By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Aug 27, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET What if God inadvertently left a carbon copy of the answers to life’s ultimate questions in the garbage can next to the driveway leading up to the Garden of Eden?
And Eve found them (we have to assume Adam wasn’t very curious and probably wouldn’t have noticed) and after sniffing the fresh carbon several times decided to share the answers with humankind and as a result we all behaved daily like perfect little model human beings?
 Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?
I think after a few Biblical Days God would probably get bored and shake up all the pieces and start over again.
In other words, it’s OK if the world doesn’t make sense to you right now and you aren’t sure what you should do with your life or even what you should do at 4:30pm this afternoon.
It helps keep God busy. And entertained. At least that’s what I think.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Aug 27, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET How depressing is it that the freshest commentary on Martin Luther King’s legacy is now twenty years old in its own right? Bill Clinton’s extended remarks at a Memphis church in 1993 remain the gold rhetorical standard for King commemoration: Clinton stretched a conventional riff about what King would make of contemporary America into an elegiac portrait of the self despair and internally inflicted injuries that haunt the black community, and the eloquence is deepened by Clinton’s sensitivity toward the national neglect that gave those wounds room to flourish.
Much of the speechifying and editorializing around this half week of “I Have a Dream” reminiscing will pale in comparison with Clinton’s talk. The favored cliché of a half empty, half full glass will pair the obvious successes—the fact that it will be a black president who occupies King’s place on the Lincoln Memorial to offer an official tribute; the emergence of a black economic elite that is one of the most potent consumer bases; the commonplace nature of advances for blacks in virtually every sector—with the just as apparent misses, from poverty to high rates of minority incarceration to the persistence of racial backlash. The most predictable liberal voices will invoke voter ID laws, stand your ground defenses, and stop and frisk police tactics in New York City as modern counterparts to Jim Crow and George Wallace, and conservative critics will seize on the gulf between each example and the harshly repressive color code of America pre 1965 to frame those same liberal voices as a farce.
There will be the inevitable effort to downsize King into the familiar ideological boxes of the past several decades. But while something should be said for Ross Douthat’s perspective that a few contemporary ideological battles have aligned at least some conservatives with traditional civil rights priorities on education and criminal justice reform, there is even more to be said for the notion that King had, and likely would have continued to have, an ambiguous relationship with liberalism. If LBJ’s Great Society wasn’t sufficient to deter King from making his last initiative a Poor People’s march on Washington, it’s reasonable to envision his evolution toward skepticism about other antipoverty programs and their effectiveness. And while some of the critique would have demanded more spending and redistribution, it’s fair to speculate if some of it could have sounded more right-leaning themes. A man who founded a civil rights movement on the ethic of individual participation and self-worth may well have uncomfortable with, for example, welfare unconnected to work requirements: and that would have sharply shifted the perimeter of the debate over welfare during the next 25 years, a period when pre Clinton liberals generally defended and wrote into law a vision of unconditional government assistance.
Does that mean that King was a prospective cheerleader for the Reagan agenda? Hardly, but it is not so difficult to imagine King sympathizing with Robert Kennedy’s famous description of public education as the second most distrusted institution in the inner city (trailing only the police). Or to see King turning into an early foe of the left’s contributions to urban pathology: from the hollowed out, decaying public housing structures crammed into the least desirable places on the city’s edge, to the bargains that political hacks negotiated, like a minimal police presence in exchange for peace with the gangs, and lucrative pensions for patronage jobs as a tradeoff for more robust social services. The interest group factionalism of the Democratic Party, it is also worth noting, is a descendant of the LBJ/Hubert Humphrey style liberalism that King seemed to be edging away from in his final months, in favor of Bobby Kennedy’s challenge to the Democratic machinery. If King had lived, it is not far-fetched to think that the next generation of partisan politics might have looked to him like something of a wasteland, as well as a protection racket for a lot of weak, ineffective dogmas.
In other words, one does not have to ridiculously envision King as a budget cutting, quota-bashing conservative to realize his potential for unsettling liberalism from a different, more eclectic vantage point. It is equally interesting to wonder how much polarization could have been avoided if one of the sharpest critics of urban dysfunction had been Martin Luther King as opposed to suburban conservatives, or if King’s evangelicalism had competed with fundamentalism to be the face of religion in politics during the seventies and eighties, or if King’s adeptness at defining a moral case for his goals had won over at least some of the blue collar whites and southern moderates who turned to the right.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: The Forgotten King
By Krystal Ball, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET It’s one of those Monday mornings that feels like I am about to take a major test I waited until the last minute to study for…
Because I thought I could pull it off…
But realize now I was probably mistaken…
For a class I didn’t want to sign up for but did anyway because I thought it would be good for me…
And two weeks ago had the opportunity to drop but didn’t and now the deadline has passed…
And decide if I gorge myself on a sweet roll and loud Motown music while telling myself “In the scheme of things…..this is not a big deal” that I briefly feel better ….
Until after the second sweet roll I start feeling both guilty, anxious, and now nauseous at the exact same time I realize listening to Lady Marmalade for the third time is two times too many…
And I look over my notes one last time and hope the questions on the test turn out to be the few I know the answer to…
As I realize that this is just another Monday ….like every other Monday. And the way I always feel before a test. And, awww hell, it will be fine…
And even if it’s not fine and I do poorly, it will still be fine…
And turn back on Lady Marmalade and it sounds even better the third time than it did the first time…
By Michael Steele, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET From 92 Y at the Jefferson:
 Former Chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele recently sat down with 92Y Producer Jordan Chariton at The Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to revive the Republican Party.
In part one of our extended interview, Steele urged his party to become the party of civil rights, a party that welcomes the immigrant instead of “repelling” the immigrant, and to realize “the old way of doing politics is not what America’s interested in anymore.”
Steele noted that when the GOP was successful in recent years, the message “wasn’t about treating women as property or looking at them as if they had no say in how to control their lives.”
Steele also reflected on the GOP’s 2012 election defeat, saying that election was over by July or August, even before the infamous 47% tapes came out. Steele says most voters had made up their mind against the GOP and Mitt Romney long before the derogatory tape came out.
Steele also strongly denounced the label attributed to the Republican Party as the “party for the rich.”
“I’ve always been amused at the argument that somehow we have cornered the market on rich. Most of the CEOS of the biggest companies…are Democrats, and they supported Obama, and yet the narrative is they’re in our pocket. I’m like ‘dude, that’s not the reality, they’re not writing checks to the GOP.’”
Do you agree with Steele’s recommendations for the GOP? Comment below!
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Aug 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I feel sometimes like I don’t post enough pictures of food I am about to eat.
Frankly, I don’t eat many meals that are that interesting or that others would probably want to know about.
But I want to fit in and had a friend of a friend send me a picture of a meal he found on Facebook recently of something someone somewhere was about to eat.
He wasn’t sure of the entire backstory — only that someone was hungry and took a picture—but was able to download it and send to me to share so I could hit my food pic quota this month on Facebook.
By Michael Steele, on Fri Aug 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Last summer when the Supreme Court delivered its surprising affirmation of the Patient Protection and Affordable CareAct (a.k.a “Obamacare”), liberals rejoiced and sang the praises of the very court they had, up until then, vilified; and conservatives scratched their heads at the perceived betrayal by Chief Justice John Roberts and renewed their call to “repeal and replace” the law after the November elections.
But Obama won, Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate and Republicans lost 8 seats in the House.
We’ve come a long way since those heady days. And still, the news on Obamacare has not been all that great.
Recently, one of the architects of the legislation, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), actually admitted that the Affordable Care Act “is beyond comprehension”; while another, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) called it a “train wreck.” But it was Henry Chao, Obama’s chief technical officer in charge of putting in place the insurance exchanges mandated by the law, who caused heads to turn when he said “I’m pretty nervous . . . Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” With supporters like that…
Certainly, actions taken by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leading up to implementing the convoluted law have not helped assuage the perceptions of members of Congress, let alone the American people. Forced to suspend the employer mandate to offer insurance to employees, the Administration finds itself in a mad scramble to play down the administrative SNAFU by playing up lower premiums for all while blaming those pesky Republicans for putting the administration in this situation in the first place.
But House Republicans (like Senate Democrats) only get to vote up or down on legislation. It is the agencies and departments of government (run and managed by the administration) that must implement the law. And for this administration, the hit parade of problems continue to mount. For example, while most Americans were enjoying their 4th of July holiday and not paying attention, HHS sheepishly announced, in a “final ruling” it will not attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies. Instead it will rely on individuals “self-reported eligibility”. So I get to tell HHS I’m eligible and they write a check subsidizing my insurance? I can’t think of a more sublime invitation to massive fraud.
Read the rest of…
Michael Steele: How Republicans should fix Obamacare
By Jeff Smith, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 1:00 PM ET From Buzzfeed:
Jenji Kohan, the creator of Netflix’s new hit series Orange Is The New Black, had to grapple with a pretty serious conundrum: How do you make a compulsively watchable series about a milieu whose defining characteristic is boredom? And yet, the show’s writers have pulled it off.
Of course, they have had to take some liberties; the series is based on Piper Kerman’s memoir but is highly fictionalized. So what did they get right about prison life, and what did they miss?
Though my year in federal prison was quite unlike Piper Kerman’s — largely on account of the differences between men’s and women’s prisons — here’s my assessment of where Orange nailed it and where it missed the mark.
Here’s what they get right:
Small things can have outsize consequences — in positive and negative ways.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I am 50 years old now and yes, I will, on occassion, when my wardrode is limited and it is the weekend, throw on plaid shorts and a plaid short-sleeve button down shirt.
I am 50. And it just doesn’t matter that much.
OK. That’s not the truth. It is not my age and limited wardrobe thay is to blame.
I will admit it, a few years ago when I was in Hawaii I saw some young surfer dudes wearing plaid and plaid and it worked for them–even though I knew it wasn’t supposed to.
While in Hawaii I didn’t buy any of those plaid shirts or plaid shorts (I already had some at home), but did buy the surfer dude casual shoes that looked ragged and pre-worn but seemed to help make the plaid on plaid scheme work.
And that is the real reason I have recently tried wearing this plaid ensemble.
I thought with the shoes and the right youthful attitude I could oull it off. But I got a good look at myself in the mirror over the weekend and relaized that instead of looking like a slightly aging former surfer dude I instead looked like a 50 year old guy with bad plaid clothes who went to Hawaii a few years ago and bought some surfer dude shoes because he thought he could wear them with his plaid clothes back home and look like a slightly aging former surfer dude.
And was sorely mistaken and no one has had the heart to tell him.
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET To the extent there is a species of Republican the very left leaning blogosphere approves of, it usually sounds something like this: pro immigration reform and eager to take to task the xenophobic strands of the anti immigration argument; libertarian on gay marriage; skeptical of the Tea Party influence on the modern right; dismissive of government shutdown threats; and independent enough to call out a conservative favorite like Rand Paul when he puts a secessionist sympathizer on the federal payroll.
That happens to also be a point by point account of the opinions of the Washington Post’s Republican blogger Jennifer Rubin, and it explains why she has taken her share of shots from the right (Erick Erickson has famously said that she has “nothing in common with conservatives other than hating terrorists”). But the fact that she is something of a punching bag within the left’s online community is a mystery to me and I suspect a lot of others who actually read her work. And the broadside she just absorbed from the Post’s former ombudsman is even more bizarre, when its principal claim is that she is a serial recycler of “every silly right wing theory to come down the pike.”
An odd charge, given her relatively centrist views, and the frequency with which she expresses them: albeit a common one based on any random perusal of the comments on her blog. Putting the ex ombudsman aside (there is no politics like intra office politics) the “Rubin is far right” charge seems to typify one of two scenarios: either a classic case of the messenger overwhelming the message or, alternatively, a pretty fair reading of the abuse any card carrying conservative faces in the volleying that passes for ideological debate circa the Obama era.
Given that most of Rubin’s online critics probably could not pick her out of a lineup (her only steady television presence is the lightly watched MSNBC roundtable Chuck Todd hosts) and allowing that the author of a three year old column is hardly a long-running bête noire of the left, I’ll opt for theory 2: whatever the precise shade of her ideology, Rubin still wears the c-label as opposed to branding herself a moderate, occupies the most prominent online conservative niche in a liberal leaning paper, and those red flags alone have made her a target. So much so that no matter how many times she deviates from right wing orthodoxy, the credit has been sparse from people who make a habit of dismissing that orthodoxy and claim to value “adults” who break ranks with it.
And that’s the most salient aspect of why a blog dustup over a nationally unknown pundit is worthy of examination: it’s a smallish but telling piece of evidence of how liberalism circa 2013 practices its own form of insularity and narrowness, and how the left exists within the same kind of ideological bubble the right is alleged to live inside. The result is a sense of mission about liberal causes that makes it hard to see conservatism in any form as a serious intellectual rival or a sensibility worth understanding. How can it be, when the left assumes that to be a conservative is to be a one percent coddling, gay hating, war on women waging, vote suppressing, science denying kind of clown.
Never mind that the supposedly monolithic right is almost Baptist like in its proliferation of rival doctrinal camps. Never mind that George W. Bush tightened more financial regulations than Bill Clinton; that even an eloquent gay advocate like Frank Bruni initially questioned the wisdom of a federal judicial overturn of traditional marriage laws; that the GOP social issue de jour, banning of abortions after 20 weeks, is the position a growing plurality of Americans hold. Never mind that a liberal icon named John Paul Stevens blessed voter ID laws during his Supreme Court tenure, or that the fact of human influenced climate change can be accepted without co-signing the Obama Administration’s aggressiveness on regulating carbon emissions.
Notwithstanding any of those stubborn facts, the left’s vision of right and wrong (and smart and dumb) thoroughly monopolizes the mainstream press, and the lion’s share of social media. Its dominance, of course, has generated a parallel universe on the Fox News Channel, with its own convictions and suspicions about the other side. But the presence of a Fox does not change the reality that in the most credentialed and prestigious media circles, denigrating conservatism is the last socially acceptable prejudice; and the rightwing counter to that contempt is still confined to one TV channel and a shrinking pool of radio stations.
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Artur Davis: What the Mini War on Jennifer Rubin Reveals
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