Prairie Weather

Have Republicans already lost 2016?

Looks that way, at least to Peter Beinart, writing at The Atlantic.

After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee published an “autopsy.” “When it comes to social issues,” the autopsy declared, “the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming. If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people.” ...Atlantic

Nice talk.  But is that what they're doing as the candidates line up and start campaigning?

Start with June 17, when Dylann Roof, a young white man enamored of the Confederate flag, murdered nine African Americans in church. Within three days, Romney had called for the Confederate flag’s removal from South Carolina’s capitol.  Four days later, the state’s Republican governor and senators called for its removal too. But during that entire week—even as it became obvious that the politics of the flag were shifting—not a single GOP presidential candidate forthrightly called for it to be taken down. Instead, they mostly called it a state decision, a transparent dodge politicians deploy when they don’t want to make a difficult call. ...Atlantic

Even leaving their current flag problem out of it, they're up against some newer voters who don't like the right's insularity.

The rise of Millennials—who are more ethnically and racially diverse and more secular than any generation in American history—is making America a far more culturally tolerant nation than it was when Ronald Reagan, or even George W. Bush, occupied the White House. For the Republican presidential candidates, that means they’re starting from behind. They begin the 2016 race burdened by their party’s reputation for intolerance, a reputation that becomes more politically costly every year as the result of generational change. ...Atlantic

"Obamacare" has lost traction as a political war-cry. Intolerance has become a key issue:

Republican candidates are running like this is their election to lose. It’s not. The economy is improving. Obamacare is growing more popular. Middle class Americans are angrier at the rich than the poor. And culturally, the country is racing left. Winning presidential candidates are smart enough to sense the country’s mood at a given moment in time and bold enough to channel it, even when that entails risk. The last two weeks offered GOP candidates a crucial opportunity to do that. And they blew it, every one. ...Atlantic

So the question inevitably looks like this:

Can the  party possibly win in 2016 .... or ever again?

Marriage equality? The right never had a chance.

Jonathan Chait says it was over before it started.

The lightning-fast progression of marriage equality from fringe cause to popular, Constitutional right will be studied for years to come. The movement owes its success to any number of things, but surely preeminent among them is the clarity of its core rationale. Preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.

The same-sex-marriage ban was never a premeditated social policy. It simply reflected an age-old abhorrence of homosexuality, and the instinctive or religiously inspired impulse to treat same-sex romance as a sin to be stamped out. Opponents of same-sex marriage have had to reverse engineer public-policy justifications, and the result was utterly feeble. Ross Douthat’s Sunday New York Times column, making a kind of final summarizing statement of a defeated position, reveals the right’s inability to muster a remotely compelling argument for its position. ...Chait, DailyIntel

Texas is still trying to muster a rebellion. 

Three days after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, some Texas county clerks are refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. 

Several clerk’s offices — including those in Hill and Hood counties in North Central Texas, Bastrop and Burleson counties in Central Texas, Jackson County on the Gulf Coast and Odessa's Ector County — said Monday they were awaiting forms or legal guidance or simply objected.

“I’m standing up for my religious liberty,” said Hood County Clerk Katie Lang, who said her office would not give out same-sex marriage licenses on religious grounds. “I do believe that marriage is for one man and one woman because it did derive from the Bible." 

After the decision Friday, some county officials said they would wait to hear from state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who issued a written opinion Sunday saying clerks with religious objections to same-sex marriages can refuse to issue those licenses. But if they do so, he wrote, they might face fine or lawsuits.

Paxton said pro bono lawyers would be ready to defend those who refuse, noting "the reach of the Court's opinion stops at the door of the First Amendment and our laws protecting religious liberty." Lang said that after reading Paxton’s opinion, she chose to face possible legal action. ...TexasTribune

Tempest.  Teapot.  Texas.

Evidence that corporate interests are undermining America overseas ...

...And doing so deliberately, led by the US Chamber of Commerce.  Five years ago, when Obama had been in office for a year and a half, Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post about the radicalization of the US Chamber of Commerce -- once a moderate organization with friends in both political parties.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, once a center of moderate Republicanism that worked with both parties but now a sort of radicalized corporate Tea Party, spending $75 million this fall mostly to defeat Democrats. The chairman of the group's board -- on which Blankenship served until recently -- accused the Obama administration and congressional Democrats of a "general attack on our free enterprise system." Specifically, the chamber accused the Democrats of "an ill-advised course of government expansion, major tax increases, massive deficits, and job-destroying regulations." ...WaPo,7/10

This was war -- war, at least, against a moderate Democratic president at a time when the tea party was showing its first signs of being a disruptive, authoritarian threat to legislation.  That they were getting a share of big corporate money made their choice of the "tea party" label an even more ghastly joke.

Now an investigation by the New York Times brings home the news that the US Chamber of Commerce is taking the same route.  It is betraying this country overseas by protecting corporate interests over all other considerations.

From Ukraine to Uruguay, Moldova to the Philippines, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its foreign affiliates have become the hammer for the tobacco industry, engaging in a worldwide effort to fight antismoking laws of all kinds, according to interviews with government ministers, lobbyists, lawmakers and public health groups in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

The U.S. Chamber’s work in support of the tobacco industry in recent years has emerged as a priority at the same time the industry has faced one of the most serious threats in its history. A global treaty, negotiated through the World Health Organization, mandates anti-smoking measures and also seeks to curb the influence of the tobacco industry in policy making. The treaty, which took effect in 2005, has been ratified by 179 countries; holdouts include Cuba, Haiti and the United States.

Facing a wave of new legislation around the world, the tobacco lobby has turned for help to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the weight of American business behind it. While the chamber’s global tobacco lobbying has been largely hidden from public view, its influence has been widely felt.

Letters, emails and other documents from foreign governments, the chamber’s affiliates and antismoking groups, which were reviewed by The New York Times, show how the chamber has embraced the challenge, undertaking a three-pronged strategy in its global campaign to advance the interests of the tobacco industry. ...NYT,6/15

The issue has come up, of course, during TransPacific partnership negotiations.

In other words, t'hell with our reputation, with any semblance of decency. American corporate interests are more important than global health or just plain respect for the interests of people across the planet.  Welcome to American "values" as they are experienced in reality.

The not-nice truth about gay marriage

Don't know if you've noticed, but marriage isn't a lovely, old-fashioned rite that serves society well in terms of economic and social stability.  Get over it!  Corporate America is well aware of the profits being scooped up thanks to (yes, this is what America is all about!) the marketing and subsequent profiteering on the part of (yes, this is what they call it!) -- the "marriage industry."

So corporate America lobbied the Supreme Court on behalf of same-sex marriage.  Equal-opportunity marriage just makes things easier for them.  But the sound of "Supreme Court" and "lobbying" in the same sentence is kind of troubling.

Exactly 379 corporations and employer organizations urged the Supreme Court to strike down state bans on gay marriage, according to a friend-of-the-court brief obtained by The Huffington Post. The document was expected to be filed late Thursday morning.

“Employers are better served by a uniform marriage rule that gives equal dignity to employee relationships,” reads the brief, filed by global law firm Morgan Lewis. “Allowing same-sex couples to marry improves employee morale and productivity, reduces uncertainty, and removes the wasteful administrative burdens imposed by the current disparity of state law treatment.” ...HuffPo

All that and more, given the profits from not just the "marriage industry" but also from its subsidiary, the "wedding industry."  Let's not forget that if you're married in a church (twenty minutes or so of a minister's time plus someone to sweep up the rose petals afterwards), you'll be paying an average of about $500 for the privilege.  So churches will have to play nice or lose some revenue.

More on this here.  Start listening at 40:30.

"The only music"

"Here we are" or "here they are," America?

Geoff Dyer writes about the death of Ornette Coleman.

When did it begin, this longing for freedom of which Ornette’s music is the undying expression? You could say that it began with the founding fathers as long as you factor in that the American project of freedom and equality for all was in its original intent predicated on a percentage of the population being denied any freedom. Right from the start there was a cage in which the dream of freedom would begin its long incubation.

It’s strange how listening to early Ornette—as I’m listening to him now—is to surrender to the closing claim of that great chronicle of the so-called jazz age: to be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Specifically, I find myself being drawn back to 1843, to a lecture by James McCune Smith entitled “The Destiny of the People of Color,” part of which is quoted by David Brion Davis in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. As Davis puts it, McCune Smith’s lecture concludes “with a prophecy that the African Americans’ struggle for liberty would lead to a revolutionary contribution to American culture”:

We have already, even from the depths of slavery, furnished the only music which the country has yet produced. We are also destined to write the poetry of the nation; for as real poetry gushes forth from minds embued with a lofty perception of the truth, so our faculties, enlarged in the intellectual struggle for liberty, will necessarily become fired with glimpses at the glorious and the true, and will weave their inspiration into song.

Clinton needs a reminder

The Intercept has posted something about Hillary that shows her self-limitations.  We can't expect a Hillary presidency to be "hope-y change-y." She's no progressive.  More like our status quo aunty?

A recent article in Politico includes a fantastic anecdote about Hillary Clinton’s worldview as of 1993. It describes how she believed that universal Medicare-for-all health coverage like Canada’s made rational sense, but that insurance company money would stop it from ever happening — and that it was hilariously naive to think a U.S. president could do anything about that.

From the article by Ben Schreckinger:

One of Bill Clinton’s first acts in office in January of 1993 was to appoint his wife to chair the administration’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. [then-Rep. Bernie] Sanders had convened his own, much-smaller task force pushing single-payer health care for Vermont, and he began trying to pull Hillary Clinton in that direction.

In February, Sanders requested a meeting with Hillary, “to bring in two Harvard Medical School physicians who have written on the Canadian system,” according to the records of the administration’s task force. Those physicians were Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, leading advocates for single-payer health care.

They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady. “She said, ‘You make a convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?’” recalled Himmelstein. “And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’ and she said, ‘Tell me something real.’”

This is important information for people to know about Clinton, especially now that she’s running for president claiming to want to engage in “Four Fights.” It suggests what she really has planned is Four Thrown Fights.

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I hope we don't need serial reminders about the issues of courage and decency when discussing the issues that divide Sander and Clinton.  But let's sneak one in here:  Clinton isn't particularly on our side: she's on the Clinton side.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Saturday he has been waiting for the nation to catch up to his support for same-sex marriage.

 

Sanders’ remarks come a day after Friday’s landmark 5-4 Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

 

He argued he was well ahead of the historic decision, unlike Hillary Clinton, his main rival for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

 

“Back in 1996, that was a tough vote,” Sanders said of his opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

 

“Not too many people voted against it, but I did,” he told listeners in Nashua, N.H.

 

Sanders at the time served in the House of Representatives, which voted 342-67 in favor of DOMA. The Senate voted 85-14 in favor, before former President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

 

“That was an anti-gay marriage piece of legislation,” he added of the law that defined marriage at the federal level as the coupling of one man and one woman.  ...TheHill