Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Sunday parking was always free in New York -- one of many outrageous subsidies to drivers, who constitute a minority of New Yorkers -- until 2002. In that year, a decree went forth from Mike Bloomberg to the effect that Sunday parking would henceforth cost as much as parking on Jehovah's six workdays. This is actually one of the very few constructive things Bloomie has done.

Enter the City Council, in defense of... religion. (I'll be back in just a sec, when this little paroxysm of laughter passes.)

--There, that's better. The Council, apprently concerned that our municipal government's hard-earned reputation for comprehensive idiocy might be marred by a single random act of good sense, passed a bill restoring the Sunday-parking SUV subsidy, and Bloomie vetoed it.

Well, there are no flies on Freddy Ferrer. He seen his opportunity, and he took it. No way could he disagree with Iron Mike on anything substantive. But Sunday parking, well, talk about a hot button.

So the most Christian knight Don Fernando saddled up Rocinante and rode forth against the Sunday parking rule, armed with the immortal phrase "pay to pray."

This is quite perfect, really. The Democrats would like to connect with "people of faith," or so we're told. Now there are lots of things that people of faith are supposed to be interested in -- feeding the hungry, for example, and setting the captive free. But those are a little problematic. Driving to church, though -- now there, if you like, is a twofer.

Well, meet the Wal-Mart 22: the House Democrats that voted against an amendment to bar any spending of money by the Department of Labor to implement the infamous deal the department made with Wal-Mart last February, giving the bastards advance notice of any child-labor inspections of Wal-Mart operations.

Need I say more?

See if any of your favorites are among the batch. I bet they are:

Marion Berry (AR)
Sanford Bishop (GA)
Dan Boren (OK)
G. K. Butterfield(NC)
James Clyburn (SC)
Bud Cramer (AL)
Henry Cuellar(TX)
Artur Davis (AL)
Diana DeGette (CO)
Harold Ford(TN)
Charles Gonzalez (TX)
Ron Kind (WI)
Jim Matheson(UT)
Dennis Moore (KS)
Mike Ross (AR)
John Salazar (CO)
Vic Snyder (AR)
John Tanner (TN)
Mike Thompson (CA)
Bennie Thompson (MS)
Ed Towns (NY)
Al Wynn (MD).

It's an interesting pattern, worthy of analysis, how right-wing Democrats consistently provide the "edge" for measures like this. How do they get away with it, time after time? And why do people who hate measures like this -- people who consider this sort of thing deeply evil -- stay in the same party with repeat-offender war criminals like Lieberman and Landrieu? This mystery lies at the heart of how the American political system works. It's like an ingenious little bit of engineering -- an escapement, maybe, or a planetary gear -- that solves the most fundamental design problem of some complex machine.

The problem, as I see it, is how to make sure that people who aren't fully on board with imperial hubris and plutocrat rule keep playing the political game, but never win anything substantive. You want 'em in the system, pushing that rock uphill, trying to get liberals into Congress and ex-liberals into the White House; but you want to ensure that they never reach the summit and change anything important.

This is the Democratic Party's raison d'etre. And shuttlecock aisle-crossers like Lieberman are the crucial little bit of engineering that keeps it working according to spec. Any time the less enthusiastic imperialists get numerous enough, or nervous enough, to give the emperor a thumbs-down, the shuttlecocks do their thing. It's like two fairly evenly matched basketball teams -- the Reds and the Blues, let's call 'em -- but a couple of guys on the Blue team will always shoot a basket or two for the Reds whenever the Red coach wants 'em to.

Of course, the great question is, why do the other Blues stay on the same team with these guys?

Well, it wouldn't happen in basketball.

attention
  straying   donkeys of the house

LISTEN UP CAREFULLY


cause im
only gonna  warn u once

     WANG THE MERCILESS AND HIS POSSE
                     ARE
                              IN TRACK DOWN MODE

    the hunt is on

any one of u pissants
  caught  aiding and abetting
  this himmlerian nonsense
                             called..... the patriot act

by whatever means  at all

by  votes or non votes

by log rolls or sweet rolls

be on guard
don't even touch that cops bible

or

i will  sniff u out

i will throw the klieg lights upon u

i will tack ur vile  squirrel's  hide

to the tallest cell tower in your district

is this clear enough???


if u  lift even the tinier of ur two  pinkies
to further the life of this   criminal  flash back

i will see to it u are destroyed

if u so much
as nod
in the direction
of these foul cookeries
these spurious
spectral menaces

i will find u out

and believe me
                u spongelike freaks
   before im done with u
         i will
make horns grow out of ur skull

  heed me

or
                          BE DAMNED

"The show's over, guys. "

That's John Murtha this week. Listen to these phrases out of an old bemedaled vet-hawk's mouth:

" I just spoke to the Democratic Caucus and told them my feelings about the Iraq war... not going as advertised... a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.... The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress ... our troops have done all they can ..."

But here's where he really strikes the heavy telling blows, opening with this line:

"Our military is suffering," He proceeds to peel out this knuckly Whitmanesque series of suffering, mutilation, butchery -- hard in-the-face stuff.

One can only glare at chicken hawks like Cheney with a mortal fury. after receiving such a salvo.

"I've been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed almost every week since the beginning of the war...." boom boom boom.

And then this for the Rummy-type neo-clam civilian pin pushers:

" Many say the Army's broken... Some of our troops are on their third deployment... Recruitment is down ... the military's lowered its standards.... They expect to take 20 percent Category 4, which they said they'd never take ... forced to do that, to try to meet a reduced quota."

His plan :

"Turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. .... before the Iraqi elections, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice. ... The United States will immediately redeploy -- immediately redeploy. No schedule which can be changed, nothing that's controlled by the Iraqis... an immediate redeployment of our American forces."

And this final pearl:

"All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free -- free from a United States occupation... It's time to bring the troops home."

Quite a moment he created, this aged puffy dough-boy Tip O'Neill figure standing up at the podium, looking bleary-eyed, looking like bathos and old bilge, weary at last with the hackery of it all after what, thirty years in Congress? -- this now nearly flightless bemedaled old VFW stager.

And yet, behold what emerged -- and with a dogged sidewalk majesty. Clio needed him, fellahs. Maybe for only this one moment, but there he was ... very, very powerful indeed.

What is most delightful is that this unlikely paladin has outflanked all the Great White Hopes in the "progressive" camp of the Democratic Party: the Barak Obamas, the Russel Feingolds.

Murtha's courage and common sense are still in short supply among his colleagues: only two other Democrats joined him, and his resolution was defeated 403-3.

Go get 'em, Dick! Don't let 'em off the hook! These creeps were right there with you going into this, and they should go down with you. Get 'em in a death grip and don't let 'em go until you're all in the Dumpster together.

Most of 'em seem to be MIA. -- Well, Paul Hackett has boldly demanded an apology from the admittedly scary Jean Schmidt for calling Murtha a coward. It would have been bolder, of course, if he'd been in the same room with her at the time, as Murtha was.

What would be really bold would be if they joined Murtha in his call for prompt withdrawal. But it seems that's asking a little too much for these ballsy dudes. Hackett has apparently mumbled something about how ill-advised "arbitrary deadlines" are.

Maybe all the earnest democratic-party Eloi who are hoping so much from Hackett et al. should give their guys an arbitrary deadline or two. Like, line up with Murtha by this time tomorrow or we're outta here.

It's been "referred to committee" -- and not one, but two committees: International Relations and Armed Services -- "for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker."

Imagine that -- Denny Hastert gets to play guardian to this resolution.

Nice play, Nancy.

• Becerra, Xavier [CA-31]
• Capuano, Michael E. [MA-8]
• Doyle, Michael F. [PA-14]
• Holt, Rush D. [NJ-12]
• Jackson-Lee, Sheila [TX-18]
• Lee, Barbara [CA-9]
• Lofgren, Zoe [CA-16]
• McGovern, James P. [MA-3]
• McNulty, Michael R. [NY-21]
• Moran, James P. [VA-8]
• Rangel, Charles B. [NY-15]
• Solis, Hilda L. [CA-32]
• Weiner, Anthony D. [NY-9]

"One would have to be more cynical than I to believe there are those in power in my party who do not want to see people like me have a chance, people who have not already made their deals with interest groups and powerful contributors, people who really do have new ideas and fresh approaches , and perhaps even uncorrupted leadership to offer.

I choose not to believe this. But if the Democratic Party puts the big states ahead of New Hampshire, I, and a lot of other people, may have to reconsider."

Go back to sleep, you old ham.

"As Republicans contemplate political ruin in next year's election, they can take solace in the fact that, if defeated, their replacements may not differ in any meaningful way on important issues of the day... That's the hope and dream of Democratic apparatchik Rahm Emmanuel and the corporate toadies he represents."

So obviously in '06 she runs again and wins, right?

Wrong. Cegalis has made the mistake of calling for troop withdrawal from Iraq. So Rahm wants a female Iraq veteran, Tammy Duckworth, who, as Andrew says, "Queried by a Chicago Sun Times columnist for her opinion on the war, replied, 'There's good and bad in everything'."

See, unlike Cegalis, Duckworth knows the party line -- and all you 'progressive' wishful thinkers out there, referring to the Democratic Party as 'us', need to know that. Rahm himself put it best: "At the right time we will have a position."

Andrew also reminds us Rahm was the NAFTA quarterback in '93, back in those dear Clinton years for which we're supposed to feel such nostalgia. After that, and before he replaced that old thief Dan Rostenkowski in the House, his patrons parked him in a "well-upholstered" job in a Chicago bank.

Part of this, of course, is just dead-cat bounce -- people who were otherwise inclined to be behind him got shook up by the events of the late summer and early fall, and now that things have settled down they're feeling like maybe they overrreacted a little.

But the fact that they got shook shows they're shakable, and the fact that they didn't stay shook can be credited, I think, to the Democratic party, which with a few rare and honorable exceptions, refused to take advantage of the opportunity they were offered. What we got from most of them was the usual lame, mumbled yes-butnik pabulum. Now the train may be leaving the station, with the Dems standing rather foolishly on the platform -- as has been their historic role, save for a few short intervals, since they were on the losing side in the Civil War.

I switched on the bedside lamp and took a thoughtful pull from the bottle of Jack Daniels I keep ready to hand for these Democrat dreams . As my mind slowly cleared, the thought occurred to me that if Nan really wanted to bat cleanup, she'd start with her own House party, and cancel the Rahm and Steny show.

Couldn't go back to sleep, so I started working on a L'Infame post appealing to my girl to do just that. Not quite awake yet, you see.

Of course as the mists cleared I realized the futility of any such appeal. But I decided to go ahead.

What sense can there be in making impossible demands like that?

Well, maybe the clear sound of the word "impossible" shot back at us in high dudgeon is itself enough reason. Maybe one too many stony dismissals can finally shatter a few stained glass illusions. "At long last is this all they are..... why in heaven's name am I putting up with this?"

So with such epiphanies in mind we will continue to call on the leaders of the party of lesser venality to do the right thing -- knowing all along we'll hear back the chorus of that old Perry Como favorite "It's just impossible ...."

In 2003, I debated Shmuley Botech, a NY Lubavicher Orthodox rabbi, on WWRL-AM radio's "Peter and Shmuely Show". (Peter Noel is a Black journalist.) A historian, I read anything by people I've encountered. Every so often I discover something that belongs out there in front of the world public.

Shmuley's "Madonna: Mother of Modern Monotheism?," in New York's 10/28/05 Jewish Week, is mostly about her. He explains that

"the fact that Judaism is becoming increasingly dependent on vulgar pop cultural icons to make it appeal to the masses is a sign of desperation rather than achievement, failure rather than success."

Then he made a confession:

"It is no secret that I spent two years in friendship with Michael Jackson. To be sure, we worked together to inspire parents to prioritize their children, and Michael even came with me to meet Ariel Sharon and stand up for Israel at a time when few others would. But my embarrassment comes not from Michael's subsequent arrest (and exoneration), but from my insecurity in believing that the Jewish faith needed a celebrity spokesman in order to garner mainstream credibility."

I'll leave you with this for starters.

Sharon:

Michael! You can't imagine what a pleasure it is for me to meet you. I've been your greatest fan for years.

Jackson:

Ariel, you took the words right out of my mouth!

As always, California shows the way: take an end run around the electoral con-game and build a state ballot proposition movement, or join one you agree with -- right where you live.

Think globally but act directly. Isn't that a better use of your money and time and energy than trying to make lemonade out of... Rahm Emanuel?

Will we fly the flag at half-mast? Certainly Congress will have to suspend its august deliberations so that a bipartisan pilgrimage can be made to watch the porky mass murderer get planted in a double-wide grave. Congress out of session, Sharon in drerd -- on balance, what's not to like?

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., were also among recipients of large contributions from tribes represented by Abramoff. Asked about Abramoff, Reid told the Las Vegas Sun, "I don't know him. I don't want to know him. I know nothing about it other than what I read in the newspaper. ... This is a Republican scandal."

Amusingly, the New York Times, which is a kind of large, slow-moving Kosnik at heart, also did its best to cover up the incestuous nakedness of the Democratic Noah. Here is the Times' graph of Abramoff's largesse, and here for comparison is the Center For Responsive Government's.

Among the larger Demo snouts at the Abramoff trough were my own dear Charlie Rangel ($36,000), the aforementioned Harry Reid ($30,000), Tom Daschle ($26,500) , and, delightfully, Steny Hoyer ($17,500). Barney Frank got $11,000, Nancy Pelosi was a comparatively small fry at $3,000.

Fourth on the list, however, was none other than the our friend Rahm Emanuel's Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, at $354,700. The Democratic National Committee received a comparative pittance of $65,720, putting it eighth on the list.

I hope they take very good care of Abramoff, and keep his singing voice in top condition. There'll be fun, fun, fun for all of us on this one.

Seems Senator Kennedy will participate in a "Living Wage Days" event on Monday, January 16 at the United First Parish Church Unitarian in scenic Quincy, Mass.

Ted thinks min wage workers need a raise. Last month, at a holiday news conference, thus Ted:

"In this the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works for a living should have to live in poverty."

" How can any of us in good conscience enjoy our own high standard of living, when it is built on the backs of underpaid workers?"

"There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American worker ... whether he is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer."

Do you hear any Democrats calling for that?

Oh by the way: this information comes courtesy of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, active both at the national level and in a number of states including Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, West Virginia and Arkansas. So if you're looking for a constructive outlet for your political energies, why not join 'em? It would feel a lot better than working to elect some Democrat In Camo, or whatever the buzzword-du-jour is.

And while you're up and at 'em, suggest indexing the Federal minimum, so we don't have to wait on the patronage of a Ted to start back along the road to where we were when Bobby was still alive.

"The key thing certainly politically is whether or not he is mentally incapacitated by these strokes. They will only know that when they bring him out of this induced coma and see what kind of reactions they see from him," CTV's Tom Kennedy reported from Jerusalem, where he is watching developments.

"Creating a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment."

Seems like it ought to be an easy demand to expect a pledge out of any Dem running for election, or re-election to the House this November: "I will vote for Conyers' bill" -- and If they're already in the House, demand that they co-sponsor it.

Now.

Or else.

orthrian politics
or
the two party system exposed

call me orthrus:

i'm a dog with two heads
one left and one right

seperate and
         unequal
but both attached
  to a single  body
    and reflecting the  conflicting moods
                             of  a single  soul

among other nice features
of  working thru  two heads

i obviously

have at all times
   two mugs to work with

two expressions to make
and
two mouths to speak

one mug can be  clean

while the other's dirty

one indignant while the other's  defiant

u get my gimmick

mix in the k street project

and
     well....

           my soul can dirempt over this

and run against itself
and drive itself from power

and and and .... 

''It all started when Gene McCarthy was willing to stand alone and turn the tide of history.''

This is not to detract anything from McCarthy, who has been overestimated but deserves a kind word all the same. I can't help speculating, though, about the precise psychic process going inside Clinton's brain. It's gotta be some kind of reflex -- no way this particular lie could do Clinton any good.

Is it that he just can't help overselling whatever he's selling? If it's a used car -- Einstein once owned it. If it's real estate -- there's oil under it. Does he feel obliged to keep gilding the lily, even after he's made the sale? Such personalities are not uncommon.

If you were a kind person -- which I am not -- and wanted to cut Clinton some slack -- as I do not -- then you might say he's just expressing the fundamental theorem of the liberal view of history -- a view in which history is made from the top down, by thinkers, writers, professors, experts, politicians, and other folk who stand out, in some way, from the common herd. According to this view, it was of course the Bobby Kennedys and the Gene McCarthys who ended the Vietnam War -- not us poor slobs burning our draft cards, or those fed-up grunts in-country fragging their gung-ho lieutenants.

"attention must be focused on changing the political composition of the House and Senate in the upcoming 2006 elections. If a Republican Congress is unwilling to investigate and take appropriate action against a Republican President, then a Democratic Congress should replace it."

Let's not take this bait again. Sure, it would be fun -- an admittedly delicious show, the very best theatre of cruelty. But after the tribunal of pointy-hatted scowling dems has clobbered and reclobbered an already beaten and totally lame-duck Bush admininstration -- what will be the body count?

Best shot -- Cheney dies of a heart attack on live television. Okay, that would make for great entertainment. But after that, what? It's a meaningless, mindless pleasure. They will never remove the man from Crawford himself -- where's the 2/3 in the Senate gonna come from?

But if folks fall for the Holtzman bait, and turn out for Dems in hopes of another Watergate soap opera -- it'll just be another palace coup, like the first one, with no political content at all. Guelphs walloping Ghibellines, or Crips taking some turf back from Bloods. We the people might get a Democratic majority in the house -- but it'll be the same old dirty Democratic party that went along with the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, the bankruptcy bill, and so on ad nauseam -- a majority that empowers the worst elements of present-day donkey-party bizwiz hawks. After the big Truth or Consequences slapstick show of the hearings, we'll be watching 'em hook up their time-honored, time-tested "working majority" with the Republican cross of Christ/Chamber of Commerce thundering hunnish horde.

Following up on his earlier comments about job exportation -- "get used to it," was his advice -- he has now made clear what the rules of admission are to the nuclear club. At a time when bipartisan hysteria about Iran getting the bomb dominates the newspapers, Max has indicated that it's just fine for India to have one:

His approving remarks echoes comments of US senator and former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry who last week backed the India-US nuclear deal, saying that it recognised India as a nuclear power.

Once one head's local operative gets into re-election trouble, then big Geryon's money flows in bountiful measure into the coffers of a seat contender from the other head.

Think this simple rule through and you'll see how well it works.

One result: if a seated head's agent is in a pickle (like us lefties could very easily put dear Jane in) -- once there's blood in the water, it's survival politics at its most naked. The incumbent's party, like a reef shark in a feeding frenzy, will devour its own creature, allowing it to be replaced by a flea from the hair of Orthrus' other head. (I know, mixed metaphor, but screw it, it's a goddam blog.)

Better to let the other team have a turn, than allow some upstarts to disrupt the machinery.

Of course, the weaker head can never be permitted to die out completely, because without a second head, the con is finished.

In this light, somebody ought to trace the tick-tock of the heads in the people's house since, say, the civil war.

Stay tuned.

How can you tell an Orthrian? Simple: donor flows. Not voting patterns. Orthrians need to keep some camouflage, so they often vote non-Orthrian. Here's how it works:

With a nice reliance on careful insider log rolling, Orthrians can protect each other's false branding. Say you've got a rep to uphold as a feminist or a champion of labor. Well, if you're in a pinch you get a pass and vote on the wrong side -- what you might call the people's rather than master Geryon's side. You can even do this a lot -- even most of the time, if you need a lot of camouflage. On corporate issues, you can defy the board roomers -- but only in a losing battle.

Go ahead, says Geryon, go out there for a little romp, Orthrus, good doggie. Vote freely! Vote your doggy conscience -- as long as you lose, lose and lose graciously. Stand tall in defeat. Stride forth with a rugged "stay the course" jutting chin. Walk up to the net and shake the victor's hand like a good sport -- and tell your disappointed constituents, "Next time."

Great, keep strokin' -- but as long as you've got the referendum bit between your teeth, as long as you're taking over the asylum, fellow inmates -- where it applies, why not add this to your state-wide movement:

Repeal the union-busting "right to work" laws now on the books in more then twenty of our soverign states.

I figure you all know who put 'em there and why.

Let's look all the way back to a richly deserved nadir of the Democratic Party's fortunes: the Republican house hegemony consolidated in the post-civil war "rump nation" election of 1866 -- the election that produced the 40th house of representatives. In it, Republicans of all stripes outnumbered Democrats ditto 175 to 49.

Now that was one hell of a nice house, stripped down, souped up, ravin' and rarin' and ready to fly. Does the name Thaddeus Stevens ring a bell?

Well, from early 1867 through three more cycles and 8 very full years of free-form romping, this multi-faceted Republicanism showed a America some of its highest and lowest moments in congressional history.

A taste of the high side : the gunpoint occupation of all Dixie, the local empowerment of the Southern freedmen.

And on the low side: No distribution of slavers' plantation land, and way too many big-time Yankee corporate shenanigans. Think railroad giveaways.

Our story starts to get interesting with the biggest corporate shenanigan of all, the vicious, huge, and out-of-nowhere crash of 1873. The first modern or Orthrian period really gets underway with the next electoral cycle after the crash. The people, knowing when they feel gratuitous pain, tossed out the Republicans in droves, including from the house. Jes'-folks up north "soured on Gilded Age business as usual," figuring that the congressional Republicans and their corporate friends were precisely what had produced the prior year's depression.

So we got a Democratic house for the 44th congress:

• Democratic Party 182 seats ( +94 )
• Republican Party 103 seats ( -96)

But surprise, the donkey proved no redeemer for northern jobsters or hocked northern yeoman farmsteads. In fact, with the north's industrial economy continuing down cripple-stagger lane for years afterwards -- even after the folks rose up and threw out the elephant men -- the northern electorate slowly but inevitably discovered Orthrian reality.

That good old donkey Tweedledee warn't no damn better than elephant Tweedledum -- except on race, of course, where the Democrats were rock-solid defenders of lynching and Jim Crow. So a step-by-step, cycle-by-cycle retrogression set in up north, though down in Dixie the noose-and-sheet party was able to defend its gains.

One consequence of the Republican debacle: Dixie was now considered "redeemable", meaning it was given back, step by step, to its "rightful" Democratic white owners.

But the net of these these two contrary regional trends nationally was that the Orthrian do-nothing sellout lost the donkey votes and seats faster than nightriding could add 'em down south.

The sad donkey declension: from 182 dem seats in '74, to 157 seats in '76, to 141 seats and a whiskery margin of nine in '78.

For any pair of eyes willing to see Orthrus was now in the saddle. The system -- outside the south, at least -- had two heads, but only one controlling mind and soul: the mind that watched the stock ticker and owned a lot of farm mortgages. So the donkey by sheer whithering-away of hope became again, in accordance with its deepest nature, the lesser head of the dog. They lost the last few seats necessary to give back house control where it rightly belonged in the election of 1880 with a further drop of 13 seats.

But lo, there was lightning flashing on the horizon: next installment, Populism, Coxey, Bryan and the origins of true Bidness Republican hegemony.

That's right -- blow up the whole damn corporate welfare rockery once and for all. Or in Ralph's own words:

Congress should decree that every federal agency shall terminate all below-market-rate sales, leasing or rental arrangements with corporate beneficiaries, including of real and intangible property; shall cease making any below-market-rate loans or issuing any below-market-rate loan guarantees to corporations; shall terminate all export assistance or marketing promotion for corporations; shall cease providing any below-market-rate insurance;..... shall eliminate all liability caps; and shall terminate any direct grant, below-market-value technology transfe or subsidy of any kind.

The bill should also amend the Internal Revenue Code to eliminate all corporate "tax expenditures" listed in the President's annual budget.

Some of what gets cancelled in such a bill might be good public policy. If so, Congress should reauthorize it. But there's too much accumulated contribution/lobbyist-driven institutionalized graft for a case-by-case review to eliminate what's in place.

Question one : are any of Rahm's rangers as yet worried at all about a base rebellion next fall?

Have they noticed the possibility that a revulsion from this do-nothing approach might hit their zombie candidates so hard at the polls, come November, as to spoil all hopes for a return to majority status?

Has it occurred to anybody that the present "planned power off" strategy -- make no blunders, it's all down hill anyway, so let's coast -- won't hack it over all the humps out there up ahead? Has it crossed anybody's mind that the voters might want to hear something more than tut-tutting and insincere protestations of shock about corruption and spying -- that they might want to hear about the big positive beef-with-thick-gravy issues, like Iraq, one-payer health, high-wage jobs?

We know by deduction what's up -- nothing. But have they all drunk the Rahm and Hillary Kool-Aid? Or is there discontent in the ranks, kept out of the public eye by the masters of the campaign-money spigot?

Go ahead, let 'em pick up all the marbles. Let the party of white loser salvation, the boys of the cross and the sword, triumph. Let's give Pat Robertson and his ilk control of the full spectrum of federal power levers. Let's see what the holy hell they got. Bring it on, as the Maxiumum Leader says.

Okay so a few of us pinkos stinkos and hoe-moe-sexuals get virtual burnings. We can take it. This isn't the 16th century. Come on, walk away from the polls. Give 'em a clear run. Let 'em have the damn keys to all the pointy-heads' offices. Let 'em drown the bastards, virtually of course -- its all pretty much a video game anyway. Who's to say anything real will even get its hair mussed?

And suppose it does -- Jane and Joe Churchgoer might figure out that what the ayatollahs are giving 'em isn't exactly what they signed up for. As the Men's Wearhouse says, an educated consumer is our best customer.

Timmy, this fine mild man bursting with southern honeysuckle and chapel-bell reason, a nice new "I pray a lot too" Democrat, has been elevated. He's received the golden tap. He's the donkey-designated counter-puncher to our august sleepwalker-in-chief, after the boy mummy reads his, or rather somebody else's, "state of the union" speech.

What a digital dust-up this has triggered. Take for just one the progoshere's Arianna Huffington. She's raging like Mrs Macbeth before the dirty deed: Why why why, oh you dunderish doltniks -- I'm paraphrasing a little here -- why this guy? Why another rock-candy DLC huckster? Is this the best pinup you jackasses have got? Another tootsie-roll Dixie-lite smile puppy, another far-from-the-beltway, potlatch-proofed, green-acres goobner from the sovereign state of bogosity. Thats what you vontzes are putting center stage? I'm told the shocked and galled Arianna has been flapping and grinding her jaws so hard over this, she may have to move forward her next chin lift.

The Washington Post says, in a more general context, and more decorous language, this latest snafuzzy is giving the party bigwigs

"an early glimpse of an intraparty rift.... fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups [denouncing] another flaccid Democratic response."

The Post item goes on to say it's not just the proglo-bloglodytes out there howling in the electronic wilderness, but the entire off-to-the-left base may be erupting because "party leaders [are] gutless sellouts."

Gotta hand it to the Post. Unlike the NY Times, they do sometimes fail to miss the story.

By the way, this Kaine strode to the Virginia governor's mansion over some mighty hallowed old oaken planks: "faith, values and fiscal discipline." What a "victory formula" that is, for the party of Jefferson and Jackson.

But Kaine is a man of principle, to hear him tell it. As the Post says,

The Virginia Democrat said he will not adjust his speech to placate the party's base."I'm not anybody's mouthpiece or shill or poster boy for that matter. I'm going to say what I think needs to be said ..."

What does this heart-of-oak man of principle think about the Iraq war? Well... er... ahh... then again....

Kaine is not alone in his contempt for the base. Again, the Post:

"The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left."

This Elmendorf, by the way, was a key player in that petrified waltz to nowhere put on by the Kerrymen back in '04. You'd think he'd be ashamed to show his face, but no, here is is bigfooting it around DC like he's some fearsome hard-nosed badass, telling the base to lie back and enjoy it -- again.

Chutzpah will take you quite a long way in life, even if you're a born fool.

Well, I don't as yet quite share his dark conclusions, nor his John Brown certainty. Damply feeble as it may seem, I'm not ready to dump the whole damn donkey into the boiling pot.

This said, obviously one question follows: Why are we two able to sing in harmony here at the Stop Me barbershop?

Simple. We share the same Stage One: blast the War Democrats and Wall Street Democrats out of the party, by refusing ever to vote for one of 'em, ever again. Stop fooling ourselves that by electing these quislings, we might avoid some additional pounding by the elephants.

If we succeed at the end of the day there will either be a party Gideonized, or a puddle pulverized. We shall see.

My heart is far from confident here. When Bryan at the 1912 convention read Wall Street out of the party -- "There is no room for Belmonts and Ryans here. This is not their home, nor will it ever be" -- he got a thunderous hour-long response. Unfortunately, I know today that even among those furtive potential allies we may have in surprising numbers, trapped inside the party, surely a call by us out here to banish the Wall Street bums, banish the stranglers' legion of Kerry, Dean, Rubin and Clark, would meet with something very much less than even sheepish bleatings.

But hey, give it time. What has happened once can happen again.

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed .

"When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said.

When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated.

The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction, as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.

Here are a few highlights from his turn on the new admonitory Post theme: "O stop good donkeys, stop before you run off another cliff again."

Tuesday, January 31, 2006:

The new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds congressional Democrats in the best position they've held in 14 years, besting President Bush and Republican lawmakers on Iraq, the economy, health care, immigration, ethics and more. All of which can mean only one thing: It is time for the Democrats to eat their own.

Elected Democrats and their liberal base are in one of their periodic splits....

"between pragmatism and symbolism."

I think this illutrates a great law of life -- you won't go too far wrong if you turn every tenet of conventional wisdom on its head. Oh, and another one too -- there's nobody more banal than a "humorist."

--MJS

To me our stage-one strategy for destroying the Democratic party as we know it is simple: don't drive the pussheads out of the party -- drive 'em out of office.

Do you all agree?

Over the last month or so, as this site has started gathering a readership, I've noticed the stalwarts commenting here so far seem -- to my mind correctly -- focused on exposing the fiends now runninng the donkey machine, more than belaboring the rights and wrongs of the several issues du jour.

Now the two are linked, obviously. It's through the issues du jour that the fiends expose themselves, as they take the pro-forma, dying-swan flop, come nut-cuttin' time.

But everybody here seems pretty clear that mobilizing folks on the issues is not the problem -- in fact, we have the multitudes already with us, at least potentially, on the issues.

Nope, the problem is what to do about the knaves that vamp about claiming they're ready to lead us to the promised land.

Hence our mission, should we choose to accept it, and oh, we do, we do -- lets put the wrecking ball to this prisoner/victim holding tank of an electoral party.

Am i right? Eh?

I think most of us agree the strength of this whole line of cell blocks is in its core of " pragmatic promise breakers" and aisle-crossers the ones with the cold eye that flat out claim they'll deliver precisely what they and their donors are determined not to deliver.

You can identify the species by its song: "Help us retake power in Washington... help us retake power for... the people." I think we are agreed this illusion, this mirage hot dog always kept a safe three inches from our mouth, this shameless medicine-show conjury, must be wiped from the minds of all decent Americans.

And since we know stages are real steps, first we need to hack away the worst elements. Concentrate the attackon the party's most obvious stinkers. Knock 'em out of office, and by doing so, prove on the field of battle that the donkeys, at least as presently led, not only never can regain power but even more, never deserve to regain power.

Their future is toast so long as they put their one by one votes into that same old same old Democratic shitbox.

Yes, mah fellow Amurricans -- your future is toast, toast, toast -- until we sweep the whole hee-hawing herd of 'em into the street. All the fat-necked DLC "New Democrat" donor-craving knaves. with their Madison Avenue blown hair and their callous fear pandering.

"No mas!" must be the watchword -- as long as they offer nothing better or deeper-drafted than the likes of a St Hillary or a Bidenbone.

Go ahead, give us 20 more years of elephant moonshine -- we'd rather take our poison straight up, neat, right out of the bottle -- than smile and smack our lips and pretend it's Madeira.

No more of those egomaniacal Macy's balloons, those loathsome power chair and spotlight freaks, these careers that are all about... their careers. Never again, till the spellbound underlings in their own rank and file rise up and chop off their corporate stooge heads.

Pluck the vultures from the party, feather by feather -- each and every Wall Street weak-kneer and humanitarian imperialist.

Negativity? You bet it is. Negativity is underrated. This is negativity at its tree-topplin' best -- each seat-warming, gold-eared jackass needs to be driven out of office, by a challenge that splits their deluded majority into two losing pieces.

This is not preperation for the launch of some neat new reform or class party. It's not so much a third party as a third rail, with enough current in it to kill off the secondary party of the era.

Kill off, did I say? And I was supposed to be the reasonable one here. Of course I meant to say, kill it off or cure it.

Shock some of 'em enough, and if they survive the experience maybe they'll morph in delightful ways, just to survive. It's been known to happen.

These times call for spoilers -- thick-skinned renegades and contrary rebels, eager to help trigger a destructive revolt of the multitude. This November, let's drive a dozen of these bums out -- and their little dogs too, out of the Rahm Emanuel puppy pound.

All the way back in the off-year election of 1874 this pattern got established -- the Democrats won the house by national landslide, barely a decade after the Civil War, in which of course they were the party of treason and the slavemaster's lash. But it was, not for the first time, the economy, stupid.

The Democrats characteristically frittered away their advantage over the next few cycles, till 1880 when the GOP regained total control of Washington.

But now right away comes a sudden massive  switchback: 1882.No economic contraction here -- that would have to wait till next cycle -- but  two factors unrelated to each other converged to produce this second big pro-donkey swing:

Number one -- and it's not applicable to this year's conjuncture, obviously -- the solid South gained 25 new seats. All went where they belonged, to the white-sheet party par excellence, and that alone would have almost allowed a retake of the House, so  narrowly lost in '80.

But in addition -- and here's a parallel -- the nation had just gone through the first leg of the fabled Garfield-Arthur administration, where the elephant boyz dutched up so badly that chunks of the usually solid East and Midwest bolted at their first opportunity.

So once again it was dumb luck -- throw-the-bums-out dumb luck -- just what Rahm and Chuckie and Hillary and Howie are hoping for this time.

Next installment: third party strangulations aren't enough when gold holds the donkey's reins. Yup, here cometh the mighty populist challenge and the curse of Cain's deadly embrace -- a sucker kill that  brought white supremacy right into the very heart of the national party and smashed popular hopes for a generation.

A possible parallel strikes one, eh? Maybe you're thinking we need something of that sort again -- some congressional committee, either house or senate, to take stock of the long war on  mad turbans, now by my count past its 30th birthday.

Now I understand the urge to dream here. As a for-instance, the Church investigations -- among other attempts to clip off some of the more hideously malformed branches of the imperial presidency-- led to the creation of the recently much traduced FISA court. Dear ole Frank Church's white hat outfit produced revelations that all bore fruit in legislation limiting executive power when the donks returned to the White House in' 77.

But as nice as this all seems, try not to project it onto today's conjuncture. The mirage of a Dem-controlled house forming a Church-like committee is nonsense -- pure unvarnishable nonsense, so long as the donks have a dominant core of  fearless resolutes still committed to fighting this terror war against the mad turbans until... well, until when? The next Millennium, maybe.

Church and his senate posse make a bad analogy. Those donkey guys had made a separate peace. For them the cold war was over well before they formed their committee.

In fact there is a far better possible parallel, also from '75, than Church and company: the infamous Rockefeller commission, a star chamber set up by Gerry Ford to whitewash a generation of domestic government crime.

Their letter is a purple-faced, spittle-spraying torrent of wild indignation and cries of mile-deep corruption in the UN secretariat. The goal apparently is to distract, discredit,  and disorganize this vote-decisive  group, just at the moment when US Ambassador and neocon ninja John "Headless Horseman" Bolton is trying to end-run the General  Assembly by rigging up a  "veto power" substitute for the assembly's contemplated new human rights commission.

Hmmmmmm.

Wonder where Tom the Impaler's impulse for this act of bipartisanship came from?

I've been taking great pleasure in the Lawrence Summers story. The porcine Clintonite dumper of toxic waste and immiserator of working people worldwide -- a guy who terrorized Washington and much of the world when he was working for Bill Clinton -- has met his match in the Arts and Sciences faculty at Harvard, who have squeezed him out of the President's chair there. It's enough to make one think more kindly of Harvard.

As if this weren't joy sufficient, who should come creaking, like a WWI tank, out of the wings to defend Summers but --

Yes! Alan Dershowitz! Thus Alan, as quoted at the Huffington Post:

The idea that a president should be fired because he believes in patriotism should shock every American.... Now listen to what Summers actually said about Israel and the Palestinians:

"But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities."

"Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."

Freed of the constraints of public office, Alan Greenspan has expanded from commenting on the economy to commenting on politics.

Speaking to a Wall Street gathering Wednesday the former Federal Reserve chairman decried the "polarization" of American politics and said the ground was ripe for a third party presidential candidate....

The two American parties now [are] controlled by their extreme wings, even though the voting public is far more centrist... the leadership of the parties [is] "bimodal" ... clustered at the extreme ideological ends, whereas the voting public [is] "monomodal" ... clustered near the middle, which creates "... an opening for a third-party candidate who appeals to the center."

"prompt the candidates of the other two parties to move back to the center."

Greeny fears -- or rather, credit where it's due, pretends to fear -- the electoral elites polarizing hoi polloi. Why?

Well, surely not because he thinks the hacks' "deepest values" are driving them to the next round of the eternal grappple, with ever-mounting righteous ferocity. He's been among 'em way too long to hold that view even in a nightmare. It must be because he sees these mindless thoroughly unprincipled vote seekers potentially getting so high on the vapors of discontent among he masses, that like a pair of sorcerer's apprentices, they provoke an unstoppable tempest. Heedless of the reality out there -- still playing pretend combat -- still studio wrestlers all; but when the streets are ready to really rage maybe they'll inadvertently stir the mobitude out there to an escape-velocity frenzy.

It's as if the Orthrian joint mind had lost integral control of itself, and the two heads had sealed themselves off from each other, and begun to gnaw each other's necks in earnest. Not a good idea, when, as I suspect Alan G correctly senses, the helots are restless and don't need any more wedge agitation but a calming goon-like regal smile -- a new Reagan head with a completed domestic and foreign agenda and all "partisanship" well behind him -- a Reagan settling down to an era of pure reignmanship -- a Cheshire Cat Reagan by stages disappearing, first the calming twinkle, then the slow head spin, and finally all that's left is just that benignly demented pursy smile.

Law professor Alan Dershowitz has argued Summers was done in by a core group of faculty angered over his support for the military, Israel, and for his comments on women in science - the last of which he apologized for repeatedly.

"I'm clearly in the left 20 percent of the country, nationally. I'm a Ted Kennedy liberal," Dershowitz said. "In the [Harvard] Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I'm in the 10 percent side of the conservatives."

Sen. Robert Byrd, the dean of the Senate and its resident constitutional expert, counts only a few regrets in his 48-year Senate career: filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act, voting to expand the Vietnam War, deregulating airlines.

Add to the list a new one from this century: supporting the anti-terror USA Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"The original Patriot Act is a case study in the perils of speed, herd instinct and lack of vigilance when it comes to legislating in times of crisis," the West Virginia Democrat said Monday on the eve of the Senate's final votes on its renewal. "The Congress was stampeded...."

This week ... he embarks on a re-election campaign for a record ninth term....

In the bathtub-size world these DLC donks grapple in taxes fall on earnings -- stuff you got by effort or something much like effort, say cleverness. But whatever -- to be a t&t party means you're the party that takes from wage earners to give to -- yup, you guessed it.

Imagine that... how 80's.

As for the progs -- they won't attack capital wealth anymore then the DLC. Recall two tax moves of Clinton -- raising rates on higher comp earnings, but as a reward to donors, a massive cut to profit "realizers".

I've always said that the only good thing abut the Times is its photo editors, and this seems the definitive proof. Look at his eyes! There's some Procopian secret history here, or I'm a lizard.

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and several other lawmakers support a bill that would keep states from adding warnings that go beyond federal rules....

State warnings alert consumers to mercury in fish, arsenic in bottled water, pesticides in vegetables and many other potential problems. The food industry wants consistent warnings across state lines.

Now normally I wouldn't expend more than a sour shrug on this story -- amazing how the sovereignty of the states is inviolable when it suits our masters, and can be swept away like a smoke ring when it doesn't. But what caught my eye about this was that the bill has a staggering 227 sponsors in the House.

Now who reading these words will be surprised to find that many of them are Democrats? The diamond on the dungheap, in fact, is none other than our favorite guy, Rahm Emanuel. I don't suppose there are many farmers in Rahm's Chicago district, but presumably Rahm is sending a message -- for the good of the Party.

And then what about Robert Andrews, from New Jersey's first district, incorporating Camden and the Jersey suburbs across the river from Philadelphia? Edolphus Towns, of New York? Steve Israel, another favorite of ours, also from New York? Or Connie Mack, from the southern Gulf coast of Florida? Only Pelosi is missing. Oh, and Steny Hoyer, amazingly.

Now of course the thing that really amuses me is this: plenty of people are up in arms about it -- understandably. You can forget about "acting locally" if Uncle can be depended on to lower the hammer when a locality gets out of line. Here's an example. Note the headline:

House Republicans Move to Kill State Food Safety Labels on Foods

"Our focus is on seeing the bill approved by the full House, by a bipartisan majority."

Mr. Emanuel, though, said he was not worried. "What divide?" he said.

"We agree on Social Security," he continued. "We also agree on the war..."

"... which is, not more of the same."

"Skelton has a position. Murtha has a position. Levin has a position," he said of Congressional Democrats who have raised questions about the war. "But all of them have one thing in common: Staying the course is a fool's errand. O.K.? I'm happy that our party has a lot of different ideas about how to solve a problem."

According to Ha'Aretz, here's the Dersh's latest stunt:

The American attorney Alan Dershowitz has volunteered to defend any Israeli officer who faces legal proceedings abroad, on condition that his actions were in keeping with Israeli government policy.

It is "a shame that officers have to hide like criminals and are afraid to visit democratic countries, only because they carried out the policies of their elected government," Dershowitz told Haaretz in a phone call from Brussels.

Dershowitz was refering to the recent threat by leftist organizations in the United Kingdom to seek the prosecution for war crimes of Gaza Brigade commander Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, a threat which led him to cancel his planned studies there....

Dershowitz said that he believed that lack of immunity for Israel Defense Forces officers from criminal proceedings is an "intolerable situation from the point of view of the international community."

I think Dershowitz is just the guy for the job, though. He defended OJ Simpson and Claus von Bulow, after all. -- Oh, and Larry Summers, recently and delightfully booted from the Presidential chair at Harvard.

I'm trying my best to not disparage the Democrats, since they're our only hope left.

I don't want to perpetuate the image of them as soft, feckless and spineless. I am worried to death that will turn off some voters and have them vote for Republicans who are driving this country over a cliff instead. But the Democrats sometimes make it impossible to not criticize them.

Senator Russ Feingold wants to introduce a resolution to censure the President for breaking the FISA statue.... But... the Democrats refuse to be outcowarded. In the face of overwhelming facts -- on their side for the love of God -- they will not back their fellow Senator in pressing forward with a censure....

Why oh why, would the opposition party not support this move to censure -- because they are worried about the effect it is going to have on centrist voters? Are you fucking nuts? George Bush is at 36%!!!!!!!! America can't stand him. They think he is incompetent, that he has blown Iraq and Katrina and Social Security and the budget and the economy. And you're worried that you are going to alienate centrist voters by coming out against him?

Maybe it's just because it's Feingold -- gotta keep him boxed up? Theories, anybody? I'm usually not short of theories, but this one finds me at a loss.

"Why?" you ask, understandably.

"Because if you don't, I'll beat the crap out of you. Actually, I'll beat the crap out of you anyway, but you still need to give me all your money."

You're not following the logic here. Understandably. "If you're going to beat me up anyway, why should I--" you begin.

"You don't understand. See that guy across the street?"

You look, and sure enough, there is a bigger, tougher-looking footpad loitering across the street, carrying a tire iron. "If you don't give me all your money," the lesser footpad continues, "that guy will come and beat you up instead, and he'll do a much better job than I will."

You're a sensible person. So you give the lesser footpad all your money. True to his word, he kicks you in the nuts and when you fall to the ground, he starts whaling on you with the baseball bat.

While this is ongoing, the greater footpad crosses the street, whups your footpad upside the head with the tire iron, and relieves him of your money. Then he starts beating up on you with the tire iron. He does seem to be doing a somewhat better job, though it's hard to tell, and either way you won't survive much more of it.

While the new assailant is busy with you, the former assailant picks himself up off the ground. As he limps away, you call after him, "Don't be discouraged! We'll gain control of the block next time!"

In New York, the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy has undertaken an incredibly impressive mission. Today, DMI issued a comprehensive scorecard grading the state legislature on issues impacting the state's middle class. It's not your standard scorecard, which is typically focused on an individual issue like the environment, labor, or gun control. Rather, it's a much more comprehensive look at the issues impacting New York's middle class and how legislators are responding to them....

The Speaker of the [New York] state Assembly is Sheldon Silver, a Democrat from the 64th district. Google him. If you look at the 'Sponsored Links' to the right side of the search results, you should notice that he's earned an A- according to the Drum Major Institute's scorecard.

I gues it's just another case of grade inflation.

... You just don't get it. YOU are surely making things worse, by condoning those who condone what Bush is doing to us. It's those at the very bottom of the political heap, those with negligible power, who you hold most culpable for the most harm....

You, too, whether you can own up to it or not, are making things worse in the hope that they will get better.

As for me personally, I took a good hard look at my life and the lives around of those around me in the decade preceding 2000, and realized that being washed along by the stream of political orthodoxy espoused by folks like you was, in fact, making my life worse. I decided that pushing out in an attempt to alter the stream's course was a worthwhile tactic. If my alteration amounts to no more than that created by a handful of pebbles, it's an alteration, nonetheless.

BTW, I suspect that's what lies at the core of the fanatical and obsessive hatred nurtured against Nader by so many Dems/Progs. Folks like me already had the pebbles, but it was Nader who goaded us into doing something with them. That's what the haters can't abide. Instead of a struggle to change course, we should have left those pebbles in our shoes, and spent eternity pretending that we didn't know what was cutting into our flesh;What was hurting us and weighing us down;What increased the pain and heaviness with each passing year, and where it came from.

It came from your team... It came from Clinton, Gore, Biden, Lieberman, and their myriad apologists and sycophants. It came from a machine run on greed, war, hate and fear. It came from the Democrats.

On the other hand -- who knew that Clinton "would have" bombed the crap out of Serbia, or made Janet Reno his Attorney General, or or or...

Well, maybe we "should have" known. But still. "Would have" or "would not have" seems a pretty feeble argument, all in all. If you look at what Clinton actually did do in office -- or even at what Gore and Kerry said they "would do" if they got into office -- then the subjunctive advantages of the Democrats seem a little, well... ghostly? Phantasmagorical?

Example: I've noticed the jingle bell of third party -- third party -- third party ringing hereabouts recently. Well, the record shows... as wonderful and innovative as third party movements have been, at least one other element inevitably plays an equally crucial role whenever American society stages one of its great transformations.

That other necessity is -- a big-time split inside at least one major party. So in accordance with this iron regularity of the record, I predict in the near future such a split will rive apart the dear old donkeydom. Hence our beaverish mission here at Stop Me to facilitate same.

Specifically, this will be a split between, well, us -- the cantankerous, ready-to-rumble hunk of its ever larger, fed-up-to-here hoi-p pleb basement -- and (on the other hand) who else but the venerable Orthrian core.

This set-to will either see us raggedy insurgents roughouse the party trogs out of control, a la Bryan and the '96 (that's 1896, of course) rout of Cleveland's golden girls, -- or, too wild and enraged to accept defeat if  thwarted, we will simply bolt for the free plains to our left -- like Jackson (Jese, that is) should have bolted in '84 (1984, that is).

Either way, obviously, for the party pros this is all very distressing. It  raises the spectre of bummed-out donors even more than voters. And, one must add, a split would be equally distressing for the progs left behind -- the "it's about winning" types who float about the kososphere -- self-styled "hard-headed" types trying to hide their nose rings, the dedicated realists, dedicated to a single-track strategy: "We'll try our damnedest to capture the party national flag, but if the hacks block us, then God love us, we'll stay loyal and work for the ticket."

By the way, this strategy succeeded in capturing that flag of great worth once already in my lifetime -- but it's an example not mentioned too often, though  a more pure Kos-like event I can't imagine. I mean, of course, the victorious McGovernite crusade of '72. An interesting precedent. You'll find not only vicious backstage post-capture "hackotage" starting with Trojan horse shock Eagleton, but (far more importantly) a return to control by the very same trogs even before a single year had passed.

The hack line then, as it would be now, against any Kos-type seizure -- "Go ahead, go ahead, you jackstraws, go ahead -- get your brains beat out.. we'll wait."

Ah, so much applies here to our prsent conjuncture; but for now I'll  sum  up with this gnomic aphorism -- it's not high-tea contests among loyalists, but sloppy, convulsive, split and splutter, head-on smash-up episodes that on occasion actually, and usually at long last, thrust our beloved America through to the other side of these long-persisting and hideously corrosive figure-eight loops -- like this one we've circled around for the past 30-odd years.

...One thing that attracts me to the left, especially the radical, socialist left, is that there is strong sense of internationalism. That is, there is a sense that we have a duty to fight for the well-being and rights of those outside our borders as well as inside, since their well-being is inextricably bound up with our own. I think Martin Luther King Jr. said something to the effect of "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Global poverty and inequality isn't just a moral outrage, it's a genuine threat to the lives of people everywhere as Mike Davis points out in an interview with Alan Maass. Having these massive ghettos stretching over vast expanses of the "Global South" is a recipe for disaster, for obvious reasons. Davis states, "1 billion people [are] living in slums in the cities of the South--unparalleled concentrations of poor people in unsanitary conditions, many of them with immune system disorders. It’s hard to imagine a more nightmarish disease scenario."

Aside from that, while so many people are living in penury in the Third World, it increases the global capitalist oligarchs' opportunities for exploitation and has a correlative effect of depressing the wages and deteriorating the working conditions of people all over the world. Michael Parenti wrote a provocative essay for CovertAction Quarterly back in 2002 which connects the fall of Communism with the global rollback of the rights and gains of workers everywhere that we saw throughout the 90s and which continues today unabated at breakneck speed.

However, global poverty and injustice is being exacerbated, if not institutionalized by institutions and agreements which Clinton openly and vociferously supported during his two terms; i.e. NAFTA, WTO, IMF, the World Bank, etc. I had absolutely no reason to believe that Kerry or Gore would have done it differently – (while we’re on the subject of poverty, Gore, as noted by Stephen Pimpare in his book The New Victorians,, was a key player in getting Clinton’s vicious welfare reform passed, which led to sharp increases in child poverty in the U.S. as Paul Street pointed out in a speech at the Work, Welfare and Families Annual Summit on Low-Income Families).

Global poverty and suffering did not decrease under Clinton (and we know it increased markedly in Iraq as he specifically intended) and we also know that they would not have decreased under a Gore or Kerry administration, given the irrefragable fact that they received (and still receive) millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the very industries and oligarchs who profit from this system (Ralph Nader pointed out during his debate with Howard Dean that Bush and Kerry's top 10 donors were more or less the same companies - primarily the banking and finance moguls).

Democrats and Republicans are indistinguishable in their desire to maintain the U.S.'s position as the world's economic core and to keep the countries of Africa, Asia and Central/South America in the periphery, functioning as extraction economies. (I still find Immanuel Wallerstein's World Systems Theory to be the best lens through which one can properly examine the capitalist system).

Aside: Consistent with Michael and JSP's Orthrian theory, one great example of how the Democrats actively promote their own demise, as well as the demise of informed citizenship, was demonstrated by John Kerry's active support for the further monopolization of the telecommunications industry ( his biggest donor during the 2004 campaign). Ironically, I still read tons of articles by liberals that decry the increasingly "right-wing" orientation of the media...

"....2005 Federal Election Commission reports indicate that five of the top 10 richest tax-exempt 527 political issue groups were liberal.... Of the top 10 political action committees, eight were liberal or affiliated with organized labor, with substantially more cash on hand than conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association or GOP-friendly corporate PACs such as the National Association of Realtors."

First there's the former Senator from North Carolina, John Edwards, He's after union bucks. Squaresville, eh? He's backing "a new effort to unionize hotel workers." Then there's Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, who is said to be "music to the ears of activists on the left." Filling the next quantum orbit: the dead center guy, Mark Warner, former Virginia governor, who "recently hired one of the leftist blogosphere's biggest names to run his Internet outreach campaign... Jerome Armstrong, founder of the popular leftist blog MyDD.com."

I'll skip some others that add little. But can you see a trend here? The Globe does:

" ...prospective Democratic presidential candidates, even those with centrist credentials [are] actively courting the Democratic Party's left wing."

Ah, now you're talkin'.

The message of one and all: ''It's very important for them to know we'll fight for their beliefs." That's Edwards talking -- the guy who ran "as a moderate who supported the Iraq war." He's now "busy" trying to build "a large base of support on the left."

The Globe warns there's a down side to all this fancy strippin' for progressive cash: "Democratic centrists who look at the voter math worry about candidates who court the left," for fear that their party will turn off too many [cue reverb] "swing voters... swing voters... swing voters." A nationwide survey by pollsters Penn, Schoen, and Berland, who work for (among others) Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, says that self-identified liberals are "only 16 percent of the population, compared with 36 percent who call themselves conservatives and 47 percent who say they are moderates."

Quite a dilemma, because that liberal 16% loom large in the primary-season gauntlet. So the classic Democratic office-seeker's strategy is to fleece the liberals during primary season, and fuck 'em afterwards.

There's a particularly big scurry for liberal fleece this year, since front-runner St Hillary created a void "in the hearts and minds of many liberal activists" by moving her band wagon to the war-fighting right. It's a void these other center Democrats "are rushing to fill" -- with hot air.

I wonder when the progs are going to get wise to this scam, and tell the hucksters "not this time, bub. I'm sick of this sub-Dickensian hustle farce." Don't expect it from His Holiness Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Pope of prog-bloggery, who has issued, on behalf of "the blogsphere", a plenary indulgence to War Democrats, ''As long as they're suitably contrite and admit they made a mistake."

Speaking of forgiven sinners and reanimated corpses, guess what -- the Kerry nation lives. Yes, despite a showing last time worthy of the Tin Man from Oz, Senator tree-trunk moves on: "One of Kerry's major assets is his mostly liberal, activist-donor list of three million names," to which his miracle anti-Alito flubberduster drive "added nearly 80,000 names."

Adding insult to injury, it ain't just candidate campaign war chests the pro hacks dream these generous and well-heeled progs will fill. There's also to be ten thousand think tanks: "The newly launched Democracy Alliance has drawn together 85 well-heeled donors willing to commit $1 million each over five years to fund left-of-center think tanks, media operations, and other institutions designed to influence the national debate" -- from which we can expect an efflorescence of genius that will make Periclean Athens and Medicean Florence look small-time.

The sagacious Globe ends by striking a realistic note: "the winner of the Democratic primary will be decided more on the power of the purse than the power of the left" -- which seamlessly leads into the punch line: "The hands-down winner on that score (cash raising ) even her critics concede, could well be Hillary Rodham Clinton."

The libs may have deeper pockets than anybody knew, but there are others deeper still, and Hillary has a long arm in every one of 'em. She don't need no stinkin' bloggers.

Need I say it -- this cry in the wilderness typifies the hideous donk hobble down there. According to Louise and company, the lobby problem is -- you guessed it -- a problem that mysteriously affects only Republicans. So the anti-lobby report, perversely, is a testament to the lobbies' power. K Street has spooked the Orthrian goo-goos like Louise into muted partisan barking.

If dear Louise had her druthers, one hopes she'd give off with a bipartisan blast -- "away, all lobby cravens, away." But nope, she stays in party harness.

I know she's got a heart and a mind. Louise, awake! Lay a lobby or two at old Rahm's door, why don't you? He may be one of your party, but he'll never hear a word you say otherwise.

The issue of intelligent design, in my opinion, is something for local school districts to decide individually. The pro-corporate, ultra-nationalist character of our de facto national curriculum is perhaps the biggest problem facing education today, since the facts of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. history and the U.S. political system are all ignored or white washed, leaving citizens wholly uninformed as well as ever willing to lay down their life for latest war for the cause of empire and the capitalist oligarchs' profits.

Lately, though, ideas like the one Tim articulates above have started to seem rather persuasive. I suspect one of the reasons that tom-fool notions like prayer in the schools, or the rights of the fetus, or "intelligent design" have started to seem important to people, is that the stances most of us would consider obviously reasonable on these issues have been imposed, not by the political process in which people can at least believe they have a role to play, but by the courts, which all sensible people despise and recognize for the undemocratic, daddy-knows-best institutions they are.

The fetus fanciers and the garden-of-Edeners have the built-in advantage of casting themselves as the defenders of bottom-up democracy, as against the top-down, authoritarian, legalistic paradigm favored by the people who are so strangely referred to as "liberals". If the obscurantists were fighting their neighbors instead of the ancestral enemy in Washington, they wouldn't have such an easy time of it.

But enlightened folks prefer to write a check to the ACLU and pray for a Democrat in the White House, rather than mixing it up with their uncouth, Bible-thumping neighbors in the local political process.

I had some thoughts about this, not as well-developed as I'd like, in Chapter 14 of my book-in-progress, Stop Me Before I Vote Again.

Some House prog needs to get this going. Bernie Sanders, I nominate you -- you Swiss army knife among fakers, you dullest doink in a very dull bunch.

1. Doesn't this tacitly acknowledge what Left critics of the Democrats have been saying for years -- namely that there is no substantial difference, on any genuinely political question, between the parties? If the Democrats are reduced to running on "competence", isn't that because there's no matter of substance that differentiates them from the Republicans?

2. Why on earth should the idea of competence appeal to us? Do we want a more competently run Iraq war, a better organized police state, faster job exportation, and enhanced transfer of wealth to the very,very rich from everybody else?

In fact, given this bipartisan consensus to screw us every way they can, incompetence is the best we can hope for.

Either way, the New Labour example shows, I think, why it's vital to deprive the Democrats of their triumph this year -- and even more in '08. It's possible that the Rahm Emanuels, the Schumers, the Hillary Clintons, don't yet have complete and unquestioned control of the party -- a long shot, but possible. But if their dreams come true this fall, or in '08, Rahm and Chuck will be vindicated.

Blair's leverage, such as it is, derives from the fact that he brought the party back into power after the long drought of the Thatcher years. Give Rahm and Chuck a similar lever, and we'll be as badly off as the Brits are.

Can anyone doubt that the Brits are worse off now, with Blair in charge of Labour, than they were with Thatcher in Downing Street? Note that this is not the same as to say that Labour is "as bad as" the Tories, or that the Tories "would have done" exactly the same things.

The reason why the Brits are worse off now is simply that Labour is a frankly, avowedly, reactionary party -- its version of the Rahm and Chuck Show is in the driver's seat. Reaction owns both parties, lock, stock, and barrel, and neither party bothers to hide the fact -- indeed, they glory in it. Tories and Laborites have nothing to quarrel about except some stupid scandal now and again, and the result is an Iron Wall of bipartisan consensus, a political lockdown, a drastic shrinkage of political space.

Labour has been pretty pathetic for a long time -- like the Democrats. Like the Democrats, it was a poorly-organized, internally-divided, timorous and compromised operation. But the Keystone Kops are much preferable to a well-trained, highly disciplined, buff and nautilized Delta Force of right-wing throat-cutters.

If Rahm & co. succeed in November, and especially if they succeed two years from now, we'll see the complete triumph of Blairization within the Democratic Party. This will be great for the party and really, really bad for everybody else in the world.

A skeptic might ask why it matters -- the Democratic Party is such a useless, compromised, right-wing outfit that really, who cares whether it's openly Blairized or only Blairized behind the scenes? What difference does it make?

I think the answer runs along these lines: it's a good idea to deprive the enemy of a victory whenever you can, even if the tactical objective is not terribly important. Open, frank Blairization would be a victory for the really really bad people -- the Rahms and the Chucks and the people who pull their strings -- people who really couldn't care less about parties, but care a great deal about their wealth and power. If we can somehow deprive them of that victory, well , we should.

A victory for Rahm and Chuck and the other Blairizers in Novermber would be a net gain for what I can only call the forces of evil. The Blair strategy is, in essence, to say frankly that from henceforth there will be no opposition party; there will only be a competitor party, an alternative gang of right-wing thugs to call in whenever the other gang seems to be underperforming.

Whether the Democratic Party is already fully Blairized or not is an interesting question, but academic. The response of any decent person has to be the same, either way: A Blairized party must at all costs be rejected, and a party whose success would Blairize it must not succeed.

Maybe we abstainers, spoilers, and all-round rumpus-mongers, even if you can't quite make up your mind to join us, at least make for a preferable state of affairs. If there were no bolters at all -- then a stream of sedulous cows plodding to the slaughter strikes me as very stable indeed. Better somebody breaks ranks here -- instead of just the endless moos of anguish, eh? It might suggest to our cowpunching herders "Hey guys, a stampede is, errrr, maybe possible round here."

To take this in another direction -- policy forks like this one remind me of A-bomb building back in the heroic Forties. Seems even at the outset there were two clearly alternate pathways to a workable nuke -- the uranium route and the plutonium route. So it's 1942, and which do we allies choose? Remember, this is America in its highest gear, maybe its finest hour -- so what else, we built... both.

I say let's take a tip from the Manhattan project. When it comes to building a real explosive prog party, you conscientious elite players keep up your boring from within the donk's belly, while we'll split and attack the neo-liberal market dogs and imperial humanists from outside.

My bomb metaphor nicely shifts to a phase two: fusion -- the big one -- the bomb of unlimited power. That's buildable when the two now wedged-way-apart wings of the American mass public can be slammed back together by a progressive party of the people.

Bob and Hillary can form a new party -- a middle party -- an SUV-loathing, soccer-mom, 200k per annum, gated professional party. Like Germany's liberal democrats or the UK's similar setup -- that bow-tied rumpskin of the party of Gladstone.

And then us progs and plebs can march off to our own new rally pole, under the banner of Andy Jackson and Bryan and ML King.

Bob and Hill get "Peanuts" Carter and the lesser of the two Clintons, of course; and history being generous, they can try to hold on to a share of the Roosevelt legacy. As for JFK, they can have him all, and welcome, and no doubt they will want to hang an effigy of ole Marse Tom Jefferson over the door and pretend it's an ancestral portrait. They can also have their present well focus-grouped party slogan, "together we can do better" -- much good may it do them.

We'll scare up a new slogan of our own. My suggestion, just to get the dialogue rolling:

"Baby, the kickin' jackass is back."

But hey, it's a bipartisan stampede we got here, as both leaderships try to put as much distance as possible between their parties and this once and future El Supremo wedge issue.

Why future?

We haven't seen the end of this by a long shot. The Latino "invasion" of the sun belt will play well to nativists, once the now fleeing bad boys stop running like jackrabbits, regroup and pound away at this Kosovo-type issue.

But that's not today, and my guess is, not even next November. For now, let's all delight in this rout. Let the electorate savor the taste of a Republican house majority that would wish nothing more out of life then to round up all the 12 million undocumented immigrants and throw 'em into concentration camps -- and there they are, these creeps, in blind flight. Yup, the vicious clowns have totally lost their nerve.

But so have 36 pairs of long ears too -- donks who supported the bill full force. And they're long ears of many colors too -- as in the likes of would-be senator Harold Ford, man of La Raza John Salazar, and dirty old Ted Strickland.

But there's even more and better donkey manure here: today's Washington Post tells us:

... it was the deft maneuvering of Democrats that preserved the bill's most infamous provision, declaring illegal immigrants felons... [that provision] has helped turn the bill into a political albatross for... Republicans.

We're victims of our own success.

I posted a comment on the Guardian's site about Gary Younge's Jesse Jackson article, in which I pointed out the disconnect between the politics of the rank-and-file and those of the office holders. Here was one of the responses to that comment:

I'll avoid the political science jargon, but look up the median voter theorem -- it explains why, in a first-past-the-post system, two-party politics is most likely and the two parties are likely to adopt effectively similar platforms. It has nothing to do with corruption, just with the need to get 50% +1 of the total number of votes cast. It doesn't matter *how much* your supporters actually like your position, just that more of them like your position than that of your opponent. Representatives are often "unrepresentative" of their constitutents; American blacks tend to be social conservatives, uncomfortable with homosexuality and abortion, yet black Congressmen are overwhelmingly in favour of gay and reproductive rights.

However the midget with the big cigar in me sees all this algebraic goo gaw about N electoral parties in the Mth method of election as being very looking-glass indeed.

To me, the formalities change no long-run outcomes.

Now long runs get to be long with some fellahs -- using the proper yardstick, the difference between FDR and Hitler are formalities -- but I think it helps me to extract this from the midnight gray of all long run cows:

The formalities do in large part answer this key question -- at what remove from the citizenry is the choice to and of compromise made? Our first-past-poster leads to the ultimate dirty-hands collaboration -- the citizen him/her self is forced by party funnels into preference constraints, i.e. the people vote directly for one or other of these squalid mass checkerboard compromise hack candidates like Hubert Humphrey or Howard Baker pick one please ...now !!!

Yes we end with only two stable parties, because each needs victory right at ground level in 435 districts, so they look toward the center of the district i.e. the middle heap, the unstructured inarticulate morass in quest of 50 plus 1.

But here's my point -- the alternative formalisms still seem to me to put the compromise somewhere, not nowhere. I don't believe the state makes more compromise then it can afford -- err, till it massively breaks down, which thank the gods of social motion always eventually happens.

Take the other extreme -- America's comic side kick "other" and living anachronism Israel, which seems ultimately to rock to the same beat we do, even with a system of proportional representation as far away from ours as possible.

Well ....so much for substance over form, at least at the level of the ultimate state.

Side light on today : speaking of the level of state -- there's our House and Senate. The Madisonian analysis behind our House of Reps never leaves my mind for long -- but it right now reflects one thing clearly: the logrolling, logjam, inherent characteristics of pop elected rep set ups are no way to run an empire. Their motions and actions, left unguided from above, reflect interests in conflict, and the study of their mechanics has a long and noble history. However since the emergence of the security state smart folks have attempted to explain its fifth wheel status.

I like C.W. Mills' take best -- the rep system essentially has been a side show since Pearl Harbor. It's too slow and too befuddled to run an empire. It was always too slow to run a war -- but empire means perpetual war status. In a nut shell, checks and balances can't get us to the launch pad on time for the first strike. It's always been clear, at certain key points where forces counter pose so well the body ceases to produce anything beyond make believe and flatulence, even the most watery of compromises is impossible. The sterling case: slavery. But the security state we've lived under since Pearl Harbor has set Uncle Sam a new task -- run a global empire -- a task that can't wait on Senator Claghorn's glass slippers. So the last 65 years or so, a fast-moving unelected, self-perpetuating self-appointed elite has run the main events above the heads of Congress. Thats what it takes to keep the imperium humming.

The election today that really counts happens but once in four years and is for one office only -- and the race for that office, I contend, is a post-party affair if we admit it to ourselves. The whys of that I'll leave for a later post.

And its also a tale of two caucuses -- one black and spineless, and the other mislabeled human, when it's only self-righteous.

In the episode of the run over foot reality commits a direct plagiarism from Tale of Two Cities. Watch Lantos morph from Pecksniffian fraud to noble vampire of the ancient regime -- amazing stuff.

I may be hallucinating this. I did, after all, just finish a Uwe Boll film festival and there&apss sure to be at least some brain damage. But if I'm reading this right...

According to the merry number-crunching gnomes at Angus Reid Global Scan, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson is the best-rated person currently serving in the sausage factory we call the U.S. Senate. This begs the question: Best-rated by who? Gently retarded clams?

Nelson, a perennial basement dweller on the Patrick Henry Club's Easy Senate Score Chart, is only slightly less conservative than Connecticut&apss own crypto-conservative Senator Joe Lieberman. If Zell Miller weren't still (somehow) alive, Ben Miller would likely be his reincarnation. Do we really need any further proof that (ding dong) the Donkey's Dead? I sure don't think so.

. The Invisible Hand of Alan Smithee

First, the voters are poorly informed, as so many have noted. But second -- and here we part company with the consensus -- citizens cannot perform sensible retrospective judgments at election time. They reward and punish for events no administration can control.

Moreover, while they know how they feel at the moment, they lose all track of how they have felt over the course of the administration's term in office. Like medical patients recalling colonoscopies, their assessments of past pain and pleasure are significantly biased by "duration neglect" (Kahneman 2000; Redelmeier, Katz, and Kahneman 2003).

Those wacky Canuck pollsters have emerged once again from their Dilbert covered cubicles with this report on buyers remorse. To wit:

Kerry Would Defeat Bush in New U.S. Election

April 22, 2006

(Angus Reid Global Scan) - The outcome of the 2004 United States presidential election would be different if a new ballot took place this year, according to a poll by Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times. 47 per cent of respondents would vote for Democrat John Kerry, while 40 per cent would support Republican George W. Bush....

Polling Data

Regardless of how you may have voted in the presidential election in November 2004, knowing what you know today, would you vote for George W. Bush or John Kerry if the presidential election was being held today?

• John Kerry (D) 47%
• George W. Bush (R) 40%
• Someone else 6%
• Would not vote 4%
• Don't know 3%

What to make of this? Given the accuracy of the average poll, probably not much. But I have to wonder, however briefly, at the motives behind commissioning such a passive-aggressive poll. Was it an "I told ya so!" sort of thing or did they just need an item for "News of the Weird"? Perhaps only their Personal Life Coaches know for sure.

The Invisible Hand of Alan Smithee

This is from the latest installment of William Blum's indispensable Anti-Empire Report (www.killinghope.org):

Charles Taylor and that fake opposition party known as the Democrats

Some things I have to repeat, because the news makes them relevant once again, and because the media ignores them once again. Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, has been captured and is being held for trial in a UN-sponsored war-crimes court in neighboring Sierra Leone. In 2003 Taylor was indicted by this court for "bearing the greatest responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law" during Sierra Leone's civil war. The United States, along with the rest of the world, condemns Taylor, applauds his capture, and calls for his punishment. What we're not reminded of is this:

      In 1998, President Clinton sent Rev. Jesse Jackson as his special envoy to Liberia and Sierra Leone, the latter being in the midst of one of the great horrors of the 20th century -- You may remember the army of mostly young boys, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who went around raping and chopping off people's arms and legs. African and world opinion was enraged against the RUF, which was committed to protecting the diamond mines they controlled. Taylor was an indispensable ally and supporter of the RUF and Jackson was an old friend of his. Jesse was not sent to the region to try to curtail the RUF's atrocities, nor to hound Taylor about his widespread human rights violations, but instead, in June 1999, Jackson and other American officials drafted entire sections of an accord that made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, Sierra Leone's vice president, and gave him official control over the diamond mines, the country's major source of wealth.(14)

      And what was the Clinton administration's interest in all this? It's been speculated that the answer lies with certain individuals with ties to the diamond industry and to Clinton, while he was president or while governor of Arkansas; for example, Maurice Tempelsman, generous contributor to the Democratic Party and escort of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright around this time, whose Antwerp, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv diamond marts arranged for Sierra Leone diamond sales to Tiffany and Cartier.(15)

(14) Ryan Lizza, "Where angels fear to tread", New Republic, July 24, 2000

(15) The Washington Post, August 2, 1997, p.A1 and February 6, 1998, p.B1 re Tempelsman. Other speculation in various places has concerned diamond investors Jean Raymond Boulle and Robert Friedland, each with alleged ties to Clinton.

Nothing signals we're about to hit a cyclonic upturn in partisan nastiness -- least of all that wet fuse leading to bomb Iran.

Can the pattern of bilge flow keep this up? I mean without resort to an utterly fabricated exciting new attraction? Or are we fated to drift from here till the next cataract? And speaking of next cataracts -- for God's sake November remains 6 months away.

Can we possibly drift that long?

Since my book, Hostile Takeover, is a look at how both parties engage in corruption, people have asked me a lot lately for good examples of exactly who is leading the Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party on behalf of Big Money interests. While there are certainly a lot of examples, today it seems the best example comes in the form of Mike McCurry. The former Clinton press secretary, who appears throughout the media billed as a party strategist, is now using his skills to try to destroy the Internet on behalf of the big telecom companies.

Congressman Joe Barton of Texas has introduced a thing called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act (COPE) -- don't you love these titles? Barton chairs the Telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee (of the Energy and Commerce Committee -- God, what a labyrinth of pettifoggery). His co-sponsor is, naturally, a Democrat, Bobby Rush, from Illinois. The technical details are tedious, but savetheinternet.com sums it up pretty well:

"Network neutrality" ... ensures that the public can view the smallest blog just as easily as the largest corporate Web site by preventing Internet companies like AT&T from rigging the playing field for only the highest-paying sites.

But Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality....

Net neutrality ensures that all users can access the content or run the applications and devices of their choice. With net neutrality, the network's only job is to move data — not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service....

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

For some no doubt celestially reasonable reason, this bill doesn't have a number, and the usual Congressional sites aren't recording votes. But as near as I can make out, of the twelve Democrats on the subcommittee who have voted one way or the other on this shining example of government giveaway to corporations, five have been supporting it:

• Albert Wynn (MD)
• Charles Gonzalez (TX)
• Edolphus Towns (NY)
• Bobby Rush (IL)
• Bart Stupak (MI)

Business interests and their Republican allies... generally support leniency for undocumented immigrants, who provide an abundant supply of cheap labor.

The GOP's populists and law-and-order factions, however, oppose any plan that allows more immigrants to stay in the country, deriding any such plan as amnesty for law-breakers.

Among Democrats, some liberals and civil rights groups have tended to support the immigrants....

but some in organized labor -- a traditional Democratic ally -- contend that adding a guest worker program to the national labor pool would help drive down wages for working-class Americans.

Then again, maybe I understate the Republican options -- watch for this Red Sea splitter from Bush -- "Boys, let's detain the sorry few, not deport the toiling many." Set up the camps and treat a few nasty brown fall guys very bestially -- Circus Maximus for the paleface viewership of Fox News -- but keep the inflow coming, so the meat plants hum like Virgil's hives.

Hey, it works for cocaine, doesn't it?

Second Thoughts in Congress on Oil Tax Breaks

WASHINGTON, April 26 - As anxiety spread in Congress on Wednesday over soaring oil prices, lawmakers in both parties said they were ready to take a tough look at oil and gas incentives they passed as recently as eight months ago.

Yup -- both houses, both parties are going into takeback mode: and why not? Now that its clearly too late for anything beyond too little, suddenly the lot of 'em are wild for barber-chairing the big-energy boys. And to think -- all this war-dancing just a session or two after a series of shameless special love-nest tax cuts and sugar-daddy type public fork-overs. Bipartisan fork-overs, of course.

The survey also asked respondents how they would vote if "a third party candidate ran in 2008 and promised to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority." ... With that option, support fell sharply for both major parties. The Democrats still come out on top with support from 31% of Americans. The third party candidate moved into a virtual tie at 30% while the GOP fell to 21%.

Part of the problem is that the folks have been simmering all their lives long in our toxic cultural broth of American self-congratulation and macho chest-thumping. They really haven't heard any opposing ideas that have any vigor -- just the "play nice" nanny-ism of the liberals. And even if that weren't so, there's no place in the world where immigration, in particular, doesn't make people anxious and bring out a mean streak in the citizenry.

You can think of all these attitudes and impulses swirling around in the public mind as if they were chemicals in solution; which ones precipitate out, or better, crystallize, can change depending on what you do with the solution. In particular, the answer you get depends crucially on the question you ask. The poll that Alan cites asked about a border wall, not about raising the minimum wage or protecting domestic jobs. Given a choice between a border wall and something that they believed would directly affect their economic well-being, would people be quite so carried away by chauvinism?

Making intelligent choices takes practice, and you're apt to make a few unintelligent ones before you get the hang of it. The American public hasn't had many opportunities to make real choices -- that's the whole point of this empty charade we call an electoral system, to deprive people of meaningful choice. Even more to the point, the public hasn't been confronted with the necessity to make a real choice, which is even more important. The public hasn't been given a clear-cut "if you want X, you can't have Y," where X and Y are both important to them. Both the Orthrian parties promise the public a cake that can be had and eaten at the same time. So people aren't accustomed to making, on the political plane, the kind of difficult adult decisions that they make all the time in daily life. This is why, on the political plane, Americans often seem very infantile and even stupid, whereas in their work and home life they are as grown-up and smart as any other nation (except when they're driving a car, but that's a special case of induced psychosis).

Personally, I wouldn't at all mind seeing a rabid bar-the-doors party taking some wind out of the Republicans' sails, as long as there was an equally rabid protect-your-job, protect-your-wages party doing the same to the Democrats. People could then decide -- would then have to decide -- what they really wanted. It could get a little hair-raising -- people are quite capable of making bad, foolish choices -- but all in all, I do think that given a real choice between their real interests on the one hand, and the Theater of Cruelty on the other, people would more often than not eschew the theater, though not without regret for its pulse-pounding excitements.

And you guys said Clinton was a bad guy!!!

No but really...the major corporations didn't even really fight it. What gives?

Sugary drinks banned from sale in schools

Associated Press in New York
Thursday May 4, 2006

Guardian
Tens of millions of children will no longer be able to buy non-diet soft drinks in US state schools under an agreement announced yesterday between major distributors and anti-obesity campaigners.

The distributors, working with a joint initiative of the William J Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association, also have agreed to sell only water, juice and low-fat milks to primary and middle schools, said Jay Carson, a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton.

Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the American Beverage Association have signed up for the deal.

President Clinton admired Galbraith enough that shortly before he left office, he wrote with the idea that the two of them would write a book on the future of American government. Galbraith weighed the idea for a while but finally declined. He liked Clinton, he said, but Clinton hadn't learned a basic truth about politics. "As I told Harry Truman," Galbraith said, "what this country doesn't need is two Republican parties. One is more than enough."

It seems to me that a sharp decrease in split-ticket voting would indicate an increase in the polarization of the electorate itself, rather than any effect produced by gerrymandering.

Good grief. Did I just write that?

The old Dixie split ticket voting (CD donk / Repub prez) is down from a high in the 60-70's of 40% to a mere 13% today -- practically random error range.

There are no more isolationists, no more protectionists, no more populists; Socialists and Commies are found only in vestigial sectarian pockets, like Gaelic speakers in Ireland. Nobody has a good word to say for unions, and indeed the union movement itself appears to be teetering at the edge of the grave. Republicans and Democrats beat the drum in rock-solid synchrony for air strikes on Iran, and vie only in the fulsomeness and fatuity of their panegyrics to Israel. The "left" cultists of Daily Kos and the "right" machiavels of the DLC disagree only about whether the Kosniks should be allowed into the party treehouse.

So what do people mean when they wag their heads gravely and deplore "polarization"? What are they referring to? I suspect it's just the shrillness of the rhetoric deployed about the sub-microscopic, Brownian differences in vocabulary and emphasis, the angstrom-scale positionings and repositionings of elected officialdom and the parties.

An academic friend of mine once observed that the intensity of struggle in a university English department was always in inverse proportion to the importance of the issue. The less consequential the stakes of victory or defeat, the more vicious and sanguinary the battle. A question of access to the Xerox machine would evoke more rancor and malice than the average fleet action.

Where politics is not really about anything except the organizational rivalry of two opportunist factions, perhaps it's necessary to keep cranking up the volume just in order to keep people's interest.

In this light, I'd think the decline of split-ticket voting has more to do with the unanimity of the parties than with anything you could really call "polarization". In the heyday of the split ticket, a significant chunk of the electorate seem to have picked a President on one set of criteria and an Congresscritter on a different set. The organizational and ideological differentiation of the parties, slight as it was even then by world standards, offered at least some opportunity for this kind of a-la-carte dining.

Nowadays, though, the parties are just "brands". They're both imperialist, globalist, statist, elitist, and corporatist -- just as Coke and Pepsi are both mostly sugar and carbonated water. With the parties, as with soft drinks, brand loyalty certainly exists, but it's based on third-order differences -- a touch of the soft pedal on gay marriage, say, or a tepid, timorous hint that it might be nice if women could decide whether to have babies or not.

Having nothing else on which to base their decisions, people make their brand choices based on these trace flavors, and having made them, there's no reason to vary the diet. Nobody drinks Coke by preference in the morning and Pepsi in the afternoon.

A: Sil Reyes, now a Democratic representative from El Paso.

Read this fine treatment of the recent jail-'em boom. Here's an excerpt:

"The origins of the modern immigrant detention complex can be traced to the mid-1990s, when Silvestre Reyes, then-head of the El Paso Border Patrol Sector (now a Democratic congressman from El Paso), initiated "Operation Blockade," a strategy of concentrating enforcement agents to snag immigrants once they cross the border. This drove up the number of apprehensions and set in motion a militarization of the southwestern border. The budget for border enforcement went from $1.2 billion in 1995 to $4.7 billion in 2006, and the number of Border Patrol agents doubled. In addition, sweeping immigration reform laws passed in 1996 by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton [emphasis mine -- JSP] allowed the deportation of any noncitizen convicted of such crimes as drunk driving, hot-check writing, and shoplifting, even if the crime occurred before the law went into effect. The 1996 legislation also required mandatory detention of any illegal immigrant deemed a "criminal alien," a noncitizen convicted or even suspected of illegal activity.

• Bill Nelson (Fla.)
• Ben Nelson (Neb.)
• Mark Pryor (Ark.)

It was a beautiful thing, this vote, as carefully and decorously conducted as a solemn sarabande of olden days: Orthrus dines with Orthrus. Three Republicans symmetrically crossed the aisle to vote "no", and one Republican and one Democrat didn't vote (the Democrat was Jay Rockefeller, the Republican Arlen Specter). After all these stately evolutions, bows, handoffs and docey-dos, the bill squeaked by at the final cadence, 54-44.

This from the Washpost:

From-tank "Third Way" reports the repubs aren't nearly as tough as Clinton was on undocs at the Rio Grande.

There it is folks, in facts and figures -- a point I tried making just a couple days ago.

The Jesse Jackson thing....

His brief moment say from '84 to '88: what if anything can we learn from reviewing this tale?

I've braced myself so fire away.

According to today's Washpost, this professional people's rep has made a 6 million dollar killing off his committee position.

No wonder the donks want to take the House back this fall. As Kos says, winning really is everything.

But it reminded me of an older grudge against the Ivy League mindset itself. Maybe what we need around here is a defenestration of the whole lot of them mandarin types. Let's explode those hives of intellectual monopoly. JAS has shown us the way. "With broadband communications being so nifty and all," he observes,

"... administrators from other countries... could do the jobs much more efficiently and, it must be said, at some savings to the trustees."

The economics department is set up for the best of all possible experiments.... Let the students determine the free market value of the teaching.

People who have broken our laws should not and will not be rewarded with amnesty. But people who work hard and play by the rules should have a chance to earn their way to legal status if they pay a fine, learn English, pay back taxes and go to the back of the line.

But look about us -- a unitary presidency with a lap congress and a star-chamber judiciary -- exactly how much more do we need? Aren't these not just the signs but the very substance of what ole marse Jeff most feared? Aren't we, ah... there, gang? The rest is formalities ...right ??

So it's only natural we have the Cato Institute stepping forward to warn us, with a recent publication: Power Surge : the Consitutional Record of George W Bush.

Could a finer source be found to decry the Empire than this outfit -- possibly the most wonderfully named of all the wildly grave and grandiose buffooneries we collect under the label "Washington think tank."

You've got to read this piece -- all I can think of that might have improved it would have been to release it simultaneously in English and Latin.

But still the shade of Hunter S Thompson visits from time to time, in the dark dead of the night.

"What's with all the whispering in there, JS?" my glamorous girlfriend calls from the bedroom.

"Aaahh, what else, it's Thompson's ghost again, still trying to pull me back in."

"Don't listen to him," she warns, drowsily. But it's too late. HST is slipping me the inside signal. "Rove's got a new plan.... No, not that ham-fingered, helmeted 6k chorus binge down at the border -- that's a diversion -- like Patton's army at Dover. No, this is the big dice tumblin' here... watch for Rove's roll, maybe as soon as next Friday..."

I peg an inkwell at him, and he vanishes. I'm not gonna get re-hooked. Cheney or no Cheney, I'm a big-picture guy now, scanning the distant horizon for thunderheads.

Brushing my teeth, there in the shaving mirror -- Hunter's degenerate pale grape-like head -- "JS, you chickenshit -- lash it up, pal. Theres no point in getting into politics again unless you plan on lashing things around."

Before I could even say "screw you, Thompson" -- zip, gonzo be gonzo.

Lashing things up.... my eye. But still -- as Rowan pointed out in a comment a couple days ago -- it's gettin' on for leg-breakin' time.

Scary. Who knows what forces might be unleashed. As J Alva says -- them christafearians might be ready to kill and die for the right to be right.

It's all getting pretty far out. The ground rumbles. Heavings, vast earth-cracking ruptures are being provoked.

Do you recall the story where Thor has the ocean, I think, by a hook, and while trying to "land him" is actually in the process of flipping this flat planet of his over like a pancake?

When the real deal starts to rumble, anything can happen. The Great War in Europe led to what -- a massive series of class convulsions -- Italy, Germany, Spain. So naturally there's the Hannah Arendt side of the brain saying, put a lid on the whole damn thing fast. And hey, that's always an option, especially for those not lodged under a bridge.

Credo according to the Washpost:

Religious liberals say their faith compels them to emphasize such issues as poverty, affordable health care and global warming. Disillusionment with the war in Iraq and opposition to Bush administration policies on secret prisons and torture have also fueled the movement.

But hey, seriously now -- making sounds and burning incense worthy of the late Rev William Sloan Coffin -- is that really gonna get Jethro and Jolene to shift from their right ass cheek to their left?

So what's really up here? The gist of it seems to be  simple -- it's cosmetic, not cosmic. The  big time donks  have noticed their hee-haw secular nakedness, and now want a faith leaf to cover their liberal loins, when they walk in the eyes of their people.

That wild and crazy guy St Paul would have been ashamed of them -- doesn't he say somewhere that charity trumps faith, or words to that effect? And I gather that when he says "charity" he's not talking about the International Red Cross, though I'll leave it to The Rev. Smith to gloss the Greek for us.

That said, however, the subject and the director seem a perfect match: a topic upon which, it seems, nothing but windy cliches can be deployed, and a director who offers ruminations like these:

Sometimes history is shaped by the collective memory of people, men and women, and here was a great chance to work with these people.... And they gave us what I hope one day will be seen as the truth. For the truth must exist in some way to confront power and extremism.... [The film is] the true story of two New York Port Authority policemen who are trapped in the rubble, their wives and their children and the incredible and almost improbable rescue efforts to save them.

Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves; and it will go near to be thought so shortly.

A none-too-fond farewell to Lloyd Bentsen.

It  is easy to obit that silver fox. He represented everything that any self-respecting progressive should despise, to the ends of his/her toes, about  Dixie democracy, Texas style.

True, he wasn't the biggest jackass  prick of his generation -- but only because John Connally got there first.

Ralph Yarborough -- now THERE was a Texan worth remembering.

I'm sure you've read about this "Euston manifesto". I'll say nothing of it here, except to notice that screen-door emerging-nation borders aren't enough. Beyond transparency and an open door, the Eustonians want an open sky from which they can drop at any moment like X-men to aid clumps of innocent humanity in trouble. Which spells warning, warning, warning, Will Robinson, to all these little cruel dark-age state fanciers. 'Cause if we freedom-thru-progress superheroes get the rights violation alert, we're comin' in, and you need to practice how to submit to humane acts of brusque social surgery.

You must learn to expect interventions -- remain prepared to be worked upon, spruced juiced and traduced in the most intimate parts of your cultural software -- and all this jiggering may come at a moments' notice, by us wise metropolitain pre-emptors, us minders of everywhere else's humane welfare.

There's a choice, of course. You can either let us do it "nice", or if not, you can watch and feel how we do it -- as ole Tina used to say -- "rough."

Okay, you could call isolationism, splendid or otherwise, a form of non-intervention -- and at its most basic, I suppose, you could call willful ignorance of the three-monkey kind a formula for isolationism.

But folks, that's just the problem. In a globe where our trans-nat corporations are already pushing their snouts into everywhere else, possible and impossible, isolationism as a national security posture is a formula for nasty surprises.

Pearl Harbor and the trade towers were both blowbacks -- no, passive national isolationism is no answer. Anti-interventionism means getting so called "American interests" the hell out of other folks' lunch pail and rain dance. And it for goddam sure it will require active -- very active -- political action. If we were to operate a proper anti-intervention regime here in the States, there would be not a single decently-connected mind in doubt, anywhere in the world, that if one of our trans-nat corporations pigs it up somewhere, the bastards are on their own. The marines ain't ever coming to clean up or clean out the mess they've made.

Furthermore, not just profiteers beware -- even (and maybe especially) cross-border NGO/NPO goo-goo outfits would be operating at their own risk also. Uncle has absolutely no call to back up these gratuitous uplift inflicters.

All anti-interventionism is by definition anti-unilateralism -- let the UN handle it, period!

Yes, pay our share of the costs -- more than our share, even. But let the UN be the bearer of the gifts of civilization -- such as they are and hereafter may become.

Has the emergence of self-constructing internet communities created a new politics? Though I'n not a close watcher of these set ups -- that I've left to Doc Smiff -- but I have observed a struggle over just what these contrivances are. What sort of a communication network? The members-only sewing-circle sort, or a floating 24/7 teleconference among action-oriented cadre? A deliberative body? An administrative apparatus? Both? Neither?

What about the fearless-leader cult? Is this emergent characteristic optional or inevitable?

You all are the real blogonauts -- use the comments to help this ole hound understand.

They and their Marplot scheme have all the tender earmarks (or is it hoof marks?) of a hot house rose. Maybe some are wild -- hey, maybe most are -- but there are bound to be plants among 'em -- plants with a royal Mounty seal on their behind.

So har-har, right?

But then again the story of Lee Harvey's nurturing would have been a har-har too, if he hadn't beaten the long odds and hit what he shouldn'ta been able to hit.

Let's wayback to 1948 -- a third-party challenge from the left has emerged to grapple with the bipartisan foreign policy of "containment". The Truman-led donkery is in a tizzy, because, among other things, through its fearless leader Henry Wallace this third party is creditably claiming to be the only party prepared to carry forward the full Roosevelt New Deal agenda -- full employment, civil equality, health insurance, union striking rights, etc., etc. Very potent stuff, right at the heart of the national Dems' franchise. Obviously this challenge will elect the Repubs if it gets its fair share of the electorate.

Enter Orthrian donk consigliere Clark Clifford, with a plan. A simple plan, in fact -- split the Wallace party platform into foreign planks and domestic planks, then scorn all the goo-goo anti-Cold War foreign planks, and more importantly, to really knock down the Wallace vote -- steal his domestic planks. Look just like him, and then run like hell on 'em.

Of course you'll do nothing whatsoever about any of it once in office -- in fact, the Dixie wingers momentarily in rebellion will be in for a pleasant surprise, when they return to the fold and find out just how empty the domestic promises were.

It worked, of course -- the devil wins most of the regular tricks; that's why we have the occasional judgement days.

"Promise 'em anything, but give 'em a cold war." 1948 was the peak of postwar donkery's pride and success, and it ushered in the permanent empire state, with everything that entailed for the next 50 years.

Why review this moment in our past? 'Cause right now the same Clark Clifford types are cooking breakfast for the same Orthrian crew. Watch the "party" paradigm shift domestically after this fall's win (if it happens). Watch the Barrage Obama of domestic smoke and mirrors neo-repealism, while overseas these bipartisan statesmen allow the same old killer potions to be poured about freely, by a chastened Republican apothecary.

For a new, more competent, tough-and-smart long-eared apothecary, we'll need to wait for '08 -- and watch what happens to the domestic plank then, donkey fans.

I'm glad we have professional politicians of the jackass kind to kick around. I don't blame the soup hounds one bit for all their fan dancing and preposterous abra-cadabra-ing.

Hey, they're just trying to make a living.

Fraudulent spells, sensless fear mongering -- all part of the package, the marketing effort.

They pour out this patent  hogwash, and will continue to pour it, just so long as we, the left side of the electorate, keep buying it.

If we've had our fill of this toxic brewage it's up to us to pit this long-eared medicine show out of its misery by tuning out its barkery, and, come election day, passing the back end of its painted wagon by.

... I think before abandoning the Democratic Party completely and voting third party the left needs to work on pressure and influence who wins the nomination.

The nugget here is "pressure and influence." I translate that as pressure equals threats of votes cast or withheld or placed elsewhere; and influence equals... well, money, mostly, but there's also volunteer time and energy. We'll return to that, but first let's think about the pressure side of the equation.

Withholding your vote -- the stay-at-home strategy -- obviously helps a little, since it proves the "elephants are coming!" cries of lesser-evilism have failed to terrify. Locally, that can matter, in tight districts, in a close race.

But the semiotics are more important. One way to read a stay-at-home vote is like this: "You're both stinkers, and I won't hold my nose and pull the jackass lever. It only encourages you hacks along your venal pathway."

But it can also be read other ways -- ways more consistent with the strategic thinking of the Demo poobahs. It's an ambiguous gesture.

So apathy is not a serious enough threat to get Party leadership's blood boiling. It takes a third-party vote to do that.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, fires up a donk pol pro hack like third party efforts. The evidence is everywhere -- from the Know-Nothings to the Populists to the several Prog incarnations to the recent Green scene.

My favorite almost-event:

We would have gotten Dewey in '48 if the Wallace prog ticket hadn't been kept off the Illinois ballot by wild dirty donkey foul play. 1948 would have been like 1848, 1912, 1992, or 2000, and maybe the fall of China and the Korean war would have been seen as Republican failures, and the donks might have moved left... okay, okay, I know I'm over the top with that last one.

But at any rate, since the cutting edge of pressure is threat threat threat, the more credible the threat, the better. And consequently, the higher the chance respect will turn into substantive accommodation.

Now as for influence, which comes from money and volunteer time -- nobody reading this, I'm sure, has enough money to make much of an impact -- not even all of us put together. So it comes down to our time and energy.

Just as the withheld vote is ambiguous, the withheld effort is ambiguous. If you really want 'em to miss you, you have to let 'em know what they're missing, by putting it elsewhere -- referenda, independent runs, activism outside the electoral arena... lots of possibilities.

robber.baron continues:

Of those who decided to run in 2004 there were drastically better options for a progressive agenda than John Kerry.

When the progs win control, the old pros will do all they can to see you lose the election. Unlike the progs, they don't at all mind scuttling the party's chances if they can't control it.

robber.baron:

I think we progressives need to fight to promote those potential candidates from within similar to how the religious right fights for socially conservative leanings from candidates in the Republican Party"

When you think about AIPAC or Big Oil or the credit card lobby, remember the old Mad mag strip, "Spy vs Spy." That's the right model for Congress -- the unending war, now in year 218, the lobby war. "Lobby vs Lobby."

Only its not a black hat lobby against a white hat lobby -- nope, you gotta multiply by N, so it ends up like a bunch of hideous spectral variants on the patrons of the galactic cafe in Star Wars.

Spread these guys around capitol hill, only semi-visible three-d images, and you got all there is to the meaning of the people's collective will.

If there 's such a thing as a general will it must somehow get formed out of the struggles of these adversarial spooks, scrapping for and against one another, as they scurry from the open mind of one people's rep to another, from possession to possession, making it all happen. That's all there is to the workings of the national interest -- a battle among special wills specially interested.

At least thats how Jimmy Madison saw it -- saw it long, steady and with a clear eye; saw it, and said it was good. Good because the lobbies will check each other -- yet another enlightenment faith in the spontaneous emergent goodness of free human interaction; another invisible hand, Adam-Smithian process.

And so it goes on, day after day -- this mad dash of all potentially against all, or for all. That is what gets embodied representationally as the US Congress -- a spectral happening in two chambers, played through a pack of venal hams.

We can apply this to any old topic, so long as we ask ourselves, early and often, cui bono?

Now let's handicap the entries based on the score card to date. When has any of these contending lobbies won, and against what other lobbies? That's the great inside game. We all know it, but we forget sometimes, and start thinking in terms of special interest against national interest -- the lobbies versus the people, the compact, motivated, on-meassage minority against the un-coordinated majority.

Sorry, this is full time work here. There are no disorganized citizen majorities -- no lobby that is the set of all lobbies not containing themselves. So whenever the lathering sets in that some lobby is too powerful -- wins too much -- compare it to another lobby that wins too few, that is too weak.

If certain lobbies or coalitions of lobbies can't be beat, thats a wonder. They must be something. Not even the New York Yankees win 'em all.

Some might suggest why not just go for anti-unilateralism? Force Uncle to work through existing multilateral institutions.

Quick answer: Korea, 1950; Kuwait, 1991. Sometimes if the interveners want it bad enough, and act cleverly or crudely enough, the UN can be had. Needless to say, this goes double for, say, NATO or any other multinational club, uncle-sponsored or co-sponsored. They all can be had.

Nope, the anti-interventionism must be home-grown; it must be internal, like the bar Japan has -- only in America's case, it'll have to be self-imposed.

Now it's true, right now Japan's more robust elite elements, grotesquely enough, are seeking to escape this bar -- but to review who's behind this move shows precisely the types we'd have to throw out of the party.

The struggle will, needless to say, be long, hard, and problematic -- a hearts and minds marathon, a spiritual crusade to save the soul of a nation. Turn it back into something more like what the old rock-ribbed abolitionists fought for.

To be continued. Next segment: "We gotta civilize 'em" -- goo-goo empiring, or the Aunt Polly missionary instinct as a temptation of the imperial serpent.

In keeping with MJS's empire project -- or, how to build a flattened planet into a better profit mat -- do all empires, even corporate scalawag carpetbagger empires, need an emperor? If so, is a unitary presidency enough?

The old fight between the center and the left in our party has run its course ....

Attention faux progs especially of the X-er and younger generations: here they come... your way. Get ready for the bear hug of a lifetime, kids, 'cause for the key party hackery its time to cut and run left -- nothing less will do -- its a matter of survival -- every man-jack and -jill of 'em for him or herself.

It's the great beltway panic of '06 -- the party core is about to explode and its sober-sided main elements scatter like mad seals off a rock.

But then watch -- like a school of fish these seals will all move in one direction: leftward ho, as they sense their 14-year-old Bermuda triangle ( formerly doing business as the vital party center ) start imploding.

I bet my generation of gliberal drug-besotted yuppie merit swine will bolt their positions, even before we get to watch the now-swirling head of muppetissimo Joe nearly sucked totally under this fall.

It'll be like Lyndon in New Hampshire '68 -- the last tango of an era. After that, they'll all begin swimming at you young folks, barking and flapping their flippers -- arf arf arf, right toward your rafts. The generational pendulum is swinging. the boomers are outsville. You iz the new queens of the ball, you guys and gals -- you far kosters, you zellmons of Alabama, you wonkettes of a hundred eyes -- u iz all gonna suddenly find your virtual pots filling with milk and honey.

Top of the list: the late 40's Marshall Plan for a war-torn Western Europe. It worked miracles -- but there's no free lunch on the empire's menu. And there was no Marshall Plan without a price. The price was... NATO.

So beware Uncle bearing soft loans -- there will always be an armed hedge in the fine print, for Trans-America Inc. to base its boundless trust and generosity on.

I know, I know -- that's well above my throw weight -- but I needed some fresh air and inspiration, so off a recent Alan Smithee post, I went over there, and found this guy Holland, who looks to be maybe as ponderously sincere and harmlessly passive-aggressive as that chubby brother of Alvin the Chipmunk.

Well, after a few twootles, don't I find him weighing in on the musical question, "is a union a special interest organization"?

Before we come to grips with that conundrum, some background.

The PAC was invented by the CIO for the '44 election cycle. How the eff a class organization gets to be a special interest organization -- an SIO -- is... well... let's just say, it's worthy of a culture that divides its households by income.

The flying Hollander cites some union sycophant attacking our beloved Kos cadre, for not attending in record numbers the" working family" panel at Kos' recent Vegas powwow.

The Kosnik response is to lump the unions with the gun and fun lobbies, as in this gem from myDD's Chris Bowers:

The reason these issues [unions et al -- Ed.] are 'ignored' by the netroots is because the netroots does not organize around advocacy organizations design[ed] to influence public policy, but instead around lifestyles....

This is an important difference between the political culture of the progressive netroots and the political culture of Washington, D.C."

That's nonsense; unions are engaged in a dozen workplace issues -- from the minimum wage to family leave...

.... immigration, the environment, job training, student loans, affordable housing, trade issues, Social Security and a host of policies related to corporate accountability. If that's a single issue, I'm my aunt Phyllis.

That's the blast -- just a knowing precocious harrumph, so to speak, at the expense of this marvelous and quite pervasive junior merit-class purblindness to lower-order jobholder "issues."

To be fair, he wraps up well:

... bottom line... there's never been an effective left without strong organized labor .... rolling back the 35-year assault on labor should be of the highest priority for all progressives....

...second only... to addressing the pernicious role of campaign cash in American politics....

As the Kosniks say: "zzzzzzzzzzz."

Case in point: the long long road taken by the old China lobby was clearly lengthened and widened by a venerable component of most local empire projects -- a component I like to call the sub-missionary component.

Foreign missions of this sort are varied indeed, at least as to intent, but their intent has one common thread -- they are always strung on an altruistic sunbeam, and for that reason, they allow the lobby, through them, to importune without appeals to self interest -- not even spread-eaglery, not even partiotism.

Nope, rather their appeal is to unrivalled goods like God, and the collective soul of humanity. (Need I say, guys like Jesus play a mean lead trumpet?)

Nowadays, of course, we have secularists in this just-for-the-goodliness civilizing business. In fact the third world is filthy with 'em -- but still, the Christian godly are the biggest section of the goodly, and prior to, say, the new-frontier days of the Camelot 60's, the uplift of the backward races was almost entirely the work of Christ's little travelling witnesses.

Throughout our history -- and here's my point -- these googoos for the man from Nazereth were easily mobilized to do the occasional multi-tasking asked of them by larger, if baser forces -- i.e. cross border long range "private gain," whether reformed or papist.

The story of Uncle Sam is the same throughout east and southeast Asia. In fact, history is checkered to the point of dazzlement with all these scurrying yankee God squadrons.

And at those terrible times when an armed impasse arose -- a time when uncle's citizens' wares and rights were under siege or threat of seizure -- these fellow countrypersons that were there as folks of the lord could be counted on to add their voices to the outcry: "Uncle, help, help! Otherwise, millions our our little brothers' souls may be lost for all eternity."

Makes for a nice humane choral group at a congressperson's door or in a singing telegram, especially when that congressperson is being asked to vote to send thousands of jarheads, or grunts, or both, to shoot their way into (or back into) some place over there across the Pacific -- somewhere where Uncle's marines and paratroopers are not entirely welcome.

Someone who knows told me this story the other day...

The New York State Assembly has long been controlled by Democrats,   and the Senate by Republicans. A few years ago, a pretty good   "progressive" Dem Senator, Eric Schneiderman, was running the Senate   campaign, and wanted to take control of the house. The Dem leadership   didn't like his aggressiveness, and essentially deposed him. So now,   with the Dems almost certain to win the governorship, in the person   of Elliot Spitzer, taking control of the Senate would mean total   party control of the state government. But Spitzer doesn't want the   party to take the Senate, and they're making no special effort to do   so. Why? Apparently Spitzer is afraid that a Dem-controlled   legislature would overspend, and reduce the governor's power. [Ex-Governor Mario] Cuomo,   that great liberal icon, felt the same way.

What a party, eh?

That's the pitch from one champ, Steve Gilliard, who's trying to boost the personal IPO float of anotha supa blogga, the Booman. Thus Gilliard:

Actually, I don't think that a brokerage would fund this [Booman's site -- Ed.] like Salon was, but something has to give. I mean, it's great Clinton hired Peter Daou, but there are people who want to report and not work for pols and they need options as well.

We can build our own media, but we have to build it.

Folks, this is a discussion where most of you don't know what you're talking about.

Booman wants to make a living so he can give YOU a better product...[to] buy books and pay for services like Times Select, so you don't have to....

... y'all need to get over the idea that this can be done for free... it takes time to actually research topics, go places and the like....

If you want punditry forever, this is a perfect system. But if you want real reporting, from trained people, it isn't going to be cheap and you need to realize that now....

You want the benefits of blogging, but act like it's some kind of sin to actually invest time and money in it....

How many of you work this hard at anything, including a blog? Why should he have to take a vow of poverty to keep you informed, because you can't make extra money when you have a blog to keep up, no side jobs and blogging. You can't exactly work, blog and freelance.

Now I understand I'm no better than second choice here -- I've been informed by the men themselves that both Alan Smithee and J. Alva Scruggs have already turned the job down. But they can afford to -- they're both independently funny.

Now I'm prepared to recieve counter-offers from you all, to stay the course here and help father Smiff, that veritable Franciscan of the fourth estate, but here's the bottom line: you'll need to kick in.

I'm not trying to short-fuse you on this, but I've already accepted the job offer. In fact Al has sent me a mock-up crack to rejoin for him, so I sent, on spec, free of charge, this completely orginal all-purpose comeback: "You wouldn't dare say that if my writers were here." (I know, I know, it's not up to J Alva's standard, or Alan's, but hell, it's a big step up for Franken.)

Anyway, you need to act now, if I'm to change my mind, 'cause it needs to happen by 12 midnight Friday, or i'll look like a grey rat to Al.

So start sending in the green guys -- but only if you care enough. I'll understand, even if some of you I've made laugh and cry and dance a thousand times or more, still don't mind seeing this rare source of joy in the darkest hours harnessed to the Franken sleigh.

Senor don Miguel de la Smiffiosa -- no more such delusion-mongering here. Please Father Smiff, I can't take the bottled-up wrath it induces in me. Either that or have two sites, one for the tough and one for the likes of me -- tender rageniks in need of some digital equivalent of cool bland food and a reclining chair.

What a fury this popinjay provokes in me -- you can see from the puff of his mouth region, he knows nothing, and yet sez candy and crap about it.

And here's the real gut flamer -- he gets to stare out at me anyway, like I just asked him to help me cheat on the chem final.

Here's my fave donk response so far:

"This has to have gotten China's attention," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee. "What some may see as a series of setbacks, I see as a series of opportunities...."

Wait till our hi-fi boyz try to open up China... I mean really open her up.

The counterargument you hear most often: announce a withdrawal date, and "they" will just wait us out. So I wonder, how would that look different from now?

Face the facts, goo-goo America -- this ends in a civil war either way, and the longer we stay around -- with or without the insurgents laying low -- the more vicious the civil war when we finally do pull out.

We're training these future sectarian forces right now -- it's called the national Iraqi army. The better trained and armed by us these still communally segregated units become, the more formidable the future clash between them will be.

Blogs can help shift the conversation from here's-whom-we-hate to here's what the country needs in order to have 21st-century schools, hospitals, businesses, streets, and nursing homes.

One lesson of American politics is that opponents have to find common ground. Beating the other side into submission doesn't work; neither does waiting for the opposition to see the light.

Another lesson is that politics lags. It can take years for good ideas to become practiced policies. Blogs could do great good by pushing the establishment to shorten this wearying time-table.

The blogosphere has rough neighborhoods full of singeing criticism and fiction masquerading as fact. But, for the most part, blogs are a new frontier for public discourse. They matter. And they could matter even more.

Chavez in Russia:

The visit by the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Russia is taking the media by storm, with one news agency reporting he has attracted much attention with his "emotional and spontaneous behaviour".

"He calls Christ the first socialist in the world; George Bush an alcoholic; pro-Washington Latin American presidents poodles of imperialism", writes Andrey Yashlavskiy in the Moskovskiy Komsomolets daily.

.... The Kommersant daily prefers to concentrate on the political dimension to the visit, during which Mr Chavez is expected to sign arms deals.

"Venezuela gets armed with Russia" write Mikhail Zygar and Tatyana Dmitriyeva.

"Moscow expects bumper arms contracts from the visit," they say, while Venezuela's eyes are on "setting up an anti-American oil bloc".

"Thus Moscow, which has just hosted the G8 summit, shows once again that, when the chance comes, it may respond to criticism from the West by making a sharp U-turn towards the West's foes."

President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have discussed the Lebanon crisis and tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme, the Kremlin said.

The two leaders spoke by telephone yesterday, a brief statement said. Ahmadinejad arrived yesterday in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan for a two-day visit.

.... Ahmadinejad warned yesterday that the conflict between Lebanon and Israel could trigger “a hurricane” of broader fighting in the Middle East.

.... The Bushehr nuclear plant that is at the centre of the controversy over whether Iran intends to build nuclear weapons is Russian-built.

Russia, as UN Security Council member with veto power, has resisted Western proposals to slap Iran with sanctions....

Russia also has stepped up efforts in recent months to exert influence in the Middle East, including contacts with Hamas after the militant group won Palestinian elections.

It hosted a high-level Hamas delegation at Putin’s invitation in March, when Moscow broke ranks with other members of the so-called Quartet of Mideast negotiators but failed to persuade the militant group to soften its anti-Israel stance and renounce its goal to seek Israel’s destruction.

Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said this month that Russia was using its contacts with radical Muslims, including Hamas, to try to promote a resolution of the escalating confrontation.

BOPnews had a nice post up explaining why "Moving the Democratic party to a reliance on small donors, and off money from various industries is job one. And it's job one not just because it will lead to better policy - it's job one because it will lead to Democrats being able to champion causes believed in by the majority of the population. In other words, it'll lead to victory."

http://www.bopnews.com/archives/006540.html

Maybe you would rather see the Democrats shrivel and die (and thus make way for a third party) than actually get their act together and win. Nevertheless the information in that post is priceless, IMHO, for explaining to Dems why their cowardly electoral strategy leads to defeat rather than safety.

AMLO si! Gore/Kerry -- no see.

Now that the Maximum Leader may be headed off for his Olympian symposium with Marx, and Lenin, and Mao -- oh to be a fly on the wall -- the corporate titans, needless to say, can't wait to "intervene", though they probably would buy a China model -- for a while. Or at least say they would. The Miami junto in exile, however, want a decapitation of the party state.

Either way it goes, Bush is off balance already, so it will be fun to watch another reactionary "national lobby," like the old China lobby, play its hand in an open congress.

Then again, it hardly seems likely that a little China 90 miles away has a future -- especially if Hurricane Hugo isn't blown out soon. More likely that little China will be presented as a little North Korea to the innocent American mass millions.

Then again, again, the clock ticks forever on, and the junto in exile may see its issimo loco dissolve away as market opportunities emerge back home for the unfanatical bulk of the Cuban-American community.

It looks as if Ned Lamont is riding the anti-war wave to victory in the Connecticut Democratic primary -- or so the latest polls suggest....

Oh I know Ned says he's anti-war, but he only means the war in Iraq. The war in Lebanon, on the other hand, is just fine by him. And he's already pledged he'll be just as staunch a friend of Israel and the Israel lobby in this war as Holy Joe ever was or ever could be....

Lamont's stance also reflects a glaring contradiction in the emerging Democratic consensus on U.S. policy in the Middle East.... it's a position that won't be sustainable for long.... it's a recipe for an even wider and more destructive war -- one I fully expect most Democrats, including Lamont, will end up supporting, despite the consequences.

... there is no real distinction between America's occupation of Iraq and Israel's intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war....

What's become clear to me is that the Democratic Party (even it's allegedly anti-war wing) will not try to stop this insanity, and in fact will probably be led as meekly to the slaughter as it was during the runup to the Iraq invasion. Watching the Dems line up to salute the Israeli war machine, hearing the uncomfortable and awkward silence descend on most of Left Blogistan once the bombs started falling in Lebanon, seeing how easily the same Orwellian propaganda tricks worked their magic on the pseudoliberals -- all this doesn't leave too much room for doubt. As long as World War III can be sold as protecting the security and survival of the Jewish state, I suspect the overwhelming majority of Democratics will support it.

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If those rumors I've been hearing about a Hezbollah/Hamas/DNC merger are true, we might be in for a slightly longer fight.

Okay, so here's my thought: will the masses settle for a Mcgovern burp this time round? The social class plates are rumbling, and the mouth of the volcano is puffing thin elegant wisps of smoke. But the Ann Coulters figure "Hell, we've seen this before... and we rode its false promise and farce all the way to total power." She means of course the aquarian cosmic revolution express, from senator Clean Gene past senator McG to senator Sam -- the monorail ride that took Woodstock boomers like me and our gray-haired red fellow travellers from the winter of '68 to the fall of of Dick Nixon.

And Ann is right to observe that that ride ended by quietly depositing us in the political sagebrush, while the right successfully drove a thousand wedges between us and the pale masses of middle America.

Well, I say, not this time, Ann, or Andre as the case may be -- this time it's going way past just changes in the collective "educated" mind's zodiac. This time the people will not react with a homely loathing to the foolish shenanigans of the spoiled of the earth, but with a righteous fury at 30 years of tower tykes' high rollin', that's left too many of 'em job-stripped and house-poor.

No, O thou of the fair large feet: deja-vu-wise, this ain't the low 70's all over again. This time it's different. This time the job-holding masses are going into "changing time" with their asses on fire.

Wal-Mart front group member compares Democrats to Hezbollah

Ha.  Hillary "Wal-Mart Board" Clinton is an anti-Wal-Mart guerrilla?  Joe Biden, the Senator from Citibank, wielding an RPG?

Hezbollah:

• Has an actual popular movement base
• Delivers some fraction of the proverbial goods to that base
• Can fight
• Is willing to tangle with Israel

If Democrats actually resembled Hezbollah, you might be able to vote again.

Thanks for your blog.  It's welcome reading from the confines of Beltway Democratic-support organizations.

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/08/26/developers_keep.php

Assisted by the necromancer, Sheldon Silver, the zombified essence of Daniel Patrick Moynihan has formed a pall over midtown Manhattan, where it sucks the souls out of passersby and fattens the wallets of culture capitalists.

Other than that, it's all good.

http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/2006/08/28/a-positive-dem-economic-strategy/

"I've heard the Rust Belt denizens complain about the export of good jobs. NAFTA, CAFTA, et al, certainly need fixing, but pointing fingers doesn't resolve the crisis.

So, what if there were an issue that granted struggling Dem incumbents in Michigan and challenger Dems from Wisconsin to West Virginia with a popular solution? And what if it also offered Dems a way to exhibit their strength on Homeland Security?

I think if there were truly a JFK-esque Dem leader today running for president, his inspiring race to the moon would now be a race to energy freedom. His strategy for Iraq would be withdrawal…. with a surprise diversion of half of those troops to Afghanistan to finish off Bin Laden and his opium funding base. And his jobs plan/homeland security plan would be to fix this mess, before it breaks us."

I read this guy when he was still sane. He's chugged a couple of quarts of the neoliberal kool aid since then. He knows better than to call the economic havoc in the Rust Belt "complaints", and that oafish comment about pointing fingers is worthy of a wingnut pundit.

JFK??? He's nuts.

It's interesting to observe the way delusional thinking about JFK is such an important component of pwog Democrats' intellectual armor. Somebody really ought to take apart the JFK myth. Not that it would do much good -- the Dems would soon find a soporific which would enable them to sleep once more.

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=22053

Read about Haiti's poor folks' twenty-year love affair with Aristide and "the flood."

You gotta be from among 'em -- a "populist", for lack of a better word -- to earn loyalty. Be of 'em not just for 'em -- otherwise progressive talk is like smoking crack.

His speculation: we left and minority voters could make it not happen by sitting this one out, and then... the elephants will trumpet and charge. At this site many have pounded away at this big scare tactic -- the prospect of the world according to grover and dick. Talk about fear politics -- well, waving the bloody shirt of the 'repugs' as human and civil rights terrorists works on the decent among us real fine. But let's for once really take stock here: count the real differences -- not the coulds, mights, and long-shot maybe- evens -- and after that's taken, ask ourselves: is it not better to shatter to pieces, over the next few cycles, the party that you know damn well, after all is said and done, is still willing to caucus with the hobbit senator from Bridgeport. Isn't blowing that hybrid of war mule and boardroom call-pig to holy hell worth more than to prevent two, four, six more years of this same old bubblin white plunder?

Maybe it's my political-economist view of our economic system, and of the planet's economy as well that encourages me to see this as the preferred option.

For example, I believe we oughta forget the deficits in both the federal war-fighting budget and the international payments potlatch. I think we're better by far letting this orgy run its course than submit to the sado-imperialist Rubinomics that the party of the whole people will replace it with.

Okay, Iraq might get a quicker dial-down. Iran, Syria -- those are scare masks. Not happening on this crew's watch -- not after Iraq and Katrina. And "doing something" about Iran certainly seems to be as popular a talking point with donks as with the incumbent party.

In the Mideast, personally, I'd prefer Lieberman's nightmare "new Caliphate" to the cuckoo's-nest, Nurse Ratched shit that the party of the whole people have lined up as an alternative. Redeploy? Go back to multilateral bomb rack and embargo diplomacy? "Ah, but there'll be less blood spilt" -- but sez who? I'll stack donkey deads up against republican deads anytime -- Clinton kills against Bush kills, even, ain't that out of balance.

TEHRAN -- Emad Baghi is a human rights activist who spent three years in prison for his writings. Shadi Vatanparast is a promoter of underground Iranian rock bands who, in the semi-privacy of her office, throws off her government-mandated headscarf. And Fazel Mehbadi is a mullah who preaches a message that's dangerously dissident in the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran: Religion should be separate from government.

These Iranians, in large ways and small, want more democracy and pluralism in their country, and they have taken risks to change their society. They are the kind of people whom US officials say they want to support. Yet they all agree that the last thing they need is help from the United States.

I'm reminded of this fact by a recent arresting finger wag from J Alva Scruggs down in the comment cages, to the effect that we shouldn't pray, root, phone, and donate -- maybe not even vote -- just to screw senator Lieberscam, just because he is the most wretched, preening, vicious, sanctimonious scumbag in the entire donk senate stable.

JAS is right of course (smart alec). Hate cults must be run with a cool detached hand, and hate votes are for rubes.

Yes, The Sun, I know, but this story is priceless:

McCain 2008 Campaign Adds Veteran of Howard Dean's Run

Senator McCain's latest additions to his 2008 presidential campaign team — a veteran of Democrat Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and a former Bush administration State Department official — are setting Washington to speculating about the ideological direction Mr. McCain's run for the White House might take.

The new pledges of support for the Arizona Republican came from an Internet guru best known for Governor Dean's upstart presidential campaign in 2004, Nicholas Mele, and from a former State Department official and veteran trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick.

... A Democratic consultant who managed the Dean campaign, Joseph Trippi, said his former colleague in the Dean camp was never a die-hard leftist. "Nicco is not driven ideologically. He's not conservative or liberal. He's more sort of a ground-up grassroots guy who believes we've got to have total reform of the political system and the role of money in it," Mr. Trippi said.

In other words, he's a hollow shell of a man who supports, sort of, a vague talking point, which he doesn't mind working against actively.

When I argue with Democrats, sooner or later it comes down to something like this: the Democrat, with the air of a man producing an ace from his sleeve, triumphantly demands, "Surely you don't believe that Gore would have gone to war with Iraq?"

The curious thing about this argument, I find, is that the burden of proof seems to lie in the wrong place. It's up to me to prove that the Democrats "would not" have been different; it's not up to my interlocutor to prove that they "would have" been different.

In a case like this you have to ask yourself, what's the null hypothesis? Because that's the epistemologically privileged one -- the one that doesn't carry the burden of proof.

I claim, of course, that the "no difference" hypothesis is the null hypothesis. For this claim a pretty good case is easy to make, historically and structurally.

From the structural point of view, both parties are donor-driven; they will follow the money, and sell themselves to the money-men as being the more likely to deliver what the money-men want. Their RFP responses will be slightly different, like two soft-drink startups vying for venture capital. They will emphasize slightly different demographics and propose slightly different ad campaigns, but such differences are not even skin-deep.

Historically, the record speaks for itself. Democrats got us into Vietnam and kept us there; a Republican finally got us out. Clinton's foreign record is dripping with gore (and dripping, with Gore). Even Jimmy Carter indulged in some adventurism -- and, if Zbigniew Brzezinski is to be believed, deliberately helped upset the applecart in Afghanistan, with results that we all know too well.

So here's what I always say to Mr. Democrat: No, no, other way round. Give me a good reason -- not just a hunch, or a feeling, or a rhetorical question -- why the Democrats "would" do it any different. I personally don't know whether they would have or they wouldn't have; "what if" questions are notoriously unanswerable. But what, exactly, is the source of your confidence, Brother Donk, that you know the answer?

Now maybe this seems like asking a lot. And it is. But it's no more than asking Brother Donk to show his cards. He, after all, is the one claiming that he knows what "would have" -- or rather, what "would not have" happened.

Here's what it comes down to, in that existential crisis we all face when we find ourselves in a voting booth. Do you share my Democratic friend's faith conviction that this time, it will all be different? Or don't you? If you do, well God bless you, your course is clear. But if you don't...?

If you don't, then you have some troubling questions to ponder. One of them could be stated this way: if I pull that lever for the donk -- if I make that leap of faith, in spite of all the structural and historical evidence -- what will be the consequences? Well, the donk might -- might! -- possibly be not quite so bad as the Republican. But on the other hand, I haven't just voted for a maybe-better -- I've also voted for an institution, or rather, I've voted for several institutions simultaneously. One of them is the Democratic party, an institution with a multigenerational record of selling out its most devoted supporters. Another is the "two-party" system, an institition which, by this time, we surely all know is really a one-party system with two factions. And, as far as I can tell from reading the papers, this institution is deeply committed to empire, to cutting my wages, to enriching my boss's boss' boss, and to sending my kids to die for oil, or Israel, or nothing at all.

We all have to make these decisions for ourselves. If, as Dirty Harry says, you feel lucky -- well, then, you will act on your belief, and get screwed again, or not, as it turns out.

But if you don't share my Democratic friend's faith -- then you might want to consider doing something different. Because if my friend's faith is misplaced, your vot