Chuck Schumer says both left- and right-wing blogs are too vicious and negative but the difference is: Left-wing blogs "have less credibility and less clout."

Excerpts from his interview with TNR's Isaac Chotiner:

CS: [One] thing the Tea Party does is threaten their fellow Republicans. They actually threaten them. If you punched in—I used to do this—“Marco Rubio” when we were doing immigration reform, nine out of ten hard-right blogs were negative on him: attack after attack after attack....

[T]here are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

IC: ... Is this a problem for your party?

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

ADDED: Kos bites back:

Left-wing blogs had credibility when they were helping Schumer's DSCC win control of the Senate. Now that we're criticizing Wall Street? No credibility! And we're just like the Tea Party, having cost Democrats a half-dozen seats and the Senate majority in the last couple of years.

Oh, you mean we haven't pushed the Democratic Party outside of the national mainstream? Weird, then. On the other hand, it wasn't bloggers trying to save Sen. Scott Brown's hide in 2012, like good ol' Chuck:

There is a good little story. [Looks to aide] I can tell this. I went to Scott Brown and said, “If you give us the sixtieth vote for the Citizens United rollback, we won’t go after you.”

If it was up to Schumer, he would've traded an entire Senate seat for one meaningless cloture vote on a bill that would've died a quick death in the House. God knows his Wall Street benefactors would've been thrilled at that!

From my perspective, intra-party relations have never been better. It seems odd that Schumer is trying to start an internecine war at this very moment, particularly with a tough 2014 up ahead. And as the number three Democrat in the Senate, his words carry outsized weight. But it's clear that the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party is feeling the heat from its resurgent populist wing: the Warrens, Baldwins, Browns and Merkleys.

Republicans are locked in their own bloody civil war. Schumer (and his Third Way allies) may have just signaled that we may be in for some bloodshed of our own. In fact, he appears eager to lead Wall Street's counter attack.

Lefty cartoonist Ted Rall criticized at Daily Kos for drawing Barack Obama in a racist way.

He cries out against what he calls "censorship" even as he links to the supposedly offensive drawings as they are still displayed at Daily Kos. Clue to Rall: criticism ≠ censorship.

The funniest part of this is that the problem is that he made Obama look apelike, but that's just his drawing style:

Why did I post here for free? To access readers, many of whom would enjoy my work if they saw it. It was an experiment....

I'm sure not going to alter my drawing style for $0.00 money....

Here is the discussion at Daily Kos, which includes a deluge of comments accusing me of drawing Obama in a racist way.

Everything is context. It is clear that many of these posters were previously unfamiliar with my work or, for that matter, with editorial cartoons. 

That's how he draws. You're an idiot not to be familiar with the drawing style of Ted Rall. Plus, he didn't get paid. Ted Rall, the lefty, would bestow left-wing comics on you people if you'd pay him enough, shut up about his it-is-what-it-is artistry, and know that he is the famous cartoonist Ted Rall.

Anyone familiar with me and my work knows I'm not racist. My criticisms of the president are unrelated to his race, and to say otherwise in the absence of evidence is disgusting.... My flaws are out there for everyone to see, but racism is not one of them.

Oh, come on. Racism permeates everything, whether you are conscious of it or not, even if you think you are one of the "good" white people. It's in there. Your job is to perceive it and humble yourself. That's the left-wing ideology, so don't try to use your left-wingitude as a defense.

"Centrists Should Mourn the Demise of the Filibuster: Only the extremists win—and in the end, mostly the Republicans."

A Slate headline, quoted in its entirety at Instapundit, as if he's not seeing the snark.

To see the snark, examine the logic

1. After the filibuster, only the extremists will win.

2. Most of the winners will be Republicans.

3. [Unstated.] Most of the extremists are Republicans. 

What counts as "extremism"? In this context, it has to do with how we think about judges. (And executive nominees, but I'll leave them to the side for simplicity's sake.) The "extreme" should be understood as the more ideologically slanted or threateningly powerful individuals that the President would otherwise have refrained from nominating. But even with the minority party disabled by the inability to filibuster, there are political constraints.

Obama can't just nominate, say, Bill Ayers.
He won't want the criticism, and there will be pressures on members of his own party to say no. The old game of letting the minority party do the dirty work has changed. The other party will still do what it can to trash the reputation of the nominee, but the President's own party will have to vote that nominee down or take the political heat for voting for this awful character.

I suspect that the political check will be more of a constraint on Democrats, because it seems that American voters perceive conservative judicial ideology as more conventional, proper, and neutral than liberal judicial ideology. And this is essentially the insight in the Slate article (which is written by Eric Posner). And by essentially, I mean subtract the subterfuge in the part I've boldfaced:

Next time Republicans control the presidency and the Senate, they will appoint ideologically extreme judges. True, Democrats could cancel out this effect by appointing extremely liberal judges when they are in power, but recent history suggests that Democrats do not care as much as the Republicans about appointing ideologically extreme judges. Unless this changes, picture a federal appellate bench composed of numerous Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases, not fully offset by Elena Kagans and Stephen Breyers.

Let me restate the boldfaced part to say what I think is true:  Democrats know that the vigorous left-liberals they'd like to see on the bench would be viewed by the American people as ideologically extreme and unsuited for judicial work.

The reason the Republicans seem to get away with leaning further toward conservatism than Democrats can lean toward liberalism is that conservatism better comports with the people's idea of the role of the judiciary.

Removal of the filibuster helps conservatives not because they are more "extremist" than Republicans, but because the political check on nominating strong judges operates more forcibly on liberals. 

What if you bitched on Facebook about the raw deal you got under Obamacare and nobody "liked" you?

Shocked at the new and worse deal she was offered under Obamacare, Lori Gottlieb wrote an item titled "Obamacare or Kafkacare?” on Facebook. Facebook is a website that — unlike healthcare.gov — works, so she expected lots of "likes." She liked her old insurance, and Obama said if you like it, you can keep it.

Like, like, like!

Everything is, like, about liking these days, and Lori must have thought she was likeable enough, but nobody liked her.

Instead, aside from my friend David, who attempted to cheer me up with, “My dad, who never turns down a bargain, would take the sex change just because it’s free,” my respondents implied — in posts that, to my annoyance, kept getting more “likes” — that it was beyond uncool to be whining about myself when the less fortunate would finally have insurance.

“The nation has been better off,” wrote one friend. “Over 33 million people who did not have insurance are now going to get it.” That’s all fine and good for “the nation,” but what about my $5,400 rate hike (after-tax dollars, I wanted to add, but dared not in this group of previously closeted Mother Teresas)? Another friend wrote, “Yes, I’m paying an extra 200 a month, but I’m okay with doing that so that others who need it can have health care.”

I was shocked. Who knew my friends were such humanitarians? Has Obamacare made it un-P.C. to be concerned by a serious burden on my family’s well-being?

Gottlieb got seriously burned, but had she really never noticed this form of liberal disciplining before? It's funny to act surprised that these people are suddenly "such humanitarians," but she's experiencing heightened awareness because $5,400 is so specific and real, and she, in her personal anger, made the mistake of thinking her "friends" (Facebook friends) were people of empathy toward individual others. But sober observation should have taught her that left-liberals expect individual self-sacrifice for the good of the group.

It will be interesting to see how that website that works, Facebook, will process the stories of individuals burned by Obamacare. Ironically, Gottlieb is nudging Facebookers not to complain if they find themselves losers. Hers is a cautionary tale: You will not be liked. But perhaps enough stories will break through the fear of not being likeable, and a tipping point will be reached. There could be a cascade of liking not liking Obamacare.

"Back during the campaign they lied and said that Mitt Romney cut off a woman with cancer."

"Now they’re lying about the woman with cancer that they cut off. Fraudulent, indeed. But lashing out at critics won’t stop the rot."

"Rot" is a good word. Mitt Romney himself was on TV last Sunday saying: "And whether you like the model of Obamacare or not, the fact that the president sold it on a basis that was not true has undermined the foundation of his second term. I think it's rotting it away."

Meade and I have been catching up on the old TV series "Breaking Bad," and we're somewhere in Season 2. The main character has discovered dry rot in the wood floor of his house and — attempting to fix it himself — he opens up a hole in the floor and then he's down in the crawl space under the house, finding the whole foundation rotten. The oblivious wife and son live in that house that is contaminated and slowly collapsing, while dad is down there, underneath, replacing a timber here and there. At one point, he stumbles over to their breakfast table in his hazmat suit and pulls off his respirator to chomp down a little toast, and their dependence on care from their father figure is such that they never say anything like: "Uh, Dad, if you're wearing that, shouldn't we get the hell out of this house?" They just keep eating their breakfast, like this is home and Daddy will provide. 

It's funny to see the lefties in the mindset of conservatives, attempting to shore up a rotting structure, rebuilding at the same time people are forced to keep using it. This is where we are, and Daddy is fixing it. Meanwhile, the righties are the radicals, eager to rip down the whole house even if there's no new place in move-in condition.

"I got cut off, yelled at, screamed on. The moderator tried gently to intervene, to ask the brother to let me speak, to wait his turn."

"To model allyship. To listen. But to no avail. The brother kept on screaming about his commitment to women, about all he had 'done for us,' about how I wasn’t going to erase his contributions. Then he raised his over 6 foot tall, large brown body out of the chair, and deliberately slung a cup of water across my lap, leaving it to splash in my face, on the table, on my clothes, and on the gadgets I brought with me."

Wrote Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, describing her experience on a panel at the Brecht Forum on the topic of "ally, privilege, and comrade," quoted by Mychal Denzel Smith in a column at The Nation titled "There Is Still Misogyny in Progressive Movements."

I don't know who the water-slinger was, and I don't mean to excuse aqua-violence, but I can't tell from Cooper's description that the man's anger arose from his misogyny. It sounds more like anger at being called a misogynist.

I've never believed the notion that left-wing politics and feminism overlap all that much, and anyone who thinks they do should brush up on the history. There's plenty of shallow feminism amongst lefties who know they're supposed to toe the line, and it's not surprising that they're dismayed to hear that they haven't done enough. Progressivism is about doing things, and there's always more to be done, so how could you possibly have done enough?

Bill de Blasio — with a 50 point lead in the polls — addresses that motorcycle mob attack.

I'd said that the attack would hurt the campaign of the Democrats' left-wing candidate for NYC mayor, so I'm interested in how the seemingly soft-on-crime de Blasio addresses the incident.

He said:

“We I believe are seeing a phenomenon with some of these motorcycle groups deciding to take over certain streets so they can perform their stunts, and disrupt traffic, slow traffic in the process, and it’s dangerous. It’s really dangerous... This confrontation is a byproduct of that, so we have to crack down on this. It’s not legal to disrupt traffic in a group, it’s not legal, obviously to take the law into their own hands as they appear to have done... This is simply not acceptable behavior."

But what are you going to do about it? It's easy to say "This is simply not acceptable behavior" about all manner of crimes, but then what. "Crack down." How?

"Did you bristle at the journalism at all, like why do we need the New York Post if the Times is gonna publish a headline saying you were a leftist?"

WNYC’s Brain Lehrer asked Bill de Blasio (the Democratic candidate for mayor of NYC).

De Blasio, admitting that the NYT headline saying that he "Was Once a Young Leftist" fit his own description of himself, in 1990 as being for “democratic socialism,” but that "I always described my philosophy of being made up of a blend of influences and ideas."

“I think that article didn’t fully represent what I feel except for one passage,” he said, “that very accurately noted that one part of me is a New Deal Democrat – just an updated version of it – one part of me is probably similar to a European Social Democrat, and I’m also very deeply influenced by liberation theology, which I learned a lot about in the years I worked on Latin America.”

So in the interest of diluting his connection to "democratic socialism," he's calling attention to his devotion to "liberation theology." Alex Pareene at Salon plays defense:

De Blasio was working with the Quixote Center, a Catholic social justice group that fights poverty and economic inequality and that is inspired by liberation theology. This is actually very typical humanitarian work, and Catholic groups in particular have been doing it for years.

But the Times seems determined to make working for a Catholic social justice organization sound much more radical than it really was, or is. So unnamed “critics” make a few appearances, to suggest that de Blasio and his friends were Marxists — “its harshest critics accused it of hewing to a Marxist agenda” — or naive hippies: “Critics, however, said they were gullible and had romanticized their mission — more interested in undermining the efforts of the Reagan administration than helping the poor.” Which critics? Who knows! How accurate were these criticisms? You decide!

"The Left must constantly re-write its own history to create the appearance of consistency in its advocacy of progress..."

"... but the Left’s definition of progress is itself constantly changing, and feminism’s embrace of pornography — celebrating objectification as 'empowerment' — is but one example of this re-definition project."

***

Here's a book that was published in 1990: "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism."



I have that on a shelf in my office, along with many similar tomes of the time.

Cheesecake, an experiment in communal living, ongoing after 20 years.

"Of the original 11 members, seven are still here... The community has taken on new members, so there are now 13 altogether. No one seems lonely..."

In matters involving the environment, Ms. Otis said, the community is divided into two camps: “Some are Druids, those who don’t want to change anything, and some are foresters, who can cut the brush back. Jill and Gaile are the Druids.”

Gaile Wakeman, a retired pediatric physical therapist who is 76, concurred. “I don’t want a single tree to be cut.... I don’t give on this. You cannot replace a tree that’s been here 300 years.”...

The other thing residents tend to disagree about is money. And as is true elsewhere in the country, Ms. Otis said, “conservatives are those who do not want to spend money, and liberals do.”

But while these distinctions may resemble those between Republicans and Democrats, Ms. Wakeman noted, Cheesecake members lean to the left politically. “We’re all pretty liberal,” she said. “A Tea Party person would never live here.”

"[K]ids who came to their maturity during the 'Age of Fail,' whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed..."

"... and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it." If we assume that — as The Nation's Rick Perlstein does in "Is Peter Beinart Right About a ‘New New Left’?" — then...

... another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

What if, in other words, the harbinger election didn’t take place in New York...

Beinart had been talking about Bill de Blasio...

... but in Colorado—where a hyper-ideological, insurrectionist, corporate-money-soaked minority... recalled two progressive legislatures for daring to favor background checks for gun purchases even though Coloradans want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent.

Beinart wants to think big. So let’s think big. Given a precedent like that, the result of our current trends might not be more socialism, but once more a stark showdown between socialism and barbarism. Apathy and social misery might make fertile ground for some charismatic demagogue, preaching scapegoating and a narrative of violent redemption…

You say you want a revolution... but what if the revolutionaries are on the other side?

Should Wisconsin Democrats go left to challenge Scott Walker?

Here's Paul Fanlund in the Capital Times fretting that Scott Walker-haters will be too mean to Mary Burke, the wealthy moderate who might run as a Democrat in next year's gubernatorial election.

With Walker gallivanting around the country, playing to tea party rallies and fancying himself as presidential timber, everything about the modest Burke suggests a polar opposite to our egomaniacal governor.

Stories speculating on her running hinted at GOP lines of attack: she is a millionaire dilettante, despite the fact she drives a Prius and lives in a modest Madison home. In truth, she is widely lauded for backing up her charitable contributions with hands-on interactions....

[She has] a Georgetown degree in finance and a Harvard MBA; Walker, of course, never finished college.

... [S]wing voters in Wisconsin are bone-weary after three years of unremitting political combat and, while they are turned off by Walker, are likely unimpressed by over-the-top outrage against him.

That sounds sensible to me, a Wisconsin swing voter, but if Democrats believe Walker is almost surely going to win, they might prefer a firebrand who can cause him some pain. That's exactly what didn't happen in the 2012 recall election, when the candidate was the dull Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, who'd already lost to Walker in the 2010 election.

All the passion of the 2011 protests petered out to an anticlimax. Who wants that again? People like Fanlund who want a shot at winning.

My advice for them is: Forefront how Burke is not like Barrett. If Burke is another Barrett and Democrats feel they're going to lose anyway, they'll cry for a fiery lefty. Why not?

The real problem with ending the 3d year of law school: What would happen to the clinics?

Instapundit asks "Should The Third Year Of Law School Be Cut?" which is a link to Paul Caron's excerpts from a set of NYT letters addressing the proposal that President Obama entertained recently.

But Caron's excerpts don't contain what I think would be the real sticking point for law schools. Let me do a different excerpt, with boldface added. From Georgetown lawprof Philip G. Shrag:

Small seminars to teach research and writing would vanish. Education in ethics would be threatened. Clinical education, which best prepares students for the real practice of law, is expensive because of its hands-on approach. It is taught mainly in the third year, and it might be the first to go.

After decades of building up clinical education in law schools, this 2-year approach looks like a devious plan to scrap them. But a second letter, from Hastings lawprof Marsha N. Cohen, makes it look completely different:

President Obama seems to have endorsed this week the lawyer training model being implemented by our new national nonprofit, Lawyers for America.... Fellows spend their third year at a legal nonprofit or government agency. After graduation and the bar exam, they return to the same workplace for a year, earning a fellowship stipend, the funds for which are provided by the agency, which benefits from low-cost fellows.

This program is not cost-free for law schools. Clinical education is far more costly to provide than classroom instruction. Without the supervision that clinical faculty provide, the practical training year could well be like many internships: young people providing cheap labor, without receiving significant instructional value in return.

In this vision, there really is a third year — off site — and the clinical teachers are more numerous and more important than ever. It's the teachers of seminars and specialized courses who are weeded from the faculty.

And how do you like everyone getting their start in "a legal nonprofit or government agency," where they spend 2 years working for nothing? The effort to cut law school back to 2 years ends up inflating it to 4!

***

Here's a flashback to 1982 — 6 years before Barack Obama became a Harvard law student. Harvard Law School — facing ''malaise'' and presser from "the school's self-described 'left,' which says the current curriculum buttresses the nation's political status quo" — issued a report that diminished the value of studying court opinions:

The Michelman committee... recommended expanded practical, or ''clinical,'' training for students, both as a teaching device and as an incentive for public service work.

Clinical training involves practice on real or simulated cases, such as work in a legal services clinic for the poor or through dramatizations before video cameras. At elite schools like Harvard, such ''practical'' training has historically been considered undignified, better left to the first years of practice.

''It is in the field under supervision, or in the life-sized simulation, that a student seemed likeliest to gain an enduring perception of the particular ways in which the conduct of lawyers may help make 'the law in action' a rather different thing from the 'law in the books,' '' the committee said....

One left-wing committee member, Duncan Kennedy, labeled the committee's findings ''homilies'' and charged in a written dissent that it failed to present ''a trenchant analysis of the educational problems of Harvard Law School and the program of reform designed to solve those problems.''

He proposed his own curriculum, including courses in case and rule ''manipulation,'' along with a mandatory two-month internship in a legal services office, and urged the school to discontinue its ''current policy of indoctrinating on the sly."...

''We are an academic institution, and it's not clear that clinical training is something we do well,'' said Prof. Charles Fried. E. Clinton Bamberger, a staff attorney at a legal services program sponsored jointly by Harvard and Boston University Law Schools, questioned the sincerity of Harvard's commitment to clinical education as legal aid. ''Harvard as an institution does not have the courage to make an explicit commitment to helping the disadvantaged through the law, because it is captured by the system,'' he said.

Think about the history and politics of these proposed changes.

What was Obama doing back when that report came out? Not community organizing. That lay ahead. He was in New York City, studying political science and international relations at Columbia University.

"How the U.S. Left is Failing Over Syria."

Interested in how consistent the anti-war left has been about Obama's military adventures, I ran across this Counterpunch piece by Shamus Cooke:

It’s now painfully clear that Obama’s war on Syria is a replay of Bush’s march to war in Iraq, both built on lies. Zero evidence has been put forth that proves the Syrian government used chemical weapons. On the contrary, evidence has been collected that suggests the U.S.-backed Syrian rebels are responsible for the attack.

If Obama wages an aggressive attack on Syria — especially without UN authorization — he’ll be committing a major international crime that will, by any standard, make him a war criminal, just like Bush before him.

And because Obama’s attack on Syria followed Bush’s logic, you’d assume that liberal, progressive, and other Left groups would do what they did when Bush went to war: denounce it unconditionally and organize against it.

Of course, this isn't happening.

ADDED: Cooke says: "Every head of state that is targeted by the U.S. government must be portrayed as an inspiring 'Hitler,' since attacking a nation led by 'Hitler' is, of course, a 'good' thing to do."

And sure enough, here's John Kerry today, doubling down on Assad is Hitler: "Secretary of State John Kerry told House Democrats that the United States faced a 'Munich moment' in deciding whether to respond to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government."

Rush Limbaugh cites facts that raise the "the obvious question: How do elections happen the way they do?"

The facts:

CNN is down, the networks are down, while conservative books sell through the wazoo and end up number one on the New York Times list.

The most listened to radio talk shows are conservative.  The most watched cable news network is conservative. ... We own books; we own talk radio; we own cable news. 

His answer is:

We're nowhere in the pop culture.  We are nowhere in movies.  We're nowhere in television shows.  We are nowhere in music.  Nowhere!

On the fiction side of books, we're nowhere, in terms of what conservatism is, being cool and plot lines and that kind of thing.  We're not in the classroom, we're not in academia, we're not the professors and the presidents of universities.  We are not school superintendents.  Those are very crucial because they get people when they're young, young skulls full of mush. They get to make and form those brains and basically propagandize them and indoctrinate them however they wish.

It wasn't liberals who originated the idea that has most famously been phrased: "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man." That was the methodology of traditional religion. Liberals — of both the right and left — should value the autonomy of the young. They should revere it. They should perform their sacred duty to develop and guide young mind. Yet they fight for the power to indoctrinate. Shame on all of them.

The central characters in good pop culture stories tend to be free and independent, so Rush's frustration that conservatives can't get hold of the "fiction side" of things is reason for hope. Left-wingers of the big government variety should have the same problem appropriating pop culture. Even if the various stars mouth left-wing propaganda, they can't imprint that agenda in the stories, which require strongly autonomous heroes and heroines.

"'New York Times' to New York Democrats: Get Over That 'Hope and Idealism.'"

Headline at The Nation for John Nichols's column decrying the NYT endorsement of Christine Quinn in the mayoral race.

The conservatives' high ground on race is colorblindness, and they'd be fools to abandon it.

That's a general piece of advice I'd like to deliver, prompted by this specific headline, seen just now at Twitchy:

Slain World War II vet Delbert Belton honored at candlelight vigil [photos]

I know there are those who think there's a need to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case, which skewed racial discourse in this country over the past year, but it's a terrible idea to go looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white and to exploit them in what seems like an effort to undo the distortions. I saw this happening earlier this week over the Christopher Lane murder, I labeled it "counter-Trayvonistic," which was a too-subtle way to say: Don't fight skewing with skewing in the opposite direction.

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations.

Trayvon Martin — an individual human being — was used by demagogues to score points about the suffering of black people in America, but this is not a game, and it is delusion to imagine that there is a need to score points on some imagined other side. This is not a game. There is no score. And we are all on the same side.

To paraphrase the Chief Justice: The way to stop skewing public opinion based on race is to stop skewing public opinion based on race.

To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.

What sparks catch fire in that candlelight vigil for Shorty?

"It's not that I think everyone to 'the left' of me is a posing emo-prog and everyone to 'the right' of me is a posing o-bot."

Reading that, I see I need to catch up on lefty lingo.

Lefties who fear that Cory Booker is "a Manchurian candidate who, while running as a nominal Democrat, is and has been deeply entrenched with the vulture capitalists..."

"... and their disaster capitalism education 'reform,' grew up in and has never rejected the religious right (while selling himself as gay-friendly, he's cultivated the same extremist movement that has promoted homophobia in Uganda and benefited from their mythology of Newark's 'transformation'), is steeped in Wall Street money and philosophy and is deeply admired by the usual right-wing think tanks."

"We have no relation to Mr. Snowden, his relations with the American justice or his travel around the world."

"He chooses his route himself, and we have learned about it from the media," said Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

"We consider the attempts to accuse Russia of violation of U.S. laws and even some sort of conspiracy, which on top of all that are accompanied by threats, as absolutely ungrounded and unacceptable," Lavrov said. "There are no legal grounds for such conduct of U.S. officials, and we proceed from that."

I think back to what Michael Haz wrote in the comments to yesterday's Edward Snowden post:

Mr. Snowden, his computers and everything stored in his brain are now in possession of the KGB. He will now fully understand the meaning of the word 'disappeared'.

The press, the Department of State and Barack Obama have all been played for the rubes they are by Vladimir Putin. And there is nothing any of them can do about it. The amateurs have met the pro, and the pro won, then erased all tracks.

Meanwhile, 20 or so reporters were thrown way off the track as they happily enclosed themselves in a Snowdenless, Cuba-bound metal tube for 12 hours. What newsless meditations did they hammer out for publication? The New Yorker's John Cassidy lambasted the on-the-tube, not-in-the-tube newsmediafolk like David Gregory who, he asserts, have demonized Edward Snowden:

Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public. The puzzle is why so many media commentators continue to toe the official line. About the best explanation I’ve seen came from Josh Marshall, the founder of T.P.M., who has been one of Snowden’s critics. In a post that followed the first wave of stories, Marshall wrote, “At the end of the day, for all its faults, the U.S. military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does.”

In the end, for all its faults... Marshall's going all last-paragraph-of-"1984." ("O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.") Except... Marshall never resisted.

Back to Cassidy:

I suspect that many Washington journalists, especially the types who go on Sunday talk shows, feel the way Marshall does, but perhaps don’t have his level of self-awareness. It’s not just a matter of defending the Obama Administration, although there’s probably a bit of that. 

Oh, just a tad. Probably! But...

It’s something deeper, which has to do with attitudes toward authority. Proud of their craft and good at what they do, successful journalists like to think of themselves as fiercely independent. 

Like to... but trapped on Aeroflot flight to Cuba, you start noticing your lack of independence. And those journalists who didn't get bamboozled into your lamentable predicament look so enragingly smug.

It’s not surprising that some of them share Marshall’s view of Snowden as “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law.”

A political philosophy I don’t agree with.... What is that? Resistance to big government? Cassidy — who says — he's "with Snowden" because he's "the underdog" — ends with "Which side are you on?" which is the title of an old union song. Here's Pete Seeger singing it. Bob Dylan repurposed it in "Desolation Row":

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”

Unlike the Titanic, the Aeroflot flight reached its destination uneventfully.

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name