Tag Archives: white

No, Fox News, coal miners do not “live longer, happier lives”

by JanisEasley Posted on May 4, 2016

No, Fox News, coal miners do not “live longer, happier lives”

By on May 4, 2016Share

“Coal is a moral substance, where coal reaches, people live longer, happier lives,” is the kind of thing you might say if you have never actually met someone who lives in coal country.

That’s Greg Gutfield, a panelist on Fox News’ political talk show The Five, explaining his stance on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to coal communities in West Virginia. Gutfield, who has made it pretty clear that he thinks climate science is a scam, went on to explain that an anti-coal and anti-fracking position “reeks of white ocean privilege.”

But back to his first claim, which was highlighted by Media Matters for America: that people in coal communities have a longer lifespan than other Americans. Err, no — in fact, the proportion of coal miners who suffer from an advanced form of pneumoconiosis, also called black lung disease, has surged in recent years in Appalachia, according to research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. One 2009 study found that the number of excess annual deaths was as high as 10,000 in some coal mining areas.

And as for the theory that coal is responsible for “happier lives” — again, no. A 2013 study found that people living in coal mining areas are at greater risk for depression, while another report noted that many mental health needs in Central Appalachian counties were going unmet. And guess what? The most heavily mined parts of Appalachia are also the parts with the worst socioeconomic conditions.

As for whether coal is a “moral substance” or not: Let’s just say that statement seems to rely on a pretty strange definition of the word “moral.”

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Read this article:

No, Fox News, coal miners do not “live longer, happier lives”

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No, Fox News, coal miners do not “live longer, happier lives”

Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

by MaribelGregson Posted on May 2, 2016

Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

By on May 2, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study just published in the journal Nature Climate Change reached an interesting, if not totally surprising, conclusion: The Earth has become significantly greener over the past 33 years.

The main reason? All the extra carbon dioxide we humans dump into the air.

Let me be clear right away: This is a kinda sorta good thing, but don’t celebrate the positive aspect of climate change just yet. The effect almost certainly won’t last, and this small positive is completely buried under a long, long list of negatives.

The research used satellites to examine vegetation growth over time, assuming that the extra green is coming from leaves on plants and trees. Using a computer model to estimate leaf growth, they find the extra greening is equivalent to adding about 18 million square kilometers of vegetated land to the globe, more than twice the area of the mainland U.S. That’s pretty astonishing.

Map showing vegetation across the globe.

Myneni et al.

The growth is due to added CO2 in the air. Plants use sunlight for energy and convert CO2 (plus water) into sugar, which is stored for food. In a naive sense, more CO2 means more food for plants (this is called carbon dioxide fertilization), so there’s more growth.

The good news, such as it is, is that this means plants are able to soak up more carbon from the atmosphere. The bad news is, it’s not nearly enough. This is made clear by a graph showing atmospheric carbon dioxide content, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii:

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

As you can see, the amount of CO2 in the air is still increasing, even with this extra vegetation. Worse, look at the increase from 1980 (roughly the start of the new study’s time range) to 1995. If you extend that slope, you’ll see that the increase has increased since 1995; in other words, we’re putting out even more CO2 per year than we did 35 years ago.

All that extra plant growth can’t keep up with the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide humans dump into the atmosphere every year.

Incidentally, some of that greening is in the Arctic. That place is usually covered with snow and ice, except warmer temperatures have been causing it to melt away. That’s not a place we want to see green. White would be way better.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the deniers, who tend to ignore inconvenient facts like that, and instead just tout how the Earth getting greener must be a good thing. World News Daily and the Cato Institute were two sources I found pretty easily making this fallacious claim. It’s cherry-picking in the worst sort of way, but then deniers have been making this ridiculous claim for a long time now.

What I find funny is that in the press release, one of the authors of the research preemptively smacks down the deniers [emphasis mine]:

The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilization in promoting plant growth has been used by contrarians, notably Lord Ridley (hereditary peer in the U.K. House of Lords) and Mr. Rupert Murdoch (owner of several news outlets), to argue against cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate climate change, similar to those agreed at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP) meeting in Paris last year under the U.N. Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold. First, the many negative aspects of climate change, namely global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice, more severe tropical storms, etc. are not acknowledged. Second, studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time,” says coauthor Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suvYvette, France, and contributing lead author of the Carbon Chapter for the recent IPCC Assessment Report 5.

Of course, deniers gonna deny. Using this study to say that climate change is good is like getting in a massive car accident and being happy you don’t have to vacuum out the car anymore.

But hey, if you’re willing to ignore rising sea levels, more extreme weather, melting polar ice, deoxygenation of the oceans, droughts, floods, acidification of the oceans and coral bleaching, more heatwaves, and the displacement of potentially hundreds of millions of people, then y’know, a little more green in your life is just great!

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Original source:

Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Earth is getting greener. Here’s why that’s a problem.

This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

by LinEagarwvz Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Hillary Clinton’s lead in delegates over rival Bernie Sanders is now almost insurmountable as they move toward the conclusion of the Democratic presidential primary contest. But Clinton has not called on him to drop out of the race, for one simple reason: the example her own campaign set in 2008.

Eight years ago this month, Clinton was trailing hopelessly behind then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. On May 1, 2008, Clinton loaned her bankrupt campaign $1 million (following at least $10 million in earlier loans). Before the end of that week, pundits were calling the contest for Obama, whose May 6 win in the North Carolina primary, by 14 points, had made his delegate lead essentially insurmountable. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” Tim Russert said on MSNBC after the results came in. Less than a week later, Obama surpassed Clinton in the super-delegate count, signaling that the party establishment was shifting behind the presumptive nominee.

But Clinton was determined to fight until the last votes had been cast. She would go on to win contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota before the primary ended on June 3, even though there was no way for her to make up her deficit in the delegate count.

Along the way, the Clinton campaign put forward every conceivable argument to justify staying in the race. It used wins in states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky to claim that Obama was losing support among white working-class voters and that she would be the stronger general election candidate. On May 5, it began to argue about the delegate math, making the case that the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination was actually 2,209, not 2,025, the figure that had been cited up until then—and that if neither campaign reached that new number, Clinton was prepared for a floor fight at the party’s convention. On May 23, Clinton justified her continued White House bid by noting that in 1968, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, after winning the California primary. And lurking in the background in these final weeks was the rumor that Republican operatives had gotten hold of a tape of Michelle Obama disparaging “whitey.”

Eight years later, Clinton knows she cannot turn around and tell Sanders it’s time to leave the race, even though her current lead over Sanders, at about 300 delegates, is larger than the nearly 160-delegate lead Obama had over her after the North Carolina primary in 2008. The Sanders campaign had $17 million on hand as of the latest public filings at the end of March, giving it far more fighting power than the broke Clinton effort had at the same point in 2008.

So the Clinton team has been careful not to say Sanders should drop out. After her victory in New York, Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the campaign expected Clinton to be the nominee but that Sanders had a right to continue to fight. Instead of focusing on Clinton’s refusal to bow out in 2008, her campaign is talking up her unequivocal support of Obama after the primary was over—suggesting that that is the example Sanders should follow. In late May 2008, she said she and Obama “do see eye-to-eye when it comes to uniting our party to elect a Democratic president in the fall.” And when she announced her withdrawal from the race on June 7, she forcefully threw her support behind Obama and urged her fans to do the same.

“I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” Palmieri said on the night of the New York primary last month.

What Clinton isn’t mentioning is that before she tried to unify the party, she was questioning Obama’s appeal to white voters, hoping that a bombshell video would surface and help take down her rival, and entertaining a convention floor fight. Despite her team’s claims of magnanimity, at this point eight years ago, Clinton was five weeks and a few attacks shy of giving into the inevitable and uniting the party.

Originally posted here: 

This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

Here Are Obama’s Best Jokes From Tonight’s Sizzling White House Correspondents’ Dinner

by GRTCollett Posted on May 1, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At President Barack Obama’s final White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night he walked on stage to Anna Kendrick’s song “You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone,” and smirked as he told the audience, “You know it’s true.”

He mused about what he’ll do once he becomes “couch commander” after his presidency and received both boos and applause when he hinted at who may take the stage as president at next year’s Correspondents’ Dinner. “It’s anyone’s guess who she will be,” he said.

See the video below. Obama’s remarks start at 2:35:00.

The president complimented Bernie Sanders’ “Feel the Bern” movement, and teased Hillary Clinton’s struggle to attract young voters. He compared her tactics to a “relative who just signed up for Facebook.”

Republicans got the worst of the roast, of course. Obama couldn’t resist poking fun at Ted Cruz’s “basketball ring” mishap in Indiana, and dismissed candidates who “didn’t poll high enough to earn a joke.”

Toward the end of the speech, Obama faked out the audience by wrapping things up without talking about Donald Trump. But later he took swings at the GOP front-runner’s previous ties with Miss Universe, and said Trump may have an advantage in closing Guantanamo Bay because of Trump’s experience “running waterfront properties into the ground.”

Obama left the stage with two words: “Obama out.” Then, he appropriately dropped the mic.

Continue reading: 

Here Are Obama’s Best Jokes From Tonight’s Sizzling White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Are Obama’s Best Jokes From Tonight’s Sizzling White House Correspondents’ Dinner

A Week of Slaughter in Aleppo Also Destroyed One Of Its Hospitals

by porvluef Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Wednesday night, two missiles from the Assad regime’s Syrian Arab Air Force struck the Al Quds hospital in Aleppo, killing at least 14 medical staff and patients, including one of the last pediatricians who still worked in Syria’s largest city. Within 24 hours of the attack, widespread airstrikes and shelling in the area killed at least another 60 people, bringing Syria’s death toll for the week to around 200. Rescue workers from Syria Civil Defense, which lost five of its own members when targeted strikes hit one of its centers earlier in the week, report that they are “still dragging people from the rubble.”

“This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral center for pediatric care in the area,” wrote Muskilda Zancada, Doctors Without Borders’ head of mission for Syria, in an online statement. “Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?”

In Syria’s five-year-old war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the attack on the Doctors Without Borders-supported Al Quds hospital is part of a broader pattern of Bashar Al-Assad’s systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure. Airstrikes on civilian neighborhoods and medical facilities are the norm, despite being illegal under international law. The United Nations estimates that at least half of Syria’s medical facilities have been destroyed. A report from the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) from February 2015 estimated that some 600 medical professionals had been killed in the fighting, a figure that doesn’t account for the past year of the conflict.

“Compounding this tragedy is that the dedication and commitment of the staff of Al Quds, working under unimaginable conditions, has been unwavering throughout this bloody conflict,” said Zancada. A press release from SAMS this morning said that Mohammed Wasim Moaz, the last remaining pediatrician in the eastern part of Aleppo, was considered “one of the best pediatricians left in Syria.”

This week’s increased attacks on Aleppo come amid what was supposed to be a partial ceasefire in Syria, but which has all but collapsed. Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, characterized the talks as “barely alive,” the Guardian reports. “How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?” he asked.

Meanwhile, many believe the situation in Aleppo will only get worse in coming weeks, with reports of a military buildup around Aleppo that some fear will result in the government’s attempt to embark on a complete siege of the city’s civilian neighborhoods.

“Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over,” said Valter Gros of the International Committee of the Red Cross in a statement yesterday. “There is no neighborhood of the city that hasn’t been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next.”

In videos of the ongoing violence posted online, rescue workers drag bodies—including those of children—from collapsed buildings, old men sob, residents race injured victims away in cars, and a terrified young girl in pigtails cries quietly in the arms of a man.

A week before the most recent onslaught, Syria Civil Defense—a volunteer organization established in 2013 that attempts to provide help to victims of the massive bombing campaigns—posted a heartbreaking tweet, as new rounds of airstrikes began hitting Aleppo following a brief respite from the fighting under the ceasefire. The tweet foreshadows what appears to be yet another bloody chapter in Syria’s war:

“We return to work with sadness and heavy hearts,” Syria Civil Defense reported a few days later. As the UN warns of a “catastrophic breakdown“—noting that in the past 48 hours, one Syrian has been killed every 25 minutes—the worst may still lie ahead.

See the original post: 

A Week of Slaughter in Aleppo Also Destroyed One Of Its Hospitals

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Week of Slaughter in Aleppo Also Destroyed One Of Its Hospitals

President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

by GBRKarma138 Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Friday, President Barack Obama released a plan for the federal government to promote the development of smart-gun technology. The guns, also known as “personalized firearms,” employ biometric or other sensor technologies to prevent them from being fired by anyone other than their owners.

“Today, many gun injuries and deaths are the result of legal guns that were stolen, misused, or discharged accidentally,” Obama said in a Facebook post. “As long as we’ve got the technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person from pulling a trigger on a gun.”

Obama began advocating smart guns in January, as part of his latest push to confront America’s costly gun violence crisis. He ordered the departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security to develop a strategy to promote the technologies and expedite government procurement of the weapons. The report released Friday details the following initiatives:

By October, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security will establish requirements that smart-gun manufacturers need to meet in order for their guns to be purchased by law enforcement agencies. They will also identify agencies willing to participate in a smart-gun pilot program.
The Department of Defense will help manufacturers test smart-gun technologies at the US Army Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland. Manufacturers will be eligible to win cash prizes for successful designs.
The Department of Justice has authorized agencies to apply certain federal grants to the purchase of smart guns.

Gun companies first pursued smart guns in the 1990s, in part at the urging of the Clinton administration. Colt, Smith & Wesson, and O.F. Mossberg & Sons developed prototypes. The products were shelved, however, when market research showed consumers didn’t trust the weapons—and after the National Rifle Association and other gun rights activists denounced the companies for a product they claimed was a Trojan horse for gun control.

The recent rise in mass shootings has helped renew interest in smart guns, including among investors in Silicon Valley. The Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, created by angel investor Ron Conway after the 2012 Newtown massacre, has handed out about $1 million in funding to gun safety startups. One grant recipient was Jonathan Mossberg, a former Mossberg & Sons VP and the developer of the iGun, a shotgun that will only fire if the shooter is wearing a special ring. Mossberg, who is working on miniaturizing his technology for handguns, told me by phone on Friday that Obama’s efforts could “raise a whole lot of interest and give people a sense of this market.”

By one estimate, smart guns may be a $1 billion slice of the industry. The White House initiative could help create more opportunity in the major market for supplying law enforcement agencies. Mossberg and a handful of other smart-gun developers have long been trying to get police departments interested in their weapons; an estimated 5 to 10 percent of police deaths occur when officers’ own firearms are used against them. Some law enforcement leaders have shown support for adopting the technology, including San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr.

But strong opposition continues: The NRA remains sharply critical of Obama’s policy, which suggests the gun industry is likely to follow suit and ignore efforts on the technology. The Fraternal Order of Police, a national interest group representing the rank and file, is also signaling skepticism. “Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldn’t be asked to be guinea pigs in evaluating a firearm nobody’s even seen yet,” FOP Director James Pasco told Politico. “We have some very, very serious questions.” (Politico failed to note that a charity run by the FOP has received at least $125,000 since 2010 from another conservative gun lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.)

Obama on Friday also announced several other gun safety initiatives, including a proposed rule requiring the Social Security Administration to better report mental-illness information to the federal background check system, and a gun violence prevention conference to be hosted by the White House in May.

See the article here: 

President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why

by StephanHedgepeth Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The number of teenage women having children has hit an all-time low, thanks in large part to increased contraceptive access and use among Hispanic and African American teenagers, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For decades, the United States has had higher rates of teen pregnancy than most other developed countries. But recent increases in access to contraception, particularly to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as IUDs and implants, have helped women of all ages reduce the chances of unintended pregnancy. Since 2002, LARC use has increased five-fold, with most of that change being due to greater use of IUDs.

Though the CDC stopped short of completely attributing the drop in teen births to contraceptives like LARCs, according to the report “preliminary data” suggests that the use of evidence-based reproductive health services, including contraceptives, is what has led to the huge drop in childbirth among young women over the last ten years.

The drop was particularly notable among Hispanic and African American teenagers. Birth rates for young Hispanic women fell 51 percent since 2006, and for black teenagers 44 percent. That’s a big deal, because Hispanic and African American teenagers have historically had much higher rates of teen pregnancies than their white counterparts. Ten years ago, the birth rate for Hispanic teens was nearly 80 births per 1,000 women, but the rate for white teens was around 25. Now, the rate for Hispanic women is closer to 40.

Still, even though the number of white teens having children has also decreased, black and Hispanic teens still have twice as many pregnancies as their white peers. According to the report, that’s because social inequalities, like income and education, and employment opportunities, remain low in communities of color and influence rates of teen pregnancy.

“The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences,” CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post. “But the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies.”

Read More:

Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Teenagers Are Having Fewer Kids—Here’s Why

Harriet Tubman Was a Republican!

by t07c6o Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Conservatives have finally found something to like about the Obama administration:

Perhaps some of the voices calling for Tubman on the $20 just wanted any prominent African-American woman to replace one of the white males on our currency. If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares? The Obama administration has inadvertently given Tubman fans of all political stripes an opportunity to tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.

Yeah. That’s the ticket. All those folks in the Obama administration had no idea who Harriet Tubman really was. They were all like, check this out, Jack: black, female, helped slaves, done. Boxes checked. Identity politics satisfied. Put her on the twenty.

The poor fools. She was religious! She carried a gun while helping slaves escape! She was a Republican! She fought for freedom against a tyrannical government! If you think about it, she’s basically the poster child of the modern-day Tea Party. And none of those idiots in the White House had a clue.

Seriously. That seems to be what they think. Next they’re going to remind us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican too.

Excerpt from:

Harriet Tubman Was a Republican!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Harriet Tubman Was a Republican!

Donald Trump’s New York: Racially and Politically Polarized

by LachlanKreitmay Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A short train ride separates Manhattan from Donald Trump’s New York. Stretching between the Hudson River to the west and the Connecticut border to the east, Dutchess County encompasses a rural, white, and conservative swath of the state, punctuated with two small, liberal cities with large minority populations. On Sunday, these two populations met—and clashed—when Trump came to town.

The Hudson Valley isn’t generally seen as a hotbed of right-wing politics, but in some ways it resembles the places where Trump has performed best. Trump has posted his top numbers in states with a high percentage of minorities, especially African Americans. His supporters are largely white, but they seem to be galvanized by the presence of minorities in their environs.

Trump’s appeal in Dutchess County was evident at a rally on Sunday in Poughkeepsie that brought thousands of his supporters—and a sizeable contingent of protesters—to the county seat, a working-class, largely post-industrial city that is 48 percent nonwhite.

“I came out to see all the racists,” said 22-year-old Marvin Graves of Poughkeepsie, who stationed himself outside the Trump rally and goaded the Trump fans waiting in line to get in. “I go to community college, I don’t have a gun,” he said, before raising his voice even louder and announcing, “I’m not going to shoot you!”

Continue Reading »

Taken from: 

Donald Trump’s New York: Racially and Politically Polarized

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump’s New York: Racially and Politically Polarized

Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

by MaybellReddick Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In response to my post yesterday about the tradition of truthtellers in Democratic primaries,1 a reader emails: “Offhand my guess would be that a lot of Bernie supporters think Obama proves that an outsider/rebel/truthteller can both win and end up a very successful president.” Another reader tweets the same sentiment:

Hmmm. I don’t think either of these is true. Obama didn’t run in the truthteller tradition. He ran more in the JFK/Clinton tradition: a young guy bringing the voice of a new generation to the White House. Obama was inspiring and wildly popular, but he didn’t spend his time explaining that we all had to face up to endemic corruption or tidal waves of money or demographic Armageddon. Just the opposite. He mostly sanded the rough edges off that kind of stuff. It was all hope and change and ending the partisan bickering in Washington.

As for Bernie supporters, I don’t think they view Obama as a rebel or a truthteller. Bernie himself is careful not to criticize Obama, but a lot of his supporters see Obama as basically a disappointment: just another squishy centrist who made some incremental progress and called it a day. In the end, we still don’t have universal health care; the banks are still running things; the Republican Party continues to obstruct; and rich people are still rich. That’s the very reason we need a guy like Bernie in the Oval Office.

This is certainly my impression, anyway. Am I wrong?

1A theme that Jamelle Bouie touches on in a much longer, more nuanced piece here about the Bernie insurgency. It’s well worth a read.

Jump to original:  

Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama