Liberals spend big money to stop the spending of big money in politics

Andy Kroll writes in Mother Jones:

A month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. ... At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front on these issues. ... "It was so exciting," says Michael Brune, the Sierra Club's executive director. "We weren't just wringing our hands about the Koch brothers. We were saying, 'I'll put in this amount of dollars and this many organizers.'" ... The campaign, Brune says, has since been attracting other members—and also interest from foundations looking to give money. [emphasis added]

Are liberals really so stupid that they don't realize that "spending millions of dollars to get big money out of politics" is just another example of spending big money on politics. We are asked to believe that it is by definition bad when the Koch brothers spend big money to advance their conservative political views, but it is by definition good when the NEA, the SEIU, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America (CWA), the AFl-CIO, and the NAACP (all of whom were attendees at the meeting) spend big money to try to silence the Koches and to advance their liberal agenda. OpenSecrets.org lists the NEA and SEIU as 4th and 5th on its list of "heavy hitter" political donors. Other liberal heavy hitters, according to OpenSecrets, include ActBlue, AFSCME, and the AFL-CIO.

Liberal hypocrisy at its worst.

Only Treasury can't prioritize, it seems

Ian Katz from Reuters writes:

In 2011, the Treasury repeatedly rejected suggestions that it could use prioritization to make some payments while skipping others. [Chris Krueger, senior policy analyst at Guggenheim Securities LLC in Washington, whose Dec. 5 research note helped spur interest in the idea of issuing a 1 trillion dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling] said he doesn’t think the U.S. would default on bonds. After that, deciding whom to pay is like “picking your favorite child.” “Prioritization is a massive political problem,” he said. “Do you pay air traffic controllers? Do you pay prison guards? Do you pay Social Security? Do you pay the troops? It’s an impossible political question.”

In other words, whereas families and businesses must prioritize their expenditures and cut back when their expenses exceed their income, the United States government is above such considerations.

Revolution: Les Misérables vs Doctor Zhivago

My wife and I went to see the movie Les Misérables the other night. All beautiful, idealistic, young revolutionaries, some falling in love with each other, all battling royalist reactionaries to bring about the dawning of a new age of republican liberty, equality, and fraternity. From the barricades the young comrades sing in unison:

Red - the blood of angry men!
Black - the dark of ages past!
Red - a world about to dawn!
Black - the night that ends at last!

A movie perfectly suited to the shallow, naive sensibilities of American progressives! One can feel the liberal outrage and the revolutionary fervor building throughout the theater as the story of the wretched Parisian slum dwellers plays out. By the end of the movie, I half expected a bunch of aging activists from the Sixties to jump to their feet around me, march out the door arm in arm, and erect and man barricades of their own, shouting Obama's socialist campaign slogan "Forward!"

How different from David Lean's more nuanced Doctor Zhivago, in which, yes, the villainy of the rapacious aristocrat Komarovsky is vividly portrayed, but in which also the idealistic student Pasha Antipov is transformed by the revolution into the ruthless, ideologically pure, Bolshevik murderer Strelnikov, who coldly declares to Zhivago:

I used to admire your poetry. I shouldn't admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you agree? Feelings, insights, affections. It's suddenly trivial now. You don't agree. You're wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.

For those desiring a more realistic, sobering portrayal of revolution (including its horrors), here's a short reading list of books (in addition, of course, to Hugo's original Misérables and Pasternak's Zhivago) that I have found particularly instructive:

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities
Michael Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution
Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924