From a classic Christopher Caldwell essay from September 7, 1998, issue of The Weekly Standard, "1968: A Revolting Generation Looks Back": How fitting that Obama's entire working experience was as a Community Organizer, which is, at its core, organizing "grievance" groups for political action.

"The victory of lifestyle politics over class politics had huge consequences. It broke the lower classes' monopoly on grievances against society; the well-off—or subgroups of them, presenting themselves s 'women,' or 'gays,' or 'students'—could suddenly be 'alienated,' too. And they pushed their claims of oppression under a wholly new type of political discourse. The Myth of Objective Consciousness could not—by definition—be dethroned through rational argument. As Herbert Marcuse said, 'A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization.' Because that civilization was so reasonable, so democratic, to argue on its rational terms was merely to make oneself a dupe of power. So sex and drugs and, most of all, 'feelings' became appropriate weapons in the political arena."

Tisdall Textbook - New Link on Right

You will see on the top right of this blog a link to "Tisdall Textbook"

I copied all of the Chapters from the wiki and all of the critical reading (magna carta etc) into it. This will be more of a static (but incrementally growing) textbook for new members than a dynamic blog. This is still the main site.

What do you guys think should be on the Critical Reading List? This can span fiction to political theory, whatever qualifies to you as Critical.

- James

Marriage and Poverty

We talk about this a lot. Here is a nice slideshow showing the data:
http://www.slideshare.net/theheritagefoundation/marriage-poverty-slideshow

Tonight's Meeting

We need to not let what happened tonight happen again. Ie. we can't talk about pornography for half of the time.

Projection;
- We will try to get voting for the posts on this blog. Easy to discern quality of the posts.
- Currently setting up a parallel blog which will be a textbook, ideally read by everyone before coming to club.
- More soon. I have homework...

Shakespeare quote

Hey guys,

I just picked a quote that I thought was fitting when I setup the blog. Now we're on our feet, anyone have any other suggestions?

- Jimmy

The Democrat's Economic Recovery of 2008-10

Principled debate over why our present economic recovery is so tepid has to include comparison with recovery from the recession of 1981-82 which started the Reagan presidency. You can start with this editorial from the Wall Street Journal 9/21/10:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575504053230524906.html?KEYWORDS=two+recoveries#articleTabs%3Darticle

Funding for a Club WSJ Account

Given the great respect we all have for the WSJ, I think it would be appropriate if we could get an online account which club members could share. Or something. Funded by Student Council.

I'm not sure how login works - ie, can more than one person be logged in at a time - but if this is possible I see no reason why Student Council couldn't hook us up with the funds for such an account.

What do you guys think?

- Jimmy

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Update: I spoke with E. Gastman and he thinks we should just ask the library for an account first. I'll get on this asap.