I hadn’t known the team was putting this together. Here are the top ten Editor’s Blog posts of 2016. Puts the year in an interesting perspective.
There was some news of this already. But now it’s coming together. The neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer is organizing an armed march against Jews in Whitefish, Montana.
Dylan Matthews has an interesting, illuminating discussion of the “border adjustment” tax which is a major part of the House GOP’s corporate tax reform plan, as I discussed here a few days ago. (Sounds like a total policy bore-fest; but actually it sounds like a pretty big deal.) Matthews’s piece gets at, while not really resolving (because it may not be resolvable), the big mystery about the policy in my mind. It’s one of two things. It may be a de facto tariff which will hit importers’ profits heavily, as well as raise prices for lots of goods middle class families buy all the time, while also creating incentives for domestic manufacturing. Or it really may have no effect on the balance of trade one way or another and basically amount to a quasi-VAT tax which will shift taxes from corporations to consumers.
Yesterday the Obama administration chose to abstain from a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the on-going growth of Israeli settlements past the so-called ‘green line’ as illegal and a threat to the possibility of a future two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (It also condemned Palestinian violence, incitement and reaffirmed support for a ‘two-state solution’.) This has been denounced as a betrayal by the Israeli government in the fiercest terms. Many right-wing American Jews have condemned the decision in no less vitriolic terms, not to mention virtually all Republicans. I should add though that even many American Jewish supporters of a genuine two-state solution have reacted with at least discomfort and in some cases anguish and anger at President Obama’s decision.
Since I wrote this post last night trying to reconcile the conflicting accounts about that Jewish family in Lancaster County, PA I’ve done a couple ‘Late Updates’ in the post itself. The gist is that the local paper stood by its original story. But since they were unable to get in contact with the family again after the ADL press release, they shifted the emphasis of the piece from ‘fleeing’ the area to taking their child out of the school. Meanwhile, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate got in contact with the ADL and learned, as we suspected, that they had no reason to doubt anything about the harassment detailed in the story. Their entire issue was with the word “fled.” In my mind that still puts the ADL (in this case I believe a regional office of the ADL) in a very bad light, since the clear import of their press release was that the entire story was false.
Since 1972, the United States has vetoed 40 United Nations Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. Most recently, in February 2011, the Obama administration vetoed a resolution declaring Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to be illegal and calling for it to “completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” But today, the administration abstained and allowed to pass by 14 to zero virtually the same resolution. By doing so, the US didn’t actually support the resolution – that’s why it gets only two cheers in my book – but it declared that it would no longer shield Israel from criticism by the Security Council.
We’ve been discussing the different building blocks Democrats will need to use the survive and expand in the Trump Era. There are countless different moving parts to the equation. None of them provides a silver bullet solution to turning back the Trump tide. But if there is one that is really important to get right it’s the person who serves as the Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Even more than the person, it is the strategy and vision for how to grow the party. To that end, I’m excited to announce I’ll be hosting in-depth interviews with both of the major candidates for DNC Chair – Rep. Keith Ellison and Labor Secretary Tom Perez – in early January. Each will join us for one full episode.
Normally, the full length version of the Josh Marshall Show is for Prime subscribers only. But given the unique interest and newsworthiness of this discussion and this choice we’ll be publishing the full versions of each interviews without restriction.
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