Hell, yes!

Just watched Markos (Daily Kos) on Meet the Press with former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN), Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. Markos, who has been hard on the DLC as right-leaning "centrists," was critical again with Harold Ford sitting beside him. He and SusanG wrote this about the DLC in today's Washington Post:

Last week, at the YearlyKos convention . . . [t]he DLC was nowhere to be found -- unless you looked in Nashville, where its members continued to preach, in empty halls, about the "vital center." Even the Democratic presidential candidates have figured out where the heart of the party now lies: with the new, unashamedly progressive movement.

The DLC had two decades to make its case, to build an audience and community, to elect leaders the American people wanted. It failed.

Its members number in the hundreds, compared with the millions that the people-powered movement can claim, and they are reduced to attacking our movement from the studios of right-wing Fox News and pleading that in the next election they'll really prove that the mushy, indistinguishable "middle" is where the American people want to be.

The DLC believes the country is more conservative than it is, Markos contends. Ford cautioned this week against pushing the party too far left and ignoring the "vital center."

Every four years, in the heat of the nominating process, liberals and conservatives alike dream of a world in which swing voters don't exist. Some on the left would love to pretend that groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council, the party's leading centrist voice, aren't needed anymore.

More to the point, it's the DLC that finds itself out of the mainstream. The Beltway-centric group is too inclined towards a politics that goes along to get along, instead of standing on principle. Standing for something. Anything, besides behaving like a battered wife. "Centrist" accommodation of this administration brought us the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and last week's FISA bill. If that's all Democrats have got, we don't deserve to lead the country. That's why there is a progressive movement.

As I have written before, the electorate (from left to right) wants to vote for candidates who are unapologetic about what they stand for and govern like they mean it. They voted for the Mayberry Machiavellis, so skilled at posturing about principle, but whose "principled" leadership brought us Iraq, domestic surveillance, waterboarding, Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. attorney firings, voter caging and the Katrina debacle.

Voters got burned. They want and deserve the real deal.

NBC's David Gregory (sitting in for Tim Russert) kept pushing Markos about whether he and the netroots were pushing the Democratic party to the left. As in his WaPo piece, Markos made the case that the progressive grassroots/netroots movement isn't about him, or who's liberal or conservative -- progressives supported a slew of candidates last fall with some fairly conservative views. Unlike the more diffident DLC, the progressive movement is about reclaiming the Democratic wing of the Democratic party and making no "triangulating" bones about it.

I'm reminded of a tale by Decatur, Georgia's Roy Blount, Jr. As I heard him tell it, he was miffed to read a national story about Southerners eating kaolin (clay) for settling stomachs. (A traditional remedy, kaolin is a principle ingredient in Pepto-Bismol and Kaopectate.) An educated man hoping to overcome negative southern stereotypes, Blount found himself facing questions from uppity Yankees: "Do you eat dirt?" Blount said (as I recall),

Now there are only two ways to answer a question like that. One, you can deny you eat dirt. They won't believe you. They know you come from dirt eaters and will think you've gotten too good for your upbringing. Or else you say. "Hell, yes, I eat dirt! I understand you people up here eat cold soup and raw fish!"

Right back at you.

In spite of Markos' stinging critiques, DLC chair Harold Ford ended the MTP interview saying he expects to attend next year's YearlyKos convention. Harold, welcome to the "Hell, yes, I'm a Democrat" wing of the Democratic party.

Conformity and Despotism?

"In any game where the rules have been abandoned, those with the fewest scruples win." -- Daniel Brook, "The Trap"

Brook was talking specifically about the rise of lobbyist influence in Washington, but the sentiment applies to much of what's gone on in D.C. in the last decade. Andrew Sullivan has described the impulses driving American politics as "scruple-free." Corporate American has both enabled and followed its Washington misleaders, reaping economic windfalls, but those rewards have not trickled down to Average Joe.

"The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America" deals with the corporatization of America and the loss of freedom Americans face as a consequence. He profiles working people who feel they've sold their souls for economic security, stifling their urges to serve their communities in order to finance middle class homes and families once attainable on teachers' and firefighters' salaries.

Yet even while New Deal policies were building a powerful, more egalitarian American middle class, Barry Goldwater warned that:

Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Goldwater said that on the heels of the conformist, red-scare 1950s, and (ironically) on the cusp of a radically nonconformist decade. Goldwater conservatives advocated smaller government and free markets as the means for unleashing individual talent and avoiding the bogeyman of creeping socialism. But were their fears justified? The conservative policies begun under Ronald Reagan and accelerated under George W. Bush have left Americans with fewer choices, not more, Brook argues:

A free-for-all society does not set people free. Instead it sets in motion a moral race to the bottom reminiscent of the savage state of nature described by seventeenth-century British political theorist Thomas Hobbes in which simply surviving becomes the overarching goal of human life and all higher aspirations must be stifled. "No Arts; no Letters" was Hobbes's stark phrase. Yet any civilization worth living in depends on having some talented people who opt not to maximize their earnings potential and instead pursue less lucrative creative and service professions.

For all the promises of greater freedom, conservative economics has delivered wealth for a few and insecurity for many. Freedom, as Goldwater understood it, meant freedom to spend more of your money as you see fit. That you'd be free to determine how you spend your life was assumed. "The Trap" examines how, whether they want to or not, more Americans -- including her best and brightest -- are compelled into serving corporate interests at the expense of their own. Necessity, not choice, is keeping them out of lower-paying public service jobs, from teaching to the Peace Corps. Many who can still afford college graduate with loans nearing six figures -- conservatives having worked to eliminate state funding for college tuitions in recent decades. Saddled with debt, with pay scales stagnant, unions under assault, and private health care costs skyrocketing, Americans who hope to cling to a middle-class lifestyle are finding themselves limited, not emancipated.

And while conservatives talk a good game on supporting entrepreneurship, Brook says:

A 2005 survey showed that 28 percent of Americans have considered setting up their own businesses, compared to only 15 percent of Europeans. Yet the employment statistics reveal that Americans are far less likely to actually do it -- 14.7 percent [pg. 66] of the European workforce is self-employed, compared with only 7.3 percent of Americans.

National health care in EU countries explains that discrepancy, Brook suggests. In 2006 the Financial Times (Britain's Wall Street Journal) found less entrepreneurial inhibition in Europe:

With its low [real estate] costs and generous welfare net, Berlin is a entrepreneurs' heaven, where barriers to entry are low and failure rarely entails personal ruin. In the past two years, twenty-seven thousand companies have been created.

Brook cuts the quote too short, however. The Times continues: "... and they are overwhelmingly one-person businesses."

Conservative pro-big business policies and anti-government orthodoxy here made things even worse with the recent bankruptcy "reform" that makes individual entrepreneurship that much more risky. Brook laments:

America is thwarting the very ambition that has long defined its people.

And under conservative economic policies, are we coming closer to realizing Goldwater's feared conformity and despotism?

Your Values at Work

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer is back with lengthy piece on the CIA's "black sites" and procedures used in "extraordinary rendition."

... A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”

[. . .]

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

Torture is like sexual relations (as in Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"). Define torture in narrowly enough, as John Woo did for the Bush administration, and -- voila -- it disappears. A president can look into the cameras and say with a straight face, "We do not torture."

A bumper sticker puts it in a more commonsense way: You'd know it was torture if it happened to you.

Our heroes

This morning's New York Times editorial says it all:

It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights. Many of the 16 Democrats in the Senate and 41 in the House who voted for the bill said that they had acted in the name of national security, but the only security at play was their job security.

[ . . ]

Mr. Bush’s incessant fear-mongering — and the Democrats’ refusal to challenge him — has had one notable success. The only issue on which Americans say that they trust Republicans more than Democrats is terrorism. At least those Americans are afraid of terrorists. The Democrats who voted for this bill, and others like it over the last few years, show only fear of Republicans.

Our heroes.

Now excuse me while I go rend my garments.

We're worried about Iran supplying Iraqi insurgents?

Today's WaPo:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

How many thousand M16s did we leave behind in Saigon? Gotta look that up.

That's leave behind, not lose.

And the good news is?

[updated below]

Slate's Today's Papers provides the good news on House Democrats' caving to the Bush administration's demands for more latitude in evading FISA in conducting spying activities:

It was all about politics, says the NYT and WP, and the Democrats didn't want to spend their summer vacation "fending off charges from Mr. Bush and Republicans that they left Americans exposed to terror threats." The good news for the Dems is that the changes will expire in six months, giving them half a year to grow a spine.

Congress seems to have decided that letting the president play with matches has worked out so well that -- what the hell -- why not hand the most untrustworthy administration in American history a live grenade when it asks for one.

For all the Republicans' woes, with leadership like this and like this it stretches the immagination to think that the country will hand the Democratic party, or at least the congressional wing of the Democratic party, a presidency when it asks for one in 2008.

The people have wised up faster than their leaders.

Update

Enter Yearly Kos. It was great fun this week watching Bill O'Reilly inveigh against Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos ("this hate site") and the Democratic candidates who went to Chicago to speak to the Yearly Kos convention. As E.J. Dionne put it:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They're paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O'Reilly at their own game. No wonder O'Reilly is so annoyed.

But it's also no wonder that the DLC's own corporate-woman-tough-enough-to-be-president Sen. Hillary Clinton is no favorite of grassroots and online activists, who feel they've been ahead of the corporate wing of the Democratic party on Iraq and other policy matters. The House vote this weekend reinforces that mistrust.

Just as the candidates' appearance at Yearly Kos instead of the DLC convention reinforces the power of online activism in Democratic politics. Says Moulitsas,

“If the DLC had an e-mail list of 3 million people there’s no reason that the candidates would have skipped that convention . . . But they don’t. We have hundreds of thousands, millions, of committed activists that will work to have them elected.”

That's something no candidate can ignore. Having them work against you is even more reason to take pause.

Respect my authority!

The president demands Congress remain in session to pass an update to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) so his legal wiretapping activities will be legal again:

"So far the Democrats in Congress have not drafted a bill I can sign," Mr. Bush said at FBI headquarters, where he was meeting with counterterror and homeland security officials. "We've worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short."

The president said lawmakers cannot leave for their August recess this weekend as planned unless they "pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States."

Or the terrorists win, we know.

Bush's demand echoes his insistence that Congress pass the Military Commissions Act last September. (The act undermined habeas corpus, in case you missed that.) "The need for this legislation is urgent," Bush said last September. The Congress passed the president's urgently needed bill on September 29.

While he was out fundraising and campaigning, the action-figure president let the Military Commissions bill sit urgently on his desk for two and a half weeks before signing it on October 17.

How many times will Democrats in Congress let this guy play them?

It's legal. Trust us.

That's why they're pushing so hard for legislation that says so:

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

This is the point at which bloggers on the right scream for loose-lipped heads to roll, right?

The WaPo report continues:

The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency's enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration's legal judgment was at least partly wrong.

It's a dog bites man story at this point. When this administration starts getting things right it should be real headline news.

Progress in Iraq: Sunni bloc quits cabinet

BAGHDAD — Iraq's main Sunni Arab political bloc withdrew from the government Wednesday, blaming Shiite Muslim leaders for not addressing sectarian issues, as explosions in the streets killed at least 70 people around Baghdad.

That should improve chances of a favorable report in September from Gen. Patraeus. Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald speculated about what the report will tell us:

VandeHei's secret sources reveal that Petraeus is planning on reporting that the strategy he designed, advocated and implemented is, in fact, working. Who would have guessed? And the fact that Petraeus' happy report will be "tempered by continued political problems in Iraq" is supposed to show that Petraeus' report is balanced and candid, even though the actual formula -- the real purpose -- for this "tempered" report is clear:

"Significant military progress" = "the Surge is working."

"Continued political problems in Iraq" = "job not yet done; must stay longer."

Once again, it's "Bush-22." And the spinmeisters who cut their teeth advocating tax cuts as the response to whatever economic news we face -- good or bad -- are already laying the groundwork for spending more lives in Iraq. Steadfast leaders, ideologues or compulsive gamblers?

Don't walk away from that slot machine, boys. You just got her warmed up and she's about to pay off. Just keep shoving in dog tags.

I-35 bridge collapses into Mississippi River

CNN - At least three people were killed when an interstate bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapsed Wednesday evening, plunging cars and chunks of concrete into the Mississippi River below.

Remember the NYC steam main explosion last month? Rick Perlstein detects a pattern:

The ground opened up beneath a horse stall in Phoenix. An eighty year old sewer line collapsed in St. Cloud. In Tyler, Texas, the sinkhole was caused by crumbling drainage pipes. In San Antonio, "big chunks of rocks were falling off into into the abyss that used to be a street." In Vallejo, California, the pit split an underground gas line (no danger in that). In San Jose, a water main ruptured beneath a high school ("the water may appear dirty," officials assured residents, "but it is safe to drink"). In Sunnyvale, the burst pipe buckled 300 feet of road surface. In Greensboro the sinkhole swallowed a car ("Randy Delano Wood has seen a lot of accidents int he 20 years he has driven for a living. 'But the road falling out from under you is something you never expect,' Wood said.")

The good folks in Greensboro are fortunate enough to have a newspaper editorial writer who connects the dots: "It's like one of those Parade Magazine brain teasers. What do these have in common?"

Not enough money in people's pockets. Time for another tax cut.

And pronto. They'll be starting a betting line in Vegas.

Behind closed doors

Ethics bill passes overwhelmingly in the U.S. House. It's imperfect, but it's a start. The New York Times reports :

The new lobbying bill would, for the first time, require lawmakers to disclose small campaign contributions that are "bundled" into large packages by lobbyists. It would require lobbyists to detail their own campaign contributions, as well as payments to presidential libraries, inaugural committees and charities controlled by lawmakers. The proposal would also put new disclosure requirements on special spending measures for pet projects, known as "earmarks."

The Los Angeles Times concludes:

Democratic leaders, eager to complete work on the bill before breaking for their summer recess, decided to work out their differences behind closed doors and have each chamber pass identical versions.

Complaining about the way the Democrats chose to advance the bill after pledging to lead a more open and bipartisan Congress, Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas) said that he wasn't even able to get a copy of the bill until shortly before the vote.

"I got my first copy from a lobbyist," he said.

And they won't be packing up any time soon. It ain't over until the cowboy signs it.

Workin' in a data mine, goin' down down down

More information trickling out in the New York Times about the NSA domestic spying program that isn't “the program the president has confirmed,” that Alberto Gonzales' circumlocutions (no, that's too dignified a term) have danced around in sworn testimony.

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

[. . .]

A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.

Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials.

An agency spokesman declined to comment on the data mining issue but referred a reporter to a statement issued earlier that Mr. Gonzales had testified truthfully.

Lord I am so tired. How long can this go on?

A Better Way Forward

Sen. John Kerry's holding a contest, asking activists to submit radio ads targeting what the talking points call "Roadblock Republicans."

I think we need to run radio ads in the states of the Roadblock Republicans, making it crystal clear that they don’t deserve to be reelected because of their continued support for the Bush Doctrine of escalation without end. We need to turn up the heat even higher.

The problem is, that's the wrong way to do it. Kerry's call is for ads telling voters why they shouldn't vote for Republicans.

You can make the spot sad, or satirical, or hard-hitting. Whatever you want to do. You can make it a personal story from your life (maybe you know someone in Iraq or have a family member there or maybe you are one of the many veterans in this community), or you can make a factual case on why voters should consider someone else because of this issue, or anything else you’d like. (emphasis mine)

Okay, it's not quite Nixon on Laugh-In saying, "Sock it to me?" But if Kerry and crack DNC consultants think YouTube debates or gimmicks like this are the way to win in 2008, they're displaying again just how little they understand progressives and the mood of the country. They've got the basics of good idea here, but in Biblical terms, they're trying to put new wine into old wineskins. The progressive grassroots isn't about tearing down the Republicans. It's about building up the Democratic Party. Democrats need to be engaging voters and telling them why they should vote for Democrats.

Voters told Republicans last November who it is they no longer believe. What they want now is someone to believe in.

Consider Bush's Hard Corps, the unshakable something-percent. They'd rather believe lies and kowtow to scoundrels than abandon their soft-focused vision of Team Decider. Like Special Agent Fox Mulder, they want to believe. So do the rest of us. Democrats who want to win need to give voters something better to believe in than just "someone else."

Progressives need to look into themselves for the answer, not at the GOP.

What is it about Republican policies that strikes you as wrong? Contrast that with what you know is right. Ground it in American ideals and speak it simply and clearly. What is it that's been lost that you miss most? How do you feel about the atmosphere of mistrust being bred by the fear mongering and character assassination? How alone and uneasy are you feeling about your future?

Odds are, you're not alone at all. Voters will respond to hearing that Democrats understand their problems and anxieties and have ideas for addressing them. They have lost much. Give them hope. Give them something to believe in.

As if to drive home the point, Bob Shrum was on The Colbert Report as I typed this, blaming butterfly ballots, the Supreme Court and Diebold voting machines for the last six years of George W. Bush. Always fighting the last war.

Praise the Lord and pass the Coronas

The Bush administration threatens to veto the farm bill if Democrats insist on closing a tax loophole for tax-dodging campaign donors.

Farm-state Republicans had been lining up with Democrats to defend the bipartisan bill but changed course when notified that a proposed increase in nutrition programs would be funded partly by tightening the rules on U.S.-based foreign companies that avoid U.S. taxes by using offshore havens.

Republicans quickly picked up on a White House statement branding the funding plan as an unacceptable tax increase. Rep. Robert W. Good- latte (Va.), the ranking Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, said that all GOP lawmakers on the panel as well as GOP leaders would oppose the bill if the funding proposal stays in.

Democrats said the tax proposal would merely close a loophole that the Bush administration itself has decried in the past. "Who is surprised that the administration takes the side of CEOs who hold beachside board meetings at the expense of programs to feed the least fortunate here at home?" asked Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.), a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee.

Not me. You?

NC in the spotlight

MyDD and The Nation look at how the Democrats' Fifty-State Strategy is making headway in North Carolina.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie

More mortgage woes in the paper this morning.

The nation's largest mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, reports more borrowers - including those with good credit - falling behind in their payments, the New York Times says this morning.

Countrywide said its customers who are falling behind on payments appear to have lost jobs, had a divorce or fallen ill. Many are living in homes that are no longer worth what they were when the loan was made and cannot refinance because lenders have become stricter.

Moral? Don't lose a job, get divorced or get sick, ya here?

Foreclosures are up in California, according to the Los Angeles Times, reporting an 799% increase over his period last year. Foreclosures are moving beyond the predatory loans (read: sub-prime) common among low-income borrowers, and are beginning to hit the middle class:

"The economy will bend further under the weight of the mounting housing and mortgage problems, but it will not break," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

That's what passes for optimism these days. Others are more downbeat.

"All the artificial stimulus housing gave the economy is going to go away," said Rich Toscano, a financial advisor with Pacific Capital Associates in San Diego who runs the popular Piggington.com real estate website. "There will be individual pain for people who made the wrong decisions. We all may end up in a recession."

The good news, as seen by Toscano: "I don't envision a 'Grapes of Wrath' scenario where we all have to pile in the family car and look for harvesting work."

Whew, that makes me feel better.

Beyond the new "Dust Bowl"

This week at the Campaign for America's Future, Rick Perlstein concluded The Foreclosing of America, his four-part series on the crisis in foreclosures caused not just by the burst of the housing bubble, but by the explosion in NINJA - a "No Income, No Job, No Assets" - home loans.

Perlstein examines how lack of oversight and cronyism in the finance services industry led to working people taking out a glut of risky loans and, since the housing bubble burst, the consequent explosion in foreclosures.

But you can't believe you're one of them. And, having internalized Republican ideology (personal responsibility!), you presume it must be your own fault.

Like most things Republicans believe, that's wrong. You've been defrauded, and under the cover of law. The ownership society has, as the kids say, owned you. It's owned us. The crisis is systemic. In this wealthiest of countries, one presently graced by rates of economic growth Republicans are pleased to all "healthy," foreclosure rates in the first three months of 2007 were at their highest since 1979 - a year when the economy was at its un-healthiest since the Great Depression.

"This could well become Dust Bowl stuff," Perlstein worries, describing neighborhoods already filled with boarded-up and unsold homes. It's a crisis that goes well beyond those who have lost their homes - the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with it effects everyone.

And I mean everyone—and not just if a housing securities collapse tanks the financial system. What FDR so wisely grasped—that preserving the value of a family's home is a collective good—is radically more true 85 years later. Our schools are primarily funded by property taxes, which are levied based on the assessed value of homes. Is America prepared to reckon with the damage to school districts across the nation as home values collapse?

Collapsing home values leave every child behind—a vicious circle, hurting everyone.

The way forward for progressives, Perlstein believes, is a "new progressive politics of homeownership" that refocuses our government's resources in the way FDR did in declaring the "inequitable enforced liquidation at a time of general distress is a proper concern of the government." Because despite the happy talk surrounding the surging stock market, a generalized anxiety persists. While "the economy" is doing well, the people are worried.

It's addressing that anxiety - the uncertainty - that Jacob Hacker speaks of in "The Great Risk Shift" that will restore the country you and I grew up in.

What would a new progressive politics of homeownership do for them? One that deployed collective resources to keep people in their homes, keep neighborhood home values up, deployed a federal rainy day fun for municipalities to keep up school funding in the event of a property-tax drought, one that (if this is truly what Americans decided they wanted) could keep the homeownership rate at 69 percent or higher by offering a NINJA loan's inexpensive and accessible terms without NINJAs' lottery-like risks, which eliminated vulture-lenders with extreme prejudice and perhaps even put some of the worst offenders in jail (or, at least, not in charge of banking regulatory agencies)?

It would rescue millions of Americans from everyday anxiety in a way not seen since the passage of Medicare in 1965.

It's something people are hungry for. Democrats need to promote this as an alternative to the "every man for himself" ethos of the conservative project, as I have written before.

I'm the Decider! Oh, marvelous me!

"For I am the ruler of all that I see!" - Dr. Seuss

The unitary executive displays its privilege stacking prowess in this morning's Washington Post.

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

"Turtles! More turtles!"

Keep it complicated, stupid

Digby commented yesterday on the "Three Stooges Strategery" behind the Republicans' obstruction in Congress.

It is so rich listening to these Republicans decry the tyranny of the majority and stand up for the inalienable right to filibuster after their tiresome "up-or-down vote!" mantra of the last six years. Nobody ever accused them of being intellectually consistent. But this takes real chutzpah.

[. . .]

I don't think the Democrats have fully internalized what is going on yet. As I wrote the other day, we are dealing with a political party that is employing a strategy of anarchy in which incoherence is used to flummox the opposition and confuse the media. They are confident (and likely right to be so) that this will never catch up to them because the media has ADD and today's political atrocity is forgotten by the next news cycle. By running circles around the Dems with obnoxious disregard for the congress and gleefully flouting their own precedents and rhetoric, the president and the Republican minority are almost daring the Democrats to try and stop them. Which is the point. They are going for the big narrative, which is the old stand-by that the Democrats are too soft to run the country: "If they can't stop Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, how can we trust them to stop Osama bin Laden?"

They appear to have the media flummoxed too. Crooks and Liars notes how the media is getting the filibuster story backwards, focusing on Hary Reid's Iraq all-nighter, but neglecting the obstructions thrown up by Republicans.

The "strategery" Digby mentions reveals two faces of Republican strategy.

Face 1: When selling their own policies, the GOP strategy is "keep it simple, stupid." Lather, rinse, repeat simple: lower taxes, smaller government, etc. - easily digested by busy people without time to follow complex details. Repeated ad nauseum, like the "no underlying crime" mantra in the Scooter Libby case. (Now there's a valid argument based on legal principle. Never mind. The Bush base will parrot it without thinking if they're told to. That's the whole idea.)

Face 2: When it's time for some serious bamboozlement, Digby's observations suggest that the GOP approach is to go for a complete reversal: "keep it complicated, stupid." A strategy to keep the same busy public from understanding what in heaven's name is going down. If the public can't understand, the public won't blame the GOP for it. Better than a cloak of invisibility.

And so far, the Democratic leadership is still off balance. I'm still waiting for Democrats to get the GOP's full attention by giving them a good, swift kick in their executive privileges.

Playing Catch-Up

Finally got around to reading Matt Taibbi's "Spanking the Donkey." At dinner I read his 2004 commentary on the ineffectiveness of sixties-style street protests decades after their time had passed:

We are raising a group of people whose only idea about protest and opposition come from televised images of forty years ago, when large public demonstrations could shake the foundations of society. There has been no organized effort of any kind to recognize that we now live in a completely different era, operating according to a completely different political dynamic. What worked then not only does not work now, but it also doesn't even make any superficial sense now.

Let's just start with a simple, seemingly inconsequential facet of the protests: appearance. If you read the bulletins by United for Peace and Justice ahead of the protests, you knew that the marchers were encouraged to "show their creativity" and dress outlandishly. The marchers complied, turning Seventh Avenue into a lake of midriffs, billabong, bandannas, and "Buck Fush" T-shirts. There were facial studs and funny hair and man-sandals and papier-mâché masks and plenty of chicks in their skivvies all jousting to be the next young Heather Taylor inspiring the next Jimi Hendrix to write the next "Foxy Lady."

Such display after an age of conformity scared the hell out of people in the 60s. But not now. Taibbi's criticisms echo one of my pieces published in the Asheville Citizen-Times a year later - September 24, 2005 - on the weekend of a large protest in Washington. I think we're on the same page:

Friends I describe as all-natural, vegetarian chain smokers have attended protest rallies since college. It’s a kind of hobby. They are probably in Washington right now, marching against the war in Iraq. Sometimes they would invite me along to protest [your favorite liberal cause here], promising it would be fun.

Sure. I can think of lots of things more fun than protesting foreign wars and abuses of power. Or listening to impassioned speeches with rhetoric so threadbare that you can close your eyes and imagine yourself at any street rally since 1966.

This weekend major U.S. cities will see protests against the conflict in Iraq. The usual cast of characters will be massing in Washington: squads of pall bearers with mock coffins, Grim Reapers, pets in drag, and clowns for peace.

Friends, would you please consider doing something effective for a change? If you like playing dress-up, there's the Society for Creative Anachronism. For fun, rent a Jackie Chan film. We've watched you get arrested earning your merit badges in civil disobedience long enough to figure out that what's really arrested is your political development.

It's not that your issues aren't worthwhile. Most are. And sure, protesting can be cathartic and promote a sense of solidarity with your tribe. You go home feeling better about the issues. But wouldn’t you rather go home having done something with half a chance of resolving them? If you want to effect change, you have to influence political leaders and win the hearts and minds of American voters.

Face it, America is not swayed by mass die-ins dramatizing the loss of life caused by war. Or by coeds dressed as "corporate whores" to satirize conglomerates prostituting after Defense Department dollars. Or by indoctrinating children through activist puppet dramas with all the subtlety of temperance plays.

How do I know? Because you've been staging these sideshows for decades and the red states keep getting redder. These are time-tested wastes of your energies and talents, public curiosities, local color on the news at six. I'd rather go bowling.

Meanwhile, the other guys have been planning, organizing, raising money and building a movement. Talking points from their thinks tanks appear in the e-mail and fax machines of sympathetic radio and television pundits, and within hours their base is on message. You’re not even sure what your message is.

It’s past time to stop playing dress-up and start playing catch-up. So here’s some unsolicited advice.

Call forth the best in yourselves and you will call it forth in others.

Voters are not stupid. Think they are and you’re just spitting into the wind.

Listen to people outside your clan. Find out what they want. Try visiting flea markets and listening to coworkers. Read widely, including "The National Review and "The Weekly Standard" online. Avoid best-selling screeds.

Speak with people, not at them.

Think bigger. You get whipped because you are a loose coalition of narrow interests without a big picture. Center for American Progress founder, John Podesta, heard from one businessman, "All you guys do is show individual products. You never show a brand." Your opponents have spent thirty years and billions of dollars crafting and marketing their "brand."

Work better with others. You’ll need allies. The sun doesn't rise and set over your pet issue. If you take your ball and go home when your issue isn’t on top of the agenda, you still lose. Don’t let the little stuff get in the way of the big stuff. (James Carville puts it more colorfully.)

"Never just oppose, always propose," he suggests. Give people something positive to vote for: community, justice, fairness, corporate and personal responsibility, clean air and water, and tolerance. Don't cede these to interests who view every human interaction as a market transaction. And walk the walk on tolerance. How many times must we wince at antiwar students shouting down speakers with opposing views?

Don’t get angry; get involved. Volunteer for and donate to local campaigns. Donate to strategic planning groups. Nag your representatives.

Hurricane Katrina cast things in stark relief. If you expect to keep America from becoming even more of a haves and have-nots nation, playtime is over. Put away the costumes, roll up your sleeves and get down to work.

But Taibbi goes me one better. The powers that hold sway no longer fear outrageous sartorial displays, they're eager to supply them. They fear only one thing, Taibbi says: organization.

That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn't "creativity." It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scare no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.

Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless.

[. . .]

Protests can now be ignored because our media have learned how to dismiss them, because our police know how to contain them, and because our leaders know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded, the protestors simply go home and sit on their asses until the next protest or the next election.

Got to rush out and buy some black slacks. A protest with 300,000 liberals marching in slacks and white shirts? It would send Bill-O to the dressing room for fresh tighty-whities.