Throughout the 2012 election cycle, the committees were relentless. In email after email, they pleaded for small donations to run ads supporting candidates who would defeat President Obama’s “socialist” agenda. And it worked: They collected more than $14 million in donations—from all over the country, and from donors who gave as little as $10.
via Kim Barker: Inside Game- Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics
(via Jeremiah Goulka: The Botox Solution - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
In the month since 51 percent of the electorate chose to keep Barack Obama in the White House, I’ve spent my time listening to GOP pundits, operators, and voters. While the Party busily analyzes the results, its leaders and factions are already out front, pushing their own long-held opinions and calling for calm in the face of onrushing problems.
Do any of their proposals exhibit a willingness to make the kind of changes the GOP will need to attract members of the growing groups that the GOP has spent years antagonizing like Hispanics, Asian Americans, unmarried women, secular whites, and others? In a word: no.
Instead, from my informal survey, it looks to this observer (and former Republican) as if the party is betting all its money on cosmetic change. Think of it as the Botox Solution. It wants to tweak its talking points slightly and put more minority and female Republicans on stage as spokespeople. Many in the GOP seem to believe that this will do the trick in 2014 and beyond. Are they deluded?
Source: guernicamag.com
(via Robert Reich: The Billionaires’ Long Game - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
A record $6 billion was spent on the 2012 campaign, and outside groups poured $1.3 billion into political races, according to data from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics.
That’s why Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission has to be reversed—either by a Supreme Court that becomes aware of the poison it’s unleashed into our democracy, or by constitutional amendment.
Source: guernicamag.com
(via John Patrick Leary: Against Civility - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
The liberal call for a return to “civility” is both wrong-headed and anti-democratic for at least three reasons. First, nobody really knows what it means—is it decorum? A political point of view, like bipartisanship? Old-fashioned etiquette? Secondly, it’s a fantasy—nostalgia for a lost era of quaint collegiality and friendly rivalry that has never really existed in a country whose sitting vice president once assassinated Alexander Hamilton for writing a critical letter about him. Cable news, for example, may change the volume and frequency of inter-party argument, but Congress was hardly a polite debating society before Fox entered the scene. And lastly, it never should have been.
Source: guernicamag.com
(via Tom Engelhardt: The Mandate of Hell - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
We’ve just passed through an election campaign that, while the noisiest in memory, was enveloped in the deepest of silences on issues that truly matter for the American future. Out of it, a “mandate” has indeed been bestowed not just on Barack Obama, but on Washington, where a Republican House of Representatives, far less triumphant but no less fully in the saddle than the president, faces media reports that its moment is past, that its members are part of “the biggest loser demographic of the election,” and that its party—lacking the support of young people, single women, those with no religious affiliation, Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans—is heading for the trash barrel of history.
Source: guernicamag.com
The President needs to make it clear to the public that the only way we can achieve a better economy is through a larger and more buoyant middle class. If we continue lurching toward widening inequality and ever more concentrated income and wealth at the top, the vast middle class—as well as all those who aspire to join it—won’t have the purchasing power to grow the economy and create more jobs.
(via Casey Michel: California’s Death Penalty Decision - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
After a half-dozen years of discussion, dissension, and dissemination of mountains of facts and figures—capital punishment has cost the state $4 billion since its 1977 reinstitution—California voters will have a chance tomorrow to become the 18th state to repeal the death penalty. The California electorate will face Proposition 34, a state-wide initiative that would ban the death penalty and replace existing sentences with life imprisonment without the opportunity of parole.
Source: guernicamag.com
(via Jennifer Sky: Faith and Politics in the Sunshine State - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
This month when I opened my Florida absentee ballot for the general election, I was forced to confront the common fact that God is being used yet again to manipulate politics.
Source: guernicamag.com
(via Robert Reich: Mitt Romney’s Question-Mark Economy - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
Average Americans, meanwhile, face more economic uncertainty from the possibility of a Romney-Ryan administration than they have had in their lifetimes. Not only has Romney thrown the future of Obamacare into doubt, but Americans have no idea what would happen under his administration to Medicare, Medicaid, college aid, Pell grants, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and many other programs Americans rely on. All would have to be sliced or diced, but Romney won’t tell us how or by how much.
Source: guernicamag.com
(via Tom Engelhardt: Democratic Mockpocalypse - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
It started earlier and lasted longer than any election in our history, and every number associated with it is bigger and better and more striking than the last. If you happen to have the TV on, every one of its moments is The Moment. I even heard one prime-time news anchor call the vice-presidential head-to-head “an epic generational debate.”
Source: guernicamag.com
Guernica is an award-winning online magazine of ideas, art, poetry, and fiction published twice monthly. Guernica Daily, the magazine’s blog, is updated every weekday.
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