I started posting on HowieinSeattle in 11/04, following progressive American politics in the spirit of Howard Dean's effort to "Take Our Country Back." I decided to follow my heart and posted on seattleforbarackobama from 2/07 to 11/08.--"Howie Martin is the Abe Linkin' of progressive Seattle."--Michael Hood.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush endorsed Mitt Romney Wednesday, earning national headlines as an elder statesman of a Grand Old Party that is still trying to wrap its head around the concept of Romney as a presidential nominee.
It is a measure of the extent to which media and political players absolve those who make laws from any responsibility for the impact of the legislation they enact and sign that Romney—who has so meticulously avoided discussing the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida—would casually accept the backing of the signer of the “Stand Your Ground” law that so many reasonable observers believe played a role in Trayvon’s death. MORE...
One year ago, activists took to the streets in Wisconsin to protest Republican Governor Scott Walker's plans to strip unions and public employees of virtually every right that they had. And now, just 12 months later, Walker is fighting for his political life, corporations and wealthy conservatives are running scared, and people across the globe have stood up and said We Aren't Going To Take This Anymore. And it all started with Wisconsin. Mike Papantonio talks about how the Wisconsin activists sparked a global uprising with Nation correspondent John Nichols, author of the new book "Uprising."
Follow John Nichols on Twitter @nicholsuprising---
Nothing about Russ Feingold's just-published book, "While America Sleeps," will diminish the belief of Wisconsinites — or the tens of millions of Americans who are cheering on Wisconsin's struggle to restore protections for working people and democratic rights — that the former senator should be the Democratic candidate in the coming election to recall and remove reactionary Gov. Scott Walker.
In fact, this book about foreign policy is so infused with regard for Wisconsin values and traditions that it reads in many ways as an homage to the state and its contribution to the national discourse.
Yet, Feingold is not positioning himself for a gubernatorial run. In fact, he has said again and again that he does not intend to run for any office in 2012 — passing up opportunities to run not just for governor but for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by his longtime colleague Herb Kohl. MORE...
It began on a Monday morning with high school students, then spread to the state university. The next day, 10,000 people rallied at the state capitol in Madison. In this video, John Nichols traces the remarkable trajectory of the Wisconsin protests against Governor Scott Walker's measures to cut pay and benefits for public employees, from its humble origins in February 2011 to the impact felt nationwide with the birth and growth of the Occupy movement and more.
Read more about the Wisconsin protests in John Nichols's new book, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, or his recent article, "America's Youth Uprising."
Howie P.S.: This interview covers much of the territory Nichols went over last night @ Seattle Town Hall. One of the key takeaways:
We in Washington state need to be concerned about the upcoming election for our new governor.
Nichols called me "brother" and was generous in his choice of words for the inscription in my copy of his new book:
For Howie-Thanks for your incredible media work!
Nichols is the kind of guy who wears a very stylish dark suit as well as a bunch of funky, friendship bracelets on his left wrist, given to him by his young daughter. His talk emphasized that the struggle for economic equality is not going away, despite the assertions of some in the corporate media including the New York Times. This observation caused me to see a connection between the civil rights movement and the economic equality movement:both will have victories and setbacks as well as staying power.
John Nichols, Washington Correspondent of The Nation, discusses his fascinating new book, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, about the labor unrest triggered by Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) campaign to strip bargaining rights for public employees and the supportive role of Ed Schultz and his viewers and listeners.
Howie P.S.: Nichols will be in Seattle TODAY, "Monday, February 20, 2012, 5:30 – 6:45pm. Downstairs at Town Hall; enter on Seneca Street. $5."
Monday, February 20, 2012, 5:30 – 6:45pm. Downstairs at Town Hall; enter on Seneca Street. $5. On the anniversary of the Wisconsin protests, journalist John Nichols describes how they led to the biggest labor rallies since the 1930s. In February 2011, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker moved to strip collective-bargaining rights from public-sector workers; now Nichols, author of Uprising, discusses how conservatives are trying to revoke unionizing rights nationwide in an assault coordinated by privatizers and billionaire political donors—and how ordinary people are fighting back. Presented by the Town Hall Center for Civic Life with University Book Store. Series media sponsorship provided by PubliCola. Series supported by The Boeing Company Charitable Trust and the RealNetworks Foundation.
Tickets are $5 at Brown Paper Tickets or 800/838-3006, and at the door beginning at 5 pm. Town Hall members receive priority seating.
The Occupy Wall Street movement’s political breakthrough came Wednesday, as leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus joined Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, in endorsing the burgeoning national challenge to corporate greed and corrupt politics.
On a day that saw thousands of union members, community activists and supporters of New York’s Working Families Party rallied in solidarity with the New York protests, Congressman John Larson, the Connecticut Democrat who is the fourth-ranking member of the party’s House Caucus announced that, “The silent masses aren’t so silent anymore.” MORE...
The volume on the ongoing discussion about whether President Obama should face a primary challenge for the 2012 Democratic nomination is constantly being adjusted. When the president compromises on basic premises of progressivism, when he talks of putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts “on the table,” and sometimes when he simply seems unfocused and politically inept, the volume goes up. When the president stands strong, however, when he outlines plans for making the rich pay their fair share, when he promotes infrastructure and investment in he face of Republican intransigence, sometimes when he simply seems to “get” that there is a point where compromise becomes capitulation, the talk dies down.
After the president drew some lines in the sand last Monday, with a speech that laid out the case for genuine shared sacrifice by the wealthy and that seemed to reject the most extreme cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the “Primary Obama” volume dialed downward. As Michael Moore said on MSNBC the other day: “It doesn’t take much” to renew the “hope”—or, at least, the partisan fidelity—that made Obama the most politically potent Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
But if the “Primary Obama” volume is turned down for the moment, the knob is still within hands reach. And there are more than a few Democrats who are only one “Super Committee” bargain away from spinning it toward “10.” MORE...
It is certainly true that Barack Obama is not an advocate for any “wild-eyed socialist position.” Nor is he an advocate for any sober and sound socialist position.
Obama’s explicit and frequent rejection of the word “socialist” parallels his rejection of the ideals and ideas associated with that word.
But distancing himself from socialist and social democratic ideals does not make Obama or his policies any more “American”—or any more in sync with the approaches of the country’s great presidents.
In battleground states—states where there have been special elections, and in the case of Wisconsin, recall elections—Democrats who run on a clear platform of standing with the workers, defending public education and taxing corporations and the wealthy have been doing as much as twenty percent better than Democrats who ran on more moderate platforms in the 2000 elections.
John Nichols joins Keith Olbermann on Countdown to discuss how Barack Obama needs to wake up and notice just how concretely these numbers reflect the progressive needs of the swing states. Read John Nichols's recent article on former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's decision to leave politics for progressive campaigning here.
After a summer of outside money and fake candidates, Wisconsin's historic recall elections are finally over. Despite the media's coverage of the "failed recall elections," the actual numbers show that Democrats won five seats while Republicans won four...an overall victory for Democrats. Not only is the state Senate only one seat away from having a Democratic majority, but one of the moderate Republicans currently in the senate was against Scott Walker's union busting agenda. In other words, Wisconsin has a pro-union state Senate.
The Nation's John Nichols joins The Ed Show to discuss what the victory means for Scott Walker's anti-union political agenda.
President Obama is interrupting his long vacation to bus across the battleground states of the Midwest this week[1], on an officially “non-political” journey that his aides obviously hope will renew a connection with the people who overwhelmingly elected him president in 2008. It is an essential endeavor, as Obama’s uncertain tenure has frustrated voters who once saw him as a transformational leader but now wonder whether there is a point to his presidency.
The disconnect between Obama and his base has grown more profound this year, as he has focused on the compromises of Washington while working people in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and other states have engaged in “Which side are you on?” fights against a Republican austerity agenda that threatens the very underpinnings of civil society and democratic experiment. MORE...
The notion that a credit rating firm could or should steer the direction of the American political discourse—and, potentially, should be unsettling to Democrats and Republicans, independents and third-party activists, liberal and conservatives, socialists and libertarians and even centrists.
If S&P can set the parameters of the debate in the United States, then it is not just downgrading a credit rating. S&P is downgrading democracy. MORE...
Before signing them, Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, picks up a stack of folders containing orders to detain the missing 14 Senate Democrats at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., Thursday, March 3, 2011.
On Thursday, (Scott) Fitzgerald got his fellow Republican senators to vote to hold the 14 Democrats in “contempt of the Senate” and to order police agencies to “forcibly detain” — translation: arrest — them.
Pretty serious business. But Fitzgerald says: “They have pushed us to the edge of a constitutional crisis.”
Actually, Fitzgerald is the one pushing toward the crisis zone.
The Wisconsin Constitution is clear. It reads: “Members of the Legislature shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest; nor shall they be subject to any civil process, during the session of the Legislature, nor for 15 days next before the commencement and after the termination of each session.”
Fitzgerald would have us believe legislative rules give him the authority to override the constitution. But a legal analysis prepared by the law firm of Cullen, Weston, Pines & Bach shreds that argument: “None of the 14 absent senators has been charged with a crime. Nor has any crime occurred. The Wisconsin Senate has absolutely no authority to order any of its members arrested or taken into custody in order to compel their attendance.”
That’s the bottom line.
So if there is a “constitutional crisis,” it has been created by Fitzgerald — at the behest of Walker. MORE...
What we cannot figure out is this: Why, if the state is in so much trouble, did Walker engineer the enactment of roughly $140 million in new tax breaks for multinational corporations, which the legislature passed in January? Why did he rush to reject federal transportation funding that other states—states with similar or worse fiscal challenges—have rushed to collect? Why, in the very week that he was pushing his budget repair bill, did the governor reject federal broadband development money that Wisconsin’s rural counties have been seeking for years?
The answer to all of these questions is that the governor has made his budget decisions not with an eye toward fiscal responsibility but with an eye toward rewarding his political benefactors. Out-of-state corporations, road-building interests that did not want competition from high-speed rail, telecommunications corporations that want to cash in on the demand for broadband all benefitted from the decisions made by the governor in January. Now, in February, the governor says that Wisconsin needs to end collective bargaining for public employees and teachers and alter the way in which the state operates on multiple levels in order to address a fiscal “crisis.” MORE...
It was partly the familiar logic of the filibuster. The forty-two senators really can, under current rules, shut down the chamber and stall a vote on the Dream Act or "don't ask, don't tell." But part of it was that the final deal, despite White House protestations, was likely not far from what Obama wanted. It's essentially what former OMB director Peter Orszag advocated in his first New York Times column, penned just a few weeks after leaving the administration.
My sense is that the White House economic and political team is starting to panic as they recognize the stubborn persistence of unemployment. They know the economy needs more stimulus, and that Republicans are loath to allow them to deliver it. Through this deal they were able to secure some stimulative tax cuts, like the payroll tax reduction. Briefing liberal writers, the White House sold the plan as stimulus 2.0. And even if tax cuts for the rich aren't stimulative, it's money into the economy. At this point, the White House will take what it can get.
It's the standard bribery model of legislating that has come to characterize Washington in the era of oligarchy: if you want to put food on the table of the unemployed, you must lavishly wine and dine the CEOs and bankers who laid them off. Obama didn't create this system, but he is making it stronger before our very eyes. MORE...
He was the prime mover in the fight to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement, which shuttered whole industries and eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in cities such as Chicago.
He was the an architect of the scheme to provide China with permanent most-favored nation trading status, a shift that ushered in the era of outsourcing that continues to devastate urban neighborhoods.
He battled labor, environmental, economic justice and community groups on behalf of Wall Street, both as an investment banker and as political insider whose basic premise was that government should deliver for those in the suites rather than those on the streets of cities such as Chicago.
He counseled Bill Clinton to steer right on economic and social issues, serving as a key White House aide during the period that saw the former president sign the anti-gay and lesbian Defense of Marriage Act and a "welfare reform" law so draconian that responsible members of the former administration—such as Peter Edelman—quit rather than be associated with it. Both those laws battered urban communities while playing to the crude fears and fantasies of suburbanites and southern rightwingers.
He counseled President Obama to abandon the values he had learned as a community organizer in Chicago and to instead embraces the likes of Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and the corporate elites who seek a renewal for Wall Street while promising cities like Chicago a "jobless recovery."
Meet Rahm Emanuel, who on Monday began making campaign-style appearances in Chicago neighborhoods —as part of his effort to replace outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Emanuel's return to the city was greeted by a Chicago Sun-Times article that raised serious questions about whether the former White House chief of staff met residency requirements.
"Ann Coulter hasn't beheaded anybody, I'm glad that's the new marker for extremism" says Markos Moulitsas of criticism of his new book, American Taliban. To the argument that comparing the American Right to the Taliban is unfair and hyperbolic, Markos notes that you don't have to go too far back in U.S. history to find lynchings and other forms of violence used in service of repressive ideas.
Markos joins Laura in studio to talk about the book, the Democrats' disdain for their progressive base, the problems with the filibuster, and much more.
What's all this talk about being in a "race" when it comes to education? Does the "Race to the Top" framing change anything? And what's all of this racing really doing for our kids? This week's featured documentary, Race to Nowhere, takes a look at just what's going on with our schools, and whether putting a lot of pressure on kids to ace constant tests and load themselves with work is actually producing happy, well-educated people.
"If Democrats are in trouble, we don't have to presume they are in trouble because they did too much." So says John Nichols, who sat down with Laura in Wisconsin, at Fighting Bob Fest, and discussed progressive congresspeople who have been stalwarts in Washington since their election on a wave of anti-Bush feeling--and who face tough races. Donna Edwards, Chellie Pingree, Phil Hare, Alan Grayson, Steve Kagan are all facing challenges this year, and are the kind of representatives that truly do make a difference in Congress. Nichols notes that if progressives like them keep their seats while other Democrats lose, there's a valuable lesson there for the party.
Finally, Stephen MacDonogh, author of Pioneers: The Frontier Family of Barack Obama, has some thoughts for everyone who wonders if Obama is "unAmerican."
If anything, the coming era is going to be one of more painful compromises on liberal priorities. Even if Democrats hold the House and the Senate, their majority in both houses is likely to be severely narrowed, if not erased entirely. Republicans lack an agenda beyond fishing for potential scandals, and despite the fact that Americans don't like them very much, the GOP will portray a takeover as an ideological mandate to prevent the Obama administration from accomplishing anything else on its agenda.
As much as liberals disliked Emanuel, his time in the White House will likely be remembered as the more successful and progressive part of Obama's first four years in office.
Since Obama is convening a jobs summit and soliciting suggestions on how to put people back to work (that don’t involve the dirty word “stimulus”), we had Baker and Nichols put their heads together and talk about ways to create good, meaningful, well-paid jobs and rethink the way Americans look at work.
Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker describes himself as being “aboard the Obama express,” and his new book, ¡OBĂMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era, collects his essays on the Obama generation and the way the campaign changed politics. A year into the administration, Hertzberg is still hopeful, though like many progressives he offers criticisms of the way the health care reform fight and others have been conducted.
In Maine, advocates of marriage equality suffered a setback in this past election, where voters overturned a decision by the state legislature to legalize gay marriage. Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll of New Left Media brought us an inside look at the No On One campaign, from get-out-the-vote training to a rally and candlelight vigil the night before election day. Watch for Part 2 tomorrow!
Though the Bush administration and many other insiders claimed that no one could’ve seen the financial collapse coming, construction workers, whose own pension funds were invested in these companies, knew that there was a housing bubble and feared for their own retirement money. We have video from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund that takes a look at the rating agencies and their future.
16 workers a day die from work-related injuries, according to this latest video from Brave New Films. Charles Jeffress, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), notes that there are hardly any consequences to employers for failing to comply with guidelines–and with four million injuries on the job each year, it seems that employers have decided that it’s easier to flout the law than to comply.
John Nichols:
calls the unemployment crisis a “social, economic and political threat,” writing of the growing sense of urgency within an administration facing a purported recovery that hasn’t extended to everyday people. Economist 
agrees, noting that unemployment is still a crisis for the families affected, who struggle to pay the bills and put food on the table.
, collects his essays on the Obama generation and the way the campaign changed politics. A year into the administration, Hertzberg is still hopeful, though like many progressives he offers criticisms of the way the health care reform fight and others have been conducted.