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In line with thetrend of traditionally liberal mainstream media outlets embracing establishment Republican voices, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt is reportedlydiscussing getting his own show with MSNBC. Hewitt, who was hired by The Washington Post in February 2017 as a columnist, would join recent MSNBC acquisition from Fox News Greta Van Susteren at MSNBC. However, MSNBC isnt the only media outletignoring complaints from progressives that the network panders too much to the center and establishment.

The New York Times recently hired Wall Street Journalcolumnist Bret Stephens, a move which has sparked criticism due to the fact that in past columns he has claimedthat climate change, institutional racism, and campus rape are imaginary enemies of liberalism. In Stephens first column, he backtracks by writing thatclimate change is real but contends that skepticism of the threat it poses is justified by science.

While The New York Times and MSNBC have shifted toward the center to embrace the demographic of Republicans that voted for Mitt Romney butare anti-Trump, they leave progressives without representationon their platform, despite the overwhelming, nationwide popularity of Sen.Bernie Sanders. The New York Times op-ed section included two staunch defenders of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries, Paul Krugman and Charles Blow, who often defendedClintonby attacking Sanders. MSNBC includes Joy Reid as a host on their network, who elevated critics of Sanders like Al Giordano, a random anti-Sanders Twitter troll. The other leading network hosts, like Rachel Maddow, have propagated disingenuous narratives about Sanders supporters as well. No MSNBC host representsany semblance of progressive ideas. In fact, when MSNBC provided coverage confirming Sanders supporters criticisms offormer DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz during the Democratic primaries, MSNBC President Phil Griffin halted the coverage after receiving an angry phone call from Wasserman Schultz.

In addition to conservative hires, several mainstream media outlets have hired former Clinton staffers to join their ranks. The Washington Post hired former Clinton campaign Chair John Podesta in February 2017. CNN brought on ClintonPress Secretary Brian Fallon as a contributor. Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri has been regularly featured in the TheWashington Postand MSNBC. Clintoncampaign Manager Robby Mook has made several appearances on mainstream news networksas he continues propagating the narrative that Russia interfered in the election to avoid responsibility for Clintons election loss. This revolving door of political staffers joining mainstream media outlets before their next gig in politics has become standard practice within the industry, and its rotting it from within.

Instead of making hiresto account for the lack of progressives in media, MSNBC, The New York Times, and other mainstream media outlets have shifted toward the right, hoping to make a dent inFox News ratings. This shift is part of a broader movement from the political and corporate media establishment to continue brushing off Sanders and his progressive supporters as the far left. This pejorative categorization of the far left suggeststhat progressives are radical, fringe and have little support. On the contrary, Sanders widespread popularity both within his base and outside of it are a testament to the fact that progressive policies are no longer fringe. Rather, they are deliberately ignored by the corporate media establishmentas they attempt to mitigate the popularity of these policy proposals. In doing so, mainstream media continues to descend into irrelevancy and broadens its disconnect with Americans, whose mistrust in mainstream media is at anall-time high.

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Liberal Mainstream Media Continues Blacking Out Progressives, Hires Conservatives - Observer

As the United States wraps up the first 100 days of Donald Trumps administration the worst first 100 days of any administration, according to various assessmentsmillions of Americans are expressing horrified surprise not at that abysmal record, (itll get worse in the second 100 days), but rather, at former President Barak Obamas speaking fee: $400,000 for a talk on health care, to a Wall Street firm. And in the wake of this (not so) shocking news item, yet more articles are being published reminding us of the reality of his actions, behind the beautiful faade of the elegant, loving, scandal-free model family.

Before that, and scandal-ridden as he was, Bill Clinton was described by TV political show host Rachel Maddow as the best Republican president this country ever had. Maddows description is a sad variation on the sorry refrain we hear in progressive circles today, that the reason we got into the mess we are currently in, is our leniency with what has come to be considered the left. Indeed, we seem to fall very easy prey to the power of grammatically-correct, eloquent statements, even when they are utterly belied by the speakers actions.

Obama, as well as the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, are only a few of the many politicians that have completely departed from a stated commitment to progressive causes, into implementing actions that range from neo-liberal to outright hawkish. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, who will receive an Israel advocacy award from StandWithUs on May 7th, is another such example.

Murrays record is exemplary of that of fake progressives and their subservience to established systems of oppression and disenfranchisement. Most recently, in the wake of Trumps Muslim and Immigrant Ban, he defiantly stated that Seattle will remain a sanctuary city, even as the Seattle Police Department stopped transit service to the Sea-Tac International Airport to stem the flow of protesters heading there. Before that, and also during his administration, members of the Seattle Police Department went on counter-terrorism seminars in Israel sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, a Zionist organization more concerned with Israel advocacy than with the defense of civil rights. Not surprisingly, considering the fact that the Israeli military and police are invested in defending an illegal occupation and repressing the indigenous impulse towards freedom and dignity, the Seattle Police Department is now under consent decree because of the racism and violence it has characteristically engaged in. Murray has also facilitated the building of a new youth jail in the historically African American part of the city, despite sustained opposition from his constituents. And while he expressed his opposition to that facility, it was his administration that granted the permits, and his lawyers who joined the countys efforts to deny anti-prison organizers the opportunity to be heard, to appeal the permits for the new jail. Today, as Palestinian prisoners in Israels jails are currently engaged in a hunger strike for dignity and human rights, up to 750 prisoners in the Northwest Detention Center, one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country, are currently on hunger strike to protest their appalling conditions. And while Murray is not directly in charge of that prison, immigrant rights organizers say that Washington state politicians claim that they will not follow through with Trumps immigration ban is proving to be a paper tiger. The connections between the two hunger strikes, one just outside of Seattle, the other in Israeli jails, will be foregrounded with a solidarity rally by Palestinian rights activists on May 13th, days after Murray will have been honored by StandWithUs.

Like other fake progressives, Mayor Murray consistently denounces racism, issuing statement upon statement about his city being welcoming, tolerant, a sanctuary, yet rather than side with the victims of racism, he has chosen to align himself with an apartheid country whose very existence as the Jewish state hinges on discrimination. An openly gay man, he has also jumped on the pinkwashing bandwagon, and agreed to keynoting a pinkwashing conference in Israel in 2015, despite appeals from the Seattle queer community to stop promoting that country as a gay haven, when in fact it misrepresents its own intolerance, and exploits regional homophobia, to distract from its egregious overall human rights abuses.

According to StandWithUss event information, Murray is being honored for standing up to anti-Israel pressure, and remaining a good friend of the Seattle-area Jewish community. StandWithUss claim is intentionally misrepresentative, as the Zionist organization knows full well that many members of the Seattle-area Jewish community, from the vibrant Jewish Voice for Peace local leadership and general membership, to the many Jewish members of QuAIA-Seattle (Queers Against Israeli Apartheid), are completely opposed to Zionism. Similarly, members of the Seattle-area Jewish community are spearheading the newly-launched JVP Deadly Exchange campaign, which seeks to end US-Israeli police partnerships.

Yet even as ample documentation keeps streaming in from various quarters, including the Israeli government itself, that Israel is an apartheid country that consistently, systematically, engages in human rights violations, Murray stands not with his own constituents, and not with the progressive Jewish community in Seattle, but with apologists for Zionism.

Murray is currently the incumbent in a mayoral race with another nine candidates, and is attempting to sound more progressive in his bid to be re-elected in a liberal city. Nevertheless, at the close of his four-year tenure as mayor, (and well over 20 years in political office in King County) Murray is not being honored by immigrants, youth activists, anti-prison organizers, people of color, the homeless, the queer community, but rather, by StandWithUs, an organization devoted to sugarcoating violent racist settler-colonialism.

Obama was our first black president, Hillary Clinton would have been our first female president, Ed Murray is Seattles first openly gay mayor, in an interracial marriage. These are indeed social breakthroughs. But at this critical juncture, we need to look beyond the symbolism of an individual. Throughout history, the greatest progressive leaders and organizers, even when grounded in the issue closest to their circumstances, have understood the global interconnectedness of oppressive systems. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to end segregation and voter disenfranchisement, but he also opposed war and militarism overseas. Nelson Mandela knew that the freedom of black South Africans was incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians. At the grassroots level, Palestinians understand that the struggle to block the North Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock is a struggle for indigenous sovereignty. Today, the organizers of the International Womens Strike oppose sexism, but also racism and colonialism around the globe.

At this juncture, as the US critically needs to free itself from the grip of corrupt politicians and the devastation they are wreaking on all our social networks, the question we need to ask is how we can avoid more fake progressives in the future.

One answer may well be that we need to look away from politicians, and focus on amplifying and escalating the work grassroots organizers are doing, with no ambition to holding political office. We can put all our energy into uplifting the efforts of our community members, rather than our supposed representatives.

But since political offices must be filled, we need to support our organic leaders as they shoulder that role. And we must always, always, stay away from Zionists and Israel apologists. Because support for Israel, with its well-documented institutionalized racism, hypermilitarism, settler-colonialism, its violation of international law and the human rights of its indigenous community, is a fail-proof indicator of moral corruption and disrespect for disenfranchised communities everywhere.

Link:
Fake progressives - Mondoweiss

Today as I write marks the first 100 days of President Donald Trump's administration. It's almost an abomination of equating the concept of 100 days to Trump, since this comes from President Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933. That was a remarkable beginning of his administration, when a variety of economic programs were enacted to confront the severity of the Great Depression. He set the standard for the beginning of any administration, and few, if any, subsequent ones have come anywhere close to the mark with the exception of Lyndon Johnson's first full 100 days after his election in 1964 following the Kennedy assassination. By comparison, Trump is a joke, since, in his first 100 days, instead of pursing policies to help people, his proposals have been aimed at hurting people. For example, the Republican health care plan that tried to change Obamacare would have thrown millions off of their health insurance.

Trump's first 100 days have been further filled with attacks on our constitutional liberties and an assault on federal programs that provide a safety net for Americans. Instead, as seen in both his version of a new health insurance program and in his proposed tax cuts, everything about his administration is to support the very rich. Trump's beginning is largely a failure with respect to any achievements. On the other hand, he continues to succeed in polarizing the country and emboldening the extreme right including anti-immigrant nativists and those harboring racist views to people of color. Trump stands for an America of the past with all of its troubling aspects and is totally against the reality of the new diverse America that is the future of the country.

One other success can be linked to Trump's first 100 days: He has helped to create a new progressive opposition that is involving millions of Americans who will not succumb to Trump's authoritarian state. The massive demonstrations throughout the country and the confrontation at congressional town hall meetings are all testimony of a new political movement to first defend our rights and the federal programs that support people.

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However, this defensive movement has to also begin to go on the offensive looking forward to the 2018 elections and the defeat of the Republicans in the House and Senate. The system may be corrupt and failing, but progressives still have to work through it, especially with respect to the electoral system. As Csar Chvez said, we can work in the system but not with it. People power can make a difference in changing the entrenched institutions of power, and we have to take advantage of it. Progressives have to remember that their aim is not just to change people in power and their hate speech, but also to begin to change the institutions. We need to keep our eyes on the prize. It is not just getting rid of the Trumpities but the system that gives rise to Trumpism. We have to remain optimistic that this can be done and that it will be done.

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Trump at 100 days: It's time for progressives to go on the offensive - National Catholic Reporter (blog)

Rex Features via AP Images

Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden walk through the the Capitol for Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony.

On Monday in this space, our columnist and colleague Paul Waldman addressed the subject of why liberals are upset about Barack Obama taking a $400,000 speaking fee from a Wall Street firm, Cantor-Fitzgerald, for a speech scheduled for September.

Waldman opined, You'd almost think Obama had begun lobbying for the repeal of Dodd-Frank, or maybe gone on a seal-clubbing expedition. He continued, in an affectionate reminiscence about the Obama presidency, that a lot of the liberal disappointment or anger reflected upset at the contrast between Obama and Trump.

I cant speak for other liberals or progressives, but here are some thoughts about my own disappointment.

As the contrast with Trump vividly reinforces, Barack Obama was one of the most principled, thoughtful, and honorable people ever to serve as president. He was a model of dignity and probity.

His biggest mistakeand in my view anyway, a mistake that undermined his presidencywas to turn to the very people who had deregulated Wall Street as his senior economic team. These were the protgs of former Citibank and Goldman chieftain and top Clinton economic official Robert Rubin, many of whom had led the parade to let Wall Street run wild.

These included Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke (a carryover Bush appointee reappointed by Obama), but also other denizens of the Wall Street-Washington revolving door who not only supported deregulation but also austerity, and deregulation disguised as trade, such as Peter Orszag and Michael Froman.

When Obama took office, Paul Volcker was sidelined by this crowd, as too radical on the subject of regulation. That noted Bolshevik, Paul Volcker!

This team was basically in place before the November election, when the banking system collapsed in September 2008. Obamas program was so closely associated with a politics of propping the financial system up rather than cleaning it out, that when a CNBC agitator, Rick Santelli, ranting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (!), called for a Tea Party revolt, Santelli had more credibility as a populist than Obama did. This prefigured Donald Trump.

And when the Obama austerity team prematurely projected a recovery summer for 2010, killed legislation for a second stimulus, and warmly supported the Wall Street-inspired Bowles-Simpson Commission, Obama helped set himself up for the epic Democratic congressional defeat in the 2010 midterm elections.

Thus Wall Streets gift to Obama and the Democrats: a team of Rubins, austerity economics, and a Democratic Party that looked to Middle America like it represented somebody else.

So when Obama accepts a $400,000 Wall Street gig, this produces not just disappointment but a deep concern about a tactical tin ear and a continuing association that is politically toxic for a progressive reconnection with working people who turned to Trump. It reminds us of another leading Democratic figure with an even tinnier ear, one Hillary Clinton.

Obama, of course, has a perfect right to take the money. Thats not the question. The question is whether this is a good idea, both for Obama and for the Democrats.

Obama is now a wealthy man. His net worth is estimated around $13 million and rapidly rising. He will become much wealthier, from his books and from plenty of speaking engagements that will produce an annual income well into seven figures.

I dont object to the occasional high dollar speech, but lets see more speeches to groups seeking racial reconciliation, or to groups pursuing better job opportunities for working America, or to any venue other than Wall Street.

Obama taking that kind of money from Wall Street reinforces the impression that the very rich really do control it all; that maybe there is not so much difference between a thug billionaire former developer president and a polished former law professor ex-presidentthey are both too comfortable with the moneyed class.

One could understand and even condone Obamas walking on eggshells on the fraught subjects of race and class while he was president. But now he is free at lastfree to exercise constructive influence on the public debate. Free to personify a salutary contrast with Donald Trumpand with Wall Street.

So thats why this particular liberal thought it sadand sadly emblematicthat Obama takes a sum from Wall Street for one speech that is about ten times what the average American makes in a year. It had nothing to do with nostalgia, except maybe for FDR.

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Liberals, Obama, and that Wall Street Speaking Fee - The American Prospect

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"Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."

Like many generalizations, this "fundamental law" of American politics, as outlined by conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer some 15 years ago, is overly broad. But it nonetheless captures something important and true about our world. Let's focus on the latter half of this maxim. It's true that liberal writers, journalists, and policy intellectuals have long expressed a level of moral outrage and even disgust about their ideological opponents that rivals and often surpasses what one typically encounters on the other side. (At the grassroots, the reverse has tended to be true, with conservatives often directing greater animosity at their ideological opponents.)

As President Trump has moved the Republican Party away from conservatism and in the direction of right-wing populism, nationalism, and anti-globalism, the liberal tendency toward moral denunciation hasn't diminished. On the contrary, it's only intensified, leading progressives to double down on their longstanding habit of seeking wherever possible to excommunicate the right from the realm of democratic argument and debate.

If liberals hope to regain the ground they've lost in recent years, they really need to change these tactics, which as often as not are self-defeating.

As I've argued on previous occasions, declaring opponents unacceptable, illegitimate, and out of bounds is a perennial temptation. That's because politics always takes place on two distinct levels. On one level is the back and forth of partisan conflict, involving persuasion, argument, electoral battles, triumphs, and defeats. On this level, pretty much anything goes as long as it abides by the rules of the political game. But there's also a second, more fundamental level of politics that involves a competition over who gets to set those rules, the boundaries of what is publicly acceptable and precisely where those boundaries will be positioned.

Far more than conservatives, liberals love to rule certain positions out of bounds in this second-order sense. They do this by appealing to the courts the branch of government that reviews, alters, and overturns the rules of the political game. They also do it in the important institutions they control within civil society such as mainstream media outlets, universities, corporations, movie studios, and other arms of the entertainment industry. When these institutions informally decide that an issue, or a specific position on an issue, is simply unacceptable because it crosses a moral line that leading members of these institutions consider inviolable, they render it beyond the pale. As I wrote in a previous column on the subject, "Over the past several decades, a range of positions on immigration, crime, gender, and the costs and benefits of some forms of diversity have been relegated to the categories of 'racism,' 'sexism,' 'homophobia,' 'white supremacy,' or 'white nationalism,' and therefore excluded from first-order political debate."

Trump's presidential campaign succeeded in part because the candidate challenged these second-order taboos (especially as they show themselves in the phenomenon of political correctness) and liberals have responded in part by attempting to reinforce the taboos, mostly through name-calling that boils down to the assertion, "You can't say that!"

Sometimes this assertion is merely rhetorical. But at other times, in the statements of various courts that have blocked Trump's policies on immigration and sanctuary cities, it's backed up by the force of the judiciary. (In France, Marine Le Pen faces a similar dynamic, with nearly the entirety of the French political establishment closing ranks against her to convey the message to the electorate that voting for the National Front is simply unacceptable.)

The problem with telling people that they're not allowed to get their way on certain issues is two-fold. First, as we've seen with the Trump phenomenon, controversial opinions don't just disappear when members of the establishment rule them out of bounds. They often reassert themselves later, more powerful and more radicalized than before. And second, the excommunicators may become fond of the tactic and apply it to an ever-expanding range of issues.

For a vivid recent example of what can happen to political thinking and debate when one side becomes wedded to upholding rigid and exceedingly narrow strictures on permissible opinion, take a look at the blistering (and bizarrely disproportionate) reaction of liberals to Bret Stephens' debut column in The New York Times. Now, I was no fan of Stephens' writing in The Wall Street Journal, where he recently resigned, especially when it came to foreign policy. Neither did I appreciate his stance on environmental issues, which struck me as overly dismissive of evidence for climate change.

But in his first Times column, Stephens came right out and described global warming, along with evidence of "human influence on that warming," as "indisputable." That sounded unobjectionable to me as did his overarching point, which was that those who favor policies to combat climate change would convince more people to go along if they sounded somewhat less absolutely, positively, unwaveringly, indisputably certain in their predictions about what is always, after all, an all-too-uncertain future.

Stephens himself predicted in the column that his humble case for humility would cause heads to explode, and sure enough they did. Liberals on Twitter sputtered in indignation, as did several center-left news sites. The Times had hired an apologist for climate change "denialism," proclaimed Slate. According to Vox, he was a "climate change bullsh--ter." (The Week, too, was not immune.) No wonder climate scientists and many others lined up to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper in protest.

Except that none of it was true. Stephens didn't deny the reality of climate change. He merely dared to advocate a slight rhetorical adjustment to the way environmental activists and their cheering sections at websites like Slate and Vox, and newspapers like the Times, go about making their case to the wider public. What followed was not a reasoned debate about the rhetorical effectiveness of claims to modesty and certainty, dispassionate concern and outright alarmism. Instead, there was simple, pure, satisfying, but politically impotent condemnation: "You can't say that!"

But of course he can. And he will.

Which means the all-important question for liberals remains: What then?

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Liberalism's self-defeating howl - The Week - The Week Magazine