Historiann

Jeralyn Merritt explains her point of view on Medicare eligibility, which I share:

If President Obama backs raising the age of medicare, which won’t save the Government money in the long run due to the huge numbers of 65 and 66 year olds who will shift to Medicaid and who will break the backs of small businesses providing health care to elderly workers — and which will force middle class elderly workers who don’t have employer paid health care to pay premiums of ten thousand dollars a year or more for two more years, with huge deductibles and out of pocket costs, he doesn’t deserve a second term as Democratic President. Let him run as as Republican or go home to Chicago. He will have sold us out.

I am a knowledge worker who outside of voluntary gardening or home improvement chores has the privilege of working with my brain in a climate-controlled environment.  However, I have two elderly relatives who although mentally and physically disabled from infancy, Continue Reading »

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Lynn Lubamersky, an Associate Professor of History at Boise State University, makes a pretty good case for using Skype instead of flying faculty and grad students around North America to (usually) northern cities in early January:

[S]ome history departments like mine have tried Skype to do initial screening interviews, and I think that it is a much more humane and effective method of seeing who is best for the job. At first, I thought that using Skype was useful because it is free, but that we should return to the AHA when the economy improves. But now I feel that interviewing via Skype is a better way to find the best job candidates.

Why? Because job-seekers are not required to travel across the country and the world to pay for the opportunity to be interviewed, and they have more control over the presentation of self. Instead of all the candidates appearing relatively the same in a sterile environment, the job candidates interview in their own offices or even kitchens, taking the opportunity to position themselves to best advantage.

I’m with her entirely–using Skype saves everyone’s time, money, and carbon emissions to boot.  And I think the arguments about the greater economic justice for using Skype make it an absolute slam-dunk.  I’ve been on search committees that wanted to inteview people at the American Historical Association’s annual convention, but because of a candidate’s recent surgery, recent or impending childbirth, or perhaps because of plain ol’ poverty, some prospects were unable to meet with us there.

But with respect to Lubamersky’s last point about the charm of seeing people in their home or work environments–I’m a little whingy about considering that at all when considering someone for a job: Continue Reading »

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Didja hear the latest awesome news about the U.S. economy?

Well, Kevin Baker called his shot about Obama more than two years ago:

Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believeing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.
. . . . .

Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past–without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, his is bound to fail.

Continue Reading »

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Once again, something that would be a funny Onion parody, except that it’s on the level (h/t Tom at Romantoes.) And the “funny” thing here in Colorado is that it’s the Democratic Governor who has proposed slashing the K-12 budget! (Then again, he’s taking a much smaller whack out of the higher education budget, which has been the unencumbered piggybank the state’s been raiding for the past three years. That’s what counts as “good news” these days, I guess.)

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I heard the speech tonight while running.  My short reaction?  State Department: 1.  Department of Defense: 0.  I think it’s a speech that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and human rights advisor Samantha Power are very comfortable with.

I thought the speech presented a convincing narrative for the intervention in Libya and a solid articulation of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.  Do I love the prospect of another open-ended occupation of an Arab or Middle-Eastern country (or any other country, for that matter?)  Of course not.  But I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect an American president to restrict his foreign policy to stamping out the flaming bags of poop left on the doorstep by the previous administration.  And Obama was elected with more of a mandate for his foreign policy vision than any president since. . . John F. Kennedy?  (That’s my guess.  In the twentieth century, most Democratic presidents have been elected for their domestic policy agendas, with perhaps the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s re-election and Kennedy’s “missle gap” strategy.)

This was the peculiar genius and daring of the Bush/Cheney regime:  they were unafraid to use their power, consequences beyond re-election be damned.  They knew that it was a lot easier to start wars than to end them, and to tear apart cities and institutions than to rebuild them, so they always knew which side they wanted to be on.  (And they were also able judges of the Democrats and the media, whom they knew would be too wimpy and internally divided to mount a serious and principled opposition in the face of a full-throated cry for wars of vengeance.)

Of course, hindsight is an infinitely wise judge, and how the “Obama Doctrine” is regarded by history will all depend on its effectiveness.  Continue Reading »

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It’s been quite a week for celebrity women’s deaths:  first Elizabeth Taylor, and now the first woman to run for Vice President on a major party ticket in the United States, Geraldine Ferraro.  I thought of the several obits I’ve seen that Joan Walsh’s was the very best, bar none.  She’s someone who gets both the New York political and national women’s historical context of Ferraro’s life, her 1984 candidacy, and her unfortunate remarks about Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. (Just go read Walsh–do it!  Do it now!) 

And now, something I should have posted in honor of Elizabeth Taylor but seems relevant for Ferraro too:  Continue Reading »

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UPDATED MARCH 23: POLLITT RESPONDS, HISTORIANN RETRACTS SNARKY BITS

Then don't bother writing for The Nation, darling!

Via TalkLeft, we learn that Katha Pollitt is (once again) shocked, shocked to find there’s sexism at the house organ of the so-called American “Left,”  The Nation magazine!

It’s been a long time since anyone seriously maintained that women in power, simply by virtue of their gender, are reliably less warlike than men—how could they be, given that men set up and control the system through which those women must rise? But apparently Nation blogger Robert Dreyfuss has just noticed this fact.

In a post entitled “Obama’s Women Advisers Pushed War Against Libya” (originally titled “Obama’s Women” tout court) he’s shocked-shocked-shocked that UN Ambassador Susan Rice, human-rights adviser Samantha Power and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were keen on intervening militarily in Libya. The piece is dotted with arch and sexist language—the advisers are a “troika,” a “trio” who “rode roughshod over the realists in the administration” (all men) and “pushed Obama to war.” Now it’s up to the henpecked President to “reign (sic) in his warrior women.” Interestingly, the same trope—ballbreaking women ganging up on a weak president—is all over the rightwing blogosphere.

.       .       .       .      .       .      .       .      

[C]an you imagine a piece in The Nation titled “Black President Opts for Bombs” or “Qaddafi, a Man, Threatens to Massacre Rebels, Most of Whom Are Also Men”?

Misogyny—it’s the last acceptable prejudice of the left.  Continue Reading »

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Sausage party!

Who says the humanities are feminized disciplines?  Not the real he-men at the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Check out this list of the winners of the 2010 National Humanities Medals (h/t reader, commenter, and BFF Shaz.)  Notice anything, friends?  Click here–I’ll wait. 

Let’s go over the list of everyone who’s won a National Humanities Medal since its inception: Continue Reading »

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Given the massive attack on organized labor that’s afoot in the U.S. these days, tt’s nice to see that it’s not just the Arab world out protesting in the streets.  I’ve been enormously impressed by the scenes in Madison and following news and commentary as I can.  Here are some interesting things I’ve found around the web:

• In “Plutocracy Now,” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has a nice, succinct historical explanation for our current situation:  “How did we get here? In the past, after all, liberal politicians did make it their business to advocate for the working and middle classes, and they worked that advocacy through the Democratic Party. But they largely stopped doing this in the ’70s, leaving the interests of corporations and the wealthy nearly unopposed. The story of how this happened is the key to understanding why the Obama era lasted less than two years.”  I’d disagree with that last sentence, in that the “Obama era” was clearly a continuation of the abandonment of labor by the Dems, who were more enamored with their “creative class” than the working class.  But Drum still presents a useful narrative for understanding why labor’s back is against the wall now.
• Big Tent Democrat over at TalkLeft points out the obvious foolishness of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s exemption of the police and firefighters’ unions from his assault on collective bargaining rights because “he couldn’t take the risk of cops and firefighters going out on strike and allow mayhem to ensue:”  “[U]nless police and firefighters are not prohibited from striking by law (think PATCO), permitting them collective bargaining rights makes the use of a strike more likely, not less. Indeed, Walker’s argument provides stronger support for limiting the collective bargaining rights of police and firefighters than for other state employees. After all, if state employees who are not police and firefighters can strike without causing mayhem, then there is less risk in permitting them collective bargaining rights. But of course nothing Walker has said on the subject has made any sense at face value.”
• Others have made this point already, but what do you notice, friends, about the differences in the makeup of the police and firefighters’ unions versus the public employees and teachers’ unions? Continue Reading »

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Representation without Taxation!

I’m sure you’ve all heard recently of the dismal survey that shows that Americans refuse to consider to pay higher taxes even as they refuse to support cuts in government services.  Gee, I wish we had a Transformational President or some visionary state governors who would point out the fact that 1) Americans have historically paid much higher taxes, and 2) that our federal taxes are more regressive than they have been in the past.  Instead, we have a President and a Congress who are pantomiming their “seriousness” by suggesting that cuts in WIC and PBS are the solution, and we in Colorado have a “Democratic” governor who released his new budget plan:  “Spending on K-12 education would take the biggest hit in state history, colleges would get less money, state employees would see less in their checks and Colorado would close four parks and a prison under a revised budget Gov. John Hickenlooper unveiled Tuesday.”

What, according to Hickenlooper, is the key to our financial crisis?  “‘[w]e have to change the culture of the state,’ the governor said. ‘We have to find ways to make the entire culture of the state more pro-business.’”

Well, what about raising the incredibly low, regressive taxes we “enjoy” here in Colorado?

However, Hickenlooper said raising taxes was a non-starter.

“There is still a deep-seated belief out there that in this economy, people don’t want to pay more taxes,” he said. Continue Reading »

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