Steve Benen had a look at Barack Obama’s last lecture, and let’s just say he had a different reaction.

A well-timed salute to treating labor badly.

It’s a propitious time to be welcoming in Greg Mitchell for a discussion about his book “The Campaign of the Century.” Over the past couple weeks, Mitchell has virtually turned over his blog at The Nation to painstakingly chronicling the Wikileaks story, and chronicling how the political, corporate and media elite have mounted an effort to discredit, destroy and punish Julian Assange. 76 years earlier, these forces came together in an electoral context, to disable the candidacy of Upton Sinclair for Governor of California.

Republicans are basically telling you their strategy. They will call the expiration of the payroll tax cut an increase. They will use the reduction in revenue to claim that Social Security is in bigger financial trouble than it is. They will try to stop the money from getting restored.

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” Thomas Paine said that, and I wish I could ask him, “What times aren’t?” Still, whatever else they are these are our times. And, however obviously true that is, it is painful to confess.

Autocrats, plutocrats, authoritarian ideologues and elitists of all stripes speak often of the people’s inability to govern themselves in a complex world that requires expertise – namely, the self-justifying expertise of the elite themselves. With surprising frankness, federal appeals court Judge Richard A. Posner summed up the elite’s paternalistic rationale: Few citizens have the formidable [...]