May 1, 2014

Meet Mary Burke, the Woman Who Could Beat Scott Walker

Eleanor Clift

She’s a political novice—and that may be what it takes to knock off Wisconsin’s governor, of whose jobs plan she says: ‘I’ve seen eighth-graders’ term papers that are more thoughtful.’

Republicans call her “Millionaire Mary,” but Mary Burke has plenty of assets aside from her wealth to make her a strong contender to derail the reelection of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, along with his dreams of the presidency. Polls show the former Trek Bicycle executive either tied with Walker or trailing by just a few percentage points, while the Republican governor, who weathered a recall election in 2012, looks headed for a closer race than anyone expected.

“Because of the divided electorate, this is going to be really close,” Burke told The Daily Beast. In the seven months since she announced her candidacy, the Democrat has put nearly 30,000 miles on her Ford Escape traveling the state. “It’s a good race of contrasts,” she says, citing her private sector business experience and her support for issues of particular interest to women, including access to abortion clinics.

“The things he has done with women’s choice issues puts Wisconsin right there with Mississippi,” she said over an iced tea Tuesday afternoon. Burke, who was in Washington for an Emily’s List dinner that night, has the pro-choice group’s endorsement, and it is making a big push to elect more Democratic women as governors.

“We only have one,” Burke marvels. “Who would have thought, with all the progress that’s been made,” that New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan would be the only Democratic woman serving as governor. (Republicans have three.) Wendy Davis, the courageous state legislator running for governor in Texas, has been in the media spotlight, but she’s got a tough uphill race in a red state, while Burke, with a blend of private sector and public service, is ideally cast to give Walker a serious challenge.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/01/meet-mary-burke-the-woman-who-could-beat-scott-walker.html

May 1, 2014

Russia Throws Soviet-Style Parade

Source: The Daily Beast

For for the first time since the Soviet Union dissolved, Russia is staging a huge May Day parade in Moscow's Red Square. The parade Thursday featured thousands marching past the mausoleum of Vladimir Lenin with flags of Russia and Putin's ruling United Russia Party. Many banners spoke to the recent seizure of Crimea and the crisis in Ukraine, declaring, "Putin is right." Putin did not preside over the march like Soviet leaders did, but he continued a different tradition, handing out "Hero of Labour" medals to five workers at the Kremlin, something he revived from the Soviet era last year. May Day, or International Workers' Day, and was always an important public demonstration in the former Soviet country.

Read it at Reuters
May 1, 2014 9:58 AM

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Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/05/01/first-russia-may-day-parade-since-ussr.html

May 1, 2014

Bill Clinton Defends His Economic Legacy

By AMY CHOZICK

Former President Bill Clinton, who has grown increasingly frustrated that his economic policies are viewed as out-of-step with the current focus on income inequality, on Wednesday delivered his most muscular defense of his economic legacy.

The speech reflected a strategic effort by Mr. Clinton and his advisers to reclaim the populist ground now occupied by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other ascendant left-leaning Democrats, and, potentially, to lay out an economic message that could propel his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the White House in 2016.

“My commitment was to restore broad-based prosperity to the economy and to give Americans a chance,” Mr. Clinton told students at Georgetown University, his alma mater, as Mrs. Clinton looked on from the front row. For nearly two hours, the former president defended the impact of policies like welfare overhaul and the earned-income tax credit, and displayed a series of charts detailing the number of people his policies lifted out of poverty.

“You know the rest,” he said of the 1990s. “It worked out pretty well.”

-snip-

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/us/politics/bill-clinton-defends-his-economic-legacy.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1

May 1, 2014

Thomas Piketty terrifies Paul Ryan: Behind the right’s desperate, laughable need to destroy an econo

Thomas Piketty terrifies Paul Ryan: Behind the right’s desperate, laughable need to destroy an economist

Five years post-collapse, Piketty and Elizabeth Warren offer a way ahead. That's why the right must destroy them

PAUL ROSENBERG

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” hit No. 1 at Amazon, right around the time that Elizabeth Warren released her book “A Fighting Chance.” Far from being the only figures addressing the failure of unregulated market capitalism to produce fair outcomes and broad prosperity, they embody two key facets of that criticism: the intellectual/academic and pragmatic/political. But there are a host of other figures criticizing the workings of actually existing capitalism and the increasingly destructive inequalities of wealth we see it producing all around us.

It may have taken more than five years since the financial crisis hit in late 2008, but are we finally seeing signs of a coherent response coming together? A number of recent developments suggest that we are. Just in the last few weeks, for example, another hot new book is “Flash Boys,” the latest from Michael Lewis on the most recent form of mass-scamming on Wall Street, and there’s new attention being drawn to the work of Martin Gilens demonstrating the power of elite control of our political system. His book “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America” was an award-winner in political science last year, but his follow-up study with Benjamin I. Page, the essay “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” has touched a broader nerve, with stories at the New Yorker, Huffington Post, and by Michael Lind here at Salon, among others, with added notice on cable TV. And of course, Pope Francis keeps mouthing off against inequality, too (which routinely causes Paul Ryan to comically insist – almost Stephen Colbert-style – that the pope is actually inveighing against the welfare state).

What makes Piketty and Warren stand out, in particular, is that real change needs both a framework of shared knowledge and possibility — which Piketty’s vast store of data helps provide — and exemplars of articulate, high-level struggle setting the terms of public debate, which is where Warren comes in.

This is not to say that Piketty’s work is something simply to rally around. That’s more of the pope’s territory. There is plenty to debate about Piketty’s work. But so far, criticism from the right has been ludicrous, while criticism from the left has been largely overlooked — a situation that must inevitably change if something is really to be done about inequality.

A neat summary of the right’s real source of upset comes from Lynn Stuart Parramore in an Alternet article republished here at Salon:

As fellow-economist James K. Galbraith has underscored in his review of the book, Piketty “explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view” of economics.

But he does do something that gives right-wingers in America the willies. He writes calmly and reasonably about economic inequality, and concludes, to the alarm of conservatives, that there is no magical force that drives capitalist societies toward shared prosperity.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/04/30/thomas_piketty_terrifies_paul_ryan_behind_the_rights_desperate_laughable_need_to_destroy_an_economist/

May 1, 2014

Fox News’ real gay problem: Inside a festering cesspool of reflexive bigotry

Forget Shep Smith rumors. If you care about LGBTQ people and their rights, here's the real Fox News scandal

KATIE MCDONOUGH

First came the Wednesday morning story alleging that Fox News president Roger Ailes had “shoved Shepard Smith back into the closet” after the longtime network anchor had reportedly expressed an interest in coming out. Peppered with quotes from anonymous Fox insiders, Gawker reporter J.K. Trotter alleged that rampant homophobia from network executives had come to define Fox’s relationship with Smith, kept him in the closet and ultimately cost him a prime-time hosting gig.

Then came the Wednesday afternoon denial from Fox News — a joint statement from Ailes and Smith calling the report “100 percent false and a complete fabrication.” Bill Shine, another network executive named in the piece as pretty much the beating heart of Fox’s homophobia problem, also called the report “pure fiction.”

A number of people have said that Smith is gay, but he has never disclosed this information publicly. I personally don’t know, and don’t really care. I also don’t really care that Ailes and Smith are denying the allegations about entrenched homophobia at the network. Because regardless of the Smith subplot, Fox News is still pretty much a cesspool of reflexive anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and that’s what actually matters here.

The network seems to pretty much despise LGBTQ people, and reliably supports the policies and politicians that make their lives dramatically shittier. This is Fox News’ actual LGBTQ problem.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/fox_news_real_gay_problem_inside_a_festering_cesspool_of_reflexive_bigotry/

May 1, 2014

GOP candidates’ freak-out moment: As Obamacare horror stories flop, what’s left?

Candidates like Scott Brown thought they'd win by attacking health reform. Looks like it's time to recalibrate fast

SIMON MALOY

It feels strange to say this, and maybe a bit premature, but we seem to be past the era of the viral Obamacare victim story.

Everyone who has followed the politics of the Affordable Care Act can tell you the saga of Julie Boonstra, the Michigan woman who bemoaned the financial injustice done to her by the health law in an Americans for Prosperity ad, when in reality she’s going to save a lot of money with her new insurance. Boonstra’s story, amplified by the conservative media, went national, as did the subsequent debunking of the AFP advertisement.

But how many people know who Christopher Schiff is? Schiff, a Marine veteran, stars in this Americans for Prosperity ad attacking Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., claiming that his “insurance costs are going way up because of Obamacare.”



The ad was released last week. In that time Schiff has appeared on Fox News and his story has drawn fleeting attention from the right-wing press, but overall no one has really taken notice of the former Marine allegedly under fire from Obamacare. (The Washington Post and PolitiFact attempted to verify Schiff’s claims, but neither was able to confirm his health coverage status; PolitiFact warned his ad “doesn’t include some important context and nuances.”)

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/gop_candidates_freak_out_moment_as_obamacare_horror_stories_flop_whats_left/

May 1, 2014

The Shep Smith story shows the failure of fact-checking

A media story about the media reveals the media's lack of self-examination

MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

On Wednesday morning, Gawker writer J.K. Trotter published a piece alleging that “Fox News Shoved Shepard Smith Back Into The Closet” and asking, “Why hasn’t Shepard Smith come out yet?” By Wednesday afternoon, the story had been picked up and repeated ad nauseum throughout the media-on-media vortex of self-absorption. Who cares if the story itself had serious inconsistencies? Aggregate first, ask questions later – if at all!

Smith, generally regarded as the closest thing to a likeable, rational thinking individual in the Fox news stable, is a frequent obsession of Gawker and Trotter in particular, who’s pretty determined to reveal the world Smith’s personal life, regardless of how weird or flat out harassing he may come off in the process. Trotter’s run several stories focusing on Smith’s sexuality in the past few months, while Smith, for his part, remains private about his relationships and orientation.

The latest asks, “Why hasn’t Shepard Smith come out yet?” and cites “multiple sources” who say Smith discussed coming out to Fox News president Roger Ailes but that “Ailes’ answer was definitive: Smith could not say he’s gay.” Furthermore, Gawker claims Smith was “demoted” after Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine ”flipped out” at a “dramatic” July 4 picnic that Smith allegedly brought a boyfriend to, leading Shine to call a meeting “among high-level executives to discuss a plan of action regarding Smith.” Not one of the “insider” sources at Fox is named. My favorite part of the whole thing is when Trotter congratulates his own vigilant “reporting” as the reason Smith attended a Fox gay journalists gala in March. My second favorite part is where Gawker updates the story to note that Shine actually didn’t attend said picnic, that Ailes and Smith call the story “100% false and a complete fabrication,” and then clarifies the timeline of Smith’s contract negotiations to acknowledge they occurred before the controversial picnic.

Yet faster than you can say “update,” the story had taken wings Wednesday, with Slate regurgitating, “Fox Allegedly Demoted Shepard Smith Because He Asked to Come Out” and shaking its head that “This doesn’t look good for the news network,” while New York asked, “Did Fox News Force Shep Smith to Stay Closeted?” The Daily Beast, meanwhile, went all in with a single paragraph saying that “Fox Allegedly Kept Anchor in the Closet.”

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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/01/the_shep_smith_story_shows_the_failure_of_fact_checking/