Ross Douthat has a striking observation on the futile Wisconsin recall: rather than echo the conventional Republican theme that the effort was an ill-conceived liberal putsch, aimed at overturning the fruits of both the electoral and legislative process, he compares the saga to 2009-10, when Barack Obama’s Democrats rammed through sweeping domestic legislation and the Right decisively counterattacked in the midterms. Provocatively, he calls them “mirror image exercises in reverse shock and awe, and…backlash.”
Fascinating stuff. Of course, it’s a message some conservatives will blanche at for the simple reason that a recall is an extremely unprecedented gesture—three governors in our history have fallen victim—while the 2010 off year races were obviously a regularly scheduled democratic exercise. But Douthat surely has the ultimate conclusion right: both sides have gotten well schooled in the gymnastics of cut and slash opposition; it’s just that Republicans are getting the better of it. And as Douthat allows, the outcome in a bluish state that Democrats are still favored to carry underscores the political pull of reeling in outsized spending and the relative weakness of the liberal alternative, when both are put to the test.
I would even go one major step further: in the post LBJ era, the public has arguably never validated a specific, identifiable liberal agenda at the ballot box. The winning Democrats in that time frame—Carter, Clinton and Obama—have won on a tightly crafted appeal that stressed economic anxiety and blurred ideological content. Even the one congressional landslide for Democrats in memory, the 2006 midterms, were linked primarily to fatigue with Iraq and Republican overreach on Social Security. If one reads the post Reagan era as a closely matched siege over time, the left owes its victories to negative referenda on incumbents and a couple of superstar performers. In other words, liberals have been cursed to plot a course identical to the one they dismissively suggested accounted for Ronald Reagan.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: One Cautious Take on Wisconsin
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Jun 11, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
David Maraniss has some more incredible insight on the President in this weekend’s Washington Post:
To say that President Obama loves basketball understates the role of the sport in his life. He has been devoted to the game for 40 years now, ever since the father he did not know and never saw again gave him his first ball during a brief Christmastime visit. Basketball is central to his self identity. It is global yet American-born, much like him. It is where he found a place of comfort, a family, a mode of expression, a connection from his past to his future. With foundation roots in the Kansas of his white forebears, basketball was also the city game, helping him find his way toward blackness, his introduction to an African American culture that was distant to him when he was young yet his by birthright .
As a teenager growing up in Hawaii,he dreamed the big hoops dream. He had posters of the soaring Dr. J on his bedroom wall. A lefty, he practiced the spin moves of Tiny Archibald. And in the yearbook of an older high school classmate who wanted to be a lawyer, he wrote: “Anyway, been great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Some day when I am an all-pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you. Barry.”
It never happened, of course. But the adolescent known as Barry kept on playing, even after he took back his given name of Barack and went off to college at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard and went into community organizing, then politics in Illinois. He played whenever he could on playgrounds, in fancy sport clubs, at home, on the road. During his first trip back to Honolulu after being elected president, he rounded up a bunch of his old high school pals, got the key to the gym at Punahou School, and went at it. When the pickup game was over, Darryl Gabriel, who had been the star of their championship-winning team, found himself muttering to another former teammate, “Man, Barack is a lot better than Barry ever was!”
In his presidency, basketball has become a recurring theme, one of the visible ways that he has escaped the confines of the White House and the pressures of his job. He’s sat courtside at a Washington Wizards game, cheering on his team, the Chicago Bulls. He’s talked trash on the court behind the White House, taken in a game between North Carolina and Michigan State on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson, and invited ESPN into the Oval Office to watch him fill out his bracket for March Madness.
This is the story of the roots of his obsession, back in his days as a teenager, when Barry Obama played on one of the best high school teams in the country.
Click here to read the full story, “President Obama’s basketball love affair has roots in Hawaii high school team”
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jun 11, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Commit to goals ahead of time so you have no choice but to achieve them!
A short story by Flannery O’Conner has a scene where a character throws his hat over the high fence so he’ll have no choice but to climb over it as part of the story’s adventure.
I love that.
And try to replicate that in my life.
For example, this morning I put on and comfortably fastened a new pair of pants for the first time. The pants were purchased two sizes smaller than my usual waist size. Because I wanted to be sure I had no choice but to achieve my goal.
It was a great feeling of success for being so goal oriented.
Even though I bought the pants nearly 3 years ago.
Remember the RP’s highly critical take on Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism? Apparently, the RP is not alone…on either side of the issue.
Here’s a brilliant piece by New York‘s Jason Zengerle on Beinart and the controversy surrounding his book:
“I’m really not a radical.”
It is late April, a month after his new book about American Jews, Israel, and their tangled, often tortured relationship has hit the shelves, and Peter Beinart is on the defensive. He’s sitting in his office at the City University of New York. Although he’s now worked at CUNY for two years, the small, windowless cube—more befitting a research assistant than a tenured journalism and political-science professor—is filled with unpacked cardboard boxes and little else. But more square footage, or a view, or some family photographs would do little to lift the sense of siege that pervades the room. “I’m trying to live as a critic of Israel’s policies, from a moral perspective, inside the Jewish community,” Beinart says, “and inside the fairly mainstream Jewish community, which is where I feel most at home.”
Now that home has become something of a war zone. At his shul—“It’s an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side,” he says, “but it’s probably better not to mention its name”—he is suddenly a controversial congregant. At the Jewish day school where he sends his young children, other parents now look at him askance. Even members of Beinart’s own family are furious at him. And yet it’s the impact his book has had on his professional home—namely the community of center-left American Jewish writer-intellectuals where Beinart has spent his career—that has been most painful.
From the moment it was published, The Crisis of Zionism has dominated the American Jewish political discourse. The book argues that Israeli policies—chief among them the occupation of Palestinian lands—threaten the democratic character of Israel and the Zionist project in general, and that it’s the responsibility of American Jews to help change those policies. Marc Tracy, who edits the Scroll, the blog of the Jewish online magazine Tablet, says, “There was definitely a period where the Scroll might as well have been renamed ‘the Peter Beinart Blog.’ Everything was about him.” Politically conservative Jews attacked the book—not unpredictably. “Why does [Beinart] hate Israel so?” Daniel Gordis asked in his review for the Jerusalem Post, before answering: “Beinart’s problem isn’t really with Israel. It’s with Judaism.” The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, writing for Tablet, branded The Crisis of Zionism “an act of moral solipsism.” But withering reviews have come from Beinart’s ideological allies on the Jewish center-left as well. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Rosen—a mild-mannered Jewish public intellectual whose most recent book was a meditation on bird-watching—savaged Beinart for his “Manichaean simplicities” and for “employ[ing] several formulations favored by anti-Semites.” Tablet editor Alana Newhouse panned the book in the Washington Post for introducing “its own repressive litmus test, this one to determine who can be considered both a liberal American and a Zionist.”
By Jimmy Dahroug, on Mon Jun 11, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
You’ll have the rest of your life to be conventional graduates. Now is the time to chase your dreams, while you’re still young enough to start over if you fall.
“This is maybe your one shot when you come outta here, so don’t blow it by jumping at money, by doing the things that everybody thinks you should do because it seems successful, figure out where your heart is and try to go with that.”
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Blind Side, offered this advice to college graduates on Meet the Press when discussing guidance he has offered at commencement addresses. It may be the best advice for any college graduates that I have ever heard. Platitudes about “going for it” are easy to dismiss unless you consider that time is running out quicker than you realize. The first year or so after college may be your last, best shot to take risks to pursue to the job you love.
For most of you, this is the rare few years before family needs and the responsibilities of a stable career consume your daily lives. If there ever was a time to risk pursuing a dream career instead of taking the comfortable path, that time is now.
Earlier this year I was privileged to attend an event where Marty Rouse, National Field Director for the Human Rights Campaign, was honored for his significant work in helping pass marriage equality in New York State. With a career of stories to tell an audience hanging on his every word, Marty chose to share that pivotal choice he made shortly after college to leave a comfortable job and devote his life to the work he loved.
Shortly after college, Marty was moving up the ladder at a promising job in New York City. One day his boss pulled him aside and told Marty that while he was great at the day job, it was clear that Marty’s passion was in his work as an LGBT rights advocate. He advised Marty to quit and at least try to make a living doing the work he loved because in ten years Marty would likely be in his boss’s shoes: too comfortable and too risk-averse to leave that job to do what he loved.
Read the rest of… Jimmy Dahroug: Class of 2012 –This May Be Your Last Best Chance
By Chris Schulz, RP Staff, on Fri Jun 8, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
If you are tired are living on this planet then you will shortly be able to begin the application process to be one of the first humans to live on Mars. [yahoo.com]
The infamous Exxon Valdez is causing controversy again as it is about to be dismantled for scrap. [latimes.com]
A look at the effort put forth to research Hawaiian songbirds. [nytimes.com]
Hopefully you got a look at Venus earlier this week. These astronomical movements are still teaching us much about the universe. [npr.org]
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 8, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Monkey Mind—according to Buddhists a term meaning “unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable”
For those of us who read this less as an interesting factoid and more as a diagnosis, fear not.
There are two apparently successful approaches for treating Monkey Mind.
1) Ratchet down with meditation, yoga, diet, lifestyle changes, and medication.
2) Ratchet up. Like The Stones. And become a Monkey Man.
Although the first option is preferred, there is merit to option two as well.
The MSM isn’t biased in favor of Romney. The MSM isn’t biased in favor of Obama.
It is biased – like everyone else trying to survive and thrive – in favor of page views.
And I can pretty much guarantee that Mitt’s shearing of the gay classmate gets a hell of a lot more of them than the rollout of his Middle East policy.
Now that technology has enabled the media to get this down to a science and shift the placement of pieces online from minute-to-minute, the media, more than ever – to paraphrase Republican ingenue Christine O’Donnell – “is you.”
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Fri Jun 8, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
The NO Saints have made a revised contract offer to their disgruntled QB Drew Brees. In an effort to get Brees under contract in time for training camp the Saints made efforts to bridge the $2 million per year gap the two sides are reported to have. [ESPN]
Ross Douthat has a striking observation on the futile Wisconsin recall: rather than echo the conventional Republican theme that the effort was an ill-conceived liberal putsch, aimed at overturning the fruits of both the electoral and legislative process, he compares the saga to 2009-10, when Barack Obama’s Democrats rammed through sweeping domestic legislation and the Right decisively counterattacked in the midterms. Provocatively, he calls them “mirror image exercises in reverse shock and awe, and…backlash.”
