It is a gorgeous day outside and hope that everyone is having some fun today. But if you are inside catching up on paperwork, reading or just looking through recipes for goodies to cook for Super Bowl Sunday (yawn), use this thread to talk about what interests you today or news we should be paying attention to.
First up, Mayor Cory Booker speaking about Gov. Christie’s call to put the civil rights of gay people to vote of NJ citizens:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Z7tl7Vy8U[/youtube]
I want to know why we can’t get this guy to be Mayor of Wilmington. No matter though — this is the perfect response to the idea that we should put anyone’s civil rights to a vote.
Ryan Lizza has a great long piece in the New Yorker called, The Obama Memos, The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency. This is a fascinating read — Lizza got his hands on a big pile of Obama Administration memos and uses what he learns from these to show how the President’s original post-partisan idea became eventually not operative. This is a long piece, but worth reading. Lizza got his hands on a memo from Larry Summers and the economic advisors group that provides a roadmap to much of the Obama Administration’s legislative agenda. And that stimulus that was too small? That was on purpose and the reasoning behind that (and it looks more detailed than what could pass Congress) is shown here. There’s lots more, on the stimulus, on the health care fight and budget austerity there.
Ebony Magazine has an interview with Van Jones who talks about the OWS, why he left the White House and other topics. He has a book coming out on March — and something tells me that his group will be pretty visible during the Presidential campaign. At least, I hope so.
Jay Rosen is a must-read journalism critic, and he has posted his Brief Theory of the Republican Party, 2012:
A Brief Theory of the Republican Party: 2012
In so far as a political party in the United States can “decide” anything, the party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. And so it is having that fight now, during the 2012 election season, but in disguised form. The results are messy and confusing.
There’s more at the link.
Lastly and not least, is a great article from Beth Miller at the NJ on what an increased minimum wage would mean to folks who are (mostly) making minimum wage. Good on the NJ for giving folks who make minimum wage the chance to tell people what this means to them.