of the U.S. resident population, Americans in this age group constituted 21 percent of 2010 voters. This age group also significantly increased their support of Republican candidates, from 49 percent in 2006 to 59 percent in 2010.
2. The number of ballots cast by Americans from households making over $200,000 a year increased by 68 percent compared to 2006.
3. Relative to 2008, minority and youth voters dropped out of the voting population at higher rates than whites, undoing much of the gain in demographic parity achieved in 2008.
4. Women-already one of the most reliable voting groups-increased their share of the electorate, and significantly increased their support of the Republican Party.
5. Bucking the national trends, Latinos increased their share of the voting population in several states, saving at least three Senate seats for the Democrats.
"Perhaps the most significant point about voter turnout in 2010 is how many voters didn't vote," wrote Steven Thomma and William Douglas at McClatchy Newspapers on our study. "Some 38 percent of eligible voters didn't vote in 2008, and this November, another 33 percent didn't show up, which means that 'nonvoters were the majority in 2010.'"
As we know from our recent poll (among others), the electorate as a whole is shifting away from the views and values of these older, wealthier white conservatives who dominated the 2010 election: "As in most midterm elections, the people who voted in 2010 were not really representative of the American people," says Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote. "This study raises serious questions about which constituencies candidates choose to court and engage as they look ahead to 2012, since the electorate, as a whole, is shifting away from the views and values of the older, wealthier white conservatives who dominated the 2010 election."
Paul Krugman in what may be his finest blog post articulates a fear I have had but been unable to properly express:
But watching the failure of policy over the past three years, I find myself believing, more and more, that this failure has deep roots - that we were in some sense doomed to go through this. Specifically, I now suspect that the kind of moderate economic policy regime Brad and I both support - a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps - is inherently unstable. It's something that can last for a generation or so, but not much longer.
By "unstable" I don't just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that's part of it. Equally crucial are the regime's intellectual and political instability.
The failure here is not the policies themselves, but the 2nd and 3rd order intellectual and social structures that maintain sufficient social support for the policies of curtailed capitalism and the state enforcement of broad social mobility and equality. In this sense, I say the New Deal did fail, because it failed to sustain itself much past the generation of people who lived through the crisis that made it possible. It is getting harder to protect Social Security because with each passing year there are less people with living memory of what life was like without it. Those people were generally immune to the propaganda, but those of us left behind lack that personal connection to seeing retired people reduced to begging and literally dying in gutters and under bridges.
That's what we have to account for if and when we create the conditions to implement a New New Deal. How to make the liberal consensus not only strong enough to do it, but self sustaining?
I'm on paternity leave (and struggling through serious sleep deprivation!), but I wanted to pass on word of the Nation magazine's "30 Media Heroes" contest. You can vote in the contest here by either leaving a comment at the bottom with your votes, sending a Tweet to @GregMitch, or sending an email to epic1934@aol.com.
Obviously, I hope you'll consider voting for some OpenLeft writers, but, of course, there are a ton of great progressive media voices out there to choose from. So just make sure to vote, no matter who you vote for.
