Political News Updates

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What’s driving inequality?

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy picked Place de la Concorde to stage his big Paris rally earlier this month, he was cloaking himself in the past conservative glories of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac. Even more, he was reliving his own victory parade in 2007, when “Sarko the American” promised to completely reform the French economy. But, as state-owned France 24 reminded its English-speaking viewers, the historic site was also where the original French revolutionaries brought King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793. Ah, yes, let them eat cake. Continue Reading…

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Sayonara, Sarko!

One bad economic data blip is easy to ignore. When jobless claims jumped up sharply a week ago, analysts blamed Easter-related calendar irregularities and warned that there is always a lot of “noise” in a weekly data series. But then the number of new claims remained uncomfortably high in the report released yesterday, and brows started furrowing everywhere (except, perhaps, in Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters.) Suddenly, the four-week moving average, a gauge designed to smooth out all that weekly noise, was up to its highest point since January. Coming on top of a weaker-than-expected labor report for March, signs that industrial production growth is slowing, and continued softness in housing, the conventional wisdom on the state of the economic recovery took a swift turn for the bearish. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal immediately published nearly identical articles, “Fears Rise That Economic Recovery May Falter in the Spring,” and “Economic Signals Stir Worries.” Continue Reading…

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Economic trouble for Obama?

BENTIU, South Sudan — As fears mount that Sudan and South Sudan will return to war, a South Sudan army commander here says he does not intend to withdraw troops from the disputed Heglig oil fields and he is prepared to fight. On April 9 the South Sudan army seized Heglig on the border between the two countries. Heglig, a major oil producing area, is internationally recognized as Sudan’s territory, but South Sudan has always claimed it. The South Sudan army is now 30 miles north of Heglig and does not plan to pull back, said Maj.-Gen. Mac Paul of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army. He said he is not worried about recent threats by Sudan President Omar al-Bashir that the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) will attack to regain Heglig. “We are not concerned about a SAF counter-attack, we are at war. When you are fighting you can go wherever you need to defend yourself,” he said. Paul said the South Sudan forces could move further into Sudan, but he said they would not advance all the way north to the capital, Khartoum. Continue Reading…

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Sudan’s return to war?

Here’s a newspaper headline that might induce a disbelieving double take: “Christians ‘More Likely to Be Leftwing’ and Have Liberal Views on Immigration and Equality.” Sounds too hard to believe, right? Well, it’s true — only not here in America, but in the United Kingdom. That headline, from London’s Daily Mail, summed up the two-tiered conclusion of a new report from the British think tank Demos, which found that in England 1) “religious people are more active citizens (who) volunteer more, donate more to charity and are more likely to campaign on political issues,” and 2) “religious people are more likely to be politically progressive (people who) put a greater value on equality than the non-religious, are more likely to be welcoming of immigrants as neighbors (and) more likely to put themselves on the left of the political spectrum.” These findings are important to America for two reasons. First, they tell us that, contrary to evidence in the United States, the intersection of religion and politics doesn’t have to be fraught with hypocrisy. Britain is a Christian-dominated country, and the Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment. It makes perfect sense, then, that the more devoutly loyal to that Bible one is, the more progressive one would be on economics. Continue Reading…

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America’s Christian hypocrisy

Now that the primary season is functionally over and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have cleared their decks for battle, the silly season of American politics has truly arrived. The spin cycle has infinitely more attention to bestow on  dogs-as-food versus dogs-strapped-on-top-of-cars,  or retro attempts to pit  working moms against stay-at-home moms,  or the at-this-point-in-the-cycle completely meaningless innards of every new poll, than it does for sober arguments about economic policy. And that’s a real shame, because if you’re looking for reasons to choose between Romney and Obama, the differences in their fundamental stances on economic policy deliver provocative grist. And not just because of the obvious — the traditional rhetorical orientation of Democrats for government action versus Republican reliance on relatively unregulated markets. While Romney’s economic plan offers nothing that is essentially different from standard Republican dogma dating at least as far back as Ronald Reagan, the Obama administration is giving us something new, a consciously articulated strategy dedicated to grappling with the profound changes in the global economy. Continue Reading…

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Obama’s race to save the Rust Belt

Compassionate conservatism, this is not. Virginia Foxx, the conservative North Carolina Republican who has been working so diligently to defend the for-profit college industry’s right to rip off the American taxpayer , said some unkind things about students who take on too much debt on the Gordon Liddy Radio Show last Thursday. I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap. At The Quick and the Ed, Rachel Fishman provides some useful context: When Foxx attended the University of North Carolina in 1961, tuition for one semester was $87.50. Continue Reading…

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Sneering at student debt

“I don’t know how you make anybody watch. You just have to close your eyes,” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett notoriously said of a now-shelved forced-ultrasound law in his state. Now one enterprising pro-choicer online has offered another option: Drowning it out with music. Although it’s the transvaginal ultrasound laws that get all the attention, the true cutting edge of abortion restrictions is currently in place only in Texas, which not only mandates ultrasounds before abortion but also compels the woman to listen to a description of the sonogram and to a fetal heartbeat. (An attempt to get the law struck down on First Amendment grounds  — both the woman’s and the doctor’s right not to be forced by the state to submit to ideological speech — has so far failed, and the law is currently being enforced.) Continue Reading…

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Tuning out bad abortion laws

OSLO, Norway — Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist behind the country’s worst-ever peacetime massacre, spent an entire year immersed in “World of Warcraft,” an online multiplayer fantasy game. He claims to have used the Internet for 70 percent of what he said was 15,000 hours of self-study. And, on the second day of his trial, he admitted that the Knights Templar National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement he claims to represent was “merely a few individuals,” a likely reference to like-minded people he met on Internet forums. The deaths of the 77 people Breivik massacred in Norway are sadly all too real. But the killer himself looks more and more like a product of the Internet. As prosecutors skillfully drew out details of Breivik’s failed life in the run-up to the attacks, it seemed that from 2006 — when he wound up his business selling fake diplomas and moved in with his mother — Breivik had retreated into an online world. Continue Reading…

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Breivik: Product of the Internet?

After Wisconsinites submitted signatures to recall their union-busting governor, labor leaders pledged not to settle for just “Anybody But Walker.” Last week, the state AFL-CIO made good on that promise. As a string of current and former elected Democrats lined up behind Milwaukee Mayor and Democratic primary front-runner Tom Barrett, the labor federation followed many of its major unions in endorsing former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk. Many labor leaders say Falk is more likely to beat Walker in the recall and reverse his policies once in office. But to get the chance, she’ll have to overcome Barrett’s 14-point polling lead before the May 8 primary. Continue Reading…

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Wisconsin unions bet on underdog