Democracy for Utah - Books and Reviews

"The Conscience of a Liberal": The Buzzflash interview with Paul Krugman

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:20:55 -0600

I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, and it's just as excellent as you'd expect. The following excerpts are from an interview Krugman did with Buzzflash about the book:

Paul Krugman: The reason that Bush is so opposed to SCHIP is the same reason he was so determined to privatize Social Security, which is that they're both programs that work. You have to understand, that is the point of view of somebody who really wants to undo the New Deal — and if possible — I quote Grover Norquist in the book — get things back to the way they were before Teddy Roosevelt and the "Socialists" came in. The worst thing is a government program that actually does help people. So the SCHIP is a really bad thing, from Bush's point of view, because it works so well. It might lead people to say, well, if we can do this for lower-income children, why can't we do it for lots of other people who need guaranteed health care? So it's the determination, on his part, to do this veto, even though there's a short-term political cost, because they're deathly afraid that people will look at SCHIP and say, gee, actually the government can do some good. [...]

BuzzFlash: We want to challenge you a little on some language. […] You used the word "conservatism," though you switch and say

Swiftboating Obama

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:31:35 -0600

From Politico

The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry’s Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what’s scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama. Conservative journalist David Freddoso’s “The Case Against Barack Obama” will offer “a comprehensive, factual look at Obama,” according to Regnery Publishing president and publisher Marjory Ross.

"How a half-century of conservatism has undermined America's security"

Tue, 27 May 2008 12:21:08 -0600

... is the subtitle of U.S. Versus Them by J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic. He argues that plain old conservatism — as opposed to neo-conservatism — is what landed us in the mess in Iraq and the Middle East. The bad ideas that mark the Bushies' foreign policy are classic conservative policy ideas.

In foreign policy, "conservative" describes a distinct attitude in which the world is conceived in terms of "us vs. them" or "good vs. evil," with the United States assuming the role of a righteous protagonist facing a monolithic enemy. It is often an explicitly religious vision, with frequent allusions...to God, Satan and Armageddon. Characterizing the Soviet Union as an earthly manifestation of evil, rather than...

The post-American world

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:29:40 -0600

Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

Your summer reading list of progressive books

Mon, 05 May 2008 11:04:50 -0600

So once you've finished the reading list of anti-conservative books, you can get started on these:

Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, Eric Alterman
The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, Robert Reich
Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, Paul Waldman
Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff
Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation, Jeffrey Feldman

Your summer reading list of anti-conservative books

Fri, 02 May 2008 11:34:03 -0600

Back in 2006, I remarked "it's about time liberals start taking aim at conservatism itself" and not just individual conservatives like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. It looks like others had similar thoughts, because there's a bumper crop of anti-conservative books available now.

The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Greg Anrig
Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, Glenn Greenwald
Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman
God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner
The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, Jonathan Chait

Why right-wing ideas keep failing

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 10:47:58 -0600

Another book to put on your reading list — The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, by Greg Anrig Jr. (TPMCafe):

The real wonder of the conservative enterprise has been its ability to transform the rudimentary desire of a handful of wealthy families to gut the government into a set of public policy ideas that would help accomplish that goal while sounding appetizing enough to attract large numbers of voters. Rather ingeniously, the simple, easy-to-understand ideas they developed are largely consistent with each other and elegantly link to a broader story line that the conservative movement has effectively sold with remarkable sophistication. That's how the right won the war of ideas. It's also the underlying reason why those ideas keep failing in practice.

Raw Story reviews Michael Moore's movie 'Sicko'

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:52:45 -0600

Raw Story:

The film's most interesting scene is an archived White House conversation between then-President Richard Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman that Moore argues is the starting point of the modern healthcare complex. In the Feb. 7, 1971 recording — part of the hundreds of hours of Nixon's secret White House tapes — Ehrlichman explains "health maintenance organizations like Edward Kaiser's Permanente thing." Kaiser Permanente is now the nation's largest HMO.

"Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. ... All the incentives are toward less medical care," Ehrlichman says to Nixon, according to a transcript. "The less care they give them, the more money they make."

As Christy Hardin Smith asked in January (D4U):

[I]s the purpose of health insurance to provide health care to everyone who pays into the system, and to spread risk across a broad pool of Americans... or is its sole purpose to maximize profits for insurance companies?

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, by Naomi Klein

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:22:57 -0600

I finally got around to reading Naomi Klein's 1999 book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. It's a critique of the hypocrisy of strongly branded companies like Nike, Starbucks, and Disney, but also an analysis of corporate power in general. It's comprehensive, startling, and infuriating.

By 1997, it had become clear to Nike's critics that if they were serious about taking on the swoosh in an image war, they would have to get at the source of the brand's cachet — and as Nick Alexander of the multicultural Third Force magazine wrote in the summer of that year, they weren't even close. "Nobody has figured out how to make Nike break down and cry. The reason is that nobody has engaged African Americans in the fight. ... To gain significant support from communities of color, corporate campaigns need to make connections between Nike's overseas operations and conditions here at home."

Creators of TV series '24' admit there are no 'ticking time bombs'

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:16:17 -0700

The New Yorker:

Each season of "24," which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer — a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland — must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. [...] With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

The show's appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the "ticking time bomb" plot. [...]

Bob Cochran, who created the show with [Joel] Surnow, admitted, "Most terrorism experts will tell you that the 'ticking time bomb' situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week." [...]

[Lead writer Howard] Gordon, who is a "moderate Democrat," said that it worries him when "critics say that we've enabled and reflected the public's appetite for torture. Nobody wants to be the handmaid to a relaxed policy that accepts torture as a legitimate means of interrogation." He went on, "But the premise of '24' is the ticking time bomb. It takes an unusual situation and turns it into the meat and potatoes of the show." He paused. "I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality."

Weekend Oscars / favorite movies thread

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:46:24 -0700

Here's something for a little change of pace — what were your favorite movies of 2006? My Top 7 list is:

An Inconvenient Truth
Brick
Half Nelson
Stranger Than Fiction
Thank You For Smoking
The Illusionist
Who Killed the Electric Car?

If you need to jog your memory, Metacritic has a good compilation of the major film critics' Top 10 lists, plus a nifty graph at the bottom of the page that shows how many times each movie was cited. The critics' favorites were United 93, The Queen, The Departed, Pan's Labyrinth, and Borat.

Movie weekend: Global warming and electric cars

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:34:45 -0600

I saw Who Killed the Electric Car? last night and it was very good. Starts off a bit slow, but has some real drama in the second half. (Yes, drama... about cars.) If you live in the Salt Lake area, you can see it at the Regency Theatres in Trolley Square. (The NYTimes reports today that Toyota is on track to surpass General Motors as the world's largest auto company, partly due to strong sales of the Prius. GM, what fools you were.)

Also, Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is still playing at the Broadway Center. Both movies are extremely informative, entertaining, and ultimately inspiring.

Have you seen either movie? What did you think?

Update: A recent YouTube parody of Gore's movie may have been created by ExxonMobil's PR firm.

Review of 'Conservatives without Conscience' by John Dean

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:05:31 -0600

Review of John Dean's new book Conservatives without Conscience by Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory:

Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers' devotion to authority and the movement's own power is supreme, thereby overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of their movement. [...]

What excites, enlivens, and drives Bush followers is the identification of the Enemy followed by swarming, rabid attacks on it. It is a movement that defines itself not by identifiable ideas but by that which it is not. Its foreign policy objectives are identifiable by one overriding goal — destroy and kill the Enemy, potential or suspected enemies, and everyone nearby. And it increasingly views its domestic goals through the same lens. It is a movement in a permanent state of war, which views all matters, foreign and domestic, only in terms of this permanent war.

See this post for one example of the right wing terrorizing "the Enemy" — in this case, that perennial enemy, The New York Times.

"Why Most Utahns are Democrats (but just don't know it yet)"

Tue, 16 May 2006 10:20:58 -0600

Steve Olsen is the Democratic candidate for Utah's U.S. congressional seat currently occupied by Rob Bishop. His pamphlet titled "Why Most Utahns Are Democrats (but just don't know it yet)" is the most compelling and provocative argument I've read that Utah can become--if it isn't already--a bluer state.

Sensitive, conciliatory without being wishy-washy about what Democrats stand for (and can stand for), this pamphlet is possibly the one best hope we Democrats have of winning converts in the Beehive State.

Kos on his visit to Salt Lake

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:22:45 -0600

Markos says:

Sans Jerome (who owes Utah a visit), I went straight from Salt Lake City airport (admiring the glorious scenery) to hang with the crew over at the Salt Lake City Weekly. I had lunch at a great little vegan joint with the lovely Jamie Gadette who penned this great profile of Senate Democratic candidate Pete Ashdown. I was hoping to talk to her more about Pete's race, but I was rushed for time. Alas, that seems to be the norm on this tour.

After some additional media work, including an interview with the motivated counterculture warriors at Slug Magazine, I headed out to an event sponsored by SLC's Drinking Liberally crew. Democracy for Utah had a strong contingent present, and several bloggers from Utah's growing ranks in the local progressive blogosphere were present. OneUtah.org had a recap of the event with several flattering pictures [link]. All Kossack readers from Utah should really start participating in your local blog scene. And that goes for everyone everywhere — support your local bloggers. All change needs to start at the local level.

I had an early flight out of SLC Wednesday, but was able to squeeze in a really early (for me) breakfast with Pete Ashdown, who is running the most technologically savvy race in the country today. He's not getting a lot of respect, given the uphill nature of taking on Orin Hatch in this reddest of Red states (55% percent still approve of Bush in SUSA's latest 50-state poll). But he's committed to the long term rebuilding of the state's Democratic Party, and is a fervent believer in the power of technology to transform politics.