reactionaries react - W21st NYC on Diigo

08 Oct 09

29 Sep 09

Something New on the Mall - The New York Review of Books

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reactionaries react conservative strategy ideology

23 Sep 09

The Washington Independent » Christian Right Looks to Debt, Economic Worries for 2010 Election

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Christian Right strategy religion reactionaries react

21 Sep 09

Thomas Frank: The Red Scare Returns - WSJ.com

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Ayn Rand redux McCarthyism redux reactionaries react one year later and the beat goes on Frank

A market-worshiping Republican Party went down in an avalanche of obloquy. A scary new populism made the cover of Newsweek back in March.
Instead, we proceeded straight to the backlash, raging against a leftist upsurge that maybe should have happened but that didn't.
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- Every now and then you hear reminders of the issues we would be considering if history still moved at its usual pace. Last week, for example, official Washington was soberly sorting out what had gone wrong over the last few years at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But the right was already advancing to the next level, with TV host Glenn Beck instructing viewers of Fox News how the murals and sculptures that surround them are actually evidence of the secret socialist faith that is presumably shared by the powerful.
- Besides, who among us really cares about the particulars of SEC mismanagement? The most notable literary response to last year's financial crisis was not to turn to the obvious genre—books about Wall Street shenanigans in the 1920s—but to skip several historical stages and to go straight to Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which heroic titans of industry are persecuted by a meddling government. The book's sales skyrocketed in early 2009, proving that when bankers puff asset bubbles and wreck the world, a large part of the public can be counted on to learn from that experience that bankers are the real victims of society, presumably deserving even more tax cuts and deregulation.
- One reason for this acceleration of the cycles is the peculiar vision of the universe that one finds on the right,
- So it doesn't really matter that there isn't much of a proper, visible, '30s-style left in America.
- And it's this willingness to believe, with its escalating cries of "socialism" and "indoctrination" that intrigues me most. Can people really be moved to worry about communism with the Soviet Union gone? Can you really hope to gin up a red scare without almost no reds?
- And so we all dare to call it treason. Calling it treason is a movie in which we can all have a role.

16 Sep 09

Freshwater rage - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

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reactionaries react Keynes refutation of Freshwater

15 Sep 09

A Method to Their Madness

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reactionaries react conservative strategy

08 Sep 09

Why the public option matters - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

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healthcare reactionaries react ideology Blue Dog Democrats

Private insurers do pay providers more than Medicare does — but that’s only part of the reason Medicare has lower costs. There’s also the huge overhead of the private insurers, much of which involves marketing and attempts to cherry-pick clients — and even with community rating, some of that will still go on. A public plan would probably be able to attract clients with much less of that.
Second, a public plan would probably provide the only real competition in many markets.
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- Third
- Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.

29 Aug 09

Paranoia Strikes Deep

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reactionaries react ideology Obama

Many of his fellow Americans agreed there
was good cause to be alarmed: a new Democratic president was proposing
an unprecedented expansion of federal power that would increase taxes on
the well-off and dole out benefits to the jobless and other
unfortunates. Several spokesmen on the right made more ominous vows: "So
help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from the chair
once occupied by Washington," declared Father Charles Coughlin, who
commanded one of the largest radio audiences in the nation.

27 Aug 09

FT.com / UK / Economy & Trade - ‘Swollen’ financials jump on Turner

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financial reform reactionaries react UK bankers attack reform

Obama Can't Pass the Buck - WSJ.com

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reactionaries react reactionary macro mythology

Rick Perlstein -- Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage

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movement conservatism reactionaries react

25 Aug 09

Reform we can afford

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healthcare reactionaries react

21 Aug 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Obama's Trust Problem - NYTimes.com

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healthcare Obama as waffler reactionaries react progressives ideology

And let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers.
Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.
And then there’s the matter of the banks.
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- So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.
- It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.
  Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.
  So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Think Again: That Doggone Librul Media, Caught Again...

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media reactionaries react ideology

20 Aug 09

Kyl Says Cooperative Health Plan Won't Win Support - WSJ.com

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reactionaries react healthcare

The number two Senate Republican said Tuesday replacing a public health care option with a nonprofit private cooperative wouldn't win any more Republican support, saying they are essentially the same thing.

17 Aug 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Telling Grandma ‘No’ - NYTimes.com

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reactionaries react right limits medicare

he isn’t envisioning a world where seniors get worse care, but he’s certainly envisioning a world in which they receive less of it.
These arguments have been effective, up to a point. But they aren’t nearly as effective as warning senior citizens that Barack Obama wants to take away their health care.
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- That’s why Republicans find themselves tiptoeing into an unfamiliar role — as champions of old-age entitlements. The Democrats are “sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare,” Mitch McConnell declared. They want to “cannibalize” the program to pay for reform, John Cornyn complained. It’s a “raid,” Sam Brownback warned, that could result in the elderly losing “necessary care.”
- But they might limit the procedures that her Medicare will pay for. And conservative lawmakers are using this inconvenient truth to paint the Democrats as enemies of Grandma.
- That’s the playbook that McConnell, Brownback and others seem to have in mind: first, save Medicare from Obama; then, save Medicare from itself.
- We’re already practically a gerontocracy: Americans over 50 cast over 40 percent of the votes in the 2008 elections, and half the votes in the ’06 midterms.
- In this future, somebody will need to stand for the principle that Medicare can’t pay every bill and bless every procedure. Somebody will need to defend the younger generation’s promise (and its pocketbooks). Somebody will need to say “no” to retirees.
  That’s supposed to be the Republicans’ job. They should stick to doing it.