ucDems :: Blog

I Got a Crush...On Karfunkel

2007-06-17T21:18:00.000-07:00

It has recently been discovered that our very own Brian Karfunkel makes a cameo in the too hot for youtube "I got a crush... on Obama" video.

Check out the video:

And if you missed it, here's a screen shot of our man:

Go to the Progressive Gala, Ready to Question

2007-05-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed by the calendar entry to the right that this weekend is the big Progressive Gala, a time for all the progressive groups on campus to get together and have a unified progressive time of it. This is a good idea, and it promises to be fun. You should go--hey, James Carville is even headlining.

However, Hollie Gilman, the self-proclaimed originator of the Progressive Gala idea, has an article in today's Maroon in which she says, "Amidst discussions of New Initiatives and ordering food, this basic core idea of the Progressive Gala [i.e. uniting progressives] has been lost." I'm not a big campus insider, and she doesn't really explain what that means, but I take it there is some dissension as to the usefulness of the event.

For my part, while I certainly encourage you to go enjoy yourself at the Gala, I do have a James Carville timeline you may wish to keep in mind:

1992: Bill Clinton retakes the White House for the Democrats after 12 years of Republican rule. James Carville gains fame and adulation as lead strategist.

2002: As recorded in the 2006 documentary Our Brand is Crisis, Carville and allied Democratic strategists enact an eerie presage of the fraudulent sale of the Iraq war to the people of America by traveling to Bolivia. Establishment Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada brought in the American hotshots as part of his successful bid to return to the presidency after a one-term absence.

November, 2004: According to Bob Woordward's latest book, John Kerry was all set to fight it out, through recounts if necessary, in Ohio in 2004. There is some pretty clear evidence that significant voter suppression was carried out in Ohio by Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and others, so it might have been productive to challenge that suppression.

Surely, as a loyal Democrat, James Carville would support Kerry in taking a stand and making sure the election was conducted lawfully. But instead, revealed Woodward, Carville called his wife, who was working on the Bush-Cheney campaign. He told her about Kerry's plan, so that Republicans, including Blackwell, could prepare to rebuff any challenges from Kerry. Kerry did not end up making any such challenge.

November 10, 2006: Carville leads the charge amongst out-of-touch DC consultants to depose Howard Dean as chair of the DNC on the heels of the wild successes of the midterm elections. The crux of his argument is that Dean should have lavished more money on third-tier races, ignoring that Rahm Emanuel is the primary reason Democratic money was concentrated on long shots like Tammy Duckworth (IL-06) rather than spread around to lots of long shot candidates. Carville's alternative is to install losing Tennessee Senate candidate (and current chair of the DLC) Harold Ford, who was the only Democratic Senate candidate last cycle who was in a close race and ran a center-oriented DLC-style campaign. Ford was also the only one in such a race who lost.

Since everyone else thought Dean did a great job, even a begrudging Rahm Emanuel, the coup didn't go anywhere. As Chris Bowers wrote on MyDD at the time, under Dean's 50-state strategy, "small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville's base of supporters hate Dean so much."

February 12, 2007: Carville appears on the CNN program Situation Room and defends Hillary Clinton's original vote for the Iraq war. Clinton herself usually defends this vote by pointing out that the intelligence the Administration showed her made it look like a really good idea, to which everyone usually replies, "Yah, but it didn't look like that great an idea, especially since other members of Congress had the same intelligence and voted against it."

To which James Carville replies, on Situation Room, "But they weren't from New York. Their state wasn't hit. They didn't have to deal with the grief of these 3,000 people." Confused, everyone else nonetheless has a ready comeback: did you seriously just buy into the fraudulent Bush-Cheney frame that 9/11 had something to do with what happened in Iraq? Really? Even after all this time, when it was conclusively proven years ago that 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq and Bush knew it?

March 30, 2007: A stir is created in the blogosphere when it is determined that Carville, a Hillary Clinton strategist/analyst, has been appearing on CNN without divulging his attachment to Clinton. The problem is that he uses his time on CNN to trash Obama without any mention that he is on the Clinton campaign. He and CNN show no regret for misleading the public and admit no wrongdoing.

Better Enforcement Through Community

2007-05-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

Last week, a supposed compromise was reached on immigration reform between Bush, Congressional Democrats, and Congressional Republicans. There appears to be a very small chance at best that the compromise will make it into law, not least of all because Bush would have to push it pretty hard--which he doesn't seem particularly interested in doing. Personally, I wouldn't listen to anything he says if I were a policy maker anyway. But it also happens to sound like a really terrible policy.

Check out some of the details of the three biggest compromises in the compromise:

"The first [Democratic concession to conservatives] would make illegal immigrants' access to long-term visas and the new guest-worker program contingent upon the implementation of the border crackdown."
"Another sticking point came from the proposed replacement of an immigration system primarily designed to reunify families with a point system that would give new emphasis to skills and education.... points would be granted to migrants with work experience in high-demand occupations and who have worked for a U.S.-based firm. Additional points would be awarded based on education levels, English proficiency and family ties."
"Finally, immigrants coming into the country under the temporary work program would have to leave when their permits expire, with no chance to appeal for permanent residence. Labor unions say such a system would depress wages and create an underclass."

I don't have a big problem with making it contingent on some improvements to enforcement. But all these crusades to build a wall or a burning river of gasoline or something along the border are idiotic. I also have a problem with the crackdown coming first, since this will mean that a bunch of bitter immigrants will see us being assholes for several years before they ever get to the part that's good for them. Speaking of which, even that part isn't very good for them.

One of the big advantages the US has always had over Europe in terms of immigration is that (a) immigrants can bring their families and (b) they can eventually become citizens. This helps keep them from becoming radicalized. Guest worker programs are more of a European thing, and anyone who is serious about opposing terrorism will oppose them since they prevent (a) and (b) from happening. If anything, Europe should be emulating our system, not the other way around. Let's revisit what happened in Europe:

The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs.... Today, Muslims constitute the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom....

Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam": militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.

Being a guest worker means you are supposedly in the country temporarily at the discretion of some employer. This means that you have no incentive to contribute to a community you are only visiting. Your employer can exploit you, because he can send you back if you try to organize or demand better treatment. There's no sense bringing a family with you, since it'll be cheaper to support them by sending money back to the home country. Since you will have no family or friends in your new neighborhood, you will be bored and restless and horny. If we're lucky, those ingredients will only be a recipe for an Old West-style environment of vice. If we're unlucky, that will mean your only friend, the only day-to-day reminder of some sort of purpose in your life, is the radical cleric who runs your local mosque.

But corporations, famous for acting in their own interest only, sure seem to like guest worker programs. Let's check in with David Sirota from April:

“Where Are All The Workers? Companies worldwide are suddenly scrambling to manage a labor crunch.” This is the public rationale from corporate executives (especially in the high-tech industries) for massive job outsourcing and exploitation of the H-1B program: We can’t find the workers we need. We are expected, for instance, to ignore academic studies published recently by the National Academy of Sciences showing that, in fact, there is no shortage of high-tech engineers here in America. We are expected to ignore the data showing that companies are using the H-1B program to drive down domestic workers’ wages by forcing them into competition with imported workers from impoverished countries.

Judging by their reaction to the compromise, the captains of industry really are still expecting these things from us. Here, by way of Kevin Drum, is that corporate reaction, playing right into the script:

Robert Hoffman, a VP at Oracle, is unhappy with the new immigration bill, which includes a "point system" that allocates visas to applicants with education and job skills:
"Under the current system," Mr. Hoffman said, "you need an employer to sponsor you for a green card. Under the point system, you would not need an employer as a sponsor. An individual would get points for special skills, but those skills may not match the demand. You can't hire a chemical engineer to do the work of a software engineer."
If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah Hoffman demonstrates here.... The idea that someone can simply get a green card without going through a sponsor and then freely work for the highest bidder is not really what high-tech CFOs have in mind when they dream of filling up job slots with foreign workers.

In other words: untying the H-1B visa program from employer sponsorship isn't such a bad idea. But untying immigrants from planting roots and forming communities is a horrible idea. Immigration can indeed be a useful tool in counter-terrorism, as some have hoped. But it is most useful when it gets communities to police themselves, not when it builds a harsher society.

Shifting Coalitions and the Politics of War Crimes

2007-05-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Karl Rove dreamed of putting together a coalition of voting blocs that would form an unbreakable permanent majority. Bush was at the helm of a conservative movement that would maintain Republicans' current strength with neocons (=neoconservatives, those who believe US might makes right), theocons (=those who support prayer in schools, Moral Majority, et al.), and paleocons (=those who are fiscally conservative but otherwise libertarian, a/k/a Eisenhower Republicans).

Together with some swing voters they were able to lure consistently over several elections, this Republican movement was able to maintain a razor-thin majority in Congress and in presidential elections for several cycles.

Then, somewhere between Katrina and Iraq, Social Security and Terry Schiavo, people realized that Bush was doing a horrible job. His approval ratings tumbled into the low 40% range, and they have been around 28-35% all throughout this year. But despite the consensus that Bush is the worst president ever, he consistently draws about 30% in the polls. So who's been peeling off, and who's left?

One group that has been peeling off is made up of people who are sort of conservative but justd not totally batshit insane. Like former Republican (and commander of forces in Iraq) Gen. John Abizaid:
Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) is another former Republican who couldn't stand it any more. He won his first race last fall.

As you may have guessed, the 30%ers who still support Bush by and large actually are crazy. Check out Paul Krugman's description of the scene at the Republican debate on Tuesday:

[A]side from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, "where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo." His remarks were greeted with wild applause....

What we need to realize is that the infamous "Bush bubble," the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

The 30%ers who still support Bush are the remainder of the coalition, now that the reasonable people have split off. The paleocons like Abizaid and Webb have left over issues like torture. And since they applaud waterboarding but sit on their hands when their candidate speaks against torture, it becomes clear that the 30%ers will not support a candidate unless he supports war crimes:

At the end of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East of which the United States was a leading member (the Tribunal was established by Douglas MacArthur) convicted former Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and numerous other generals and admirals of a panoply of war crimes. Among them was torture:
The practice of torturing prisoners of war and civilian internees prevailed at practically all places occupied by Japanese troops, both in the occupied territories and in Japan. The Japanese indulged in this practice during the entire period of the Pacific War. Methods of torture were employed in all areas so uniformly as to indicate policy both in training and execution. Among these tortures were the water treatment...

The so-called "water treatment" was commonly applied. The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

Support for war crimes makes Rudy Giuliani a good choice for the neocon wing. But the theocons just can't get behind a guy who has such a dodgy record of marriages and support for abortion. So the 30%ers are threatening to splinter even more.

There is some danger that people will only see Bush's criminally poor job performance as a reflection of his unique leadership abilities, when in fact his performance has been the perfect embodiment of his movement's principles. Conservatives may be disowning Bush, but they are not abandoning his horrible world view. Some people are worried that the lack of philosophical unity among the new Democratic supporters will translate to flimsy support. I don't think we have anything to worry about as long as Republicans stick with Bush in principle, if not in name.

Breaking the Camel's Back

2007-05-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

If ever there was any doubt that George W. Bush needs to be impeached, the testimony we heard yesterday should lay it to rest. A former top aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft testified yesterday about a series of events that sounds more like the climax of a Hollywood thriller than like a government playing by the rules. From the Post:

On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

That's right, John Ashcroft, who liberals love to hate for trampling civil liberties with the Patriot Act and various other awful conservative offenses, is actually the good guy here. He recognized that Bush's blatantly illegal domestic spying order was illegal, and he refused to sign off on it. The second in command of the Department of Justice had to bring the head of the FBI to Ashcroft's hospital bed to keep Bush's goons from forcing his signature.

Apparently Comey also testified that if he, Ashcroft, Ashcroft's chief of staff, and the head of the FBI hadn't all threatened to resign over the program, Bush would have gone ahead with it anyway. Now, just to be clear, the program is still illegal, to this very day. So whatever change Bush conceded to in order to appease Comey et al. doesn't solve the problem or make Comey and Ashcroft into actual good guys. But in this Administration, just being less evil makes you look like a saint.

As Glenn Greenwald implies today, there is no solution for the problems this creates short of impeachment:

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.
Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution...

Yet even once Bush knew that both Aschcroft and Comey believed the eavesdropping was illegal, he ordered it to continue anyway. As Anonymous Liberal wrote yesterday:
That's a rather stunning fact, and one that I wish at least a few mainstream journalists would attempt to grasp the significance of. The White House authorized a program that everyone of significance in the Justice Department had determined to be lacking any legal basis. They willfully violated the law.

As Dan Froomkin writes today, trying to get a sick guy to sign a paper is never going to be considered the worst thing this Administration has done. But it may be the one thing that makes all the other stuff make sense. It might exemplify the rest of the misconduct, somehow symbolizing it for people who don't have time to follow the ins and outs of emails about purging prosecutors. It might, in other words, step into the role the Mark Foley scandal played last fall. To quote myself:

the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's [that] they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence.

But as cool as I feel for drawing that analogy, I felt even more vindicated to see the following in the Post editorial page:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.

You may recall that my very most recent blog post was about how the Administration got away with so much just by doing things that people couldn't believe an Administration would do. At that time, I relied on Kevin Drum's assessment of the situation, which I now re-cite:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

So the Washington Post editorial board provides the other reason this may be such an important development in the scandal. Just to review, the first reason is that this is easy to remember, and it symbolizes the larger problem. The second reason is that the gatekeepers of establishment knowledge, who are too blind to see the obvious when it is spread out in front of them, may finally get it when it is sitting in front of them nicely gift-wrapped. Let's hope so.

US Congress, featuring Fleetwood Mac

2007-05-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

The House Judiciary Committee invited Alberto Gonzales to testify yesterday, but he apparently heard an invitation to come tell lies, in the finest Fleetwood Mac tradition.

Although, to be fair to Gonzales, some of the things he said would be more accurately classified as non-sequiters than lies. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has been providing excellent coverage of the Gonzales saga, and she chimes in with an perceptive take on the proceedings in yesterday's issue.

Lithwick describes "a divine moment of stunned silence when he insists, toward the end of the hearing, that 'it would be almost impossible to make a political decision in the Justice Department. ... If that happened we would read about it in the paper.' " Technically, this is a lie. The paper trail has shown just how easy it would be to make a political decision in the DoJ. You can also tell it's a lie, because you have in fact read about it in the papers. But it's just such an obvious, brazen lie, really only half-heartedly masquerading as truth, that it seems like a joke. A non-sequiter, something so random as to be inherently hilarious.

The "testimony" Gonzales gave yesterday is full of these fun little nonsensical moments. Lithwick goes on:

[T]he AG proves himself to be as defiantly incurious as his boss. He tells the committee at various times that he didn't read the CRS report detailing how previous administrations handled U.S. attorney dismissals. He didn't read the University of Minnesota study that broke down the disparity in investigations of Democrats over Republicans. He tells Maxine Waters, D-Calif., that he still has not read the fired U.S. attorneys' personnel files. He notes several times that he hasn't much read the newspapers. He tells Sanchez that he still doesn't know who at Justice had more than "limited input" into these decisions. The most revealing moment, perhaps, is when Gonzales inadvertently confesses that some members of this secret cabal of senior leaders may not have even "known that they were involved in making this list."

These statements are probably a lot more true, but they have the same non-sequiter property that the lies do: instead of describing something obviously false, though, they describe someone obviously incompetent.

For someone who is so incompetent at running the Department of Justice (and at testifying before Congress, for that matter), Gonzales sure sounds like he was relaxed. But why shouldn't he be? He doesn't serve the American people, he serves the White House. And the White House is behind him all the way, and he knows it. Plus, the longer he doesn't resign, the easier it is for Republicans to claim that the fact he hasn't resigned shows nothing bad could have happened.

There are several possible reasons why Bush might not want to fire Gonzales. For one, if Gonzales leaves, Bush will need to submit a new candidate for AG to Senate confirmation hearings. If that happens, all sorts of fun documents will probably come to light. For another, Bush is obdurate and often refuses to do the right thing simply because he wasn't doing it already (see also: Iraq, invasion and occupation of).

But the most convincing explanation is the one Kevin Drum has articulated:

One of the great discoveries of the Republican Party over the past decade or two is that an awful lot of the rules we take for granted are, in reality, just traditions. Like redistricting only once a decade, for example, or keeping House votes open for 15 minutes. And what Republicans have found out is that if you have the balls to do it, you can just ignore tradition and no one can stop you. It's that simple. Alberto Gonzales has learned this lesson well. Normally, cabinet officers who have been caught in multiple obvious lies have to either resign or else seriously try to defend themselves. But Gonzales realizes this is just tradition.

I would add to his examples the tradition of not lying. That seems basic and obvious, but I really think respect for that tradition is what allowed many people to rationalize letting us get into Iraq in the first place. The evidence for WMDs was shaky at best, but surely the President wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Either way, Drum is right: our democracy is not well set up to stop people who intentionally try to destroy it from the inside.

Got to Give it Up

2007-05-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I talked about the hypocrisy of Republicans who are setting a timeline in September after dragging every other proponent of a timeline through the mud for years. Well, this may shock you, but I found some more Republican hypocrisy since then. This time they're trying to harass the Iraqi politburo, or whatever joke of a legislative body "runs" their country, into giving up its two month summer vacation.

In order to think this is an important problem, you have to assume that the legislative body there actually controls anything about the country. But from the violence and failed infrastructure, combined with the foreign military occupation and mass resignations, I would say they don't.

But Dick Cheney says they do. Specifically, he was scheduled to say that on his visit today. At the press availability this morning, the US Ambassador to Iraq mentioned that Cheney would talk about the vacation:

"The reality is, with the major effort we’re making, the major effort the Iraqi security forces and military are making themselves, for the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer if [sic] impossible to understand," [US Ambassador Ryan] Crocker said.

I would have to say I agree with that. But I'm quite surprised to hear about it coming from this party. The 109th Congress (last term's; dominated by Republicans) worked the fewest days AND failed to even complete its most basic legislative duties. Bush set the record for laziest President ever (measured by vacation days) almost two years ago. Most famously, Bush insisted on prolonging his vacation while thousands died in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

But this problem of vacations just dovetails with the larger Republican problem of connection with reality. Guys: it's too little too late. Sing it with me now: you got to give it up. If working on this pressing problem (so pressing that approximately 3,400 Americans are dead because of it) was so important to you, why did you take all those vacation days? And that brings us to Cheney's other statement. Apparently today he was scheduled to say, among other things, that:

We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time.

As others have pointed out, what is it about a war ravaging through the Middle East for the last four years that makes it "game time" only just now? Was there a time when this was not important? Were you only giving this partial effort before, since it wasn't game time? Up til now, have we just been talking about practice?

Tenet and Iraq

2007-05-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

Former CIA director George Tenet was in the news last week for his new book on the build up to the invasion of Iraq. Basically no one is buying the premise of the book (although people appear to be buying the book itself, which ranks #11 on Amazon as of this writing). In the words of Wonkette, the premise can be expressed thusly: George Tenet's Book Absolves George Tenet.

Basically everything I've read about the book (although I have not and will not read the book itself) agrees with Wonkette: it is a self-serving pile of crap. Conservatives think he is rewriting history to make the Administration look bad, and just about everyone else thinks he is rewriting it to make himself look good. If he really felt so uncomfortable with the invasion, one might note, well, he was pretty much the one person in the best position to stop it.

But instead, he marched along to the invasion drumbeat when that's everyone else wanted, and, now that everyone else wants out of Iraq, he has a book saying that's what he always wanted too. Many people have seen the Medal of Freedom Bush gave Tenet as a sort of quid pro quo for (a) not blowing the whistle on the bogus WMD intelligence and (b) stepping down to take the fall for the failure to actually find any. Of course, despite all his righteous indignation, Tenet has announced that he will not be returning that particular medal, thank you very much.

As luck would have it, yours truly 'got' to hear a speech from Tenet himself a couple years back. I and several hundred of my classmates got to hear Tenet on May 17, 2003. George W. Bush had just steamrolled us into Iraq, and the invasion was already a mission accomplished. War opponents such as myself had essentially no representation around Washington, whether in government or my classrooms. When the speech concluded, I swallowed the bile building up in the back of my throat long enough to clap, but I was the only one I could see who wasn't standing. I was grateful and proud when I found out that the only people in the family section who didn't stand were in my family.

Anyway, said Tenet (emphasis added).

International politics is all about "being true to your values. About having the spine to stand up for what is right. About making choices that are not simply practical or clever, but good and beneficial."
[...]
"[W]hile we must work to make things what they can be, we must never lose sight of what they should be."
[...]
Culminating his list of 8 secrets to his success:
"Seventh: Pray. Ask God for the guidance and strength to meet the challenges of life. Put on His armor to face the forces of evil. Manifest His goodness in caring for those who are weak and in need, showing love for others each and every day.

Finally, I would say to all of you-it is a little old fashioned, but you need to hear it: Love and serve your country."

That's right. We should focus our lives on praying to defeat terrorism. But more to the point, if there's any single thing that you could now say about Tenet, it is that he had anything but the spine to stand up for what was right.

As a postscript, let me just briefly mention a couple recent developments on Iraq. One of the favored tactics of Republicans trying to keep us in Iraq is the reassurance that in just a couple months things will be better and/or Republicans will bolt. Minority Leader John Boehner was the latest to use the line this weekend, but it's not new (and probably no more accurate than it was before).

On the Democratic side, the Washington Post reported last week that Democrats were all set to abandon all their principles on Iraq. It made for a great page one headline and fit right into the typical narrative that Democrats can't stand for anything they believe in. That's why it's such a shame that the story was a sham. Oh well. Maybe we'll just have to see how the debate unfolds after all!

What do we remember?

2007-05-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it's May 1st. There are a whole bunch of things traditionally celebrated on May Day, but I usually think of International Workers' Day. Most industrialized countries celebrate their Labor Day today, in memory of the workers who were brutally suppressed at Haymarket Square right here in Chicago back in the 1880's. The raw emotions so many people attached to that event in the United States led President Cleveland to put US Labor Day in September. But people still remember. For example, immigrant laborers remember. They took to the streets of Chicago in a peaceful demonstration one year ago today:

Cleveland failed to make people forget about Haymarket just by moving the holiday. Ironically, George W. Bush, the most anti-labor President since the Great Depression, has distracted people from that tragic day without doing anything labor-related. You see, Democrats remember May 1st, 2003 as the day Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Democrats sent the supplemental funding bill to Bush today as a means of commemorating that great speech.

The Bush camp has denied having anything to do with the infamous banner, but it's a powerful image nonetheless. And, not surprisingly, the denials also happen to be a lie:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan later acknowledged that the sign was produced by the White House.

Part of remembrance is using it to help guide you in the future, so it is fair to ask, what is our current mission? both in Iraq and generally?

Some have argued that our new mission should be energy independence. The Apollo Alliance has teamed unions up with activists to push for creation of a lot of new skilled jobs, ripe for unionization, by ramping up alternative energy. But what chance do a bunch of panty-waist liberals have of getting something like this going? Those sissies that care about things like jobs and planets--who cares what they think?

Well, it turns out the most macho organization on Earth, the US military, needs to care about it, too. You'd think the strategic costs alone would have made energy independence obvious to the military long ago, since getting fuel to troops in the field has become extremely problematic. And the troops in the field need nothing like they need fuel: an Abrams tank gets a whopping 0.6 miles/gallon!

But now the military officially knows the obvious, as the Boston Globe revealed today that the Department of Defense has received a report telling them about it:

A new study ordered by the Pentagon warns that the rising cost and dwindling supply of oil -- the lifeblood of fighter jets, warships, and tanks -- will make the US military's ability to respond to hot spots around the world "unsustainable in the long term."

The study, produced by a defense consulting firm, concludes that all four branches of the military must "fundamentally transform" their assumptions about energy, including taking immediate steps toward fielding weapons systems and aircraft that run on alternative and renewable fuels. It is "imperative" that the Department of Defense "apply new energy technologies that address alternative supply sources and efficient consumption across all aspects of military operations," according to the report, which was provided to the Globe.
...
The Department of Defense is the largest single energy consumer in the country. The Air Force spends about $5 billion a year on fuel, mostly to support flight operations. The Navy and Army are close behind.

Of all the cargo the military transports, more than half consists of fuel. About 80 percent of all material transported on the battlefield is fuel.
...
The costs of relying on oil to power the military are consuming an increasing share of the military's budget, the report asserts. Energy costs have doubled since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it says, and the cost of conducting operations could become so expensive in the future that the military will not be able to pay for some of its new weapon systems.

Creating three million new union jobs in alternative energy production, as the Apollo Alliance wants, seems to me like the perfect way to remember appropriate parties while moving forward with a new mission. In a few years, hopefully we can remember the days when labor was on the decline in America as income inequality was on the rise. And hopefully we can likewise look back on the days when we fought wars half-way around the world over oil.

Rahmblin' Man

2007-04-27T23:06:00.000-07:00

Anyone who read this blog during the 2006 midterms (i.e. my Mom) knows how many, uh, suggestions I had for the way Rahm Emanuel should do his job as DCCC chair. But I tried not to lose sight of the fact that Rahm and I are still on the same team, even if we don't see eye to eye all the time. That's why I was so happy to see the text of his recent speech to the Brookings Institute.

Rahm's speech was about the over-politicization of government that the Administration has engineered. As anyone who has read this blog lately knows, I've been interested in the purposeful destruction of the Enlightenment principles of liberalism that have shaped our government since at least 1789. So it would seem that Rahm and I have some real common ground here.

Some choice quotes from the speech:

[T]he U.S. Attorney scandal will be to public corruption what Hurricane Katrina was to incompetence in the Bush Administration.
...
Instead of promoting solutions to our nation's broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.
...
The Attorney General could offer no coherent explanation for the [US Attorney] fiasco, because to do so would unveil the guiding principle at the core of this White House—insinuating partisan politics into every aspect of government and bringing politics into what used to be a political-free zone—the Justice Department.
...
The corporations don't have to lobby the government, because they are the government.

Unfortunately, just when it looks like Rahm might have gotten himself re-invited to my birthday party, he ends up not going far enough. After mentioning examples of politicization such as cronyism in Iraq reconstruction contracting, outsourcing Walter Reed hospital operations, quashing climate change data, revelations from former White House insiders O'Neill and DiIulio about the lack of policy interest, the student loan scandal, the recent GSA/Hatch Act controversy, and the RNC email controversy, his analysis basically peters out. He concludes that political appointees are a good thing but that these particular ones are too political.

It's not that he's wrong, it's just that he undersells the danger the Administration poses. The corruption we've seen isn't some freak occurrence of corruption, it is a purposeful occurrence of an active effort to destroy our way of government. It's not a culture of corruption, it's an ethos of corruption.

Mark Schmitt, in a review of the new Rahm book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution, emphasizes the essence of the Rahm situation. As he says, it is probably an exaggeration to claim that the Democrats won in spite of Rahm rather than because of him. After all, he did raise a lot of money, and he did seem to understand some things. To wit,

And that is what makes Emanuel a little different from, say, former Democratic National Committee chair Terry MacAuliffe: he understands that politics has to be
about something, and more than just a vague statement of values.

However, the need to drag Rahm kicking and screaming into talking about the war and contesting more seats still haunt his record. Plus, he's kind of a jerk. As Schmitt explains,

[A]s a twenty-five-year-old working on Senator Paul Simon’s first campaign, Emanuel was known as “the nuclear fund-raiser,” and colleagues would gather to eavesdrop on him loudly accusing elderly Jewish donors of betraying the state of Israel if they failed to max out, in their grandchildren’s names as well as their own, to Simon’s campaign. Apparently the strategy worked.

Together, all this evidence highlights the Rahm dilemma: you like having someone feisty on your team who won't take no for an answer, who knows it takes more than statements of values to win. You just wish he could take it to the next level, where he would understand the bigger philosophy instead of just the list of violations or the intimidation of elderly donors.

Exit Strategy

2007-04-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

Also, Student Government Elections are happening this week. Many people on the Dems Exec Board are running.

Vote here.

Unitary Execution

2007-04-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

When people describe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a "loyal Bushie", they are essentially referring to his support for the wacko 'theory' of the unitary executive. For example:

As long as Gonzales remains front and center in the furor over last year's mass firing of U.S. attorneys -- as long as his goofy stonewalling continues to distract attention from all the elements of the purge that point so incriminatingly toward the White House -- he simply enhances his position as the ultimate "loyal Bushie."

The 'theory' basically holds that the President is an elected autocrat who doesn't need one or even two coequal branches of government in order to preside. It is the unifying principle behind basically every disgusting thing the Bush Administration has done. To wit,

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter “clarifying” testimony he gave on February 6. In what amounted to a “By the way, I kind of perjured myself before you,” Gonzales said that when he said the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was “all that [President Bush] has authorized” in the area of warrantless surveillance, “I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President.” This tautological sleight-of-hand can lead one only to conclude that there are other “programs” of surveillance. But don’t ask what they might be.
Gonzales also noted that when he said—three times—that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal, he might have left the “misimpression” that the Justice Department had not conducted any analysis of whether purely domestic wiretapping without a warrant might be legal. Oops.

The response from the Judiciary Committee, of course, was a great big pile of nothing. By now such admissions have become so routine, they fail to bring attention beyond a story buried deep in the back pages of The Washington Post. After all, this is the administration that leaked the identity of a CIA operative in order to discredit a political opponent. (Remember Bush’s promise to fire anyone involved?) This is the president that claims “we don’t torture,” then fights to retain his prerogative to torture. When forced by political fallout to sign a law outlawing said torture, he issues a “signing statement” making clear his intention to ignore the law when he feels like it. Potential appointees to scientific panels are asked whether they voted for President Bush. Regulations on environmental and occupational safety that the administration finds distasteful lie fallow and unenforced. Treaties signed by the United States are derided as “quaint,” then cast aside. When the Government Accountability Office issues a ruling that the administration’s use of phony “video news releases” purporting to be real news constitutes “covert propaganda” and is therefore illegal, the White House simply ignores them and continues the propaganda campaign.

Gonzales' testimony before the Senate last week on the US Attorney scandal was another perfect example of the unitary executive in execution. The Justice Department is of course a cabinet department, and cabinet departments are part of the executive branch, which make them virtually indistinguishable from the (Bush) White House. For example, since Clinton left office, the number of White House officials who are allowed to comment on ongoing DoJ investigations has increased by over 10,000%!

Bush issued some effusive praise yesterday and over the weekend for the outstanding (but plainly awful) performance Gonzales gave last week. I believe it comes back to two explanations, the first of which is the heavy involvement of the White House, and especially Karl Rove, in the US Attorney firings.

One White House adviser (who asked not to be ID'ed talking about sensitive issues) said the support reflected Bush's own view that a Gonzales resignation would embolden the Dems to go after other targets—like Karl Rove. "This is about Bush saying, 'Screw you'," said the adviser, conceding that a Gonzales resignation might still be inevitable.

The other reason, though, is this business with the unitary executive. If the executive branch really is allowed to govern without the other branches of government (bear with me here), then testifying before Congress is a sort of optional theatricality at best.

For anyone who regularly reads the progressive blogs, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick was a little late to the party, but her article on Friday was still right on (and still lightyears ahead of the media establishment):

Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being poleaxed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."
...
For six impressive hours, the attorney general embodied the core principles that he is not beholden to Congress, that the Senate has no authority over him, and that he was only there as a favor to them in their funny little fact-finding mission.
...
This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of "Because I said so" into a public spectacle.

This is yet another reminder of why fighting Bush tooth and nail is so important. This battle isn't just about whether some bad policies get enacted and whether some bad people get positions in government. This isn't just about what happens in Iraq or what happens to the economy. This is about government itself, about our way of life and our very identity as Americans. The Administration is attacking liberalism itself, and it is absolutely imperative that Bush be stopped if we have any intention of continuing to live in a democracy.

Told Ya So

2007-04-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

On Monday, gunman Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, plus himself. On Wednesday, bombs killed 178 people in Baghdad. In 1993, some guy killed 8 people in San Francisco. More children die in swimming pools each year than die from guns. How do we talk about tragedies? And what do we say when we do?

On Tuesday, there was a vigil for the fallen 32 at Virginia Tech, which politicians tripped over themselves to appear at. President Bush was there, within one day of the event itself. On a side note, it took him 4 days to even show up in New Orleans after Katrina, which killed over 1,300.

So where was the vigil for the 178 killed in Baghdad yesterday? Or the 650,000 needlessly killed there since the ill-conceived invasion began? That question is obviously rhetorical, since there are some pretty big differences in the two situations. (a) It's different having a tragedy in your own community instead of half way around the world, and (b) it's not like 650,000 have to die before you can call something a tragedy.

But another difference between Iraq and Tech is how we talk about them. On Iraq, we are told that anything we say or do that contradicts the Administration is hurting the troops. It's a pretty ridiculous claim, not unlike Walter's claim that little Larry is killing his father:

Even worse is the claim by conservatives that we shouldn't say anything about how our every endeavor in Iraq is a failure (it is), since this would make the families of fallen soldiers feel bad for having lost their loved one in vain. I'm sorry, but this is a classic instance of the blame the messenger mentality, and it doesn't hold up. Eventually these families are going to have to face the fact that indeed they did lose their loved one for George W. Bush's vanity war.

To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest and counterproductive. It's like knowing your friend's boyfriend cheated on her and not telling her about it. When she finds out, it's going to really suck for her, and she's going to be really mad. But she's going to figure it out eventually, and whatever you say about it doesn't change what it actually was. It may seem like something that's not very respectful to say, but it has to be said. (Note to all my attached female friends: this example is purely hypothetical.)

Fortunately, we haven't seen the same kind of timidity from gun control advocates in the wake of Monday's shootings. The right wingers usually love to trash anyone who disagrees with them on anything. But Bush merely used the vigil to talk about something near and dear to him (but irrelevant to public policy): prayer. The usual conservative hit men don't seem to be stepping in to call the gun control advocates any names this time. However, gun control has more or less disappeared from the Democratic agenda since 1994, the last time meaningful legislation was enacted.

In 1993, Gian Luigi Ferri went to the 34th floor of the 101 California Street office building in San Francisco and opened fire with a pair of TEC-9 handguns. Then he took the elevator down to the 33rd floor and opened fire there. It is extremely fortunate that in the end only 8 people died. But it's also fortunate that the specter of anonymous gunmen spraying bullets around office buildings provided enough legislative momentum for a ten year ban on assault weapons, which Democrats forced through Congress in 1994.

Democrats went on to be routed in historic fashion in the 1994 midterms, and gun control has basically been regarded as a politically untouchable bogey man ever since. I was a little young, but I remember when 101 California happened. I remember more clearly gazing out at the 101 California building from the windows of the downtown San Francisco firm where I worked in 2004, thinking about the Republican Congress letting the assault weapons ban expire on September 13th of that year.

The shooter at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, reportedly used a couple of basic sidearms, rather than the powerful killing machines favored by Ferri and the Columbine shooters. Nonetheless, unlike that other notorious killer--swimming pools--all guns are designed for one purpose only: killing things. You just can't say that about swimming pools or really anything else. I'm not taking a position at this point on swimming pool policy, but it seems fairly clear that we don't have anything to lose by restricting gun sales.

Conservatives are fond of making the argument that if only more people had guns, we could just shoot everyone who tried to start something, and then he wouldn't be able to kill 32 people. They call it "self defense". Some conservatives are even saying that if only all those Tech students hadn't been so cowardly, things would have turned out better. This canard is easily disposed of, since tales are emerging of the brave and heroic things many of the victims and would-be victims actually did do.

No one likes to politicize tragedy, but the fact is that politics is designed to respond to tragedy. I'm sure no one at the vigil on Tuesday wanted to hear every politician using the occasion to grind whatever political ax he's always had. And no one wants the sacrifices our nation's families have made in Iraq to be cynically exploited for votes. But we need to talk about gun control, and we need to be honest about the situation in Iraq. To do otherwise won't help anyone in the long run.

Volunteer for Dick Durbin

2007-04-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

On Friday, May 4th, there will be a gala dinner downtown to fête (and raise money for) Illinois' senior senator, Dick Durbin. All the big shots will be there, including Senate leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And guess what? you can be there too!

Kate Hermann with the Durbin campaign is recruiting volunteers to help out at the event, hob nob, get free food, and I believe receive a free T shirt. Plus you get to spend a glamorous evening at a swank downtown hotel ballroom without actually being swank yourself. (N.b. You do have to dress up a little: for gentlemen, jacket and tie--for ladies, whatever the chick equivalent of jacket and tie is.)

The other catch is that you need to spend one evening next week (either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday) doing a phone bank in Near North. There will be pizza provided at the phone bank. So please, post a comment or email Kate Hermann at katherine.hermann@gmail.com as soon as you can if you want to take advantage of this exciting opportunity.

Picking Nits?

2007-04-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

Now that Democrats run Congress, some interesting investigations are getting underway, just as Republicans warned us they would. There are now some big, sexy scandals brewing as a result. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been holding hearings on pretty much every aspect of the corruption and incompetence surrounding Iraq. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pursuing the sordid US Attorney firing scandal. But there is a much less sexy scandal brewing as well: White House staffers have been misusing their email accounts.

Various rules and regulations demand the following of White House employees:

Using official government resources for political/party purposes is prohibited
Using political/party resources for official government business is prohibited

Many White House employees do political work in addition to their official government duties, which is not prohibited. In order to comply with the demands of the rules, the Republican National Committee provided many White House employees, especially Karl Rove, with laptops and Blackberries to use in performing their party duties. You see, it would be not just unethical but illegal for them to use their White House email accounts to conduct party business.

The problem is that they also used their RNC emails for official government business. Business such as the politically motivated firings of US Attorneys. Froomkin explains:

The use of non-government e-mails first became an issue about four weeks ago, when some of the e-mails turned over in a congressional investigation of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys showed that Rove deputy Scott Jennings repeatedly used an RNC e-mail address (sjennings@gwb43.com) in his official communications. One e-mail to Rove was sent to a kr@georgewbush.com address.

But the problem extends beyond just using the wrong email account for the wrong job function. The White House email servers are set up to automatically back up every single email, while the RNC email servers allow users to permanently delete whatever they want. Sure enough, many vital emails were in fact deleted:

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
...
Since 2004, White House staffers using those accounts have been able to save their e-mail indefinitely -- but have also been able to delete whatever they felt like deleting. By comparison, the White House e-mail system preserves absolutely everything forever, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

It is fairly easy to come up with some knee-jerk objections to Waxman's pursuit of such a minor 'scandal'. One could argue that Republicans all warned everyone during the 2006 campaign that a Democratic Congress would just do non-stop investigations instead of pursuing a positive agenda, and the email scandal plays right into that narrative. Since there are so many other scandals going on right now, one could argue that citizens will get so-called "scandal fatigue", whereby the marginal increase in shame per scandal goes down as the number of scandals goes up. One could also argue that by pursuing small-bore stuff like email archiving, the Democrats are just going to look like they're being vindictive as a result of the Clinton impeachment.

But, assuming Democrats handle themselves correctly, I believe this email scandal could be an essential piece of the narrative Democrats ought to be creating for 2008. For one thing, all the fishiness around Iraq and the US Attorney scandal has established a narrative of malfeasance in the White House that puts the onus on to the Administration to counter. Even if people don't pay too much particular attention to it, the email scandal could help contribute to this narrative.

An analogy can be drawn to the Mark Foley scandal from last October--it's not that Republican leadership really influenced policy by protecting a sexual predator, it's they helped people condense the narrative of corruption and arrogance that surrounded the Republican Congress. We also know from the groundbreaking work of Samuel Popkin that voters tend to form a narrative and then adjust it with new information, rather than constantly weighing and reweighing all the evidence. The email scandal could thus be extremely helpful as one more thread in a richly woven tapestry of corruption.

But better yet, since RNC email accounts were involved, it provides a link between the Bush White House and the entire Republican party (by definition) that, if properly invoked, could help in virtually every other campaign around the nation next year.

Brinkmanship

2007-04-10T22:42:00.000-07:00

One of the things you can always count on Republicans doing is sticking to their guns, no matter how misguided. George W. Bush didn't spend the last six plus years ignoring reality just to start acknowledging it now. That's why it's so important for Democrats to be firm in their opposition to Republicans. On two crucial issues, taxes and Iraq, the Democrats will have prime opportunities to make their stand.

Taxes
The elephant in the room, as it were, when it comes to taxes is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The AMT was instituted in the late 60's to stop millionaires from taking advantage of so many loopholes they ended up not paying any taxes at all. One potential solution would have been to close the loopholes, but instead this crazy, complicated parallel tax system was invented. The problem is, no one ever indexed it to inflation, so next year it is set to affect way more people (middle class people, specifically) than it was ever intended to. There is bipartisan agreement that this is a bad state of affairs, but no agreement has yet been reached on how to fix things.

This article from the NYT details Democrats' intention to overhaul the AMT so that it once again only affects the truly rich. The problem is that by doing so, billions of dollars of currently projected government revenue will dry up. The article has what I consider to be a fairly limited view of the range of options Democrats face:

House Democrats see multiple political benefits from seeking a permanent fix. Some are eager to position themselves as tax cutters. Others want to show their ability to tackle a big and difficult initiative. Last but not least, the alternative minimum tax has a disproportionate impact on states with higher average incomes and high state and local taxes — like New York and California — which tend to vote Democratic.

“It’s a tax cut to the 23 million American families who have no concept that they’re going to get hit with this tax increase,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

Rahm's comment at the end there demonstrates the political peril of the AMT situation. Politics is NOT an arena in which, as the saying goes, "when you've done your job right, no one will be able to tell you've done anything at all. " In politics, when you do something right, you hit the road and the airwaves to make sure everyone and his sister knows. Fix the AMT now, and no one will really know you helped them because they will simply continue not paying a ridiculously high AMT. Don't fix it, and everyone will be mad at you for not having fixed it. What to do?

If the Democrats can stomach the brinkmanship, this could be a prime opportunity to reverse a core piece of Republican ideology. You see, for the last 25-30 years, it has been political poison to suggest raising taxes. But the sentiments that drove that political reality look like they may be fading, and fixing the AMT might be a good opportunity to get the ball rolling on our counterattack.

John Edwards, the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, has already announced that his universal health care plan will have to involve some higher taxes. Even some supply-side conservatives are now admitting that it is unrealistic to constantly lower taxes without ever raising them. As Mark Schmitt wrote in Washington Monthly recently, taxes will have to go up soon if we are to retain a government that can act on behalf of its people, but it's going to take some smart political planning to get us there. Schmitt goes on:

But the truth is that we are heading down a path toward fiscal crisis that will inevitably require a major increase in revenues. In case that sounds like a euphemism, I’ll say it plainly: Taxes must go up. If Democrats try to avoid that fact, they’ll become mired in trench warfare with Republicans over small-bore increases that will cost them political support and won’t really address the problem. But if Democrats seize the opportunity to define a new era of the politics of taxes, as Republicans did 30 years ago, they can shape the debate in a way that may actually help them to achieve some of their most-cherished policy goals.
...
[T]o make it possible to talk about revenues when the opportunity arrives to actually do something about revenues, Democrats and anyone else who is serious about avoiding economic crisis must spend the next two years thinking and planning how to condition the political environment so that politicians can move with courage. That will require, first, establishing the idea that taxes must increase as a non-debatable fact; second, fixing the political process that has greased the way for tax cuts; and, third, setting the framework in which we talk about taxes.

Fixing the AMT could be the opportunity to lay some effective groundwork for a new era in which taxes can actually be raised when appropriate. Democrats should use AMT debates to highlight the enormous loss of revenue that fixing the situation will cause. They should frame a choice between continuing popular programs and letting government wither away. They can offer Republicans the chance to work with them on overhauling other parts of the tax code to make up for the lost revenue. After making this offer, though, it gets tricky.

The Republicans will hear the offer, and their knees will jerk, and they will reject any form of increasing government revenue, no matter if the net effect keeps revenue constant. Republicans will offer their usual style of compromise (see below): you give up on your position and we get everything we want, in this case rolling back the AMT without doing anything about replacing revenue.

At this point in the process, there will be enormous pressure on Democrats to cave and do what the Republicans want. Instead, they must have the courage to let people get hit with a year's worth of really high taxes, if necessary. People will be furious. But, if Democrats have done their job right, they will have made sure everyone knows that they are paying more as a result of Republicans refusing to come to the table. Once a precedent like this has been set (that sane debate over revenue can and should take place), Congress' budget talks might start taking place in a whole new paradigm.

Iraq
The Democratic-controlled House and Senate recently passed supplemental funding bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that set dates for American withdrawal from Iraq. Since that isn't precisely what Bush wanted, he's naturally kicking and screaming a bunch of nonsensical BS about how Democrats hate the troops. In times gone by, Democrats would have immediately run away with their tails between their legs at the very invocation of troop support.

One such bygone time was two weeks ago, when Barack Obama did precisely that. Obama was busily admitting that after Bush vetoes the Democratic supplemental bill, Congress will go right ahead and give him the money with no strings attached anyway. The best part was when he said that no one "wants to play chicken with our troops," which is such a great Republican talking point it might as well have been said by Karl Rove.

In times gone by, Democrats would have been sensitive to calls for compromise with Republicans. Such calls would lead to some very earnest press conferences and meetings, at the end of which Republicans would have everything they wanted and Democrats would have done all the compromising. This is Joe Lieberman's idea of compromise, and it's what snarky bloggers call "date-rape bipartisanship". It's also what the insider's insider (and noted U of C alumnus) David Broder thinks of as compromise.

Fortunately, the Democrats look like they are going to abandon Obama's idea of negotiating and Broder's idea of compromise in favor of principled action. (To be fair, Obama apparently improved his post-veto rhetoric this evening.) When Bush accuses Democrats of playing political games with troop safety, the correct response is what it looks like Dems might actually do: point out how we passed the damn bill already and now he's the one playing the games.

In particular, Harry Reid's statement hits all the right notes. Quoth Reid (emphasis added):

"The American people want the President and the Congress to work together to bring a responsible end to the war in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are willing to meet with the President at any time, but we believe that any discussion of an issue as critical as Iraq must be accomplished by conducting serious negotiations without any preconditions. Our goal should be to produce an Iraq supplemental bill that both fully funds our troops and gives them a strategy for success.

"With his threat to veto such a plan for change in Iraq, President Bush is ignoring the clear message of the American people: We must protect our troops, hold the Iraqi government accountable, rebuild our military, provide for our veterans and bring our troops home.

"The President is demanding that we renew his blank check for a war without end. Despite the fact that the President persists in trying to score political points at the expense of our troops, congressional Democrats have repeatedly reached out in the spirit of cooperation. We renew our request to work with him to produce a bipartisan bill that provides our troops and our veterans with every penny they need, but in turn, demands accountability."

In a way, Obama's right: no one truly wants to throw our troops out on the curb. But the solution to that problem is not to cave to Bush, especially when we can fund the military through July without passing the supplemental funding bill. The correct solution is to stand our ground as long as we can and keep making sure the American people realize this is Bush's mess, and he's the one who is refusing to get us out of it.

Conclusion
Cautious observers are partly right: it is a dangerous game of brinkmanship for Democrats to call Republican bluffs on taxes and Iraq. But these are very dangerous times. The last twelve years of Republican Congressional dominance have proven there is nothing for Democrats to gain from timidity. I am encouraged by their refusal to blink on Iraq so far, and I hope they can bring that same resolve to our fiscal mess.

The Tides of Change Reach Vote Fraud

2007-04-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

News from Florida
First, the big story: Florida has rolled back its odious voting restrictions for ex-felons. The story begins many years ago, at the tail end of the Civil Rights era. Many states were frustrated at their powerlessness to deny the vote to black people, so they restricted voting by ex-felons, who they knew would be mostly black as a result of other existing inequities.

As bad as that sounds, in Florida's case it has actually been worse than that. The 2000 presidential election is mostly remembered for the recount debacle in Florida, but there is a racial story behind that debacle. What jumps to mind about that election are images like little old ladies (lifelong Democrats) having their ballots counted for Pat Buchanan, chads hanging, and protesters (who turned out to be paid GOP operatives rather passionate citizens) demanding an end to the recount.

It just so happens that there is pretty solid evidence that Gore really did win that election by a couple hundred votes, which would be common knowledge if the recount had been allowed to proceed. Unfortunately, in one of the most disgraceful moments in its history, the Supreme Court stepped in with a highly biased, partisan, and poorly reasoned ruling to stop the recount, which legal scholars have strongly criticized.

But Gore would have won by a much more comfortable margin if ex-felons, who are disproportionately black and therefore disproportionately Democratic, had been allowed to vote. And Gore's margin would have been much larger still if the ex-felon voting restriction hadn't been illegally applied to tens of thousands of non-felons. Greg Palast explained in 2002:

Two of these “scrub lists,” as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as “David Butler,” (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches...

Thomas Alvin Cooper (2), twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida's elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race...

Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that “blanks would be preferable in these cases.” (Harper’s counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts.

(my emphasis; original emphasis removed)

Florida's move to finally allow many ex-felons to vote is therefore not just a breakthrough for the civil rights of ex-felons. It also has huge implications for the civil rights of every black person in Florida, any one of whom could have been removed from voter roles very easily through this type of chicanery.

Nationwide Implications
The roll-back of ex-felon restrictions in Florida was spearheaded by a Republican, new Governor Charlie Crist. I was shocked to hear that a Republican had led the charge, but apparently Crist was genuinely struck by a sense of injustice tugging at his conscience. It's an inspiring example that goes to prove that merely being a Republican doesn't automatically entail being a bad person inside.

But it helps. For example, former governor Jeb Bush, who presided over the illegal felon disenfranchisement in 2000 to help his brother, is a rotten shell of a human being. Less publicized than even the 2000 disenfranchisement in Florida was the 2004 disenfranchisement there, which Jeb also presided over.

The 2004 edition was actually led by Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin. After the recent purge that has become such a scandal, Griffin was nominated to take over as US Attorney in Arkansas. As I mentioned in Wednesday's entry, it should be no surprise that Republicans want subpoena powers for one of their dirtiest thugs in the state where Hillary Clinton spent most of her adult life.

The 2004 voter suppression, as orchestrated by Griffin, is emblematic of the new approach Republicans take to voter suppression in general: challenging the ballots and registrations of regular minorities, regardless of their criminal record. Griffin was challenging absentee ballots from black communities in Florida, but a favored tactic in other states has been to challenge registrations from registration drives by Democratic groups. This tactic is likely to have played a large role in deciding Ohio in 2004, for example.

But Griffin isn't the only connection between this tactic and the US Attorney scandal. It turns out some of the purged attorneys were fired for inadequately prosecuting such cases of alleged voter fraud.

This recent tactic is directly connected to Karl Rove (via Griffin), but aggressive pursuit of voter fraud has Rove written all over it, anyway. The defining Rove strategy, generally speaking, is to take your own weakness and turn it into your opponent's weakness. Think of how in 2004 draft-dodging George W. Bush somehow looked like the patriotic defender of his country while decorated veteran John Kerry looked like the pansy. It's the same deal in this case: Republicans commit massive voter suppression, yet they try to make it look like Democrats are the ones manipulating the voter roles.

Conclusion
The recent Florida decision and the uncovering of the crass politicization of justice represented by the US Attorney purge are steps in the right direction. I compliment Crist for listening to his conscience and helping more people vote instead of less, like the rest of his party seems to be doing. Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State in 2004, lost badly in his bid for the Ohio governor's mansion last year. Conscientious liberals have launched a project to get responsible people in Secretary of State offices across the nation. We're not there yet, but the tides of voter suppression may be turning.

Enlightenment Watch - April

2007-04-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

In a liberal democracy, the government is the people. You may be familiar with this concept from examples such as the times I have written about it or ambient culture, like The People vs. Larry Flynt. The concept of the government and the people being coterminous stems from the Enlightenment philosophers. The ultimate power in any society, according to that view, rests with its people--agents of a state are only using power delegated to them by the people.

In a totalitarian dictatorship, by contrast, the government is the party. You may be familiar with this concept from the examples of the Soviet Union or Mussolini's Italy. The concept of the government and the party being coterminous stems from the legacy of every warlord, despot, and regional strongman in the history of humanity--whatever faction seizes control is the only one with a right to power.

The Bush Administration, Karl Rove, and other Republicans have made it more clear than ever that under their watch, the government of the United States will be coterminous with the Republican Party. The continuing sagas of the US Attorney firing scandal and the suddenly disputed right of habeas corpus, joined by a new scandal at the General Services Administration, all reveal the sad truth of this Republican governing philosophy.

Habeas Corpus
Glenn Greenwald, the blogging jewel in Salon.com's crown, filed a little-reported update in the Republican war on the 800-year-old right this weekend. According to Greenwald, two of three Republican frontrunners for the 2008 nomination are convinced habeas corpus exists. As far as I know, John McCain still supports habeas, but neither Romney nor Giuliani do.

We're not just talking about some contemporary issue like trade deficits or abortion here: habeas corpus is the very foundation of all democracy. The importance of this issue was summed up nicely by that famous bleeding heart hippie liberal Winston Churchill (as quoted by Andrew Sullivan by way of Greenwald):

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist. [emphasis added]

GSA Corruption
It was revealed this month that the General Services Administration, which oversees office supplies and real estate for the federal government, was being directed to help Republican candidates win elections in 2008. The GSA is not the first place you would look for partisanship, especially since using its resources and capabilities for partisan purposes is illegal. But one of Karl Rove's deputies was dispatched to give a slideshow on such strategies this January.

US Attorneys
A typical Republican defense for the firing of the eight US Attorneys is that all US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, and he may remove them for any or no reason. I don't know of anyone who is disputing that fact. But the Justice Department initially claimed that the USA's were fired for performance reasons, yet it has become obvious that they were removed for political reasons. We probably wouldn't have had a scandal if the Administration had just been up front about that. But, like the best mystery novel detectives, sometimes the best way to solve a case is to wait for the perp to slip up.

"But detective, how did you know I committed the murder?"
"I didn't. You just told me."

The politicized aspect of the US Attorney firings that gets the most attention is the involvement of many of the fired prosecutors in corruption and fraud probes. For example, Carol Lam was fired from her position in Southern California after getting a conviction on Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) in a defense contracting corruption case. Recently it also became apparent that Lam's ongoing corruption probe was getting close to the Vice President's office. US Attorneys in New Mexico and Washington were allegedly fired for failing to adequately prosecute election fraud, which turned out to mean they didn't manufacture the evidence their superiors wanted to see on Democratic election fraud.

Less attention has been paid to the proposed (and subsequently withdrawn) appointment of Tim Griffin to replace Bud Cummins as US Attorney in Arkansas. You may be thinking, "So what? It's a politically appointed post, why not install a former Karl Rove protégé like Griffin?" It just so happens that Griffin used to be an opposition researcher for the RNC. During that time, Griffin likely committed grave voter fraud felonies himself. More to the point, it would seem like an unlikely coincidence that the Administration wants to give their top opposition researcher subpoena power in the home state of Hillary Clinton, just in time for her presidential candidacy.

As Johnathan Alter summarizes it in this Olbermann clip,what Rove was trying to do is in jurisdiction by jurisdiction, protect Republicans, go after Democrats, and essentially turn our criminal justice system into what they have in a banana republic [i.e. any totalitarian system].

Conclusion
I should qualify that I don't think most rank and file Republicans are interested in destroying democracy from its very foundations. But the Republicans in power sure seem to be. This means that in this case the opponents of liberalism are probably not accurately described as conservatives. But what, then?

Andrew Sullivan makes a crucial distinction between membership blocs of the Republican party: "If conservatism is about preserving one's own past, fundamentalism is about erasing it and starting afresh." There is no question that things like habeas corpus are part of "one's own past" for most Americans, and the people in power are obviously not interested in "preserving" them. Yet, Bush & Co. also don't seem to be interested in "starting afresh" so much as in recreating the type of despotism that dominated the world prior to 1776.

Survey of Local Democratic Cleavages

2007-03-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

As the authors of Crashing the Gate, a netroots essential, have written, liberals need to stop infighting to have a chance of moving forward on the national political stage. On a local level, in a situation dominated by Democrats, it's not so bad: you've got a big Democratic pie, and you're fighting to distribute it. But on a bigger scale, these street-level divisions are crucially important to resolve.

Three traditionally liberal groups that University of Chicago students are familiar with include students (duh), Blacks, and labor unions. Unfortunately, these groups don't always get along perfectly in Chicago.

You may have seen copies of the free weekly Black newspaper N'Digo (note: a saucy soul soundtrack awaits anyone who actually clicks this link) lying around the waiting rooms of various Hyde Park businesses. I picked up the latest issue yesterday at Lung Wah on 53rd, and there was an interesting editorial on a division between Blacks and labor.

The editorial's author, N'Digo publisher Hermene D. Hartman, describes the efforts of unions to target Aldermen they consider to be anti-union. So far it sounds like a reasonable thing for a union to do. Since unions are such an important way to organize liberal votes around the country, I actually wish they would do more of it.

But the problem for Hartman is that (a) many of the targeted Aldermen are highly regarded leaders in the Black community and (b) many of the unions haven't done a good job of accepting Black members into their ranks. It's quite a shame, since unions and Blacks could gain quite a bit from cooperating--in particular, getting more Black laborers organized would be a proverbial win-win situation.

Students have fewer common interests with unions and Blacks. Moreover, sometimes students have trouble getting involved in local issues. We're not from here, we're only here for a couple years, etc. But the University and the community are stuck with each other, and the administration is the permanent face of students to the community. This hasn't always worked out well.

The University has a bad history of trampling neighborhood interests in the name of redevelopment, which still creates resentment. Hyde Park has been "successfully" gentrified over the past 40 years, but the Woodlawn neighborhood (south of the Midway) has not been interfered with to the same degree. But as the University expands operations there with the construction of a big new dorm, old tensions come bubbling back to the surface.

On a more positive note, recent activism by the SOUL group to encourage the University to negotiate a better contract with about 600 of its unionized employees was a welcome example of cross-group cooperation. It's probably also a good example of really the best action students can take: pressuring the University, as our representative, to deal respectfully and fairly with local groups.

Democratic Messaging Follies

2007-03-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, the Democratic National Committee mailed me a survey. It's called the 2007 Democratic Strategy Survey (see pictures below), and it appears to be an attempt to learn what rank and file donors want from the party. But sometimes these voter surveys come across as a little clunky or ideological. One wonders if the purpose is to reinforce the Democratic message in the minds of the donors. To paraphrase Lisa Simpson, what's the deal with these surveys?

The first thing I notice about this survey is the instruction section. It says that my answers will be kept confidential, which is something any IRB will like because it protects privacy. However, an IRB would like it more if you also keep people's answers separate from any identifying information beyond a case ID. The instructions are therefore the first indication that this survey might be about finding out what is important to the donors who give the most.

But right near the top of the survey are a couple questions about withdrawing troops from Iraq. Maybe it is about planting the Democratic message.

Skipping down to question #5, the survey asks us donors whether we "support raising the minimum wage from its current level of $5.15 per hour". The response choices are essentially yes and no, but the survey provides a whole bunch of superfluous rationale, too. Instead of just being "yes", the affirmative option reads "Yes, the minimum wage should be increased to help workers make ends meet." The negative option reads "No, raising the minimum wage will hurt small businesses and cost jobs."

Does it seem like question #5 is designed to measure opinion, or is it intended to implant talking points? It doesn't do either well, so it's hard to tell.

Assuming for the moment that the point is to measure opinion, then adding the detailed rationale is not a good idea. It confuses the data. What if I oppose raising the minimum wage, but not because it will hurt small businesses and cost jobs? Or what if I support the minimum wage increase, but only because I think it will reduce government expenditure on food stamps? What answer do I choose? The DNC would end up with a pretty skewed version of what respondents think no matter what someone who doesn't fit the question chooses to do.

Since gathering information doesn't appear to be the real purpose, let's assumed the survey is designed to expose me to the Democratic platform. To do so, it should expose me to a false choice. That is, both options should be in line with the Democratic agenda. By choosing between degrees of liberal, instead of between liberal and conservative, the reader is anchored to a leftward conception of what the available options even are.

But that's not what the survey does. The "yes" option, is appropriately in line with the Democratic agenda, based on its emotional appeal to nurturing the less fortunate. But the "no" option reflects the traditional Republican rationale that distributing money more fairly throughout a community will hurt jobs.

As a side note, the supposed harm of minimum wage hikes has been pretty much objectively disproven, as even many small business owners will tell you.

If Democrats were trying to convince me about their talking points, they wouldn't actually give me the choice between their version and the opposing version. The "yes" option as written would be fine, but the negative option should be something like this: "No, there are more pressing and efficient ways to promote economic justice." If I disagree with the minimum wage raise, there's no reason to remind me why I feel that way.

The rest of the survey proceeds pretty much along the same lines. Question #9, for example, asks whether I support tax cuts for working families. It happens that I don't, but not just because of their suggested rationale: "additional tax cuts at this time will only worsen the federal deficit."

The reason I don't support more tax cuts is that I support a civic culture where everyone contributes their fair share to the common good (government). Constantly talking about tax cuts makes people feel like they're entitled to always pay less and less. Remember that under a classically liberal form of government such as ours, the government is the people. Constantly putting the government on sale encourages the conception that you need to go bargain hunting like you would at Wal*Mart.

In the end, I can't tell what the DNC is really trying to get out of this survey. The DNC survey distribution list comes from previous donations, the DCCC's list, and so forth. They know the people they send the survey to are not Republicans. If they were really trying to gather information, they wouldn't bother trying to find out whether I like Republican talking points. (They should know damn well that I don't. ) They would also provide a more methodologically sound opinion instrument. Likewise, if they want to keep Democratic messages in my head, they shouldn't be exposing me to reasonable-sounding iterations of Republican rationale.

The DNC should be able to use surveys like this both to read Democratic opinion and solidify messaging. We're not talking about some mom 'n' pop charity that gets the receptionist to design the survey because they operate on such a small scale. In improving this survey, you wouldn't want to make the questions too stilted or too dry. People won't fill it out if they think the survey is pure manipulation, but draining too much slant from the questions will eliminate the messaging benefit. By way of closing this entry, let me suggest a few relevant changes to #14.

Old question: "What is your opinion about our environmental laws in America?"
New question: "What is your opinion about laws protecting America's environment?"
Old choice 1: "We need stronger environmental laws to protect our air and water, clean up toxic waste, safeguard wildlife and habitat, and combat global warming."
New choice 1: "Current environmental laws do not go far enough protecting our world, our neighborhoods, and our families from polluters."
Old choice 2: "Our environmental policies are about right; no new laws are needed." (This choice can stay as is.)
Old choice 3: "Our environmental laws burden businesses and hurt our economy."
New choice 3: "We have too many laws protecting our environment."

Enlightenment Watch

2007-03-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

I've blogged previously about Bush's contempt for the enlightenment and about his dream of becoming a Sun King. A couple things came up last week that demand an update to this line of criticism. But first, a trip down memory lane.

My opponent thinks the government -- the surplus is the government's money. That's not what I think. I think it's the hard-working people of America's money and I want to share some of that money with you so you have more money to build and save and dream for your families. It's a difference of opinion.

This quote is from George W. Bush in the October 10, 2000 presidential debate. Everyone knows that because of Bush and his insatiable desire for cutting taxes and increasing spending, we have a crushing deficit far larger than anything we could have imagined in 2000. I would contend that having a solvent government would have helped the American people more than shifting the tax burden off the absurdly wealthy and onto the middle class.

But what he describes in this passage is goes beyond the woulda-shoulda-couldas of policy. It is less a a difference of opinion than a difference in the fundamental philosophy of what government is. Al Gore, apparently, supported a classical liberal view, the view that this country was founded on, the view that came out of the Enlightenment itself. George W. Bush supported, and supports to this day, a regressive view that would take us back before the Enlightenment.

You see, in a liberal democracy, the people are the government. There is no opposition between paying down the debt and rewarding the people for their hard work and prudence. The people of the United States are in debt up to their eyeballs, both personally and socially.

Fun fact: repealing the estate tax entirely would cost the people of the United States over $8 billion over the next ten years from the Walton family (owners of Wal*Mart) alone.

Anyway, on to the two updates: outsourcing tax rules and signing statements.

#1: a continued emphasis on destroying the rational-bureaucratic norms that are a central feature of all modern societies. This time it's back to the IRS, which apparently is pushing to allow private tax attorneys and accountants to just rewrite tax rules as they see fit.

In the Conservative mind, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Who better to write tax rules than the people who deal with them every day? So much the better that these people are willing to do it for free! There's probably no catch, and if there were, it probably wouldn't be based on rigging the tax rules to favor their clients.

In the liberal, Enlightenment view, by contrast, the people regulate themselves through the intermediary of a meritocratic bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is employed using money collected from the people and directed by politicians elected by the people. This system is good because everyone involved is accountable to everyone else. Doing it their way, the doers are accountable only to their captain of industry clients.

#2: the issue of signing statements is finally upon us in a much more tangible way. To provide a brief refresher, signing statements are the mechanism Bush has been using to assert an unjustifiably extravagant amount of Constitutional authority. The hubbub over signing statements is about a year old, but heretofore it has been largely hypothetically. Last week, the FBI put a much more real face on the situation.

It all begins with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act in the fall of 2005. One of the measures included was an unreasonable ability for the FBI to infringe on privacy with virtually no supervision. Some people complained about this at the time, but of course that would have meant the terrorists win. To the surprise of approximately no one, the FBI promptly turned around and abused their awesome, completely unchecked power by breaking even the modest oversight requirements in the law.

The connection here is that the signing statement Bush issued with the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act is the very one that drew attention to the controversy over signing statements to begin with. And that signing statement spelled out very clearly that Bush intended to ignore the portions of the law that the FBI has now, indeed, ignored.

This could force a real showdown over the Constitution, which one has to believe was the intention of the Administration all along. After all, if Bush wanted to just get away with one, why would he announce he was going to break the law? Democrats in Congress, and self-respecting pundits, are already making noise about getting Alberto Gonzales to resign. Between this scandal and the politically motivated firing of otherwise competent US Attorneys, it is starting to look like Gonzales may not be able to make it too much longer, which can only be good for the country: it's time we stopped assaulting the Enlightenment.

Full Frontal

2007-03-07T22:48:00.001-08:00

So I recently read an article on the illustrious Slate.com concerning a new technology called Back Scanning.

Basically its like that thing from Total Recall (bellow), a machine which can be used to identify weapons (or in this case drugs or even less dense objects) concealed on people's bodies.

Unlike Total Recall, you get a peak at a person's form rather then their skeleton. This basically presents a fundamental privacy issue as guards at the airport will potentially be checking out your goods as you get on a plane. The Slate article suggests that this isn't so bad, as long as this process is totally divorced from the individual.

Basically, somewhere, someone will see you naked. But they'll never know it was you. As you can see from these images from the TSA, each person (be they white, black, arab or asian) is pretty much reduced to a sort of zombie like blur. So as long as that blur is never put next to the person it belongs to, we should all be ok and can avoid the awkward screening and pat down system we have now.

One concern immediately raised on the Slate's Fray by a user named Fozzy is basically that these will become the new metal detectors, and the frequency of their use will decrease any kind of privacy standard like the kind mentioned at airports .

I'd say Fozzy's concern is very valid and really underscores the most depressing aspect of this war on terror: when are we safe. Technology like Back Scanners will let us peak deeper and deeper into people's lives to make sure their not going to blow us up. We're consistently asked to bear all in the name of our country.

The thing that I find most disturbing about Back Scanning is how quickly I agree with it and would condone it. Because it beats pat downs and racial profiling, right? Because it keeps us safe, right? In the coming century, we as individual's will become easier and and easier to scrutinize. Trust will become less of a word and a code and more of a fact, verifiable by scans and probes which let us see when its safe.

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." said Benjamin Franklin. I think this quote is especially pertinent given our current mindset about security after 9/11. I'm not saying that we can't be free and safe. But one has to ask themselves where that line lies and if we trust ourselves to stay to the right side.

Faith-Based Policies

2007-03-06T09:50:00.000-08:00

I'm no lawyer, but generally I approve of having some sort of standard of evidence. Which is why it's so funny to see the oil industry shills with their backs up against the wall.

Fact: global warming is happening right now, and humans are responsible for it. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report spells it out as starkly as such a document can. In an ironic bit of metaphor, global warming is an effect that will only snowball - the more heat gets trapped, the more the forces that trap heat speed up. There's really no denying that this is a huge problem that only we are responsible for. There's also no denying that we will have to wait until 2009, when a less evil president assumes office, in order to get started on implementing the policies we so desperately and urgently need.

As if this weren't enough reason to for the oil industry to worry, peak oil is also starting to rear its ugly head. Production at some of the largest, most productive oil fields in the world (including the crown jewel fields of Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Alaska) has started to decline despite increased drilling. We may soon see an irreversible worldwide decline in production.

So what is the oil industry response? Via their front group, the American Petroleum Institute, it appears to be make-believe. As observed in this diary on DailyKos, the industry shills are telling us that proven reserves aren't what matter - we should be looking at un-proven reserves. In other words, let's make our policy based on faith. In oil companies. Yep, that's probably superior to evidence.

It's truly astonishing that they have now taken up methods that not even Police Detective Riley would use. Per Jack Handey:

Police Detective Riley was a no-nonsense kind of guy. Before, he really loved nonsense, and would use it a lot in his murder investigations. But he found that most people didn't appreciate it, especially the family of the victim.

Now, granted that whoever was speaking for the API was probably a PR guy, which would make him the spinmeister for a spin group. Hardly someone you should trust. But clearly the American Petroleum Industry trusts this guy, so somebody is actually embracing nonsense as a methodology for science and policy.

Fortunately, supporting this kind of statement actually does seem to finally be eroding the credibility of the oil industry. And with Obama and McCain jointly sponsoring global warming legislation, it looks like 2009 may be the beginning of the end for the oil industry. I therefore issue the API, the industry at large, Bush, and that whole gang this challenge, by way of Homer Simpson:

You couldn't fool your own mother on the foolingest day of your life with an electrified fooling machine!

Leadership Vacuum

2007-03-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, my colleague Benediktion writes about the difference between moral high ground and action in the context of divesting from Darfur and stopping the Iraq occupation. Although I disagree with several of the things he says, I'm glad he brought it up. These are vitally important issues, and the context in which we deal with them lends itself well to Sartre's analysis of man: his identity is constructed by his actions, not his words.

Last November, Americans came out and took action en masse, giving form to their dissatisfaction by kicking the Republicans out of power in Congress. But outside of elections, the people in a representative democracy retain their ability to speak while delegating their ability to act. So, despite the fact that there are various issues on which the people demand action, the beltway politicos are content to make sure their demands stay mere words.

First case in point: Iraq. Three quarters of respondents to the most recent CBS News/New York Times poll thought things were going badly or very badly in Iraq. Iraq was clearly a major factor in the 2006 elections. Yet so far, the Democratic majority has responded by letting Bush's escalation go forward, not supporting measures with teeth to bring an end to the occupation, and letting Joe Lieberman give the weekly radio address. The Administration promised the escalation would be different because this time we were seriously going to hold the Iraqis to some benchmarks. Now that benchmarks have already been missed, no one is pressing the administration on it.

Second case in point: health care. A stunning poll was released last week that was basically ignored by most media. It turns out Americans support single payer health care. Big time. Health care is the most important issue for a majority (not just a plurality) of the respondents, 64% think the government should guarantee coverage, and 60% we would be willing to pay more in taxes so that everyone could have guaranteed coverage. A popular mandate for the best solution to the preeminent domestic policy problem of our day would seemingly translate to major action by the government, right? So why haven't the Democrats jumped at this opportunity to help people and make themselves look good?

As Michael Tomasky notes,

What we don't know about the Democrats at this point is whether the party has an interest in summoning Americans to think about the world from a broader perspective than how a given issue affects them directly.

Because that's what health care and Iraq are about. Sure some people are directly affected by the health care crisis or Iraq, but most people aren't. Or at least they don't feel like it. But people recognize that these are the important issues in America today. People want them solved. Visionaries are those who solve big issues, not those who solve easy ones.

Visionaries are what we need, and it is easier to be a visionary from the White House (or at least a presidential campaign) than it is from the halls of compromise (read: Congress). Fortunately, Democrats currently have a bumper crop of great presidential candidates, at least so goes the conventional wisdom. Edwards, Clinton, and Obama are considered to be form an unusually strong field for Democrats.

Unfortunately, all these great candidates are taking equally cowardly approaches to substance. Obama, especially, has "decided to run--à la Gary Hart in 1984--on the notion of new ideas without actually offering any." Establishment Democrats clearly need more encouragement to start acting on the values they sometimes seem to have. We spent a really long time (from 1994 to present) in this defensive crouch, so I guess it's too much to expect one little election to immediately break the bad habits. But it's frustrating - our people are finally in office, so why aren't they doing the things we want? For now, all we can do is keep the pressure up on our representatives. Hopefully sooner or later one of these great candidates will emerge to make Democrats do what they must know they need to do.

Moral Superiority

2007-03-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago we all heard how the University’s Board decided not to divest from Darfur. Though certainly not happy with that decision, I was neither surprised nor particularly saddened. I wasn’t surprised because, hey, this is the UofC board of stodgy unconnected intellectuals, and nobody was really expecting anything less of them.

I wasn’t particularly saddened, however, because looking at it rationally, divestment does very little. Yes, it “sends a message,” and it could be argued that it grants “us,” whatever we are as a collective, the moral high ground. But in reality, we’re talking about divesting less than one million dollars from multibillion dollar, multinational or state-owned firms. They wouldn’t notice.

Though I respect what STAND has done and continues to do on campus, the fact of the matter is that their actions would do almost nothing to end the actual genocide, whether or not they actually achieved their policy goals. The only thing that divestment would actually accomplish is making some people feel good about themselves, and give them the ability to say, “I told you so.”

I’m quite sure that the family of one of the hundreds of thousands dead in Darfur is not completely comforted by the fact that some first-world people are very sorry for what’s happening to them and their people. In fact, I’d wager that they’d prefer some action to lessen the genocide over the united first world saying that we’re really sorry and do not at all support what is happening.

While having the moral high ground may help some of us watching the horror feel better about ourselves, it’s doing nothing for the actual victims. I think that a grief-stricken mother would prefer her son back than to have some more people express their apologies and do no more, no matter whether that mother is from Darfur, or is from the United States with her son in a flag-draped coffin flying back from Baghdad on an Army cargo plane.

The sad fact about the genocide in Darfur is that there’s very little that an individual, or even a group of students or activists, can do about it. The same cannot be said about ending the war in Iraq. Whether through direct action or through the Congress, the people of the United States have the ability to bring an end to the Iraqi War, and every day we chose not to, we become culpable for more and more deaths.

Look back for a second to the 1972 presidential election. Richard Nixon wins on a promise to end the Vietnam war, a platform he’s forced to adopt because of George McGovern’s promise of immediate withdrawal. The same George McGovern that beat Muskie, Humphrey, and Wallace in the primaries on the strength of one of the first real grassroots campaigns, on the backs of people who were willing to work to bring their friends, lovers, brothers, and sons back from a lost cause in the jungles of Vietnam.

We have the same power in 2008 as the students, the progressives, the caring of this nation had in 72. We can force this war to end, whether or not we win the presidency (which we will, but that’s for another column).
But even if the war ends in two years, that’s two years of dead friends, of dead sons and daughters, which is two years too many. Congress has been talking about a nonbinding resolution expressing their displeasure over the war. It passed the House, and failed a procedural vote in the Senate, with 53 supporting (not the 60 needed to force a vote), so a majority of both houses supported this resolution.

Of course, the resolution was nonbinding, and our dear President could, and all but said he would, completely ignore the will of Congress and the directive of the American people, and not only continue the war but send more soldiers into the mouth of Hell, leaving us to watch in dismay as yet another hero fell.

In that sense, the resolution and divestment are exactly the same thing. The people of America, the people of the world, have stood up, made their disapproval heard, and watched in dismay as the horrors continued. The tragedy has lead us to conclude what must be a central ideal of this new progressive movement, the one that can actually hold power in this country: Moral superiority is no longer enough.

Moral superiority is divesting from Darfur, is a nonbinding resolution. Moral superiority is setting things up se we can se “We told you so.” And moral superiority does nothing at all to save somebody’s son or daughter’s life. While it is certainly a tragedy that we cannot do more in Darfur (even the UN is powerless because of Sudan’s government), we can do more to end the war in Iraq. We, through Congress, hold the pursestrings. We control the billions of dollars that this war needs to continue.

Call your Congressman, call your Senator. Get the word out that cutting the purse does nothing to harm the troops, to endanger our friends, lovers, sons and daughters, beyond force the executive to bring them home. We can win this battle and end this war, before 2008. We cannot, and we must not, remain content with this war being a “Republican” problem, with us saying “We told you so.” Because even if it’s good for us politically, even if it gets us the Presidency, it costs us in lives, a trade-off that no progressive can make.

Moral superiority is not enough anymore, friends. We must act, we must see results. Central to the progressive movement is the belief that we can improve people’s lives. I put forth that there’s no better way to do this than by saving them.

May the God of your choice bless you,
Benediktion

Con Union Se Vive Mejor and Homeland Security

2007-03-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is Spanish. Roughly translated, it can mean everyone's life is better with unions.

And it's true: unions are great. They have some problems, of course, but they are essentially the only organized force opposing unbridled corporatism. They help their members by ensuring safe working conditions, living wages, and health insurance. They also help everyone else by pushing workplace safety legislation; union activism is responsible for the 40 hour work week and the weekend. Unions have an added appeal for Democrats, because they are a great way to organize supporters. Republicans use churches in roughly the same way, but unions lately have declined while churches have not.

That's why in 2002, when the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was being debated, Democrats tried to make sure DHS employees could unionize. This was more than just a partisan self-interest thing - it would have improved safety. Take the example of baggage screeners at airports. A union could make sure they are treated well and paid well, thereby minimizing turnover and dissatisfaction. It could make sure working conditions are productive by negotiating how much overtime screeners work, thus preserving their alertness.

Unfortunately, Democrats seemed to be caught completely off guard when Republicans claimed that the terrorists would win if we limited the flexibility of the new Department in managing its personnel. So, after Bush initially opposed the very plan of creating a DHS, Republicans successfully used the issue to depict Democrats as weak on national security. This was a major cause of the Republican routs in the 2002 midterms.

But recently there has been talk of another shot at unionizing the DHS, and I heartily commend Democrats for taking the issue up again. Republicans appear to be ready to play the same card, as Bush is expected to veto any legislation that includes anything pro-union. If Democrats go through with it, this will force Bush to be the one who obstructs a vital security bill for partisan reasons.

Democrats need to force Bush to get out his veto pen on this issue. But Democrats also have to be sure they help the media and the public make the connection between the danger to our shared security and Bush's intransigence. If they bring the legislation up, they must have that plan in place.

Incidentally, the proposal is not even particularly strong. To wit, it will empower a union to negotiate workplace conditions but not salaries. I don't really see why they should bother in such a watered-down way, since Bush & Co. hate unions more than anything. They are so reactionary in their opposition to any form of unionism that the measure won't get past his desk no matter what it looks like.

Better to just propose that the TSA union be fully empowered. In for a dime, in for a dollar, as they say. It could be argued that since the pro-union project here is doomed from the start, the whole project is just about leverage. And you get more leverage out of saying that the President blew it when you tried to meet him halfway than when you presented him with a partisan plan.

If this is indeed the rationale, then it is a prime example of the misguided thinking that helped mire the Democrats in futility for so long. This thinking is largely a product of the wing of the party that fetishizes centrism, thereby ignoring the basic principles of negotiating. Every carpet seller in the bazaar knows that you offer higher than you will settle for so that you can let the other guy talk you down. You end up with what you really wanted, and the other guy gets to think he got a bargain.

Granted, it gets a little tricky when applying this to Bush, since he is so obviously irrational. But in theory, if you went to him with a proposal for full unionization, even though you would be willing to settle for a union that can only negotiate workplace conditions, he could talk you down to that level. You could have your union, and he could tell his corporate overlords that he had really gotten a good deal out of you. Democrats would be well advised to get into the habit of playing smarter in this way. In the meantime, it's a step forward that they are proactively pushing this again.

Greenwashing

2007-02-26T21:09:00.000-08:00

Environmentalists have a shaky relationship with corporations. Corporations are the biggest, most powerful, most unified force fighting to destroy the environment. Business gets a lot cheaper when you can just dump your waste in the creek, as it were.

Corporations have a shaky relationship with environmentalists. Corporations like the environmentalist seal of approval because it gives them good PR. But environmentalists demand that corporations actually do something good for the environment before getting support.

This is where the concept of "greenwashing" comes in. To whitewash a problem means to do something very superficial that makes everything seem better without solving anything. To greenwash is to do something superficial to make yourself appear environmentally responsible without putting anything behind it.

A classic example of greenwashing is so-called "clean coal".

This ad from GE last year is disgusting on a number of levels, not least of which is that it combines a folk song about the horrendous exploitation of coal miners over the last couple centuries with Zoolander-style models strutting around. All for the sake of a "coal is great" message. But the real issue here is portraying coal as clean. Granted, there are ways to filter out some of the most disgusting particulate burn-off (aka soot) that coal plants generate, but they still generate huge amounts of CO2. It might be possible to have cleanER coal, there will never be any such thing as clean coal.

This morning, evil energy giant TXU, which had been aggressively trying to build more coal power plants without even pretending to make them clean, has been bought out. Not only that, but the new owners are pledging to stop building (so many) coal plants. Not only that, but they are also pledging to support government regulations capping CO2 emissions!

The head of one of the equity firms involved is also on the board of the World Wildlife Fund. So someone in the process has an environmental conscious, which pretty much explains why the deal worked out as it did.

Do we need to worry that this deal is just greenwashing? TXU was originally going to be building 11 coal plants, and now they're scaling it back to 3. That's cool and all, because it's a big reduction. But if it's a bad idea to build 11 new particulate-spewing, climate destroying power plants, why is it still a good idea to build 3?

In the end, I don't think this deal is greenwashing. It's not as great as it would be if environmentalists conceived and executed it from start to finish, but it's tremendous progress. The interests behind this have involved more people, and made more serious commitments, than they would have if they didn't mean it. And, as the Post article quotes an anonymous source saying, getting a big energy concern like TXU to do this may go a long way to changing a lot of minds among traditional opponents of the environment.

Update - 2/27:
The Christian Science Monitor has an article today pointing up the increased relevance of environmental costs for Wall Street. I take this as partial confirmation that the TXU deal is more than simple greenwashing.

Update 2 - 2/27:
Yes, I'm aware that the GE video is strikingly similar to this idiotic (hot?) techno video from several years ago:

The Netroots vs. The Restroots

2007-02-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

One of the main reasons the 2006 election was so amazing is that the grassroots finally harnessed the power of the internet to wrench a small portion of political influence away from entrenched politicians, mainstream media, and megadonors.

Naturally, the powers that were are not too happy about sharing their power with the "netroots" (a lazy man's portmanteau of grass roots and internet, you see). It will always work out better for beltway insiders to scratch each other's backs than it will for them to behave as if they represented actual citizens, which is why it's crucial that the netroots maintain, and expand, their influence.

Don't get me wrong - beltway insiders have the right, nay, the obligation to look out for themselves. A basic premise of capitalism, and its ally democracy, is that people should pursue their own interests. We should no more blame insiders for their chauvinism than we should blame the Yankees for spending twice as much money as every other baseball team. As long as the system doesn't restrict you from doing something, you are free to do it.

But the justification for selfishly pursuing individual interests is having opposing interests challenging them, keeping them in check. An article today in the Washington Post, the official mouthpiece of beltway conventional wisdom, simultaneously analyzes the opposing relationship of the netroots to the establishment and participates in it. The article, titled "Woman in the Middle", is by Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald. It is about the efforts of the left/netroots to challenge Rep. Ellen Tauscher (a centrist Democrat from a very liberal district of California) in her Democratic primary in 2008.

There are several hints scattered throughout the article as to the establishment sympathies of the writers. First, the netroots is composed of rowdy bomb throwers:

"Moderate Democrat Is New Target of Liberal Bloggers"
"the party's left wing had already settled on their new enemy"
"eight MoveOn.org activists were accusing her of helping President Bush".

The beginning of the piece also has an anecdote about how the party's left wing demands Tauscher show some leadership on opposing Bush's escalation in Iraq. Tauscher apparently responds that she gave a speech opposing the escalation and that she has shown leadership in bringing infrastructure pork to the district. Since the point is that the leadership be focused on Iraq, the left is left unsatisfied by the encounter. The article insinuates that we want to argue more than we want to be convinced.

The fundamental objection the netroots has to Tauscher is that she doesn't support progressive policies or politics. For instance, she echoed Republican (!) talking points before the 2006 election by accusing the netroots of dragging the party off a left cliff. She has also been pro-corporate, siding with Republicans on issues like the odious bankruptcy bill, and thus making such bills look more bipartisan than they are or should be.

But these actions don't just piss off bomb throwing bloggers, they are are also out of step with Tauscher's liberal district. As the story notes, the netroots aren't challenging conservative Democrats in conservative districts, like Heath Shuler (D-NC). But the story makes it clear that, in the minds of the writers, Tauscher is doing an awesome job of representing her district. For instance, Tauscher is described lobbying for more C-17 cargo planes, which are based in her district.

She then raced to catch the last minutes of an Armed Services Committee hearing, just in time to question Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As five women from the antiwar group Code Pink stood in protest, Tauscher asked two quick questions: Why didn't Bush's budget increase production of the C-17, a plane based at Travis? And how much would the president's troop increase cost?

Pace called the C-17 a "great aircraft" and hinted that he wouldn't be too upset if Tauscher, who chairs the subcommittee on strategic forces, stuck a few more into the budget, as she did last year.

This is not the space to argue about pork, but suffice it to say I am not impressed with Tauscher's devotion to her district as expressed by betraying its values and bribing it with a couple extra jobs. This passage also illustrates the back-scratch ménage à trois that boils the blood of any grassroots activist. Beltway insider Pace passes a wink to beltway insider Tauscher, who nods back. The beltway insider fishwrap holds up its end of the bargain by reporting this as positive evidence of Tauscher's devotion to her district. Never mind that our military budget is way out of control or that Tauscher's constituents would benefit more from balanced bankruptcy regulations and a higher minimum wage.

The WaPo's ally on this issue of protecting the establishment first turns out to be House leader Nancy Pelosi. The story goes on to explain how Pelosi and Tauscher used to have their differences, but now they're suspiciously good friends. The newfound friendliness would sound a bit more natural if the teeth expressing it were a bit less clenched.

Said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly: "We want to protect our incumbents. That's what we're about."
[...]
[Tauscher] was once the only California Democrat to oppose Pelosi's campaign for leadership, but she now marvels that the speaker's performance has been "absolutely perfect -- and she looks so beautiful doing it!"

I should note that this is actually exactly what I want to hear from the Pelosi camp, which is advancing its own interests as it is supposed to. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to vote with the Congress you want, not the Congress you have. If you're Nancy Pelosi, and you want members to vote with the caucus, one of the few bargaining chips you have is the promise to help them keep their jobs. So this is precisely how you should run a caucus, and running a caucus is precisely what I want Nancy Pelosi to do.

But this story also proves the benefit of having a third force, i.e. the netroots, wielding some influence. If it were left up to the mainstream press and the political leadership, as it always was in the past, there would be no pressure on Tauscher. And it is obvious that the pressure the netroots is putting on Tauscher is helping already: she is following Pelosi's lead in the caucus since she knows she needs Pelosi to help her with the coming challenge.

The article also mentions Rep. Jane Harman, another Democrat from California, and Sen. Joe Lieberman. Even if a primary challenge against an incumbent like Tauscher fails to unseat her, the cases of Harman and Lieberman show that putting the pressure on can still be crucial.

"I don't think [Lieberman is] a fair comparison," Tauscher said. "My colleagues look at this and say, 'If they're going after Ellen Tauscher, holy moly!' "
[...]
But Kos points to Harman as a perfect example of how the Net roots can keep Democrats in line. He said Harman used to be a constant irritant, a go-to quote for reporters looking for a Democrat to tweak liberals -- until she had to fight off a primary challenge from the left in 2006. "She's been great ever since," he said. Now Harman even writes on the liberal Huffington Post blog.

Under the old paradigm, the beltway insiders were free to collude, thereby shutting out passionate, concerned citizens who lacked only organization. Now, the concerned multitudes have the means to organize, and we should not be surprised that their concern is not welcome. The establishment interests can kick and scream all they want, I don't think the netroots are about to let up on them.

Triangulation: The Strategy I Love to Hate

2007-02-19T18:59:00.000-08:00

[If] deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray--by the subtle signs of self-knowledge--the deception being practiced.

Robert Trivers wrote this sentence in the introduction to Richard Dawkins' influential The Selfish Gene, and it gives a genetic excuse for every earnest promise that has ever gone unfulfilled. Ladies, this is why that gentleman was able to say he loved you and then slept with your sister anyway - people have a capacity to mean things only when they say them in order to convince other people they believe them.

Casting around completely at random for an example to illustrate this, we could take a shot in the dark and hit Hillary Clinton. Clinton has a major problem admitting that her vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. Primary voters in New Hampshire seem to be especially displeased by this, as well they should.

So why won't Clinton just repudiate her stupid vote already and move on to enjoy her enormous structural advantage on the campaign trail? Apparently she thinks apologizing would be "a gimmick".

OK, fair enough. If she doesn't mean it, she shouldn't apologize. Such an apology would sound like the apology for resting your french fries on your brother's side of the back seat. But just as in the back seat, it's not that we want to hear her say "I'm sorry", it's that we want her to be sorry.

Quoth Clinton, “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.” As Kos trenchantly remarks, "Thank you, Hillary. I think I will."

There are plenty of ways for Clinton to get out of this situation without saying she's sorry. For example, she could use her genetically programmed excuse and say that it seemed right at the time but it was actually wrong. There, problem solved.

Trotting out her usual laundry list about why and how she was misled and did the right thing given the situation and blah and blah isn't going to cut it. Voting for the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. I opposed it from Day 1. So did Barack Obama. It was obvious (to me at least) that Bush and his cronies really had deceived themselves into believing that Iraq had to be invaded, but erasing the subtle signs of self-knowledge wasn't enough to convince me that the invasion was worth supporting.

What really nags at me about Clinton's refusal to say something straightforward is the presence of some subtle signs of self knowledge in her persona. One suspects that she knows that voting for the invasion was wrong, and she was just intimidated into going with the crowd by the jingoistic atmosphere and Bush's high approval ratings. But she won't admit it.

Even though John Edwards voted for the war resolution, he has completely and humbly retracted that vote. This tells me that if chose him from the other candidates, as Clinton would have me do, John Edwards would use better judgment next time. I don't see that from Clinton.

Shifting to the other side of the aisle, conservatives still hold Clinton to be public enemy #1. Her current position on the war, moderate as it is, simply isn't ludicrous enough to convince any right winger that the sexual threat she represents can be overlooked. To wit, the smash and grab artists who were behind the bogus swift boat attacks on John Kerry are now trying to figure out how they can baselessly smear Clinton the same way.

Clinton is a strong girl who can take of herself, and she's been public enemy #1 for so long that there isn't going to be any new dirt on her. Without new dirt, the same old attacks will (a) not pique much media coverage and (b) fail to turn anyone against her who doesn't already hate her. So whatever further conservative attacks she suffers, she has nowhere to go but up. But the conservative opinion thus identified underscores the larger problem: triangulation.

Clinton is taking two very distant ideological points and creating a third point in the middle. The assumption of this strategy is that public opinion will be distributed maybe 20% strongly left and 20% strongly right with the two sides fighting over the 40% in the middle. Therefore, says the strategy, if any one candidate could appeal directly to that middle, he or she would have an instant plurality.

But in the case of Iraq, strong majorities oppose the occupation under every formulation. And here the main problem with triangulation emerges: by trying to appeal to some sort of middle, Clinton is left with no friends. People on the left hate that she won't own up to her misjudgments, and people on the right hate her because they're bitter, hateful people.

Some centrists might conclude that they like her style, but passionate people, the kind of people who will really go to bat for you, believe in things. They won't accept "maybe" for an answer.

More Internship and Training Opportunities

2007-02-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

OK, after digging deeply through my browser's bookmarks, I have unearthed some more opportunities for young people in the progressive world.

Media Matters: progressive media watchdog offers internships in several areas.
Progressive States Network: organization devoted to state-level politics, based in New York.
Progressive Policy Institute: not as progressive as the name would have you believe, this Washington think tank is allied with the DLC.
Mother Jones: San Francisco-based liberal magazine and institute offers journalism internships.
Campaign for America's Future: internships are available at this think tank/activism group.
21st Century Democrats: this organization trains Democratic campaign workers for management level positions on campaigns, but I'm not sure it's still active.
Center for Policy Alternatives: this Washington-based organization is also interested in state-level political transformation. The Center is under the same umbrella as the Progressive States Network. Both branches offer internships.
Center for Progressive Leadership: this group offers trainings and fellowships for progressive youth.
Common Cause: a Washington-based organization that focuses on accountability and government transparency. Offers internships.
Demos: based in New York, this think tank offers policy internships.
Drum Major Institute: also in New York, DMI has internships in social justice.
Emily's List: this advocacy group to promote progressive female candidates. It offers trainings and internships.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR): the title sums up what this organization is about. It offers media internships.
Gloria Steinem Leadership Institute: offered by Choice USA, this program does trainings for pro-choice youth.
Green Corps: offers environmental leadership training.
Institute for Policy Studies: this DC think tank offers internships during the summer.
New Democrat Network: NDN bills itself a policy and advocacy group. It offers internships in the spring for sure, and possibly in the summer.
People for the American Way: PAW is a venerable civil liberties group, and in today's environment that means it's effectively liberal. Offers internships.

Now go forth, and develop thy career track!

Because It's Never Too Early...

2007-02-14T12:16:00.000-08:00

These days, I've been casting my mind back to my days during 1st and 2nd year, and I can remember how much of a pain it was to hunt down all the cool internships that are just waiting to be applied for. So in that vein, here's a preliminary list of places to look for summer internships:

DCCC (Congressional Campaigns): http://www.dccc.org/get_involved/internships/

DSCC (Senate Campaigns): http://www.dscc.org/about/internships/

DNC (Get Ready for '08): http://www.democrats.org/a/2005/07/dnc_internshi.php

Center For American Progress: http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus/intern

DLC (Centrist Democratic Politics): http://www.ndol.org/ndol_sub.cfm?kaid=86&subid=62

Politicorps (Through the Bus Project):

The PolitiCorps Fellowship is geared toward juniors and seniors who would like a 10-week experience of politics: hands-on campaign skills training, innovative public policy intensives, and real-world applications of leadership skills and campaign savvy. PolitiCorps fellows learn new ways to think about the world, but PolitiCorps is not just a school of thought. It's a place where Fellows learn by doing, and make a real difference every day. Rolling Admissions through May 1st--if there are spots left! The application is available online. Check out our website!

So These are some starting points, but feel free to get in touch with the exec board if you have questions about applying, or if you have more specific places you want to work. We've got some contacts with the Hillary, Edwards, and Obama campaigns, as well as some congressional stuff as well. Happy Hunting!

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion

2007-02-12T18:04:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm the only one who does this, but whenever I hear a politician being blatantly disingenuous, it makes me think of this scene from Donny Darko. We're talking the kind of dishonesty that just reeks of insincerity, inauthenticity, or a basic failure to realize how easy it is to fact-check with Google nowadays.

You see, Sparkle Motion is not a terribly profound project (see Appendix A), and there isn't much reason to be committed to it. So when a politician exhibits an insulting disregard for the actual priorities of the nation, it makes me think he's treating citizens' priorities like the mom in the doorway treats Sparkle Motion. Herewith, a roundup of recent insults to the collective intellect of America.

John McCain:
You may know John McCain (R-AZ) as the politician committed to being a maverick outsider, willing to stake himself against unregulated soft money contributions to political campaigns. He even put his name all over the issue by cosponsoring the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law of 2002 that has helped Democrats rediscover their small donor base. His partner in that endeavor, Democrat Russ Feingold, has put his money where his mouth is by voluntarily declining soft money donations. But where he should have put his money, McCain put his foot last week by actively courting the very same soft money donors he used to oppose.

Hillary Clinton:
Clinton (D-NY) is addicted to triangulation. For those who are too young or don't remember, triangulation is the practice of stabbing your allies in the back to make yourself look good. More to the point, it's the worst of squirmy political pandering. For example, triangulation would counsel a politician to support the invasion of Iraq so as to not appear too dovish, but also to not appear too out of touch with reality by acknowledging that the occupation isn't going well; instead, the politician ought to find some ill-defined middle ground from which to scuzzily stand for nothing.

Clinton took a page right out of the triangulation book this weekend in New Hampshire. A primary voter asked her to just say she was wrong about voting for the Iraq war. Instead, she stuck to her script by saying that she was right to do what she did when she did it based on the evidence she had but that she wouldn't do it again knowing what she knows now. Does she even understand how lame that sounds? No one is questioning her hindsight, we just want to know that she understands what it means to just be wrong.

Joe Lieberman
Lieberman (CfL-CT) has proved everyone right who said he was just a selfish jerk out for he, himself, and him. Incidentally, in a hilarious twist, it does not look like Lieberman will be getting the nomination for the Connecticut for Lieberman party's 2012 Senate bid, as some cantankerous malcontent in Fairfield will be holding the party's convention in his rumpus room.

But back to the latest betrayal: Lieberman made a big stink during his campaign about how he was going to hold people's feet to the fire on Katrina accountability. To the surprise of none of his critics, he promptly abandoned that promise in favor of making out with George W. Bush some more (see Appendix B). I could have sworn someone like Lieberman would have been more committed to Sparkle Motion than that.

George W. Bush
I know what you're thinking, and the answer is yes: Bush really did do something disingenuous for once, if you can believe it. Technically, there are some people who still support Bush for some reason. But defend him as much as you like, I don't think anyone serious would argue that Bush is an environmentalist. Which is why it was so hilarious (and insulting) when the Administration tried to claim last week that Bush is really on the ball with climate change science.

This is like the Pope trying to claim he's a Mormon. Are you kidding me? I know you fooled the country going into Iraq, but who do you think is really going to believe Bush has been forthright on climate change science? The Administration's claim was laid out in a letter quoting Bush from 2001 but with a generous dose of ellipses:

"First, we know the surface temperature of the earth is warming ... There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming ... And the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity."

Turns out those ellipses are the places where he is saying that humans aren't to blame. Sometimes I doubt his commitment to the environment, honestly. This is like Elaine yada yada'ing sex. Come on, guy. Show us you really care about Sparkle Motion, just once.

Appendix A - Sparkle Motion in Concert

Appendix B - Bush and Lieberman, sitting in a tree

Law Giver -or- Moses and The Burning Bush

2007-02-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush is a divine law giver, sanctioned by God to bring rules to all mankind. He need look nowhere but inside himself to determine what these laws are. At least, that's the impression you get if you look at his administration's actions over the last couple years.

An excellent diary today by Kagro X over at DailyKos puts this fact in stark relief by discussing the recent flap over Douglas Feith's "inappropriate" but not "unauthorized" intelligence memo. But before getting into the Feith situation, I'm going to lift the Nixon quote Kagro X cites:

Frost: "So ... what ... you're saying is that there are certain situations ... where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal."

Nixon: "Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

Frost: " By definition."

Nixon: "Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security ... then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law."

The fact that Nixon is the one who made this comment is (a) not surprising at all and (b) the connection we need to the current administration. People like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came of political age in the Ford administration, and they have a huge chip on their shoulders from when Congress reined in Nixon's absurd theories about the executive. Much of the unitary executive theory that crackpots in the White House subscribe to today is basically a continuation of Nixon's plans to bring Law to Man.

Which brings us back to Feith's comment that his unsavory, reprehensible, morally odious memo was not unauthorized. Who cares whether the thing was authorized if it was illegal, right? The Administration cares, because whatever the president approves becomes legal. As Kagro X also points out, that's why Alberto Gonzales felt justified to tell the Senate that the Administration was operating within the law on its blatantly illegal wiretapping program. Since the president approved that program, in the eyes of theorists at the White House, it was legal.

This concept of the "unitary executive branch" is dangerous and illegitimate, and it underlies everything Bush does. Case in point, his now-infamous signing statements. At a far higher rate than any previous president, Bush has issued statements when he signs laws that say that he will interpret the law in question "in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."

Note that Bush does not say he will or won't disregard any law in any specific way. All he says is that he will interpret them however his royal whim dictates.

In addition to ignoring any bill Congress passes, Bush's protection of "the...executive branch" apparently extends to ignoring any oversight Congress attempts to exert over the various cabinet departments. Senators Grassley, Leahy, and Specter (at least) have voiced strong opposition to the non-responsiveness (and at times obstructiveness) of the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales.

Not only does DOJ apparently refuse to provide its own responsive documents at the request of Senate committees, but it also tells other executive branch departments not to do so either. You see, DOJ is responsible for handling the legal representation of all federal agencies, and as their attorney, it has advised them not to comply with Congressional oversight requests.

In this context, what would normally be merely a disgusting misuse of power for political purposes starts to take on a much more sinister character: DOJ has also been firing US Attorneys from offices around the country to replace them with hyper-partisan loyalists. They may also take advantage of a provision of the PATRIOT Act that will allow these appointments to become indefinite without Senate confirmation. Not that they need a legal justification since every bead of Bush's sweat is as good as law.

If Bush & Co. are to be believed, he is the only part of government that matters. Heck, I bet he could play all nine positions on a baseball team, too. But I don't think this is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set up three separate branches of government any more than Abner Doubleday had one-person baseball teams in mind. Since Bush's most significant experience before becoming governor of Texas was (poorly) running the Texas Rangers baseball team, maybe this shouldn't come as such a surprise.

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

2007-02-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

Big news in health care today, as a new super coalition is going to try to tackle America's insurance mess. The new group, vapidly titled Better Health Care Together, brings together unlikely partners such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Center for American Progress, Wal*Mart, and AT&T. The idea is to promote these four bland and content-free action items:

1) We believe each person in America must be guaranteed access to quality, affordable health insurance coverage;

2) We believe individuals have a responsibility to maintain and protect their health;

3) We believe that America must dramatically improve the value it receives for every health care dollar; and

4) We believe that businesses, governments, and individuals all should contribute to managing and financing a new American health care system.

The interesting part of this news is obviously not the action items but rather the coalition itself. Previous efforts at health care reform have been stymied by business interests, led especially by health insurance companies. Somehow the insurance industry got it in its head that eliminating private health insurance would be bad for their business model, and they will do everything they can to stop the most effective reform: eliminating private health insurance, just like every other advanced country:

Every other advanced nation in the world has a national health care system for all. Try asking a crowd of people if they know anyone in Europe who doesn't have health care coverage. Or in Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malta, Costa Rica, Cuba or dozens of other countries in the world..

It's not an easy thing to do when you want to eliminate an entire sector of your economy for the health, as it were, of the rest of the economy. But it will be easier if big corporations that have previously sided with health insurers throw their weight behind fixing the problem. Not just because they are the largest consumers of health insurance and will be listened to, but also because you have to have corporate money talking if you want any Republicans to listen.

The good news is that for the last couple of years, big business has started to realize how much it's getting screwed by the current employer-provided system. Notably, GM announced that health care expenses were adding thousands of dollars per vehicle in extra costs to their bottom line. GM reasoned that this was forcing them to be less competitive on the global marketplace, since their competitors have operations in countries with sensible health care systems. Now, this is pretty much BS, since GM's lack of competitiveness is more easily traced to their willingness to let Honda and Toyota make much better cars with much better gas mileage. But overpaying for health care isn't doing big powerful corporations any favors, and the point is that they now realize it.

So perhaps we have reach an impasse. Big corporations want to stop paying for health insurance, and health insurance companies want people to keep buying it. It would take a real visionary, decider, uniter of a politician to craft the delicate solution that could fix this problem. Fortunately, George W. Bush is still in office, and the health care plan he announced at the State of the Union Address addresses every corporation's worry. It changes tax incentives to make it more economical for people to buy their own private insurance and less economical for them to get it through their employer. But by sticking with private insurance, the HMOs get to keep making a profit off denying people medical treatment This is not an adequate solution, and fortunately it doesn't look like the Democratic Congress is going to jump up and help Bush make it work.

That's the real beauty of this coalition. It isolates the health insurance companies from their erstwhile allies in big business, and it lends legitimacy to the only actual solution. By combining the forces of the Wise (people who want to see effective, efficient coverage for everyone) with the Wealthy (those who want to see costs become reasonable), we can only end up with the one rational solution for making everyone in America more Healthy: single payer care.

Inconvenient Monday

2007-02-06T21:34:00.000-08:00

We're showing Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth on Monday at 6 PM.

There may also be dancing/singing/melting ice cream. Maybe. We'll see.

Love the posters:

It's All Grossman's fault

2007-02-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

Tonight the Bears lost to the Colts in the Superbowl. This is disappointing on at least two levels.

Fact: Superbowl MVP Peyton Manning is a whiny choke artist, and seeing him fail again would have been great. Also, he donates to Republicans.
I live in Chicago, and therefore the Bears were my choice.

The consolation prize for the distraught Bears fan is that the team is still quite good, it's really just one guy's fault. Grossman. With even a moderately competent quarterback, one who could have gotten a first down at some point in the second quarter for example, the Bears would have walked away with this one.

Sure, the stats show that he was 20-28 with 1 TD and 2 INTs, but he really played much worse than that. Raw numbers just can't capture the futility that is running ten yards back of the line of scrimmage and falling down by yourself twice on consecutive plays.

But the real highlight of the game came before the opening whistle, when Billy Joel sang our national anthem. It was enough to bring a tear to the eye of even the least patriotic/biggest terrorists among us. Fortunately, through the miracle of Youtbe, the video of Joel's rendition has already been made available. Enjoy.

Gloating is Over

2007-02-03T18:01:00.000-08:00

This isn’t going to be long. It seems like an overly simplistic and idealized notion, but I feel like it has not been said enough. It can never be said enough.

Bush is trying to salvage some semblance of a legacy. He is, in many ways, making compromises and welcoming debate. I applaud the Democrats for the 100 Hours agenda—they delivered for the first time in over a decade, or at least as long as I have been interested in politics.

But Bush has been putting himself out there—gas reduction, Iraq debate, balancing the budget, even social security—Democrats need to call his bluff. The political environment is ripe. Drop the bitterness and show the country that you care what the other half has to say—invite Republicans to the caucuses and get their input, because they have constituents as well. I just don’t want to blow this. The Republicans know they got beat; they’re desperate to save the Bush Era. Give ‘em some credit (even if it is undeserved). They’ve had a rough few years.

Plus, it will get the easy shit out of the way so Barrack can concentrate on things we’ve been neglecting, like Medicare, education, and human rights.

I Gotcha Politics Right Here [gestures]

2007-02-03T16:41:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed how people keep using this phrase "play gotcha"? (You may have noticed it here, here, here, here, or here, for example.) Sometimes it's even varied as "gotcha journalism". Using this term is basically a defensive tactic for when you believe your side is not getting a fair shake. For example, you could accuse Tim Russert of playing gotcha when he asks deceptive and irrelevant questions that he knows Howard Dean won't have an answer for. In this sense, it expresses the frustration of being marginalized by someone who isn't playing fair but controls the discourse anyway.

However, there is a much more insidious use of the term. And wouldn't you know it, our old friend Joe Lieberman is at the forefront. Lieberman recently used the term in response to a heckler. Seems this gentleman was disappointed that Lieberman promised so earnestly to investigate the Administration's response to Katrina during his campaign, only to refuse to do anything about once he had won. GOP Joe, I mean 'independent Democrat' Joe, seems to think Congress has no role in placing blame. Quoth the slimeball,

"We don't want to play `gotcha' anymore," Lieberman said. "We want to get the aid and assistance to the people of the region who need it."

Now, no one is here to say that aid and assistance should not go to the people of the region who need it (sic). But decrying gotcha politics when you're Joe Lieberman is like decrying the need to know how the nation was misled into war when you're Tony Snow. The Administration has been pretty consistent in wanting to talk about how we're going to win in Iraq instead of talking about why we're there, which makes sense because they look really bad when the conversation shifts that direction.

Gotcha politics, focusing on the present, looking forward. Whatever you want to call them, these terms all denote the tactics of people who wouldn't look so good if we focused on the past. But, as Josh Eidelson points out, gotcha politics is a pretty good thing for Washington because of one simple virtue: accountability.

If no one ever played gotcha politics, no one would ever be calling anyone on their mistakes. Entrenched beltway insiders like Lieberman would be free to make mistakes all the time, constantly undermine the fellow members of their party, and generally behave in the most selfish ways possible without ever having to answer for it. W would be within reason when he asks us to trust him on Iraq. I hope I don't need to flesh out this nightmare scenario any further.

This is where politics starts to seem like a mutual fund. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, we are constantly told. And while technically that is true, it's also pretty much the only thing we have to go on when choosing mutual funds, unless we have inside (and idiosyncratic) information on how some of the stocks in the fund will be performing. So, Joe and George, I'd love to not bother assigning blame, but you guys just keep screwing up. I personally don't have any reason to think your future results will differ greatly from your past performance.

I agree that it would be nice not to have to play gotcha politics all the time, but the solution to the problem is to stop people from screwing up. Running around whining about how much we dislike it is a deceptive, ad hominem, disingenuous tactic that ends up hurting productive political discourse more than it helps. Therefore, here here for gotcha politics.

Pizza and Politiks 2: War Criminals

2007-01-31T15:40:00.000-08:00

Join us in Bartlett Lounge next Monday at 7 PM for another exciting

Pizza and Politics!

We'll be watching the "War Crimes" (Not sure if its that title) Episode of West Wing and discussing American War Crimes and what should be done about them (ICC and the like) afterwards.

Pizza and Politics, where Hmmmm meets Mmmmm.

Ford-Lincoln-Mercutio

2007-01-27T18:45:00.000-08:00

ROMEO: I dream'd a dream to-night.
MERCUTIO: And so did I.
ROMEO: Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie.

It is truly bizarre how despite the fact that most Republicans in Congress and around the country have turned their backs on Bush, some just can't be cured of their Bush fetishes. They seem to see him as some sort of visionary, a dreamer who is misunderstood by the world. Dispiritingly delusional, this group includes Rudy Guiliani, the would-be Republican presidential nominee.

Holding up as examples the top two presidents in the Republican pantheon, Lincoln and Reagan, Giuliani explained their leadership qualities.

“I don’t imagine that they had those favorable/unfavorable things back during the Civil War,” but Lincoln would not have fared well, Giuliani said.

Seeming to draw present-day comparisons, Giuliani noted that Lincoln even faced riots in New York City because people were unhappy with the war. “They wanted to quit because it was getting too tough.”

There were extensive casualties, the conflict dragged on and Lincoln had to fire many of his generals, Giuliani reminded the salad-eating crowd.

For right-wing crackpots, the comparisons go (or at least ought to go) beyond simply presiding over tons of casualties and firing generals. Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, as has Bush. Both Bush and Lincoln thought they were engaged in existential struggles over the very fiber of our nation. Comparing Bush to Lincoln also provides the convenience of the fact that today just about everybody thinks the Civil War was worth fighting, whereas just about no one thinks that about Iraq. This comparison does not hold up very well overall, of course.

For one thing, as opposed to Iraq, the Civil War actually was an existential struggle. If the Union had lost, the country would have been literally ripped in two. The struggle today is nothing like so serious, since Bush says the only way we can lose is to withdraw from Iraq. (Sounds fine to me.) And I don't think the reason Lincoln is popular today is the huge death toll he racked up. To tell the truth, I think it's disgusting how many people died during the Civil War all for the sake of making sure I still get to be in a country that includes Alabama. But Lincoln's rationale was more that the states cannot opt in or out of the Union at any time, forcing us to stick together whether we like it or not. In the long run, I believe this has been a healthy precedent to protect.

Another difference between Bush and Lincoln is that Lincoln didn't really have to worry that much about economic ennui. The country secession of half the country was a substantial economic disruption that had a clear military solution, and the nature of the sacrifice must have been clear to the citizen of the day. Bush, on the other hand, expressly requires no sacrifices of Americans during our present existential struggle, preferring that they just keep buying stuff. So today no one really cares what Lincoln's economic policies were, but I think a lot of people are going to keep caring about Bush's.

And the number one thing I think of when Bush and the economy come up together is his support for the plutocratic corporate order. In an excellent article, William Pfaff provides the key to explaining both Bush's foreign policy blunders and his economic blunders. An overinflated sense of American exceptionalism is probably to blame both for quixotic quagmires overseas and
the unacceptable injustice all around us. As Pfaff says,

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

For an example of the destabilizing injustice of the corporatist plutocracy, let's look at Ford Motors. Not because Ford is unique, but because it is recent and oh so typical. As Devilstower points out over at Dailykos, Ford posted its worst loss ever last quarter. This was because of short-sighted planning and market positioning by top brass, not because guys on the assembly line weren't working hard enough. The solution? Fire 40,000 and give bigger bonuses to the top brass!

This is the kind of system we get under Bush, and, for that matter, under Clinton. As Devilstower notes, though, Democrats like Jim Webb are not on board with this system; to Webb I would add other freshman Democrats like Sherrod Brown and old salts like Barney Frank. With sensible leaders like these, hopefully we can start to fix some of the worst injustices to the middle class at least and ideally to the poor as well.

Just for the sake of fairness and balance, let me tell you about a couple of Democrats who don't appear to have received the memo on making life more fair: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton we always knew about, since she has the backing of all the elites and is so deeply allied with the DLC.

Since election to his Senate term, Obama has basically coopted the DLC playbook of valuing bipartisanship above all else. This is as self-serving and defeatist as it's ever been, but Paul Krugman is also right to point out that Obama's rhetoric about rhetoric is missing the point. A lot of people attack Obama for having a thin Senate record and wring their hands about his lack of experience, but his substance problem doesn't have that much to do with his record. Having been a civil rights attorney and spent some eight odd years in elected office, he has more substantive experience than Bush had when he became president. No, the substance argument against Obama is boils down to the fact that he thinks it's more important to establish a polite tone than to fix problems.

While Bush may be a dreamer, he is certainly no Lincoln. Neither is Clinton or Obama (who plans to officially announce his campaign around Lincoln's birthday in scenic Springfield, IL, hometown of Honest Abe himself). The next most admired leader we have will match Lincoln's courage in pursuing a dubious war with today's economic problems. In other words, we don't need a Lincoln to solve our war, we need FDR to save ourselves.

Blog Scholarship

2007-01-26T12:57:00.000-08:00

FYI, I plan to apply for this scholarship for college political bloggers. Anyone else who posts here should think about doing so also.

Libby Sleeps with the Fishes

2007-01-24T22:27:00.000-08:00

Scooter Libby's perjury trial started this week, and already there have been some exciting surprises. During the opening statement phase, when attorneys for both sides try to establish a narrative for the trial before introducing evidence, Libby's attorney took an unexpected tactic: he broke with the administration.

One of the most remarkable things about the heyday of W's presidency was the message discipline. Factionalism naturally springs up whenever you get enough egotistical people together to form a presidential administration. This means that most administrations usually supply a constant stream of leaks to the press as part of internal power struggles. But in the Bush administration, the only leaks that have, well, leaked out have been ones that were essentially approved by the powers that be.

To find a prime example of this, one need look no further than the leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover agent by the Bush administration in 2003. The leak was a retaliation move against Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had recently written an op-ed partially exposing the lies of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Someone (Richard Armitage of the State Department, as it turned out) told a reporter about Plame as an off-the-record source.

It appears that Armitage was not really playing the game, but this was a classic move of the administration's media game. You tell the reporter you will give him or her some good dirt, but it's a sensitive issue and you don't want your name on the record. Well duh, every issue around a presidential administration is sensitive. None the less, the reporter wants that scoop and is willing to cite an "anonymous source highly placed in the administration", even if it's really Karl Rove doing the talking. So these leaks that really have no reason not to be on the record would come out anonymously, discrediting an administration opponent while keeping the leaker's hands clean. Only approved leaks got out, so it was all part of the incredible unity and discipline the whole team displayed.

As an aide to Vice President Cheney, Libby was a crucial cog in that message machine. Until yesterday during opening statements, when his attorney turned his back on all that. Libby had been expected to try to get convicted quickly and name no names in order to be eligible for a pardon before Bush leaves office. But instead he jumped ship, crapped the bed, took the low road, failed to forward the chain letter. Libby's attorney portrayed him as a scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb who was destroyed to save Karl Rove.

This means that Libby will probably be "accidentally" shivved to death during a serendipitous prison riot, because The Party appreciates loyalty. But it also means that the house of cards is continuing to collapse for Republicans. When you build an empire on lies, a small amount of truth can really start to snowball. And if there turns out to be any substance to Libby's accusation about taking the fall for Rove, a whole lot of fascinating stuff that has been kept behind the scenes is going to start seeing the light of day (remember that Cheney himself is scheduled to take the stand).

So if The Party collapses on Libby for breaking rank, his career as a conservative will likely be over. But he will have sacrificed himself something far more valuable than helping Karl Rove avoid indictment: letting the public see the inner workings of a secretive and evil regime.

Clin-ton and The Politics of Failure

2007-01-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president on her website today. Senator Kang tells us, "The politics of failure have failed. We must make them work again!" Clinton's record makes me nervous that she will be the candidate to try to make them work again, although there is hope for her yet.

Clinton is the last gasp of the pointless wing of the Democratic party. She is the chosen candidate of the so-called centrists at the DLC, who have been the main repository for conventional Democratic wisdom inside the beltway for nigh on 15 years. This is the kind of wisdom that says don't attack Bush on Iraq. The wisdom that says the passioned, ideologically energized base should accept unity for unity's sake, as long as it's insider unity and not principled unity. The same wisdom that says anti-war activists are out of touch with the majority of Americans. (Presumably "majority" is some sort of slang for "11%", which is the support escalation is getting in national polls.)

The DLC and its ilk, with their money and their insiders, dominated the discourse when top-down media like TV were it. That domination got Democrats control of zero branches of government. Now that the internet has come into its own a little, the passionate people on the bottom have started building their way up. We now control two branches, and it's because we realized the center was whatever real people care about, not whatever the DLC says it is.

Even outgoing DLC head Tom Vilsack has apparently read the writing on the wall about campaigning on failure. In his presidential campaign, Vilsack is staking out a position on Iraq that relies heavily on opposing US involvement there. And fortunately for him, his old friends at the DLC will be supporting him by...backing Hillary.

But leaving the DLC alone for a minute, what did Hillary herself say in her announcement video?

"Let's talk about how to bring the right end to the war in Iraq." How about instead we talk about how you don't regret supporting the war in the past. Let's talk about how when you use the term "war" it makes people think there is some way to win, whereas when you say "occupation" and "civil war" it sounds more like something we shouldn't be a part of (and like what it is). Let's talk about how limp-wristed, squirmy nuances like not regretting giving Bush authority in Iraq but regretting "the way the president used the authority" don't convince anyone you're serious.

"You know, after six years of George Bush, it is time to renew the promise of America." You know, that is most idiotic political boilerplate you could have used. You know, this is the kind of endlessly repeated phrase that sounds great in a beltway strategy session but nowhere else. If you take two seconds to think about it, renewing the promise of America is actually completedly drained of meaning. This is the kind of stock phrase that makes everyone else wonder how politicians can say so many words while communicating so little.

"So let's talk, let's chat, let's start a dialog about your ideas and mine." So let's chat about how I've hired some high priced consultants to tell me that top-down doesn't excite people any more. Let's start a dialog about how I can send signals that I'm hip to the new reality by announcing online instead of in a traditional press conference. Let's talk about how this focus-grouped pandering strategy is actually the only real hope for her campaign: if she really does listen, she will hear how lame her position on Iraq is. She will hear how universal health care doesn't make any sense if it maintains a role for private insurers.

Don't get me wrong: if Hillary wins the nomination, she'll have my vote. And she'll have a better chance of getting the nomination if she does listen to people on the internet. But she's pretty well set up already.

The primary schedule gives a big bonus to whoever raises the most money by having the first four primaries at basically the same time (Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina). And with California now looking to join the fray, things will only get more expensive. Clinton is certainly the candidate who can raise the most money. But running a campaign based on advertising forces you to listen to consultants, and listening to consultants means you're not listening to people. Listening to your backers, your colleagues, and your beltway think tanks is the central tenet of the politics of failure. Hopefully Hillary will follow through on listening to the people. The politics of failure can't and won't work again.

Democrats Can't Just Talk the Talk

2007-01-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

If we are serious about making the Senate a serious place ( which it hardly it) besides the petty squabbling that goes on in closed hearings and the themed lunch days like " at the beach," the Senate needs a serious make over. Reid promised the American people that their Senator would work just as hard as they do *gasp! (recent polls shows Senators work on average 2 1/2 days a week). After the long MLK weekend which cut off Senate time, this weekend the Senate is not voting until Tuesday afternoon. Therefore, another long weekend is here. History only gives parties rare moments to change themselves and the course of a nation. Democrats are at this point, and we can hide away from the power (for fears of '08 blame) or we can seriously act like the party Americans believe it (and deserve).

Obamarama08 - Updated Repost

2007-01-17T17:29:00.000-08:00

Note: I originally posted this when Obama for President started heating up in October. Now that he's declared, enjoy it in slightly updated fashion. --IVFK

Blacks in Chicago average about half the income of local whites. Barack Obama himself is probably doing his part to bring the average up, and good for him - he's a sharp guy who took advantage of his opportunities. But every politician has a pretty good living wage. What's sticks out about Obama? Why is he different from other politicians? Why do people love him so?

I think it's his silver tongue. Obama can give a damn good speech when he wants to, and frankly that's something recent Democratic Presidential nominees Kerry and Gore were unable to do. He's a charismatic guy, and he gives off the air of someone who is thoughtful, principled, and really smart. And what's more, he looks less stupid than most Democrats when he talks about religion. This is both good for Democrats and good for religion. The rampaging maniacs who currently control religion-in-politics are ruining us politically and ruining the reputation of religion. So on these two fronts, I think Obama is a great candidate.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn't meet the leadership standards I would really like to see, at least not at this point. My leadership standards are essentially the same ones that are being pushed across the internet by concerned rank and file Democrats. They include pulling the debate to the left instead of caving to the center and unplugging the influence machine in DC that puts its own above the country. But Obama came of political age at the tail end of the Clinton triangulation era, before these values rose to prominence.

In 2000, Obama was dealt an embarrassing defeat right here in Hyde Park. In the Democratic Congressional primary, entrenched incumbent Bobby Rush mopped the floor with him. His stated reason for tilting at this particular windmill was an astute observation that Bobby Rush is not a particularly responsive legislator.

For example, Rush is beloved across the netroots for his sponsorship of the legislation to destroy net neutrality. One begins to suspect some undue influence may have swayed his opinion on the issue, though. Telecom interests gave Rush hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars. He also helped arrange a hefty donation by telecom interests to a technology center in Englewood. I would argue the long term interests of his constituents are better served by having a measure of freedom on the internet than by having a technology center. Internet freedom is what allows jerks like me to fight otherwise unaccountable insiders like him. But at least Rush doesn't see a contradiction between constituent service and corporate corruption.

At any rate, Obama took his purified optimist shtick out for a test drive and was soundly defeated. He challenged the corrupted insider interests, and they put him in his place. The lesson he appears to have learned is not that he should try harder. Rather it is that he should play the insider game, even if he sticks to his populist rhetoric. For example, he has had problems respecting the will of the party's voters in Connecticut, where his show of support for Ned Lamont was tepid at best. He apparently feels it's OK to praise George Bush.

Obama also has some phraseology in common with Joe Lieberman. Of particular note is the unspecified phrase "a different kind of politics" to denote some sort of transcendent bipartisanship. I don't think anyone is saying that rancor, partisan or otherwise, is a good thing, but it's not a nuanced or sophisticated phrase to say. It basically tells to me, as a member of the liberal base, that Obama is committed to centrism. Again, no one is saying people shouldn't agree on stuff, but when you go for centrism, you move the whole debate to the right.

David Callahan recently wrote a book called The Moral Center in which he makes the case for (a) more moral bottom lines in political rhetoric, (b) more centrist policy solutions, and (c) more unity thereof. However, as this reviewer points out, the reason moral bottom lines would resonate is that they would appeal to people's hunger for (allegedly) Kantian absolutes. Per her interpretation of Kant, there is always one right thing and everyone should always do it. But if we take that interpretation, then "moral center" is an oxymoron and trying to find one will do nothing to sate the hunger.

But the point of pulling the debate to the left is that you have to if you want things to end up in the center at the end. If you start off shooting for the center, you get negotiated down by the right and end up with something right of center. For example, say you want to decrease income disparity. You can start (as Democrats are doing) by tinkering around the edges of the issue by lowering student loan rates. Doing so is a great idea, but it is certainly going to be opposed by the powers that be on Wall Street (who also happen to run the Treasury Department right now). To get anywhere, negotiations will need to happen and anything that ends up succeeding will probably be watered down significantly. In the end, not much will change with this pretty centrist approach. Whereas to fix the issue of income disparities between blacks and whites in Chicago will require a significantly more visionary, boldly leftist set of policies.

Offering up some bipartisan praise or refusing to go against a powerful guy at your office (especially if he's president of the US) aren't capital sins in and of themselves. But putting things like this together with co-opting Lieberman rhetoric leaves me thinking that Obama isn't on board with the grassroots platform. Not to say he would be a bad president (and certainly better than anything Republicans will ever offer), and not to say he couldn't straighten himself out, but I'm just not sold on him yet.

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOOOTBALLLLL!

2007-01-17T15:00:00.000-08:00

Frankly I don't really think this post needs any introduction. Except to say that if the whole President thing doesn't work out, Obama definitely has a future in sports broadcasting...

He's Ready. Why Wait? Obama '08

2007-01-16T21:23:00.000-08:00

Big news today in the race for the White House: Barack Obama, the first term Senator from Illinois, announced his intentions to run for president and has taken the first step in raising funds. He has filed papers to create an exploratory committee and will wait a few weeks to formally announce his candidacy. When likely democratic voters are polled, Barack Obama ranks among the top three candidates to be the party nominee. The big issue around Obama is the fact that a little more than two years ago, he was just an Illinois state senator and does not have the experience at the national level to be a legitimate candidate for president. (Keep in mind Abraham Lincoln only served one term in the House of Rep. and had no other national experience before being elected President. Granted it was a different time, but ponder that bit of information for a moment.)

His “inexperience” actually works to his advantage because he is inexperienced and yet people are serious when they talk about him. People don’t dismiss him as a potential candidate one day, there is a demand for him right now. During the ’06 campaign, the only other Democrat to attract bigger crowds at campaign rallies and fund raisers nation-wide was Bill Clinton! That is saying something!

But while others see inexperience as a problem, I see it as an opportunity. I know I am far from alone when I say that I get excited thinking about the prospect of Obama as the 44th President of the United States. That is saying something. It is rare and remarkable in politics to find someone who excites people the way Obama does. If you look at his public speaking skills and his energetic personality, it’s easy to see why so many people like him and would like to see him make a run for the White House. Obama is not even halfway through his first term as Senator, yet he has had enough time in Washington to get his feet wet. He is for all practical purposes a Washington outsider on the inside, a role that can easily play to his advantage in a political campaign. He does not carry the luggage other senators such as Kerry, Biden or even Edwards and H. Clinton carry, yet he serves as a member on the Armed Services Committee (a high profile committee particularly in today’s news) and is already a national celebrity.
Obama is special. He inspires a certain amount of idealism and passion that even few experienced politicians can muster. He’s a youthful figure that can energize the democratic base and he already has an established grass roots network that will come in handy in the primaries. Obama is ready and he has what it takes to be the future of the Democratic party.

The Smallness of our Politics

2007-01-16T20:29:00.000-08:00

Today, Barack Obama announced that he is forming an exploratory committee to test the possibility of a presidential run. Assuming he decides to enter the race, he will be one in a crowded field, with John Edwards, Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack, and Christopher Dodd already announced, Hillary Clinton and Wes Clark about to, and Al Gore. While I won't bore you with discussion over his entire release, (http://www.barackobama.com/video/from_barack_transcript/ if you want to read it) one thing he mentioned struck me:

"Challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics."

We've seen the pettiness of the Republican Party manifest itself over the past six years, and we've seen some Democrats recently fall prey to this too, with James Carville practically demonizing Howard Dean and trying to stage a coup at the DNC. While certainly worlds better than God's Own Party, the Democrats cannot claim to be above partisan bickering.

But, you might ask, (curious little brat that you are) why is it this way? Why has Washington broken into two openly hostile camps? The easy answer, and one of the right ones, is that Tom DeLay is slimier than the cockroaches he used to exterminate, and the extreme right, driven by their fanatical bigotry and frightening determination, believes itself ordained by God to warp and twist this country into a horrid specter of what it stands for. Of course that's just continuing the partisan hackery, and despite how truly enjoyable it is, this country deserves better.

The better answer, then, is isolation. Rule by 51% leaves half of this country silenced (we won't even get into rule by 35%, like my home state of Texas) and only serves to continue to distance the American people from their government. With that distance, politicians become insular, focusing only on keeping that 51% and their jobs. What excites me about Obama is that he is different.

He is a Democrat who reaches out to evangelical Christians, holding an earnest conversation with them while standing by his positions and beliefs. He fights for progress without becoming a marginalized talking head, and he actually garners popular support, instead of being the lesser of two evils. (John "Not Satan but Beezelbub" Kerry)

But this post actually isn't about Barak Obama. This post is about how to end the "smallness of our politics," and Barack Obama is just a catalyst that can be used to start that. If you, dear Reader, support Obama, go out and get involved. Volunteer. Contribute. Phone Bank. If you detest the man, now-less-dear Reader, get involved. Volunteer. Contribute. Phone Bank. Politics does not shape people, it is shaped by people. A genuine grassroots movement cannot divide the American people, as they contributed to it as one. Recognize that, while different, we share many goals: a just society, equality, security, and a nation whose actions we can actually be proud of.

The true beauty of progressivism is not that once people get involved with politics as a positive tool instead of a domineering master, they see the possibility of government to do good, to be just. Progressivism is not an ideology to force a country into lockstep. It is not God's Own Party marching to marginalize everyone they don't see at church on Sunday. Progressivism is a movement of the masses seeking to better all our lives by bettering our government and our nation.

Barack Obama, whether you love him or hate him, can spearhead a new movement in politics. He, with our help, can make politics "big" again. So right now, it's not about my guy winning. It is becoming, and with all of us working for it, will surely become, about anyone who has a hope of winninghaving to be my guy, because standing beside me are a million others, all of whom are taking our country, and our government back. It's not We, the Party, in America, it's We, the People.

So in the words of Richard "Kinky" Friedman,

May the God of your choice bless you.
Benediktion

Why 20,000 More Troops Will Be As Effective in Stabilizing Iraq As Chewing Bubble Gum

2007-01-16T19:50:00.000-08:00

Last week, King George II addressed the nation to announce that he would be increasing the troop numbers in Iraq to help stabilize the region and continue the mission of bringing “freedom to Iraq.” The immediate reaction of the Democratic Party and an overwhelming majority of Americans is that it is too little too late. The window of opportunity to increase troops and effectively stabilize the region has long since closed, and the reality of the situation is that we need to get the hell out of there.

After a fierce blow to the Republican Party in the previous mid-term elections, Washington has finally come to the conclusion that many Americans, myself included, realized some time in March, 2003: that victory in Iraq eluded us way before Boy George and to be frank, from the beginning of this war, the power to bring freedom and democracy to the region was never within our grasp. As much as we’d like to envision our nation as being the “Johnny Apple Seed” of Democracy, planting American-like governments across the globe, the truth is Democracy does not flourish where it is not hospitable. It is not a weed that can grow anywhere, and once it manifests itself in a field, spreads easily. Quite the contrary, it’s much more like a vineyard that needs close care and attention and the deserts of Iraq were not the right place for it. Our own democracy did not sprout over night, and it certainly did not come from another nation liberating us from the British. Democratic governments are born from internal strife and idealistic revolutions that are rooted within the people of a nation. It’s just plain common sense that a nation of people who go to church and Wal-Mart on Sundays can’t bring freedom and ensure tranquility in a country where sectarian polarization is so strong that they’d rather kill each other than even consider compromise.

Any progress and stabilization that will come to Iraq, will not come from sending 20,000 more kids my age. It is up to Iraq, and Iraq alone, to come up with a plan that will at least quell sectarian polarization. The violence that keeps escalating in Iraq is the product of political failure to compromise. Iraqi democracy can only come from Iraqi policy makers, and sending more troops at this point is sending the wrong message.

Three Lessons

2007-01-15T23:37:00.000-08:00

Cassandra, Iraq

C. K. Williams

1.

She's magnificent, as we imagine women must be
who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained.

This is the difference between we who are like her
in having been right and disdained, and we as we are.

Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right,
are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads.

Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are,
but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge.

2.

In this tale of lies, of treachery, of superfluous dead,
were there ever so many who were right and disdained?

With no notion of what to do next? If we were true seers,
as prescient as she, as frenzied, we'd know what to do next.

We'd twitter, as she did, like birds; we'd warble, we'd trill.
But what would it be really, to twitter, to warble, to trill?

Is it ee-ee-ee, like having a child? Is it uh-uh-uh, like a wound?
Or is it inside, like a blow, silent to everyone but yourself?

3.

Yes, inside, I remember, oh-oh-oh: it's where grief
is just about to be spoken, but all at once can't be: oh.

When you no longer can "think" of what things like lies,
like superfluous dead, so many, might mean: oh.

Cassandra will be abducted at the end of her tale, and die.
Even she can't predict how. Stabbed? Shot? Blown to bits?

Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net.
That we know; she foresaw that - in a gush of gore, in a net.

(From the April 3, 2006 issue of the New Yorker)

The day we went to war, March 20, 2003, was the day I also debuted on stage at my suburban high school. It was a night of mostly comedic one-act plays, all directed by students. I had been cast in "The Swimmer" in which I played a delusional man stuck at a bus stop because he believed that the surrounding concrete was a sea of water. I'm sure there is an allegory there, but I'll let you do the analysis.

Honestly, I cannot remember one line from that play, even though I was onstage for 45 minutes. The only thing I can recall is that at one point I got billy-clubbed (unintentionally for real), and that I clipped a "No War" button to my costume. In my cozy little high school cafetorium, right down the street from Dennis Hastert's office, I was 'that kid' who didn't support our troops, and was unconcerned with the safety of the American People (this was way back when the war was about WMD's). We closed our one night show with mixed reviews, most people confused that I died in the last scene with no closure.

Nearing four years later, we're pumping 20,000 more troops into Iraq. What do I think about it? I'm no General--My military experience extends as far as conquering the Aztecs in Age of Empires in the eighth grade. But you know what you get when you cross a Greek Prophet, contemporary suburban drama, and a real-time strategy video game? A kid who knows enough about this world to gather good information, portray it clearly and honestly, and that all the other civilizations hate it when the most powerful civilization moves their ballistas in and starts exploiting the resources of the subjugated Aztecs.

New Bloggers

2007-01-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome new bloggers!

We've recently added some new U of C undergrads as bloggers.

With that, I leave you with this civics lesson:

SUUURGE!!!

2007-01-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

Tonight, George W. Bush will make his big speech on "surging" troop levels in Iraq, although apparently he won't use the word "surge" this time. I wish I could have found video of the old Surge ad that featured unexplained couch-jumping, but this hose-and-lawn-chair one will have to do. Incidentally, isn't it quaint how those Neanderthals in the late 90's thought it was a good idea to promote the "carbos" in their beverage? and how they called them carbos instead of carbs?

But back to Iraq, there are two main concerns for the diligent progressive observer: (1) the framing here really does matter - the alleged surge should be called escalation, and (2) the Democrats need to show some backbone in their response to the situation.

Using the word "surge" implies that the increase in Iraq troop levels will be temporary. On a geological timeline, it is true that anything Bush does will be temporary. But outside of that framework, there is really nothing very temporary about 18-24 months, and there is nothing strategically innovative about setting benchmarks for the Iraqi "government". So really it is what it is: an escalation of the existing strategy. Faced with a failing Iraq strategy, Bush will once again adapt by changing PR tactics.

If this is all just window dressing, why all this fuss and bother over PR tactics and framing? As it happens, Americans are dramatically more supportive of a temporary troop increase than they are of an escalation. (Note: still well under 50% of poll respondents support the temporary increase; it just looks like a lot when compared to Bush's approval rating on Iraq at 26%.) But here's the bottom line: people do not support this escalation, especially when they know what it really is. And well they shouldn't, since just like the rest of the administration's activities in Iraq, this one is horribly misguided.

It is difficult to tell precisely what the Democratic response will be, however. It seems as though their big bold breakthrough is going to involve a limp-wristed symbolic resolution. Yet it also sounds like legislators such as Ted Kennedy and John Murtha are planning on blocking it. Can you tell which option I prefer?

Bush has taken a classic Karl Rove tactic here: Democrats were elected in large part to stop the occupation of Iraq, and the first thing the Rove book says to do is attack your opponent right where he is strongest. Bush is therefore testing the Democrats to see who will show up. Will it be the milquetoast Democrats of 2002 and 2003? the ones that lost the 2002 midterms by playing the Republicans' jingoism game and then let themselves be fooled into supporting an unjustified war? Or will it be the principled Democrats who campaigned on standing up to Bush? the ones who eventually overcame their fears of being called troop-haters? If Democrats have truly grown and matured, they will support the troops by keeping them out of a civil war halfway across the globe. If they are ready to slide back into the cesspool they just emerged from, they will settle for a resolution.

Are Suburbs Immoral?

2007-01-08T23:41:00.000-08:00

Two phenomena in particular cause me to wonder about the morality of suburbs. One is the fact that they seem to be hotbeds of the kind of conservative politics that I view as immoral. The second is that when it comes to addressing the biggest challenge our of young century, global warming, suburbs are part of the problem.

In the two maps of Chicago above (larger version available here), we see CO2 emissions displayed in full color - the more energy is used the redder the picture, and the less energy used the bluer. The left map is CO2 emitted per square mile. In this map Chicago looks like a humongous energy user, which jives well with anecdotal evidence about the Sears Tower (which supposedly uses as much electricity as a town of 35,000) and auto emissions and so forth. But in the map on the right, CO2 is measured on a per household basis, with red meaning more CO2 is produced per household and vice versa for blue. In this map it is clear that the denser areas of Chicago use much less energy per person, emit less CO2, and make less global warming impact.

In the Chicago region, and many others, the suburbs have been the force of conservatism, as compared to the liberalism of the urban core. Around here, that takes the form of machine politics in town and conservative values further out. In LA and DC, it takes the form of a large inner city black population versus affluent suburbs in Orange County and Virginia. The great exception may be San Francisco, where suburbs in Marin and Berkeley could give the most liberal regions in the rest of the country a run for their money.

Before I get too much further, let me define a couple of my terms. For my purposes, a prototypical suburb is a low density (one household per lot) town that is more or less coterminous with a combination of other such towns, countryside, and/or an urban core. There may even be a gate at the edge of the community. Energy use per person is high: life is more spread out, requiring more driving, and stand-alone dwellings do not have the same efficiencies of scale that large, multi-family structures in the city have. Suburbs often vote conservatively.

Everyone has his or her own definition or what's moral, but it is widely agreed that the essence of morality is taking other people into account when choosing actions; usually, concern is further directed to the well being of other people. Note that conservatism is recognized as being the ideology of individualism (e.g. private accounts for social security), which is the fundamental opposite of other-mindedness. This is part of the reason I consider conservatism immoral at heart.

It is often surmised that people in suburbs vote more conservatively because of issues like crime and the economy due to their possession of children and mortgages. I think it goes a little deeper than that, however. I believe that suburbs promote conservatism by removing a variety of impediments to selfish thinking that would otherwise be found in a more dense environment. To wit, as a suburban resident, you live in a detached house. You drive a car that you own, and you use it to take yourself (by yourself) between home and work along a roadway meant exclusively (or almost exclusively) for cars. You occasionally stop at the supermarket in the strip mall or your kid's soccer field. If you want to sunbathe or barbecue, you go in your own backyard. Other people only enter your world when they cut into your lane or steal your lunch out of the fridge. It isolates you and removes consciousness of other people from your usual frame of reference.

Living in a city, on the other hand, you are constantly exposed to other people and their problems, which can start to seem like your problems. If you HAVE to deal with that homeless guy on the bus, homelessness seems like your problem. If your kids get sick at school because their friends' families can't afford health insurance, health care seems like your problem. Even if you don't start feeling like you share problems, I think it makes a difference in your consciousness to just see that homeless people or people without health insurance are real people that are trying to live real lives. And for that matter, you may see how people interact with each other around pollution, and it may give you a better sense of the importance of environmental issues. Issues like how much energy you consume compared to someone else.

Some holes are appearing in the argument that suburbs are conservative, however. For example, Democratic Senator Jim Webb, newly elected in Virginia, probably owes his victory to the increasing size and liberalism of D.C. suburbs. However, much (though not all) of this growth is occurring in places like Ballston (pictured here), which is really nothing like the prototype I've described. It's more like a small city right outside a larger one - it features dense development clustered around transit hubs and puts residents close to jobs. Plus, on a more puerile level, Ballston is one of the all-time funniest/most homoerotic city names in the country, although it's only one vowel switch away from being dethroned by nearby Manassas.

At any rate, Ballston and the rest of suburban Virginia seem to be part of a national trend whereby so-called inner suburbs are becoming denser and more liberal. This appears to be true even in suburban Chicago, where the sixth Congressional district has always been a reliable Republican seat. The last couple of elections, though, Democrats (Cegelis, then Duckworth) have provided strong challenges. Places like DuPage County are still a long way from cleaning up their environmental behavior, however. This is where some doom sayers have started to seem cautiously optimistic.

This key is this phenomenon of peak oil, whereby oil will become so expensive as it runs out that it will become uneconomical for most of its current uses in a very short timespan. Many of its adherents envision a world where suburbs are simply no longer viable, doomed by the death of the personal automobile. This seems like a pretty safe bet to me, since (a) we know that oil will run out eventually and (b) we're not doing anything about it right now. To support the kind of population we have now, it seems clear that we will have to find a way to live more densely sooner or later.

And that brings us back to the environmental side. There is one guy in particular, Joel Kotkin, who addresses these issues frequently in various opinion pieces and articles for relatively mainstream publications. Kotkin is really more of a hack making a career as a "thinker" by peddling one contrarian idea: that predictions of the demise of suburbs are overblown because people like living in them. Telecommuting and the relocation of high-paying jobs to suburbs will make travel from suburbs into cities obsolete, thinks Kotkin.

But to a certain extent, I think Kotkin is arguing against a straw man. If pressed, I don't think any environmental alarmist, myself included, would really say that the very existence of a suburb is immoral and everyone needs to live in a city. Some even think that cities will be every bit as obsolete as suburbs, once the crisis hits. Denser, more efficient and transit-oriented suburbs would be (and are starting to be) delightful for both political and environmental concerns, in fact. It's the outmoded, automobile-based prototype of the suburb that breeds immorality, and that is the version that needs to go.

Meeting Tonight

2007-01-08T06:12:00.000-08:00

At 6 PM in Barlett Lounge we're meeting (for all blog readers in Chicago).

We'll have Free Food from the delicious Cedars Restaurant along with some well deserved gloating.

Here's a flyer we've been putting up for the event:

Burn.

Protesting the First 100 Hours

2007-01-03T23:58:00.000-08:00

An article in today's Washington Post highlights just how much work Democrats have ahead of them in their first 100 legislative hours and beyond. Winning the midterms was a terrific victory, but it seems that two Democratic groups in particular are at risk of regressing. The rank and file needs to embrace ways of solving problems that don't include protesting, and the Democratic elites needs to learn that there are other ways of seeking the middle than doing something half-way between what they actually want and what Republicans would do.

The protesters described in the WaPo piece are planning demonstrations surrounding the swearing in of the 110th Congress tomorrow. They will reportedly demand more focus on the things they think dragged on Bush's approval ratings the most in 2006: Iraq, civil liberties, and human rights. Holding these protests is tactically inadvisable.

For starters, the activists in question aren't giving Democratic leaders the chance they deserve. The 100 Hours initiative might as well be called the Low-Hanging Fruit Initiative. Everything on this list is so obvious and has so much support that there should be little opposition, and most things are relatively simple problems with similarly simple solutions.

Lobbying reform - this is a gimme because it was a huge part of recent Republican corruption scandals, meaning its opponents will not be bold. It is sound policy because the Supreme Court keeps ruling that campaign contributions oughtn't to be regulated; lobbying reform is a great way to get around the regulation of contributions.
Implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission - duh.
Minimum wage increase - just about everyone thinks this is a good idea. If we are serious about promoting the social ideal that working is the ticket out of poverty, we need to make it so that working actually can lift you out of poverty.
Fixing the Medicare drug supplement - only a drug company could appreciate restricting Medicare's power to negotiate drug prices. Even conservative values, which ostensibly favor market competition, ought to support this measure. In the real competitive marketplace, Wal*Mart is huge and can negotiate lower prices; Medicare is bigger than Wal*Mart, so restricting it from negotiating is tantamount to a price support, which true economic conservatives hate.
Stem cell research - unless you define human life as beginning at the moment daddy first winks at mommy and she asks her roommate to walk her dog tomorrow morning, you favor this.
Cutting interest rates for student loans - student loans are crucial for the middle class, so the original Republican ploy to save a couple hundred million by making them more expensive seems chintzy and shouldn't be hard to repeal.
Energy independence - again, you'd have to be an oil company to think this was a bad idea.
Fighting against privatizing social security - this isn't really a proactive agendum, but large majorities are opposed so why not put it on your list?

So Democrats have this list of easy-to-get things that everyone wants. They can use it to establish a baseline of productivity for themselves and build up a head of steam heading into the real battles over Iraq, rights, and liberties. The protesters are basically protesting the lack of their favorite projects on this particular list.

Tactically, this puts the protesters at least two steps behind. Back in the pre-1994 days, when Democrats had reliable and safe majorities in the House, liberal groups learned to try to claim as large a slice of the pie as they could by competing with other liberal groups. Everyone's project was the one that couldn't wait - abortion or gun control or the environment was the one big thing that had to be taken care of first. Liberal groups had to fight against each other for attention. That was Step 1.

Step 2 was the 12 recent years when Democrats were out of power. Liberal groups kept working against each other, and Republicans kept winning. Groups like NARAL and Sierra Club might support a Republican, like Lincoln Chafee, if the Democratic candidate didn't meet the requirements of their issue checklist. Meanwhile Republican groups were maintaining power by having weekly breakfast meetings with Grover Norquist. In these meetings, they would cooperate and take turns because they knew that eventually flag burning or tax cuts or anti-abortion would make it on the agenda. Step 3 for Democrats cannot be a return to Step 1.

But getting back to protest as a tactic, well, there is a time and place for everything and this is neither for protesting. Protesting works when (1) you are frozen out of conventional channels of power to which you have some claim and (2) you have something specific to accomplish, which is usually joining those channels.

Works: Gandhi successfully protests British rule in India because Indians are not permitted to participate in shaping their national future, leaving protest as the only option for self-determination.
Doesn't work: no amount of free concerts in the park is going to convince China to let you participate in the discussion about Tibet. Freeing it is probably a great idea, but U2 has no recognizable moral inside track on wanting it so.
Works: Cindy Sheehan didn't end the Iraq occupation by camping out in Crawford, TX during August 05, but she did a great job of putting the pressure on the entrenched wielders of power because she had a legitimate claim to some answers about her dead son.
Didn't work: protesting the beginning of the Iraq war failed to have any effect on the course of the war because peace supporters were not at a moral disadvantage in society, they were just being bowled over by better organized forces.

Protesting tomorrow will not do anything good either. At this point, the people doing it look childish because they are renouncing any power to work within the system - they could have legitimate influence over sympathetic lawmakers who are now in charge, but they choose to protest instead. They look childish because they want their issue dealt with now, before everybody else's issue. And they look childish because they just protest everything on a knee-jerk basis, protesting almost just for the sake of protesting. And looking childish plays right into W's trap of acting fatherly.

Here's the catch, though. Just because protesters are tactically wrong doesn't mean they are wrong about their fundamental assumption - Democrats need to pressure Bush on civil liberties, human rights, and Iraq. Democratic lawmakers are indeed threatening to abandon the strong moral principles that swept them into office by embracing the weak principles which kept them out for so long. Let's check in with Sen.-elect Ben Cardin (D-MD):

"The Democrats have to be careful not to fall into these [partisan] traps that I think paralyzed the Republicans," Cardin said.

Of course no one is arguing that Democrats should fall into traps. But what Cardin is saying comes dangerously close to the pre-2006 Democratic tactic of trying so hard not to offend anyone that everyone gets offended anyway. True, the Republicans were ultimately undone in part by their partisan zeal. But if everyone always agreed on everything, we wouldn't need leaders. Leadership comes from taking positions that not everyone completely agrees on.

Bush seems to recognize this truth, as he is banking on a "surge" in troop levels that is opposed by roughly two thirds of the country to rescue his occupation and his presidency. Democratic legislators need to rise to his challenge by vigorously opposing such an escalation. As Yousir puts it in his most recent special comment, saying "surge" implies temporary, when in reality it will be the most permanent thing conceivable for the next brave young man or woman to die in Iraq.

So everyone has a little cooling down and reassessing ahead of them. The protesters need to back off a little, but legislators need to remember the essential moral issues being protested as 2007 and 2008 unfold.

New Bush Narratives

2006-12-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Time Magazine is generally not a publication I trust to deliver earth-shattering scoops, but an article there caught my eye the other day. This piece by Michael Duffy begins by describing how an integral part of the Bush As Decider narrative is his resistance to fickle changes of heart. However, as polls consistently show disapproval ratings for Bush flirting around 60%, it becomes increasingly clear that people have given up on something about the perpetual Bush narrative.

A crucial corollary to the Bush As Someone Whose Mind Is Made Up narrative has always been the Bush Is Someone Who Has Experienced Evangelical Rebirth narrative. This second narrative relies heavily on the story of Bush giving up alcoholism in a moment of piety. However, as he continues to belatedly acknowledge that his decisions suck (by waiting until the second he loses his Congressional majority to fire Rusmfeld, for example), the part of the narrative where he formerly made stupid mistakes until he repented becomes less and less plausible. As Duffy points out, instead of now seeming like a saved and prostrate pietist, Bush now just seems like someone who habitually waits far too long to correct his mistakes. If he's such a great decider, why did he decide to wait until he was in his forties to pull his shit together in life?

Causation is difficult for someone as atheistic as me to put together in this case, but one is forced to notice the correlation between the putrefaction of the Evangelical Bush narrative and the cracks surfacing in the Evangelicals As Wacky, Partisan Culture Warriors narrative. With the caveat that whatever transition might be happening is clearly in a callow, liminal state, we are starting to see such cracks. For example, recently the president-elect of the Christian Coalition had to step aside because he thought evangelicals should stop worrying exclusively about what's going on in other people's uteri and move on to dealing with life's little ennui and minutiae, such as the horrible, crippling poverty most of the world lives in and the imminent destruction of our planet. Despite this gentleman's resignation, the notable development here is that someone from within the conservative evangelical fortress even suggested worrying about things that matter but are not titillating.

Likewise, when megachurch rockstar Rick Warren recently invited Barack Obama to speak about AIDS at his compound in the inland LA suburbs, it was a stunning moment for the openness of the movement. In addition to not being a Republican, Obama believes in a woman's right to control her own body. I believe that what this represents is not just the Democratic sophism that Obama is the one who will swoop down from heaven to help us connect with religious swing voters, but the new reality that Democrats are in fact well positioned to connect with evangelicals on several critical levels. Despite their years of instruction in the evils of letting Terri Shiavo rest and expressing your love for any human being of any sex, many rank and file evangelicals are starting to depart from the teachings of their wizards, shamans, and witch doctors by placing more emphasis on ending genocide and poverty and fixing the environment. Just to spell this out a little, those are EXACTLY the kinds of things liberals are usually concerned with.

And hey, there happen to be a couple of liberal names being mentioned in the 2008 presidential picture whose credentials are based on precisely such issues. John Edwards has been talking about poverty for quite a while, and he has been doing so in very moral terms. Al Gore has famously renewed himself as a public servant by going on his environment tear. Even Obama has been willing to talk about things like universal health care. While Hillary Clinton may be the one claiming to be an evangelical, the others are the ones who are taking the moral stands that are actually needed to connect to religious conservatives.

Stupid Books

2006-11-27T19:00:00.000-08:00

In a certain episode of The Simpsons, Lisa pits Bart against a hamster in an intelligence test. One of the rounds involves getting Bart to try to eat a cupcake, which Lisa places on a bookshelf for him to discover. Bart notices the cupcake as he walks by glaring at the bookshelf and muttering "Stupid books." One often gets the feeling that our august president reacts similarly in the face of humankind's accumulated knowledge, especially since some of his most notable mistakes were made by much smarter people well before he ever got to office - everyone thought the lessons of engaging in precarious voluntary wars halfway across the world had been discredited until Bush showed up.

But Bush's apparent contempt for the Enlightenment (see below) is insufficient to stop him from seeking his own presidential library. The presidential library is kind of a funny tradition, because why should every president have his own library? Why not a regular museum? Or a generic archive? I guess it's just one of those things: lions have prides, whales have pods, presidents have libraries. As for the Enlightenment, think back to some of the central aims of that project and ask yourself how Bush is doing: integrating religion and state, replacing trained bureaucrats with private warlords, defining science and truth as dependent upon who is in power instead of universal principles, etc.

I would be remiss in my account of the relationship between Bush and books if I didn't mention that Bush was reportedly in a heated reading contest this summer with staff brainiac Karl Rove. Never mind that most of us grew out of reading contests before we had grown out of braces, it still seems a little far fetched to imagine a moron like Bush picking up Camus, as he is alleged to have done. Despite a lack of hard evidence (something which has never stopped Bush before), I am going to go ahead and aver that he is lying in almost every detail of the reading contest. With that declaration safely behind me, Bush's lies about his reading fit right in with his general pattern of lying about everything, thus embodying his disrespect for the orderly transmission of knowledge.

It gets better, though - the library is apparently intended to be attached to a new think tank at SMU, to be modeled after Stanford's Hoover Institute. Ignoring for the moment that it would more rightly be called a thoughtless tank, it's pretty scary to think of serious scholars deliberately trying to emulate this president. Alas, this is the nefarious evil of the conservative movement: establishing the intellectual infrastructure to dominate the debate. It's basically one more way for the people with money to make sure everybody thinks how they want them to. For a political ideology that values intellect so little (see also: candidacy of George W. Bush), it makes more than a little sense that one prong of the attack on truth should be bullying legitimate intellectuals from within the academy. Fortunately, I think it's going to take more than a library/tank to rescue Bush's horrendous legacy.

Who likes money?

2006-11-26T22:14:00.000-08:00

Money
So they say
Is the root of all evil today

These words are as true today as they were thoses time my roommates got high and blasted Pink Floyd through the house. Or are they? Not many serious people are against money as a concept these days, but a couple of new books highlight one extreme of the influence that the economy can have on democracy.

Jacob Hacker addresses economic security in his The Great Risk Shift. This work appears to combine the twin notions that the middle class is getting screwed by things like the horrendous health care situation and the downward pressure globalization is putting on jobs with the way conservative think tanks and echo chambers have made it difficult to talk about fixing the problems. This doesn't sound like an earth-shattering insight, but the more awareness there is of these problems the better. Plus, I have every reason to think Hacker, whose last book was excellent, is likely to give these problems a trenchant treatment.

Gerry Spence seems to be onto something in his Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power; The Rise and Risk of the New Conservative Hate Culture, which appears to explore the connection between economic violence and actual violence. Says Spence, "It’s easy to hate gays if one can’t find a job that pays more than the minimum starvation wage. It’s easy to jump on the patriotic band wagon to blow the hell out of half the innocent people in Iraq if one has, in effect, been blown to some sort of economic hell and is equally innocent. When people feel hurt they hurt back." This phenomenon may be our contemporary equivalent of Marx' economic alienation, and it reflects the old sociology chestnut that people compensate for uncertainty in their own lives by seeking certainty in the moral order. So once again we find ourselves grappling with the question of what role the economy should play in society.

Anthony Downs gives a classic interpretation of the role economic analysis can play in understanding society in his canonical Economic Theory of Democracy, but this isn't exactly what I'm driving at. What I'm going for can be traced back to accounts of the rise of capitalism in 18th century England and its subsequent spread around various parts of the globe, in which many observers have noted that a middle class seems to be a prerequisite for successful democracy. It's hard to prove any law of causation with certainty in the social sciences, but anecdotal evidence suggests that prosperity does encourage democracy. When Japan first opened up to the West in the mid-1800's, it had a sizable bureaucracy class known as Samurai; soon thereafter, Japan began to prosper and to govern effectively via a democratic Diet. In the United States, the 1890's saw a harsh economic bust cycle, and the period is now remembered for xenophobia and the restriction of rights, among other things. Contrast that to the period following World War II, when America's economic dominance over the world was unquestioned, and when available democratic rights, especially for blacks and women, multiplied.

People aren't in as bad a position today as they were in the 1890's, due to some accumulated wisdom in economic management and some of the social safety net first installed during the New Deal. But things aren't good, either. It has become a truism today that income disparity is a serious and rapidly expanding problem. It's a problem that is going to demand bold solutions to overcome, such as a reworking of the tax code.

But ultimately it may not matter what our tax code is if we continue to ignore our impending environmental collapse. Nothing would be worse for the economy or democracy than an uninhabitable world. A responsive democratic government that evaluates and acts upon relevant scientific evidence would be a good first step to acknowledging and addressing our dire environmental predicament. While we moved towards that goal by dethroning maniacs like Inhofe earlier this month, a strengthened middle class would surely help sustain progress towards a better democracy. If restrictions on democratic rights and polarization of income are problems that build on each other in hurting the environment, then so expansions of the middle class and democratic rights should build upon each other in helping the environment. This is the true division between the Democratic vision and the Republican vision - under their vision, when one person does well, he hoards it to himself, but under our vision, when one succeeds, so do all others.

Thanksgiving Homework

2006-11-19T20:14:00.000-08:00

If University of Chicago readers are anything like me, your programs are too easy and you're just itching for some more homework to do over the Thanksgiving break. As luck would have it, here is an assignment for you. Many of you will be spending time around lots of family, and, tragically, not every member of every family is as enlightened as we would like. Many of them may be conservative and/or Republican, and others will just want to hear what the smarty-pants college student at the dinner table thinks about the mid-term election results. So your homework, should you choose to accept it, is to think up something clever to say about why you're a Democrat and why it's good that Democrats are soon to be in power. And, as an internet personality, it's my job to help you.

I'm not actually the one who determines how you vote (maybe I will be some day, but for now it's up to you), so here is a quick range of options that might describe your situation. Maybe you're like Senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia - someone who doesn't feel that he is particularly liberal but who is sick of the Republican BS. Webb worked in the Reagan administration, and he has been a lifelong military man; other turn-ons for Webb include walks on the beach, kittens when they yawn, and the Scots-Irish. This is the description of someone who thinks of himself as reasonable and realizes that there is no place for reason in the Republican party of today. More and more people who may not be bleeding hearts are finding that the Democratic party is the only one available for people who aren't complete psychopaths.

Or maybe you're more like me, and you identify yourself with liberal values. Fortunately, the list of desirable values that can now be considered liberal has grown dramatically in proportion to the growth of the aforementioned insanity in the Republican party. It used to be that the values liberals could claim exclusivity over were limited to things like taking care of each other, social justice, and compassion. Today, we can add reasonable and ernest political debate, intellectual integrity, the constitution, and more.

But, as I have pointed out before, probably the single most important thing you can do is make sure that whatever your rationale is, it can be summed up in one or two sentences. We lose the debate before it even gets started when Republicans can say "less taxes, less government" (even if it's not exactly true) and we come up with a fifteen point plan for why Democrats would do everything Republicans do but just a little better. If you're fortunate enough to think of yourself as having liberal values, Michael Tomasky has already done your work for you. In this piece he spells out the case for Democrats to embrace goal of "the common good." This is in contrast to the Republican platform of "personal this, private that" - a platform that puts everyone out on their own. So that's my plan. If anyone asks me to tell them why I'm a Democrat, it's because Democrats are the ones who believe we all need each other. What's yours?

Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead

2006-11-17T06:08:00.000-08:00

Milton Friedman, the economist that leftists love to hate, died on Thursday at age 94.

Friedman was widely regarded as a charming and pleasant person, so it's too bad that his legacy is so harmful to the world. Last month my grandmother passed away in a town just down the coast from where Friedman died, and it's safe to say that she did the world more good with her work on the library board and geneological society than Friedman did with his economics. Just like Sam Cooke, there are several subjects about which I don't know much, and one of them is economics, but I'll do my best to show where this animosity comes from.

Of foremost concern to people around Hyde Park should be that Friedman is probably the single name most associated with the University of Chicago. He is credited with founding the so-called Chicago school of economics, which in turn is credited with conferring a great deal of intellectual legitimacy on the conservative movement. Friedman was an ends-justify-the-means type of guy. One of his most famous works, The Methodology of Positive Economics, propounded the idea that it doesn't matter what your model's assumptions are as long as its predictions are accurate.

Which is handy if you plan to make the kind of friends Friedman made. Perhaps his most notorious ally in the government world was Augusto Pinochet, the reviled and ruinous Chilean dictator and human rights violator. Pinochet brought in scholars from the Chicago school to introduce Friedman's monetarist, free market ideas into Chile's economic policies. So if human rights violations are the assumptions of your model, that shouldn't matter as long as the economic prosperity predictions prove true, right? Obviously that's a fairly dubious claim, and it doesn't help that without regulation, the economic welfare of the poor and middle class in Chile deteriorated precipitously over the course of Pinochet's rule. But Friedman, apparently, didn't care about distributive justice in economics. Most economists today find it pretty hard to argue in favor of screwing the poor in your economic policy.

It's hard to prove a connection between Friedman and the development of the right-wing think tank infrastructure, but it walks and quacks like a duck, as they say. At the beginning of his day, Friedman was often the only economist opposing the Keynesian orthodoxy, which would later get Chile back on the right track after Pinochet. I would contend that his example of the potential power of having some scholarship to back up your wing-nut conservatism inspired other conservatives to build up the right wing think tank infrastructure, including places like the Stanford's Hoover Institution, with which Friedman himself was affiliated following his time in Chicago. It is this think tank infrastructure which does the intellectual leg work for today's conservative movement, testing and developing ideas like school vouchers.

So Friedman's gifts to the world were economic policies that are disasterous for almost everyone (i.e., those who aren't already rich) and a shining ray of hope for conservatives looking for scholarship to justify their ideology. Those who harm the world seldom think of their actions that way, but it seems that it didn't particularly matter to Friedman. Pleasant conversationalist or not, I don't mourn him.

I've Been Waiting/For a Girl Like You/To Come Into My Life

2006-11-15T22:16:00.000-08:00

When the Democratic House caucus convenes tomorrow to hold leadership elections, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) is expected to become the highest ranking elected woman in American history. This is actually a pretty big deal, because, as Dana Goldstein and Sarah Wildman point out in American Prospect, just the presence of such a powerful woman could help recruit more women into other areas where they have not been well represented, such as political journalism and especially punditry, and help turn out the female vote. Closer to home for me, women are a powerful force in blogs, but their muslces have yet to be flexed in political blogs.

What is even more interesting than Pelosi's coup for her gender is how short-lived it may turn out to be. Hillary Clinton is in clear position as the early frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, at least so say the experts. Here's one problem, though: people already know Hillary Clinton, and 45% say there is no chance they would vote her. A bigger problem may be her stance on the occupation of Iraq. She was profiled in this month's Atlantic, and towards the end (sorry - I think it's available to subscribers only) is a devastating description of the author's interview with her on the subject. The core problem, as demonstrated there and elsewhere, is that she lacks America's most prized commodity - authenticity. In the interview, she describes the big long list of evidence to support her contention that she was misled by Bush & Co. into supporting the war, and she describes her recently developed interest in accountability and winning. Maybe she could get away with that style of argument as a lawyer, but her evidence is dumb. Everyone can tell that Democrats like her sold out to W, who was pretty obviously out to grind the neo-con Iraq ax, because they were afraid to stand up to the Republican intimidation machine.

But getting back to Pelosi, who voted against the war, we might wonder how she will do as speaker. The netroots have clearly gained a lot of confidence in her abilities, judging by a methodologically dubious DailyKos poll in which she has increased her approval rating a modest 50 points since July. Since the election, however, she has done at least two notable things: one was heading off an intra-caucus squabble by brokering a deal to get Rahm Emanuel, who for some reason has gained respect from some people, into the leadership without fighting with Rep. Clyburn, an African American from South Carolina. So score one for some much-needed unity and minority caucus love.

The other thing she has done is endorse Jack Murtha for Majority Leader in his race against Steny Hoyer. This move seemed like a good idea to me at first, because Murtha got Democrats rolling on the pull-out-of-Iraq message last year, and I feel like he's more or less with the program; Hoyer seems like he's always been out for himself and not with the program. However, shortly thereafter the news cycle's narrative became "Murtha is too corrupt". Since what evidence there is on Murtha being corrupt dates back well over 20 years, one has to wonder why the press only jumped on this story once the Pelosi endorsement came out. For example, could a certain outgoing Minority Whip with a penchant for undermining the party be spreading rumors? We don't know.

I think Pelosi is an astute leader, and my opinion is backed up by the fact that anyone of any gender would have to be pretty sharp to get where she has gotten. Hopefully she will inspire more women to get involved, and hopefully none of them will be Hillary Clinton.

The Perfect Storm

2006-11-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

In the eponymous movie (and book), a group of fisherman goes out in some big storm and some of them die or something. Apparently the original definition of the term must have been a hurricane that causes the maximum amount of damage possible, and extrapolating from that has given us the same practical meaning as the stock phrase "a whole that is more than the sum of its parts." And it really grinds my gears how overused this phrase has become.

The situation has been especially dire with news coverage of the recent midterm elections. Some writers have tossed the term around indiscriminately, and some at least have had the grace to put quotation marks around it. Sometimes reporters are just reporting that some idiot used it, while sometimes they have apparently picked it from amongst many competing nautical metaphors. However, overuse during the midterms has been an extension of the usual journalistic corner-cutting, as there have also been recent mentions in articles on topics as varied as the music business, privacy regulation, and heavy industry.

This example, from my hometown fishwrap, has an outstanding example for analysis. The author desribes the situation thusly:

What we have is a perfect storm which combines the GOP's desperation to tarnish their opponents, the Democrats['] obsessive defensiveness over being branded as soft on defense, and the media's fixation with conflict.

Oh. My. God. More than one thing happened at once? Something was caused by more than one thing? This is so weird it needs a special term. How about perfect storm?

This is precisely the type of nonsense George Orwell decried in 1946 in his famous essay Politics and the English Language, a classic about the lazy degradation of said language for political purposes.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

Step #4 is what is clearly being ignored by the guilty reporters, but to a certain extent this example of misattribution of causation is simply emblematic of some more or less common shortcomings in the human capacity for reason.

When determining cause, people often make the so-called fundamental attribution error, which consists of giving too much weight to an actor's personal characteristics at the expense of his situation. A simple example is seeing someone slip and concluding that he is clumsy instead of taking into account that there was a spot of ice on that part of the sidewalk. Research has also shown that people are frequently content to find one explanation for a phenomenon they observe, no matter how many causes actually contributed; people also expect a cause to look like its outcome and will often discount potential causes that don't look like the observed outcome.

David Hume had even more trouble pinning down causation than research subjects, although he at least gave it some more thought.

One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life.

Other philosophers have given it a go, and they have come up with some incredibly detailed explanations of causation. Non-Western philosophy has taken a crack, although we ought to be able to come up with something that doesn't rely on metaphysics. Perhaps the answer is that life imitates art, as those in the important philosophical tradition of intellectual powerhouse Tipper Gore have suggested.

But getting back to the point, if it's beyond the capacity of David Hume to solve causation, I don't know why I should expect anything more from newspaper reporters, let alone newspaper readers. None the less, I'm siding with Orwell here: I'm tired of hearing how two things happening at once constitutes a perfect storm, and I hope that the fad of describing things as such will soon pass.

It's a Dead Man's Party

2006-11-09T19:35:00.000-08:00

Back when legendary supergroup and noted Rodney Dangerfield enthusiasts Oingo Boingo released Dead Man's Party, they probably weren't thinking about the Republicans in 2006, but I sure am.
And I don't mean to connote the party of Abraham Lincoln, one of America's most famously dead people for approximately the last 140 years. Since Lincoln joined The Great Majority, his party has moved through a variety of stages, lately arriving at the point known as "off the deep end". Republicans are currently facing an uphill battle to keep the party alive.

Let's start with Bush. The neoconservatives had their moment in the sun on his watch. Now that Donald Rumsfeld is gone, following the earlier departures of people like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney is the only prominent neocon left in the administration. The new defense secretary, Gates, is a product of the Brent Scowcroft/Bush #41/James Baker school of being evil while at least acknowledging the existence of the real world. As Maureen Dowd puts it in the New York Times,

Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.

Gates has two principle strikes against him. Strike One: he played a central role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Said affair was one of America's all-time sleaziest moments, an illegal and immoral international embarrassment under Reagan and #41. Strike Two: at the CIA he was responsible for establishing the precedent that you should manipulate the intelligence you have to make it look like the intelligence you want. In his days, that meant everything was a sign of Communists, but many of the managers he trained at the CIA were still there at the beginning of this decade. And they are the ones who produced the infamous 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showing the "indisputable proof" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But back to Bush. He made a rare acknowledgment of the existence of the real world in his press conference yesterday. Unfortunately, for a moment of honesty it was strikingly dishonest.

Q. "Just a few days before this election, in Texas, you said that Democrats, no matter how they put it, their approach to Iraq comes down to terrorists win, America loses. What has changed today?"

Bush: "What's changed today is the election is over, and the Democrats won."

So, in other words, he lied because of the election, and he expects that excuse to vindicate him. Huh. At least all the cries of "filthy liar" he inspires are confirmed, as if there were ever any doubt. The crowd surrounding #41 mostly confined their lying to big things. You know, things like illegally selling weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages and money and funneling the profits to anti-democratic terrorists in Central America. W just lies about everything, all the time, no matter what the situation or consequences, for any reason. Big deal if he accuses the earnest opposition to the policies he privately realizes are failing of treason if it might help him grab more power, right? Why would anyone think that was wrong?

And this attitude of doing whatever it takes to get some power is all over the party. By way of example, one of the various scummy tactics Republicans used on election day was pretending that Michael Steele, the would-be Republican Senator from Maryland, was a Democrat. Forces friendly to Steele (he obviously knew nothing about it) bused in homeless people from Philadelphia to tell black voters in Baltimore to vote for him as a Democrat. One of the homeless people has spoken up, and his story is heart-wrenching for anyone with a comitment to democracy or social justice:

"People started screaming, at us, 'Do you think we're that stupid? What are you trying to pull?' " said El-Bedawi. "I said, 'I didn't know it was a lie! I'm from Philly!' And they said, 'Then go back to Philly!'

[and]

"I am so angry and upset, I don't know what to do," said El-Bedawi, who's particularly shattered that he and at least 200 other Philadelphians didn't get home from Maryland in time to vote here.

"These people think we're too stupid to understand the magnitude of what we did."

[and]

"I might not have a home," El-Bedawi told me yesterday, "but that doesn't mean I don't care about right and wrong. No one has the right to use me that way."

This is becoming the problem for Republicans: people are starting to realize how much they care about right and wrong. It is becoming more and more obvious to people across the country that no matter where Republicans say they stand on a given issue, they just can't be allowed to rule.

Once upon a time, Karl Rove had a dream of building an unstoppable Republican super-coalition. He would maintain all the current Republican support and add black evangelicals and Latino social conservatives, yielding a permanent majority. Not only did this election shatter that dream in the short run, but it looks like Rove may be building a permanent majority for Democrats. The youth vote apparently fell to Democrats by a margin over 20% this cycle; other polls show that the younger people are, the more support they have for things like gay rights. And Latinos and blacks, shall we say, did not exactly fall in line. This year, Latinos gave 69% of their vote to Democrats while blacks voted 89% for Democrats.

Democrats will probably pick up some more seats next election, especially in the Senate, while the GOP fights its civil war between the maniacs and the evil reasoners. Eventually Republicans will bounce back to some degree. But there aren't many trends looking good for them right now, and it looks like they're dead in the water for the time being. I'm sure more than a few wish their party could be more like that one dead man's party.

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

2006-11-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

This summer, Time ran the cover article displayed at left about George Bush running up against the limits of going it alone. Well yesterday he ran up against an even more important limit - the amount of BS the public was willing to tolerate. So now that the Bush cowboys have been vanquished (note that real cowboys like John Tester are flourishing), certain questions are emerging to define our moment. These questions are based on the 'who' of the situation, and they boil down to these two: who is responsible for getting the Democrats here now? And who are the Democrats that are now here?

As for who got us here, there are three possible answers I'm looking at, including conservative, moderate, DLC-type Democrats; progressive, blog-friendly, liberal Democrats; and Republicans. As for who they are, duh, out of that selection the first two are the only possibilities.

Basic election coverage in both the New York Times and the Washington Post includes statements to the effect that the earthquake we've just seen was brought to us by conservative Democrats. The reasoning appears to go that only a more moderate or conservative Democrat could wrest a Republican seat away from said Republican, plus newly elected Democrats like Heath Shuler (NC-11) and Bob Casey (PA-Sen) are not supporters of abortion rights. Others in the MSM are eager to credit Rahm Emanuel with hatching a brilliant strategy that paid off big time.

Fortunately, these two arguments are easy to dismiss. Voters pretty clearly repudiated conservatism in favor of liberalism (judging by the exit polls), and a lot of the newbies just aren't that conservative anyway. While Shuler and Casey might be more conservative than Sherrod Brown (OH-Sen), they share one particularly notable quality - economic populism. In addition to Brown, Democrats added some bona fide progressives in Jerry McNerney (CA-11), John Yarmuth (KY-03), and Tim Walz (MN-01). So that takes care of the illusion that somehow going centrist was a national recipe for Democratic success.

As for Rahm Emanuel, the worst thing since un-sliced bread, I guess I'll start with the positives: he raised a huge amount of money, and he recruited several candidates. Good. Now let's jump right into the bad stuff. There is absolutely no doubt that we won the House despite Rahm Emanuel, not because of him. Per the article in the preceding link, here's his rap sheet:

Constantly recruited candidatest for primaries against more progressive Democrats that were otherwise unopposed, including McNerney and Yarmuth. Tammy Duckworth (IL-06) was another Rahm recruit, from out of district, who won her primary but lost the general election despite the $3 million Rahm dumped into her race; her primary opponent, Cegelis, got really close to Henry Hyde last cycle with very little help. Michael Arcuri (NY-24) is another example of a Rahm primary recruit, but he won his general election.
Stiffed in the general election any candidate who ran against one of his primary choices. There was no money forthcoming from the DCCC for candidates like Yarmouth and McNerney, and candidates like Larry Kissell (NC-08) who did receive some support are now locked in statistical dead heats that probably could have been broken with some of the $3 million Rahm poured into losing IL-06 (although of course we were all pulling for Tammy).
Warned of gloom and doom if Democrats ever made the mistake of talking about the Iraq war, and we all know how much voters supported the Republican position on that.

Republicans obviously don't make up the new crop of Democratic winners (except in Kansas, where there were multiple defections from R to D), so let's think about whether they gave the election away. They raised a ton of money, they ran some really nasty ads, and they did everything in their vicious power to paint Democrats as whatever they liked. For their part, Democrats ran their 50-state strategy, expaned the field of contested seats, and hit hard on Iraq. So while we couldn't have done it without the Republicans, I think we earned it.

If many of the new Democrats entering Congress will be reasonably progressive, who will the rest of the Democrats be? Well, some of the most important ones, committee chairs, will be liberals - Conyers (MI), Waxman (CA), Rangell (NY) are some of the names now giving Republicans nightmares. You see, although Republicans abolished the practice of giving chairmanships based on seniority, Democrats didn't, and the Democrats with the longest service are (no surprise) the ones in the most liberal districts. So the composition of our august legislature, brought to you by the left wing of the party, will also be largely leftist.

The new Democratic majority is also the first since 1920 to come to power without a majority of seats in the South. Liberals like Tom Schaller have been arguing for some time that this is precisely the party makeup Democrats should be embracing anyway. And, indeed, it does seem that it will alow a less compromising brand of liberalism to guide the new party. Additional stability should come from the fact that PVI ratings (Partisan Voter Index - a measure of a district's underlying partisanship, independent of its elected representative, based on its presidential voting) for many new Democratic districts in the Northeast and Midwest lean Democratic. Since so much has changed in the last couple of years, I would guess that the next time PVI ratings come out, they will be more favorable to Democrats in some of the other new seats in the Mountain West and Midwest that currently look more Republican. These data put the nail in the coffin of the argument that it must take a conservative Democrat to capture one of these seats.

Another way people are asking the question "Who are the Democrats that are now here?" is in terms of what they will do and who they will invesitgate. For his part, Bush has made an overture for bipartisanship with Democrats. However, it should be remembered that Bush is an awful, malicious human being who probably doesn't mean it.

On a rhetorical level, it's a neck-snapping reversal from the savage smearing of Democrats as troop-hating terrorist-appeasing cowards that continued right up until last night, when the will of the voters became undeniable even by White House standards.

Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled off a bipartisanship-style reinvention of his image this year en route to easy reelection as governor of California after pushing a right-wing agenda last year, but suggesting that George Bush might be capable of coopting a Democratic platform to the same extent stretches the limits of believability. There's no way any voter wants the Democrats to jump right into retribution for the cockamamy investigations Republicans launched against Clinton, so Democrats have sensibly promised bipartisanship in holding the administration accountable. But it is essential going forward that they not resort to what some have started calling "date rape bipartisanship": giving in to the Republican agenda in the name of compromise. If Republicans want to be bipartisan in actually holding the administration accountable, actually fixing Medicare, or actually promoting alternative energy, I say give em a seat at the table. But our new, hard earned progressive influence in Congress shouldn't be wasted on the Lieberman-style "bipartisanship" of supporting Bush on Iraq and the privatization of Social Security.

What Now?

2006-11-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

Well, that was fun. There was some election theft, but we pulled it out for the good guys. The Democrats took the House decisively, and the MSM is using some well advised caution in calling the Senate. However, the DSCC is taking the right approach in calling VA and MT for Democrats while still encouraging every voice to be heard through a recount; assuming they're right, and assuming Lieberman doesn't further betray us, we will have the Senate. So what now? The first question on the lips of any thoughtfully engaged civic participant is, of course, which Led Zeppelin song title best characterizes the story of this election?

Communication Breakdown: Republicans are finally revealed to have nothing more to offer than their brilliant communications strategy, which finally breaks down.
Gallows Pole: Republicans have been judged for all their crimes and will now face the brutal frontier justice of Congressional committee investigations.
Good Times, Bad Times: Good times were had by some when the treason rhetoric and tax cuts were flowing freely from Republicans, who are now in for some mighty bad times.
Heartbreaker: Republicans had their hopes up really high this time, but their hearts were broken when the results came in? This one doesn't seem too plausible.
Ramble On: Bush's rambling, incoherent speeches will continue unfettered as Democrats continue to give him carte blanche to do whatever he wants. I'm not buying this one, either.
Ten Years Gone: It has been ten years (give or take) since Democrats controlled the House, and now that those ten years are gone, we're back in action, baby.
The Song Remains the Same: Democrats are the same as Republicans, all politicians lie and steal and cheat equally, nothing will change. I'm giving a big thumbs down to this one, too.
When the Levee Breaks: When it rains, it pours. Voters' resistance to Republicans broke in a bunch of little spots, and it led to a landslide for Democrats. When conservative ideology threw poor black people overboard during Hurricane Katrina, the levees broke and there was no going back for Republicans. This is probably the most compelling.
Your Time is Gonna Come: Well, the Republicans' time just came, actually. But directed at Bush, whose time to be investigated is going to come when Democrats finally get on top of those committees, this might be pretty apt.

In a somewhat more serious examination of metaphors, noted U. of C. alumnus David Broder remarks for the WaPo that the appropriate metaphor to use here is not tidal wave, but earthquake. An earthquake causes a lot of commotion when fundamental, underlying elements undergo dramatic shifts, whereas a tidal wave makes a big splash that doesn't leave much lasting impact when the water recedes and everything goes back more or less to what it was. But that's a topic for another post, which I will hopefully get to tonight.

For now, the most comprehensive way to describe this election may (somehow, if this is even possible) not involve Led Zeppelin at all. Perhaps the best way to describe this election is through Neil Young: "Hey hey, my my."

The Inevitable Tightening

2006-11-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

For most of this campaign cycle, Democrats have had a significant advantage in the so-called "generic ballot." This ballot is a poll question that asks voters which party they would prefer to see in power (usually in the House) without mentioning candidate names. However, two recent polls that asked about the generic ballot found the Democrats' lead diminished dramatically from where it had been earlier in October. But how much does it matter?

For starters, the last time there was a hegemonic shift in Congress, 1994, the Democrats lost a whopping 52 seats, and the last generic ballot showed them up by 5%. This guy takes a statistical validitation approach to declaring his opposition to the use of generic ballots. On the other hand, this guy just thinks there is no such thing as a generic Democrat or Republican. It is part of the conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans always underperform in the generic ballot because they turn out at higher rates than Democrats. Of course it doesn't help that Republicans do a pretty good job of suppressing Democratic turnout through shady and/or illegal means (see here, here, here, and here, for example; see here for what to do).

But these are the real reasons why I'm feeling pretty good about the Democrats' chances tomorrow despite the tightening of the generic ballot:

Race by race, we are projected to win a majority (218 or greater) even before toss-up races are factored in.
Voter enthusiasm has been higher among Democrats, which should mean more Democrats are motivated to get out to the polls. Supposedly Kerry's latest slip is going to reenergize Republicans, but I think it may be counteracted by the Haggard gay sex 'n' meth scandal.
People always come home at the end. One of the classical debates in political science has been whether voters make their decisions rationally or emotionally. The most likely answer is that there's a little bit of both involved, but the upshot is that by the time of the election, some of those people who were thinking this might be the year they crossed party lines will come home and vote with their own party after all. This can be seen in New Jersey, a solid Democratic state, where once-endangered Senator Bob Menendez has been pulling away.
The two polls showing diminished leads have proven to be outliers, since other polls have since come out showing the same comfortable leads we were used to.

As you're well aware, it all depends on how many people turn out, so make sure you do your part. GET OUT THE VOTE! GO DEMOCRATS!

Pins and Needles

2006-11-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

Start holding your breath....now!

Digging Themselves Into a Fox Hole

2006-11-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

The Evil Fox Network has just announced some terrible ratings news that should make everyone who prizes independent thought cheer in unison - their ratings are down almost a full quarter over the last year. This, frankly, is incredible. Considering the kind of numbers Fox is used to putting up, we're talking about an enormous amount of people. And it's all the more incredible for how unstoppable they seemed as recently as, well, a year ago. Along with the decline of Ann Coulter, it might be the most interesting trend this fall. The thing about the unstoppable right-wing juggernaut of the last decade or so is that it all depended on momentum, like a pyramid scheme.

Fox blames its bad ratings news on the fact that this is a slower news year than 2005, which can't possibly be true. Any year when there is a major, tightly contested election is automatically a big news year. More appropriately, 2006 has been a bad news year for people who watch Fox, in that their entire movement has been collapsing under the weight of its own lies and antipathy. Since, as I've explained, the liberal system is based on being right while the right-wing system is based on maintaining power, the right-wing system has always necessarily functioned as more than the sum of its parts. Things only worked when they worked in synch. Fox was a very influential part of this system, and it is therefore a great case study in how this is going to be a vicious downward spiral for the Repugnicans.

The excellent book Off Center explored an interesting aspect of this system. Right-wingers were able to convince moderate Republicans to go along with their extremist agenda because they could offer moderates something called backlash insurance. Because the right wing was able to control the debate, control what bills came to the floor, control the news cycle, and control what went on behind the scenes in conference committees between the House and Senate, Republicans were able to effectively shield these moderates from being held accountable by voters for going along with the very most conservative parts of the right-wing agenda.

The military was also a key piece of this puzzle. It is an old truism in the military that you can't keep the ranks disciplined if they don't think the leaders can shoot straight. Well, as it turns out, the ranks currently don't think the leaders can shoot straight. The Army Times, the newspaper of record for folks in the Army, has joined with sister newspapers for the other services in calling on Rumsfeld to resign. Again, this is huge. The American military is obviously a proud bunch, and one of the most fundamental things they are proud of is their two centuries of subordination to civilian control. When the lies were only partially obvious, and when the consequences were only partially destructive, the military could be counted on to take its orders. But, like most people, there's only so far it wants to be pushed.

So the house of cards is about to come crashing down on the Republicans. Congressional candidates can't get far enough away from Bush, and Democrats are about to get subpoena power. What will happen to Bush? Everyone knows he lies a lot. And so far he has found it difficult (by his own admission), which is pretty credible since one doubts he has the brain power to pull it off too much longer. Bush was apparently fairly articulate when he was governor of Texas, but lying is stressful, and it may be that the stress of lying all the time is taking its toll. With Republicans in Congress acting as the proverbial rubber stamp, the system has worked together to protect this practice. With the system broken, how will Bush do? How far will the Republicans fall?

I Hear the Secrets That You Keep/When You're Talking in Your Sleep

2006-11-01T15:43:00.001-08:00

This fall, Republicans have seemed like they were talking in their sleep. And why not? What do they have to talk about? They have been in total control of government for about six years now, and what do they have to show for it?

Tax cuts for the absurdly wealthy, which are now hurting us badly.
Faith-based social services, which turn out to have been a political ploy this whole time.
"Missile defense" that preoccupied Bush when "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside US" couldn't get his attention.
A made-to-order, Think Tank brand quagmire in the Middle East.
Flushing the environment down the toilet.
A screw-everyone-not-named-Pfizer (or Wyeth, or Merck, etc.) drug plan.
An attempt to take money away from little old ladies.
Disingenuous and ineffective education policy.
An eviscerated Constitution.
I could go on.

So Republicans have basically shown that they're out to ruin the country, which means there's no agenda left for them to talk about. Instead, they've gone on auto-pilot. They're doing what they do best: scare tactics. Negative advertising has been a big one this cycle for both teams, but especially on the Republican side. They've had some good ones in Tennessee, and some others nationally.

Better yet is the flap this week over John Kerry's statement on education and Iraq. This is what Kerry said on Monday:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

To me, this is more of a joke on how the Bush administration has heightened income inequality and provided a way to get yourself killed if you're poor. It probably wouldn't be my first example if you asked me to cite some jokes that were in good taste, but whatever. Republicans, on the other hand, are the party that brought you the politics of stains and Christmas cards. They absolutely couldn't wait to pounce on their whipping boy Kerry, who they mercilessly antogonized for his alleged lack of patriotism in 2004. Except this time, a full two years too late, Kerry actually fought back with some really good points. Such as the fact that he's actually a decorated veteran, while none of the people attacking him have any significant service. Kerry doesn't need to apologize for this, and it would actually be better if he didn't.

So Republicans, faced with nothing else to run on, are running on a platform of attacking the people who are trying to fix their humongous mess. Fortunately for them, this is what comes naturally. They can talk like this in their sleep. But when they do, it's no secret what they're not talking about.

President Obama

2006-10-29T17:36:00.000-08:00

Blacks in Chicago average about half the income of local whites, although Mr. Obama himself is probably doing his part to bring the average up. And good for him - he's a sharp guy who took advantage of his opportunities. But every politician has a pretty good living wage. What's different about Obama? Why do people love him so?

I think it's his silver tongue. Obama can give a damn good speech when he wants to, and frankly that's something recent Democratic Presidential nominees Kerry and Gore were unable to do. He's a charismatic guy, and he gives off the air of someone who is thoughtful, principled, and really smart. And what's more, he looks less stupid than most Democrats when he talks about religion. It's abundantly clear that there has to be someone providing a voice to counter the rampaging maniacs who currently control religion-in-politics. So on these two fronts, I think Obama is a great candidate.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn't meet the leadership standards I would really like to see, at least not at this point. These leadership standards are essentially the same ones that are being pushed across the internet by concerned rank and file Democrats about pulling the debate to the left instead of caving to the center, unplugging the influence machine in DC that puts its own above the country, and so forth. But Obama came of political age at the tail end of the Clinton triangulation era, before these values rose to prominence.

In 2000, Obama was dealt an embarrassing defeat in the Congressional primary by entrenched incumbent Bobby Rush right here in Hyde Park. His stated reason for tilting at this particular windmill was an astute observation that Bobby Rush is full of crap. Incidentally, Rush himself is beloved across the netroots for his sponsorship of the legislation to destroy the democracy of the internet, especially after receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from telecom interests. Moreover, he helped arrange a hefty donation by telecom interests to a technology center in Englewood, which I would argue benefits the long term interests of his constituents less than having a measure of freedom on the internet, which would allow normal people to fight insiders like him. I guess I've talked myself into a circle at this point.

So Obama took his purified optimist schtick out for a test drive and was soundly defeated. He challenged the corrupted insider interests, and they put him in his place. The lesson he appears to have learned is that he should play the insider game, even if he sticks to his populist rhetoric. For example, he has had problems respecting the will of the party's voters in Connecticut, where his show of support for Ned Lamont has been tepid at best. He apparently feels it's OK to praise George Bush. And while offering up some bipartisan praise or refusing to go against a powerful guy at your office aren't capital sins in and of themselves, putting things like this together leaves one with the distinct impression that Obama isn't really on board with the whole grassroots platform. Not to say he wouldn't be an OK President (and certainly better than anything Republicans will ever offer), and not to say he couldn't straighten himself out, but I'm just not sold on him yet.

Freedom Through Regulation

2006-10-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Freedom is something that literally everyone can agree is a good thing, like puppies, true love, or, in a bygone era, bright copper kettles and brown paper packages tied up with string. However, unlike puppies, freedom means different things to different people and in different situations. George Lakoff has recently examined how contested the idea of freedom is and what it means to liberals and conservatives. I think of freedom as something you get more of when there is more regulation, and I am opposed to those who think of it as something that comes from lack of regulation.

An incredulous observer might ask, "How can you say freedom comes from regulation? Do you mean like when prisoners, with their regulated lives, are granted the freedom to do a prison rodeo?" As it happens, that is not what I have in mind. What I'm thinking of is the Roosevelt conception of freedom from want, need, and fear. These are things that America must have collective freedom from, and, as influential theorist Jurgen Habermas has observed, "Group needs, which cannot expect satisfaction from a self-regulating market, tend toward state regulation."

Over the last few years, freedom through regulation has been overshadowed by so-called "free market" ideas, which use the "unfettered" definition of freedom. In my opinion, they piggy back on the good will engendered by the term freedom as most people know it to advance an anarchical freedom from interference by government in their despoiling of the world. You would have thought we'd learned our lessons about how well the "free market" does at protecting freedoms during the gilded age, but apparently at least some of us are at least tempted to forget the drawbacks of "free market" policies.

Let me put out a couple of examples. Everyone is free to lobby the government and public for what they want, so powerful corporate interests lobby against unions, and telecommunications companies lobby against net neutrality. The regulations establishing the right to collective bargaining and the egalitarian structure of the internet have done quite a bit to enhance our freedom from need and of ideas. But naturally these two sets of regulations promoting freedom are being targeted by the anti-regulation crowd. To return to Habermas, "The political public sphere in the welfare state is characterized by a singular weakening of its critical functions. Whereas at one time publicness was intended to subject persons or things to the public use of reason and to make political decisions susceptible to revision before the tribunal of public opinion, today it has often enough already been enlisted in the aid of the secret policies of interest groups..."

Corporations are actually pretty highly regulated, which is why it's so interesting that they are fundamentally intended to fight against the common good in favor of a very narrow definition of their own interest. Under US regulations as they are currently constituted, it is the obligation of stockholders to remove any corporate officer who acts against profit-making by standing up for what would actually benefit society, say by promoting environmental concerns. Never mind that it's going to be bad for profits when we have complete environmental collapse.

I suggest that it's time to rethink many of the economic regulations we have in place, to get them more oriented towards producing freedom, in other words, to start building a new economic paradigm. What I am specifically interested in is freedom from crushing income inequality and cataclysmic environmental degradation. One piece to this puzzle could be rewriting the definition of the corporation to make it less selfish. Another piece could be to stop calculating economic progress based on outdated measures like GDP, which count environmental degradation as a costless part of profit-making, and to start factoring in the totality of our actions by accounting for the negative side effects, as U of MD professor Herman Daly has urged. Some people have started to resist the free market, globalization-happy wave, but it might be time for something bolder than rethinking trade pacts. Clearly there isn't a lot of momentum for this specific plan at this time, but it's clear that sustainability is likely to be the defining issue of the 21st century. Our group needs in this regard cannot expect their satisfaction from a self-regulating market.

Blue Dog's in Congress

2006-10-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

Good LAT piece about what may happen when the Dems take back congress. The piece ponders whether a Democratic victory in the House would be the liberal love fest everyone predicts, including republicans:

Or instead as a byproduct of running conservative Democratic candidates to win conservative house seat, we're actually in for a much more conservative congress when we take back the House and the Senate in November.

The article fits well within my fellow blogger's discussion of liberalness vs. winningness. Do we sacrifice our ideals to take back the country, or are we merely feeding the fire of a conservative take over by serving up Bush Light.

I think that the answer lies somewhere in between abandoning ourselves and abandoning the South. As much as I'd like to, we cannot just leave the conservative parts of America for dead and move on forward our liberal agenda. Clearly the Republican vision for America does not work. But just because that's true, doesn't mean we liberals are given the mandate to do whatever we want. We need to convince people. And that will take time, and compromises.

At this point in the debate, Democrats need to present solutions to the problems America faces before we can expect people to buy into our ideology and agenda. If that means sleeping with some blue dogs, so be it. Only when the Democrats can prove to America that we can be trusted can real change occur, and can we really start converting people's hearts and minds.

Anchors Aweigh!

2006-10-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

No, not the nautical kind, the psychological kind. And, shamefully enough, the title of this post is also a song reference. Moving along, as many students are doubtless aware, there has been a movement amongst the Democratic rank and file of late to force the party to stop pandering to "centrists" and refocus on the liberal agenda all us diehards believe in. The intellectual justification goes beyond "Me me me! Do what I want!" though. Two prominent strains to this justification are the anchor strain and the values strain.

To me, all the most interesting aspects of psychology and politics deal with how people make decisions without comprehensive information, and anchors offer a great perspective on it. The idea is that there are some areas where most people just don't have any information of their own - say deaths caused by the occupation of Iraq. They've heard some estimates in the range of several dozen thousand, maybe 100,000. Then Johns Hopkins goes and reveals that it's closer to 700,000, and it's so far out of the range people are used to thinking about (i.e., that they are already psychologically anchored to) that they don't believe it. As the WaPo link above indicates, this phenomenon does not have to be bad, though.

The anchor strain of logic for pulling Democrats to the left goes that ever since the party lost Congress in 1994, it has tried to move a little more to the right in order to peel off just enough Republican voters to retake it. In so doing, the public essentially gets two right-wing visions: one that's real and well articulated, and one that seems like it's pandering to get your vote. Faced with this situation, you go for the real one, but more importantly, your frame of reference is anchored to right-wing policy frames. Then when someone comes along with a good liberal policy, it seems so far out of the range you're used to considering that it can't even be seriously considered. This argument has been partially vindicated by recent scholarship showing that over the past thirty years or so, people have consistently mischaracterized the Democrats as leaning further left than they do, suggesting that people's definition of "left" may be something just past whatever Democrats actually offer.

The values strain builds on the work of my main man George Lakoff. Liberals and conservatives work off distinct moral systems, liberals' based on nurturant parent metaphors and conservatives' based on strict father metaphors. But the two sides have enough accessibility to each other that they can still be mutually conceptualized - as a liberal, it's not like I can't understand what a strict father is. So when conservatives talk conservative values, it activates my conservative cognitive chanels, and when liberals talk liberal values it activates conservatives' liberal cognitive chanels. But when the Democrats give up on liberal talk and go for "centrist" talk, the voter is left with only his or her conservative cognition activated and therefore votes conservative.

And, in fact, Republicans have taken advantage of this fact by basing their ruling philosophy on the strategy of limiting choices. They keep yapping about a liberal media bias in order to anchor us to the idea that what we thought was non-partisan is actually too liberal, trying to force us to see conservative and really conservative as the only acceptable options. They don't let Democrats bring any bills to the floor, because that way it looks like only Republicans have any ideas. Then they spend a few years intimidating Democrats out of offering any alternative to Bush on Iraq, helped out by Democrats (like I Voted for Kodos whipping boy Rahm Emanual) who try to avoid running campaigns on the Iraq issue. But fortunately most Democrats have by now realized that Iraq is totally screwed up and worth holding Republicans accountable on, so when Democrats didn't give in to the Rove line about the need to Stay the Course, it ended up looking really stupid.

To the extent anchoring has been employed recently as a campaign tactic, I would say it is working, since Democrats are capturing more and more centrists despite (because of?) their more leftist appeals. But outside of campaigns, the stakes couldn't be higher. It turns out that on torture, Bush's re-positioning of the worldwide anchor is having the completely predictable, and tragic, effect everyone else anticipated: foreign regimes around the world are justifying torture as OK because the US does it. Hopefully the anchor strategy will stick in domestic campaigns and change in the international human rights arena.

Yousir

2006-10-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

How much longer will Keith Olbermann be confined to MSNBC? I am ready to assert that his is the boldest, most admirable voice in television news and analysis. And it's not that he seems particularly liberal, it's that he has decided to call things as he sees them. We all know that reality has a liberal bias, but these days that has more to do with the fact that Republicans are being purposefully misleading (to put it charitably) than any inherent quality of the truth itself. No, Olbermann seems like a prime example of an enraged moderate, someone showing that you don't have to be a crazed communist hippie to think that eliminating a recent democratic innovation called habeas corpus (seems like 1215 was just yesterday) is a bad thing:

Since I like Olbermann's j'accuse tone, I think I am just going to start calling him Yousir. At any rate, former Salon editor Boehlert has come out with a recent book all about how cowed the American press has become, and it is supposedly very interesting. But you don't need to read the book to know what he's talking about - reading the newspaper with even a little skepticism over the past six years should have been enough to tip off just about anyone.

Yousir implies that there will always be an urgent threat that absolutely requires giving up some sort of freedom, just as demonstrates that there always has been. The powerful blog software we work with here at UC Dems can't predict the future, so we can't test whether there always will be an urgent threat. But my own investigation has turned up evidence that urgent threats existed at least as far back as 1947. Beware, the video below is long (I think a little over fifteen minutes), and it has some pacing and plot structure problems, but for an old news reel I found it to be pretty eye-opening.

And I am thrilled to be able to link to this incredibly good article by Corey Robin that touches on these very subjects. Just as it was hypocrital of J. Edgar Hoover to purge homosexuals from the State Department, it was also hypocritcal to claim you need to torture terror suspects when it has been shown that it is more useful to monitor them for longer before capturing them - and in any event torture doesn't work. This article sums it all up and puts the issue in perspective better than I can.

But Yousir makes a larger point, which does not actually break new ground: George W. Bush has been a criminally destructive force for our democracy and our country in the best case scenario. Things are definitely bad when Nixon's cronies start questioning your ethics and behavior. But you know how Bush has had a pretty bad year? It was well over a year ago that he had basically cemented his place in history as the WORST. PRESIDENT. EVER. This is not liberal hyperbole, this is academic consensus - much as some people like to whine about liberal bias in universities, they would do well to remember that academics study reality, so they can take up the liberal bias with that if they really don't like it. But despite the seeming obviousness of the President's shortcomings, not just to liberals but to anyone who values the very basis of democracy, Yousir is apparently the only member of the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) who is on the BS Detector beat. Even supposed Democrat George Stephanopolous, host of ABC's This Week, failed to call Bush on his obvious, blatant, easily correctable lie (see link in first paragraph) about never being for "staying the course" when as late as a month ago he was using those precise words. Yousir is out there all the time proving that you don't have to be a partisan to appreciate the truth, and I hope that in the near future he gets a more prominent forum than MSNBC can provide.

Obama '08?

2006-10-23T08:53:00.001-07:00

Local boy, and Oprah Presidential Favorite, Barak Obama kinda sorta threw his hat into the ring for the 2008 Presidential Race.

One word: awesome.

Lessor of a Lonely Heart

2006-10-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's not the best pun I've ever made. But it is a good introduction to a discussion of the crippling flaws with the right wing vision of an "ownership society". Said society combines the Republicans' predilection for disasterous policy ideas with their predilection for sink-or-swim isolationist obstinance. It might come as a shock, but it turns out that this idea favored by Bush is actually a little disingenuous.

In essence it promises that when people own more, they will get and give more. They will get a larger stake in the American dream, and they will give more back in community spirit and involvement. This concept of the effect of ownership goes back an awfully long time. But another thing we know about Republicans is that they are completely corrupt and only look out for the richest one percent or so in their economic policies. So surely they don't mean that we should be letting poor people own things and get involved in politics, right?

Thankfully, the answer is yes - they have no intention of letting poor people own things or participate more meaningfully. Just because Social Security privatization is off the table for now doesn't mean they haven't won some battles on behalf of their ideal society. Last year's "reform" of the bankruptcy system made it easier to get credit while making it harder to file for bankruptcy, thus nicely wrapping up a gift to credit companies that are now allowed to entice people with more free money and then make sure it is remunerated no matter what. Incidentally, Republicans are now refusing to stop predatory lending to troops on the outskirts of military bases.

Needless to say, the results of right wing victories in the Ownership Society battle haven't really worked out for much of America. Serious problems are still going ignored, even in areas where a good faith interpretation of Ownership Society would predict positive things. Obviously things aren't going well for the poor (otherwise they wouldn't be poor), but they're hardly looking up for the middle class either. So not only do Republicans want to make us lonelier by abolishing our means of collectively caring for each other (i.e. Social Security), they want to make it harder for us to own things by getting us up to our necks in debt. So think twice before you put any earnest money on that lonely heart.

Horse Race!

2006-10-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Thanks Phil for the links.

Seals Closing In, Bean Struggling to Hang On

2006-10-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

The latest polls from Constituent Dynamics have Dan Seals making ground in the IL-10 and Melissa Bean slipping in the IL-8.

No poll has yet to put Mark Kirk below 50%, so this is big news.

Check out this map http://www.majoritywatch.com/