Category: The Dish

Bill, that is. Tom Edsall sums up what a lot of us have been observing:

Although little noticed, Obama has been challenging influential Democratic primary constituencies at a rate of about once a month, building what now is a significant record of dissent from key party factions. He has taken on civil rights groups, the National Education Association, and the powerful lobby opposed to any changes in Social Security benefits.

Appearing May 13 on ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Obama suggested that he is prepared to consider a major alteration of affirmative action policy to make it less racially based and more economically rooted:

"My daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged," he said. "I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."

In the same May 13 interview, Obama said he would consider raising both the retirement age and payroll taxes as part of a package to put Social Security on a stable fiscal basis. "Everything should be on the table," Obama said, although he rules out privatization.

A month later, in a June 7 talk at a Spartanburg, South Carolina Baptist Church, Obama pointedly challenged black men who abandon their children:

"There are a lot of men out there who need to stop acting like boys; who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; you need to know that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one,"

And in Philadelphia, at a July 5 National Education Association meeting, Obama endorsed merit pay — anathema to teachers’ unions. "If you excel at helping your students achieve success, your success will be valued and rewarded as well," Obama said, careful to add, "I want to work with teachers. I’m not going to do it to you, I’m going to do it with you."

Well, it’s a change election, like 1992. And Obama represents change for Democrats as well as the country.

Not an encouraging news round-up:

A Kurdish journalist, for example, was given 18 months in prison last year because his online writing criticized leaders of the Kurdish region in Iraq. A Saudi spent 13 days in jail for online writing that warned about the power of religious extremists in Saudi Arabia. And a Libyan journalist who wrote critical articles about Libyan officials for London-based Libyan opposition Web sites was mysteriously gunned down in 2005, activists said.

And a photo Glenn Reynolds will love.

Bloomberg’s nanny-state ratchets it up a notch.

A wild-eyed theory about the chief justice.

Some web-activists, a few paper flags, and a blog. It may make a few of you feel better.

A publisher caves to Islamist pressure.

More and more are openly gay; and more and more are being accepted as equals. The next generation is changing the world in ways my generation only dreamed of. And the courage taken to do this is occurring at a younger and younger age. If the GOP doesn’t understand this – and understand that their hostility to gay dignity is damaging them deeply among future voters – then they are facing a wilderness.

West Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2.30 pm.

The feeling is widespread, it seems:

I couldn’t agree more with your comments. After I graduated from college I worked in book publishing for a few years. Rather than get a normal 9-to-5 entry-level job sending faxes and fetching coffee, I stumbled into a handful of projects that let me do relatively high level work — specifically, editing book copy on a more or less freelance basis. But it didn’t add up to much income (evidence itself of how highly editing was valued) and I wasn’t on any clear career track. So I had a few people I’d gotten to know in publishing arrange advice sessions for me with about a half-dozen top NY editors. With varying degrees of vehemence, every one of them (including, ironically, Nan Talese) told me to get out of the book industry. One explicitly told me "Book publishing is no place for people who love books." Several of them said that, if they had it to do again, they’d go into another profession.

This was almost 20 years ago; everything I’ve seen and read leads me to conclude it’s gotten considerably worse since then.