Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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Anonymous on the royal Crowns: no "there" there?
[Read the article: Why is Clinton struggling? Insert answer here]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... Obama's connection to the Crown family ...
It's not clear what the story is here. Breaking it down, it looks like a half dozen or so wealthy people contributed something under $50k total, over 4 years, to Barack Obama's various campaigns. Throw in maybe a few hundred thousand more — again, total, over 4 years — to the Democratic Party. Given that Obama's campaign is looking at an 8-figure budget for just the next 12 months, not to mention what the party is spending, that's in the tenths of a percent range. It's couch change.
In addition, none of the links cited show how the late Henry Crown was, indeed, the "power behind the scenes" at a company in which his investment company once owned a 20% share (now, if you follow the links, divested down to under 10%).
So in summary, there's a rich family with an investment portfolio that included some military-industrial stocks, whose members each gave Barack Obama and his party money. The donations were largely if not entirely within the legal limits imposed on political campaign contributions, and the total sums are a very small fraction of his total fundraising.
This is either a misguided effort, or the work of a Republican agent provocateur.
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Who wouldn't prefer not to work for a living?
[Read the article: The whole "working mother" thing actually works]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... research suggesting that nearly half of all working women want to give up their jobs to stay with their children and that women regularly limit their work hours to be with their children. Doesn't that suggest that a lot of mothers would be happy to just stay home?
Who wouldn't love to give up their day jobs to pursue their non-remunerative ambitions, child-related or otherwise? Very few of us are fortunate to love what we do for a living enough that it would be what we chose to do if we didn't need the money.
And as Broadsheet has pointed out in the past, Caitlin Flanagan's own career as a successful pundit is more work-from-home than stay-at-home — hardly a great example of how much happier women are (or anyone is) with nothing to do but play with the kids.
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Jason Wolfe on Reid's constituency
[Read the article: Harry Reid's FISA games]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Who are these Bush Enablers working for? I don't get it.
It's puzzling, isn't it? Take Harry Reid, for example. Embarrassing the GOP as minority leader, putting his foot down over Olsen, and denying Bush recess appointments are all real moves that pretty much guarantee lasting enmity from the Bush regime. Right-wingers are foaming at the mouth over anti-Reid talking points coming out of the White House. There's some serious hate going on there. And yet at the same time Reid's own constituents are, overall, unhappy with him — and the recent actions against Dodd that Glenn Greenwald documents show that he's an astonishingly poor team player.
He's a career politician with no evident desire to cash in on his influence through a move to the private sector. He doesn't appear to be enriched personally by any of this. (At least not more than most Senators with 20-whatever years under their belts.) So what's the deal? Is he making anyone happy?
Glenn Greenwald is sniffing around the right hydrant, I think, when he writes:
Until Congressional Democrats know that there are consequences from siding with the administration and attacking their actual suppoters, they will continue to do that.
Let's go back to Reid again. Interestingly, Republicans in Nevada are as close to unanimous as it gets in their contempt for Reid — a senator who could not have returned to Congress with the highest margin of his career without substantial support from the red side of the state. So in under a year he's managed to piss them off something fierce. Meanwhile Nevada Democrats appear to continue to support him by a substantial majority. So he is making someone happy after all.
I don't know much about the vagaries of Nevada political demographics but by the numbers it would appear that Reid's unpopularity at home is, counter to the overall trend documented extensively in "Unclaimed Territory," due mostly to Republican outrage and is mitigated by strong approval from Democrats.
So there's a lot of evidence that what Reid is doing is what his core constituents — Nevada Democrats — want him to. If that's true, and his situation applies more generally, it suggests the inconvenient possibility that it's not that corrupt party elites are out of touch with their rank and file, but rather that the rank and file aren't ready to embrace progressive views.
Not nearly as dramatic, unfortunately, nor as easy to shake one's fist at in impotent rage — these are regular people who share a desire to end the war, restore American stature, end corruption and so on, but need more persuasion before they're "on board" all the way.