Worth reading

Russell Fox say Time got the person of the year right

Lawrence Guloyta's review of Manning Marable's Malcolm X biography discusses the relationship between Malcolm and African-American democratic socialists like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

Michael Berube. the Left and Libya

With Sober Sense (Marxist-Humanist Initiative) Beware of Leftist Anti-Semitism

Mark Engler analyzes military spending as a jobs program and finds it lacking.

         It is a good piece but I wish that in addition to discussing Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Michael Kalekci, and Seymour Melman, the early contributions of third camp socialist T.N. Vance/Walter Oaks to the theory of the permanent arms economy had been mentioned.

Jonathon Bernstein at Political Animal on the end of the Iraq War

the war ended because citizens, acting mainly through the Democratic Party, ended it. Democratic Party actors - activists, policy specialists, politicians, campaign operatives, and eventually just about everyone, many of whom were not politically active before the war - made it clear that a pro-war candidate could not be safely nominated, eventually, for any federal office. And the other point is that it took just forever to get that done, and it was never certain; had the economy boomed the Republicans might well have won in 2008. Is that undemocratic, given that the war polled badly for some time? I’d argue no: after all, at no time did a solid majority of all voters not only oppose the war but consider it a high priority, a critical voting issue. In those situations, it’s never quite clear that there is only one clearly democratic policy outcome. Instead, what we get are a wide variety of possible legitimate democratic outcomes. And what matters is which set of people care enough to try to get it done, and then are successful enough at politics that they can eventually get their preferred outcome.