Year: 2012

A Response to McReynolds: ‘Romney’s Decline and Fall’

David McReynolds threw out his two cents on Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as running mate. I respond below, followed below by his original post: I think John Nichols called it. Romney knows he will lose, and does not want the GOP hard right to blame his “centrism” for the defeat. So he picks Ryan so that the GOP can have a grand old debate on whose fault the loss of ’12 was. Here’s the fact that those of us who view things with a long haul lens, should not forget: demographic shifts (i.e. immigration) will produce a Texas that leans blue in 2016 and is solid blue by 2020. Texas is a game-changer. With all its electoral votes, it changes the presidential strategy for a generation…or more. Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida – all are irrelevant. The Democrats can carry the majority vote in national elections with an ease that […]

The Sandpiper Serves as Lookout Against the Ferals.

I’m taking a mental health day; smoking a cigar on the fire escape. I bought my Padron at the Humidor, a neighborhood spot where the old men can smoke their stogies on the leather couches inside. They’re watching coverage of the Greek elections like it’s a soccer game. I’m not sure which side they’re on. I take the opportunity to refill our bird feeders. Bay Ridge doesn’t have a lot of bio-diversity. We get lots of finches and the occasional mourning dove. Lately there’s been a couple of sand pipers to enliven the scene. They’re beautiful. Their tail feathers are slightly robotic in motion. I hear a bird whistling like an alarm. Is she pissed that I won’t vacate the fire escape so she and her comrades can enjoy the new snacks we’ve laid out for them? I notice it’s one of the sand pipers alerting all the other birds […]

A New Low in Social Media

In my never-ending quest to figure what the hell is going on in the social media world and how we can use it to organize for a better world, I’ve been kicking around on Tumblr. I first discovered this thanks to my 17-year-old cousin, whose tumblr (I won’t link to it; you can’t make me) is a mesmerizing mess of “will you date me?” quizzes, Megaman fan art, Topless Tuesday feminist critiques, Topless Tuesday reposts, animated porn gifs, animated Tyler the Creator gifs, animated “SLC Punk” gifs, “open this pit up” memes and other various and sundry glimpses into our younger generation and decaying society. It’s an animated train wreck that’s hard to look away from. Thankfully, Kate is mesmerized, so I have an excuse to continue to troll my cousin’s tumblr. We’ve actually created our own tumblr, but that’s a secret so you can’t see it. I’ve discovered that […]

Review: James P. Cannon and Origins of the American Revolutionary Left

Quitting the Socialist Party freed me to commit the twin heresies of reading V.I. Lenin and Michael Harrington. My political perspective hasn’t changed very much, but my perspective has become more nuanced. This leaves me very familiar with American social democratic theory and with the twists and turns of the old Socialist Party, as well as its last major off-shoots, and, thanks to Si Gerson’s library, with the external work and internal factionalism of the Communist Party, at least up until 1960. But the history of the American Trotskyite movement has remained a willful gap in my knowledge, mostly because I tend to find modern-day Trotskyites so interminable. Bryan D. Palmer’s “James P. Cannon and the American Revolutionary Left” begins to fill in some of that gap. Cannon is best known (to the extent that he’s known at all) as a father of American Trotskyism and founder of the Socialist […]

Introducing…

I flew back from New Orleans yesterday feeling a little under the weather. Ordinarily, it’s the sort of thing I would power through. But the prospect of also having to push my way through the teeming masses of Super Bowl celebrants (good game, that) just to get in the front door of my office left me with a very definite case of Blue Flu. On my day off, I helped a very talented local artist set up her personal website. May I introduce to you my wife, Kate Ostler. Oh, yeah. By the way, this happened while I was neglecting my own website.

The Reds in the Bleachers

Bill Mardo, sportswriter for the Daily Worker newspaper, died last week. His NY Times obituary notes his column’s crusading role in pressing for the racial integration of Major League Baseball in the 1940’s. “In the years before the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson as the first black player in modern organized baseball, Mr. Mardo was a leading voice in a campaign by The Daily Worker against racism in the game, a battle it had begun in 1936 when Lester Rodney became its first sports editor. … The Daily Worker asked fans to write to the New York City baseball teams urging them to sign Negro league players at a time when the major leagues had lost much of their talent to military service. A milestone in baseball history and the civil rights movement arrived in October 1945 when Robinson signed a contract with the Dodgers’ organization, having reached an agreement […]

Charter School Board Conundrum

A conundrum that charter schools face when recruiting prestigious one percenty-types (celebrities, politicians, stockbrokers and lawyers) to serve on their governing boards is that, yes, this may open the school up to more charitable giving. But, people with outrageous fortunes sometimes came to them through outrageous means. When a school board member is hoisted on his own petard, to what extent should that reflect on the school? Old-fashioned school district school boards – however incompetent, corrupt or amateurish – have the benefit of being democratically elected by the people, and therefore, NOT OUR SCHOOL’S FAULT when they go to jail for their own idiocy. In the era of charter schools, where governing boards are corporations appointed through insular networks of money and influence, things get tricker. Take the scary situation of Bronx Charter School for the Arts, an otherwise lovely and totally rare arts-centric (in this day of standardized math […]