Jay-Newton Small at The New Republic writes—Why the Left Needs Nancy Pelosi:
The minority leader has spent almost her entire political life under threat. Conservatives have vilified her as a San Francisco wingnut who wants to drag America into socialized health care, weaken the military, and throw money around like confetti at a Pride parade in the Castro. (They often trot her out as the unwitting star of their attack ads, linking her to Democratic candidates all over the country.) At times, moderates in her own party have piled on. Last year, Tim Ryan, a centrist Democrat from Ohio, led an insurrection in which 63 members voted to remove her as minority leader. Now, however, Pelosi is under assault from a new cohort: the left politicians eager to distance themselves from an ossified Democratic establishment. Dozens have rushed to announce that they wouldn’t support her for speaker should they take back the House in November. “While I respect Leader Pelosi’s years of advocacy on behalf of California and the Democratic Party,” said Gil Cisneros, the Democratic nominee for a Los Angeles House seat and a self-described Bernie Sanders Democrat, “it’s time for new leadership.”
Democrats should be careful what they wish for. Pelosi’s longtime number two, and the person most likely to succeed her if she is pushed out, is Steny Hoyer, a moderate Blue Dog Democrat from Maryland. No matter how much left-wingers pillory Pelosi’s willingness to compromise with Republicans, and her ties to big donors, she is still a better fit than Hoyer for their agenda. She may not be a purist, a Democratic socialist, or even particularly charismatic. But she understands her party and the pressures it faces. Democrats can dismiss her as a relic, a fossil like those she was hoping to dig up in Kenya, but they may be surprised at how much of an asset she can be.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Nancy Pelosi doesn’t care what they say about her:
“Do whatever you have to do. Just win, baby.”
Nancy Pelosi’s feisty, candid and pragmatic words to Harvard students on Tuesday reflected the House Democratic leader’s full adaptation to the role of designated dartboard for House Republicans. She granted full absolution to party hopefuls who think they’ll enhance their chances of winning by promising not to elect her House speaker.
“None of us is indispensable,” she declared amiably.
But then came a steely postscript: “You can’t let the opposite party choose the leader of your party.”
“And I say this especially to women,” she added, “because they think women are going to run away from the fight. But you can’t do that. You believe in what you have to offer.”
She does, and her implications are clear. Republicans want to get rid of her because she’s effective. Sexism is a big reason for her starring role as an ogre in GOP advertising. And while Democrats should say what they need to say now, they would do well to be wary of deposing her in response to pressure from the other side.
Emily Atkins at The New Republic writes—Beto O’Rourke shows Democrats how to talk about climate change:
Global warming is an existential threat to human life, but most candidates aren’t talking about it. One of the few exceptions has been O’Rourke, the Democratic congressman from El Paso,who’s running a heavily covered campaign against incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
In the past, O’Rourke has focused on the potential for economic growth in fighting climate change. But in a televised debate against Cruz on Tuesday night, he tried out a new tactic: directly tying Cruz’s climate denial to negative consequences in voters’ lives. “I continue to wonder why Senator Cruz voted against more than $12 billion in FEMA preparedness knowing full well that we will see more Harveys going forward,” O’Rourke said, according to ThinkProgress. “Mind you, that was the third 500-year flood in just the last five years. We know that there will be more of these floods coming, and I want to make sure that the people of Texas, especially southeast Texas, are prepared for the next one.”
When Democrats do talk about climate change, they usually warn about the consequences in the future. O’Rourke’s attack is different. He’s framing climate change as a problem affecting voters right now. He’s also holding Cruz accountable for making the problem worse, since Texans would have been better prepared for Hurricane Harvey had Cruz and other climate-denying Republicans not ignored the scientific consensus. (Scientists found that Hurricane Harvey’s record-breaking flooding was made 50 percent worse by global warming.)
It’s true that, right now, voters don’t prioritize climate change as a political issue. But who could blame them when global warming is constantly framed as a problem for the next generation? If Democrats change that false framing, they just might convince more Americans to vote based on the most critical issue of our time.
Ted Lau at the Brennan Center for Justice writes—The Trump Administration Wants to Drastically Limit the Right to Protest in the Nation’s Capital:
The Trump administration is considering new restrictions that would severely limit the right to demonstrate in the nation’s capital — including a rule that would charge a fee for protest organizers in Washington, DC. The park service has also proposed closing off 80 percent of the White House sidewalk, a significant protest site.
On Monday, Brennan Center president Michael Waldman was among the signatories of a letter sent to a National Park Service official opposing the proposed rule change. The letter, which was organized by the Niskanen Center, called the proposals “anti-democratic,” and “unconstitutional.” The Brennan Center also submitted comments to the National Park Service on Monday opposing many of the park service's proposed revisions.
These proposals are particularly troubling in the context of other recent attacks on free speech and efforts to rein in public expressions of dissent. In at least 16 states since last year, Republican legislators have filed bills designed to toughen laws on protests. The Trump administration has consistently attempted to undermine First Amendment rights, labeling the press “enemies of the people” and falsely portraying protestors as paid political operatives. Last week, President Trump referred to protests opposing the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as "the rule of the mob."
Jamal Khashoggi at The Washington Post writes—What the Arab world needs most is free expression:
A note from Karen Attiah, Global Opinions editor
I received this column from Jamal Khashoggi’s translator and assistant the day after Jamal was reported missing in Istanbul. The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen. This is the last piece of his I will edit for The Post. This column perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world. A freedom he apparently gave his life for. I will be forever grateful he chose The Post as his final journalistic home one year ago and gave us the chance to work together.
I was recently online looking at the 2018 “Freedom in the World” report published by Freedom House and came to a grave realization. There is only one country in the Arab world that has been classified as “free.” That nation is Tunisia. Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait come second, with a classification of “partly free.” The rest of the countries in the Arab world are classified as “not free.”
As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change. [...]
My dear friend, the prominent Saudi writer Saleh al-Shehi, wrote one of the most famous columns ever published in the Saudi press. He unfortunately is now serving an unwarranted five-year prison sentence for supposed comments contrary to the Saudi establishment. The Egyptian government’s seizure of the entire print run of a newspaper, al-Masry al Youm, did not enrage or provoke a reaction from colleagues. These actions no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community. Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence.
Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times writes—A President Kowtowing to a Mad Prince:
American presidents have periodically engaged in cover-ups of their own corruption or licentiousness, but President Trump is breaking new ground. He is using the United States government to cover up a foreign despot’s barbarism.
As someone who knew Jamal Khashoggi for more than 15 years, I’m outraged at the reports that a Saudi team of royal thugs beat, drugged and murdered Jamal — even cutting off his fingers, presumably because that’s what he wrote with — and then dismembered him with a bone saw. But I’m equally outraged at the pathetic White House response.
In the past, Trump repeatedly denounced President Barack Obama for having bowed to a Saudi king. But today Trump is not just bowing to a king; he’s kowtowing to a mad prince. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as M.B.S., has repeatedly manipulated Trump and Jared Kushner, for he knows how to push Americans’ buttons, and now it’s happening again: Trump is helping whitewash what appears to be the Saudi Arabian torture-murder of an international journalist.
Anne Applebaum at The Washington Post writes—Saudi Arabia’s information war to bury news of Jamal Khashoggi:
For the past several days, the Saudi Twittersphere has been awash with patriotism. Saudi accounts have tweeted, in Arabic, a “#message of love for Mohammed bin Salman” and encouraged one another to “#unfollow enemies of the nation.” The latter hashtag started trending at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, peaked at about 5 p.m., and by Wednesday had been mentioned 103,000 times.
This might have been because Saudi citizens, consumed by national indignation, took to their smartphones to show their support for the crown prince in his moment of difficulty: The disappearance and presumed murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Post columnist, under exceptionally grisly circumstances, has not been good for the international reputation of the royal family. But it’s equally possible that those hashtags were pushed by bots — fake, computerized accounts — as well as by paid, professional Internet trolls. After President Trump visited Riyadh in 2017, Marc Owen Jones, a Persian Gulf expert at the University of Exeter, tracked the accounts enthusiastically welcoming the U.S. president to Saudi Arabia. “Eighty to ninety percent of them were bots,” he told me.
Despite its medieval aspects, Saudi Arabia is in this sense a thoroughly modern authoritarian state: Over the past several years, the Saudi government has fine-tuned a sophisticated information policy, one that bears a distinct resemblance to the sort used in other states that have also learned to use social media for social control. As in Russia — where these things were first pioneered on a grand scale — the Saudi government understands that it is useless to silence the entire Internet. Instead, the regime floods the Twittersphere with patriotic messages designed to drown out critical or credible information.
Kelly Hayes and Jacqueline Keeler at NBC News Think/Opinion write Elizabeth Warren connected DNA and Native American heritage. Here's why that's destructive:
Making Native identity assumable, like a costume that can be worn on Halloween, erases the specific horrors Indigenous nations experience while also making future human rights violations possible. Treaties with Native nations, which have often been swept aside in the United States, can be factored out of the narrative if Native people are treated as a racial group with an oversimplified history of having been abused and mistreated “once upon a time.”
Meanwhile, outside of the fantasy of an appropriated identity, Native nations face real political peril at the hands of the Trump administration. “If tribes would have a choice of leaving Indian trust lands and becoming a corporation, tribes would take it," Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said, without evidence, at the 2017 National Tribal Energy Summit shortly after taking over the department.
Donald Trump’s personal resentment of Native people is also well documented. In 1993, while testifying in Congress before the Native American Affairs Committee, Trump said of Native casino operators, “they don't look like Indians to me, and they don't look like Indians to Indians.” As president, Trump has doggedly pursued the rollback of environmental protections, the expansion of pipelines and drilling and the opening of protected lands for commercial purposes — efforts that have put him in direct conflict Native people, who have traditionally played key roles on each of these political fronts, through activism, advocacy and governance. [...]
So what does this all have to do with Warren’s DNA test?
Most Americans are unacquainted with the true legal nature of Native identity; Warren's DNA test will doubtless muddy the waters considerably, dealing Native nations a real political blow. Although her primary intention was to push back against Trump’s goading and name calling, Warren has provided an unwitting assist to the conservative Goldwater Institute and other Republican initiatives that are attempting to take away tribal sovereignty.
Sandra Park at the Speak Freely/ACLU writes—How America Systematically Fails Survivors of Sexual Violence:
“Why didn’t you report?” is the refrain so many survivors face when they disclose violence for the first time. But too often, police dismiss survivors who go to law enforcement. This attitude results in governments’ decisions not to test thousands of rape kits in cities like Detroit, Albuquerque, and Washington DC, based on officers’ assumptions that there was no sexual assault. It also explains why one in three survivors feel less safe after contacting police.
Survivors also bear punishment for filing complaints. They are ostracized by their communities or accused of lying and prosecuted for false reporting, only to be exonerated years later. Sometimes cities enforce policies that hold victims responsible for crimes in their homes, resulting in their eviction.
Survivors are frequently denied employment, educational support, housing, and other benefits due to violence and harassment. They are retaliated against by supervisors for breaking their silence. Schools ignore their requests for accommodations or protection, pushing them out. Landlords evict them for resisting sexual demands. Veterans seeking disability benefits based on PTSD as a result of military sexual trauma are rejected unjustly, because they cannot meet a standard of corroboration that is not demanded of veterans with other forms of PTSD.
Branko Marcetic at In These Times writes—Trump’s Space Force Is No Joke:
In the rush to heap scorn upon the Trump administration, the president’s critics sometimes miss the forest for the trees. Such was the case in June when Donald Trump announced the creation of the socalled Space Force, a sixth branch of the U.S. military.
Critics mocked the idea as “ridiculous,” “stupid” and part of an “imaginary space war.” “There’s no threat in space! Who are we fighting?” asked Stephen Colbert. Voxwondered if the Space Force would carry lightsabers.
It was easy to miss that the idea is not uniquely Trumpian—and poses a real threat. For all intents and purposes, a space force already exists in the form of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), a 36,000-person division of the Air Force that’s been operating since 1982.
Where Trump’s proposal differs is that it forms an entirely new military branch devoted to space, something James Clay Moltz, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and author of The Politics of Space, says is “largely unprecedented.” [...]
The proposal is viewed by the space-savvy in the military as “either unwise, unnecessary or premature,” Moltz says—and almost certainly expensive. It’s on the basis of its potential wastefulness and redundancy that critics such as Defense Secretary James Mattis, ex-astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, Air Force secretary Heather Wilson and other members of the military have assailed the idea.
But there’s a much bigger debate to be had. International conflict in space is no longer a plotline ripped from a sci-fi paperback. A space war is becoming more and more likely.
Sam Wang, Ben Williams, and Rick Ober at The American Prospect write—How Gerrymandering Reform Can Win in the States:
Despite severe gerrymandering, Democrats stand a strong chance this November of regaining power in statehouses across America. If they realize those gains nationwide, they can use the resulting pro-reform climate to level the playing field for the next decade.
Increasingly, voters live near politically like-minded neighbors, a geographic pattern of population clustering that serves as the raw material for constructing gerrymanders. In 2010, Republicans used this raw material to create the most gerrymanders in modern history and consequently, a large political advantage. Even if Republicans lose the national popular vote by as much as 6 percentage points, we estimate that they still have an even-odds chance of retaining control of the House of Representatives. A good half of that advantage comes from creative districting in a handful of states. As a result, several dozen House seats in those states are nearly guaranteed to be occupied by Republicans in nearly any political climate. This advantage is like a levee, built to withstand waves of public opinion that favor the other side.
By Eric Alterman at The Nation writes—Why Do the Media Keep Parroting Trump’s Falsehoods?
The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale has been tracking Donald Trump’s lies since Inauguration Day, and in the first week of October, the number of falsehoods reached the second-highest point of his presidency, with 129. But Dale’s cut-off date meant that he didn’t include the October 10 op-ed signed by Trump attacking Democratic proposals for Medicare for all, which USA Today, incredibly, agreed to run. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who has also been tabulating Trump’s lies, concluded that “almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.” As if he were purposely trolling the fact-checkers, Trump actually linked to one of Kessler’s items that had previously debunked a false claim he was now making again. [...]
Thing is, Trump may indeed be nuts; but his constant lying is perhaps the least nutty thing about him. His relentless dishonesty works. Yes, the Postand the Star track his “falsehoods.” (So far, Kessler has called only one of them a “lie.”) The New York Times uses the word “lie” every once in a while. And, of course, Twitter fulminates. But the mainstream media almost always pass along his lies without prejudice. The same day as the USA Today op-ed, NBC News ran a story with the headline “Trump accuses Hillary Clinton of colluding with Russia as crowd chants ‘lock her up.’” Once again, everyone working at NBC News must have realized this accusation was a lie. But Trump clearly understands what he can get away with and—as ridiculous as this “I’m rubber, you’re glue” contention is—what works.[...]
Can democracy survive this? We shall see. Just don’t expect the men and women of the media to save us. Their job, as they define it, is to be lied to and then to repeat those lies in quotation marks.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News writes—Pa. can’t afford to wait until 2023 for a pit bull on climate change. But we might have to:
Pennsylvania's 47th governor did predict a fading future for fossil fuels — not so much as the great moral imperative of our times but because, in his words: "According to the economists, it's hard for power-generation companies to get capital in the capital markets for a fixed-site centralized power-generation plant right now." Wolf did say solar power is the future, and he talked about how his recent move on "closing borders" — a complicated concept most voters aren't familiar with — will help Pennsylvania generate more sun power right here. OK, that's good. So this was his kicker: "We are moving — I think — into a sustainable energy future. The question is, what are we doing in the meantime?"
I'm not sure either I or the state electorate knows the answer. Neither do many of Pennsylvania's environmentalists, who looked toward Wolf with great hope when he was first elected in 2014 with promises of an 180-degree reversal from the reign of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who was deeply indebted to Big Oil and Gas. In his first term, the York Democrat kept some of his promises for tighter regs on pollution in the fracking industry but backpedaled, or watered down, or even forgot about others. Full-time environmentalists say they're disappointed. Some citizen activists in the heart of fracking country are livid.