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« Liberal Outrage: November 2007 | Main | Liberal Outrage: January 2008 » Liberal OutrageSo what can we do? We are all outraged and upset about what's going on with politics in this country and we always feel like there's nothing we can do. What we should be doing is supporting primary challenges to the fake Democrats currently in office. As we've learned this year, Democrats in DC are more afraid of David Broder, Joe Klein, and Mr. 24%, than they are of their constituents. They are more concerned with Beltway opinion than they are with the national consensus. They are happier dealing with lobbyists than they are dealing with real people. They are more concerned with avoiding criticism than they are of delivering campaign promises. So what can we do about it? We've bitched and moan and pleaded and begged and threatened and cried -- and none of that mattered. We really can't hold up money, since quite frankly we don't have that much, and the lobbyists will always have more. Votes? We're an important part of the party's ground game, but the most entrenched of our ineffective Democrats have been in office 250 years and in safe districts, and have little to fear from you and me staying home, too disillusioned to participate. And they know damn well we'd rather hold our nose and vote for them than risk an even viler Republican slip in their stead. So what does that leave us? Well, we have one tool at our disposal, our only way to influence the behavior of our elected officials: We can primary them. Defeating Joe Lieberman sent a shockwave through the political world. If he could go down in a primary, none of them were safe. And after years of taking the party's base for granted, and as ill equipped as they were (and still are) to listen to us, they had to learn -- or else. Rep. Jane Harman, having faced a spirited primary in 2006, became 100 percent better overnight. She learned her lesson, and it made her a better person and legislator. Ellen Tauscher, threatened with "facing a Lieberman", headed off a potential primary challenge by suddenly voting her Democratic district, something she had seldom deemed necessary beforehand. Other Democrats haven't been so quick to reform, and they face spirited primaries. Key among them are, of course, the incumbents facing spirited challenges by Donna Edwards in MD-04 and Mark Pera in IL-03. Let me say this is no uncertain terms -- our ONLY ability to influence the Democratic caucus in Washington D.C. rests in our ability to defeat them in their primaries next year. No other elections are more important for purposes of our movement (as opposed to the nation as a whole) than these two. If Dan Lipinski and Al Wynn hold on, it will tell other Democrats that they have little to fear from us. If we defeat them, it will put the entire caucus on notice that we can and will target them if they lose touch with who they serve (i.e. the people, not themselves and their lobbyist cocktail party hosts). If you live in Maryland or Illinois near either of these districts, please join these candidates' ground armies and help them fight the establishment forces arrayed against them. If you don't or can't, please consider giving to these races. You want better Democrats? Then get involved. You want leverage against the other Democrats? Then get involved. The alternative is more of the hell we've suffered this year -- timid but safe congressmen and senators who'd rather capitulate rather than fulfill campaign promises. This is all we've got, guys. I know it's the holidays and everyone is looking ahead to presents and Iowa, but how about you drop at least $10 into both or at least one of them? Let's give them a numbers boost before the fourth quarter ends and better equip them to fight next year's important battles. We can worry about electing more Democrats later. Right now, let's focus on getting better ones. If we fail in these races, we'll have many more years like this disastrous one that is mercifully coming to an end. By fnord12 | December 21, 2007, 2:41 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, but this was a great response from him. Also take a look at part two and look at the insane word game they try to play with him around 2:00. (H/T to Kaminal) By fnord12 | December 21, 2007, 1:10 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I missed this from back in October, from Nancy Pelosi: "Look," she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. "I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things -- Buddhas? I don't know what they were -- couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk." Unsmilingly, she continued: "If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have 'Impeach Bush' across their chest, it's the First Amendment." Though opposed to the war herself, Pelosi has for months been a target of an antiwar movement that believes she hasn't done enough. Cindy Sheehan has announced a symbolic challenge to Pelosi in California's 8th Congressional District. And the speaker is seething. "We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow," Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their "passion," Pelosi called it "a waste of time" for them to target Democrats. "They are advocates," she said. "We are leaders." Oh, you're a leader, are you? A leader of what, exactly? What contempt these politicians have for ordinary citizens ("advocates") who actually care about real life issues. Disgusting. By fnord12 | December 21, 2007, 12:59 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link They'd already succeeded in getting a Green Party candidate on the ballot to drain liberal votes from Holt (a favorite GOP trick). And they had already put Raymond's firm to work calling Green-oriented households and urging them to support the Green candidate. But what came next was "even better": "We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter." "Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?" "Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?" So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character. After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!" So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt." I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business." The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house." We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls. By fnord12 | December 20, 2007, 5:00 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link How can you guys not mention this obstruction rate in every single story about the Senate?... Paul Kane: This is a running theme among liberals who are defenders of Harry Reid and Senate Democrats, blaming Republicans and filibusters for everything that's gone wrong with the Democratic agenda. Yes, the Senate has essentially set a record for the number of votes to cut off filibusters in 1 year, already breaking the record for a 2-year Congress. In almost every story we write in the Post, we talk about the need for 60 votes to break GOP filibusters. Do we need to cite this statistical record in every single story we write? I think not. Whereas filibusters were previously used as an extraordinary tool to preserve minority rights in the Senate, and were routinely depicted as "obstructionist" by the press when wielded by Democrats, they have now become the standard course for Republicans. Yet Kane, and most other Congressional reporters, simply refuse to point that objective fact out -- that Republicans are using this obstructionist tool on virtually every issue at a record rate -- because to point that out would be to violate the Sacred Law of Balance, even though it is true. Indeed, Kane, amazingly, goes so far as to describe the objective facts as nothing more than the "running theme among liberals who are defenders of Harry Reid and Senate Democrats." Thus, because it is "liberals" who point these facts out, Kane can't report them that way, lest he be accused of being unbalanced and "biased." Here we have the perfect expression of the mockery Stephen Colbert delivered to the White House press corps: "reality has a well-known liberal bias." Worse still, Kane defends himself and this fact-free reporting by noting that "we talk about the need for 60 votes to break GOP filibusters." But that's not a defense of the reporting; it's an indictment of it. Because of that, the public is largely unaware of just how obstructionist the Republicans have been because most Beltway journalists haven't reported it. And they haven't reported it because the rule they follow most religiously is that they never will describe the facts as they are if those facts reflect poorly on Republicans, because to do that means that they are "unbalanced" and "biased" and will be attacked as such. In Beltway journalism circles, misleading though balanced accounts are always preferred to factually truthful, "unbalanced" ones. Republicans always have a valid point, their version is always reasonable and worthy of respect, even when false. Also don't miss the new definition of the word "rumor". (And the Krugman twist.) By fnord12 | December 20, 2007, 4:36 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link To be fair, the piece also says this: This story gives a lot of context to the debate over health reform now. Obama clearly sees himself playing the same role as president that he did as a state legislator - as a broker among groups, including the insurance industry, as someone who can find a compromise solution that's acceptable to a wide range of opinion. My thoughts: being president isn't at all like being a state legislator, Illinois Republicans aren't like the national Republican party, 2009 won't be 2003, and the insurance industry's opposition to national health reform - which must, if it is to mean anything, strike deep at the industry's fundamental business - will be much harsher than its opposition to a basically quite mild state-level reform effort. The point is that if national health reform is going to happen, it will be as the result of a no-holds-barred fight of an entirely different order from what Obama saw in Illinois. The president's role will have to be far more confrontational, involve far more twisting of arms and rallying of the public against the special interests, than Obama's role as a state legislator in the Illinois case. And it will take place against a backdrop of fierce attacks not just from the industry but from Republicans who fear, rightly, that any kind of reform will move the country in a more liberal direction. My worries about Obama are that he doesn't seem to understand this - that he thinks that in 2009, as president, he can broker a national health care reform the same way that as a state legislator, in 2003, he brokered a deal that mollified the insurance industry. That's a recipe for getting nowhere. This "broker" approach is exactly what the Clintons tried in the 90s. It failed too. Why can't we have a candidate that will actually fight? By fnord12 | December 20, 2007, 3:58 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (5)| Link MoveOn is running a drive to buy calling cards for US troops so they can call their families during the holidays (and if you want to contribute, click here) but whenever i see these efforts, not just from MoveOn, it makes me wonder something that i've never seen anyone else wonder online: WHY THE @#*$! DO OUR TROOPS HAVE TO FOOT THE BILL FOR A @#$^!! CALL HOME WHEN THEY ARE ON DUTY? We have the largest military budget in the world, in absolute and per capita terms, and we can't spare enough money to give each soldier a $15 calling card during the holidays? Does that seem insane to anyone else? By fnord12 | December 20, 2007, 2:07 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Oh, the Democrats. If you like being disappointed in them, click here (you may have to sit through a few seconds of Salon's entry ad. Just wait for the continue to Salon link to appear). By fnord12 | December 13, 2007, 10:51 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Or is this a calculated move? Running to the right on health care and social security combined with the anti-gay gospel singer, taking Robert Novak smears at face value, repeating Jeff Gerth lies and now going after Paul Krugman, leads me to the niggling awareness that this is a conscious, if subtle, strategy. Any one of those things could be an accident, and perhaps some of them are. But taken as a whole, conscious or not, liberal fighters in the partisan wars are being sistah soljahed. Unlike the big issue of Iraq where being on the right side is being on the left side, these little digs and policy positioning are all sweet spots for the Village --- and sore spots for the base. Perhaps that's the smart move. It has long been known by just about everyone who matters that the rank and file activists of the Democratic party are a huge liability. And anyway, where are we going to go? Mike Huckabee? Ron Paul? We have no choice. So, no harm no foul. Running to the right of even Hillary Clinton on health care and social security and using GOP talking points and symbolism is probably all upside. It may be the best way to insure a win in the fall. But I can't say that it looks like either a transformative inspirational politics or a willingness to fight the conservatives and win on the merits. And here i was hoping Obama would beat Clinton in the primaries so i could vote for a Democrat in 2008. Maybe Nader will run again... ;-) More... By fnord12 | December 12, 2007, 10:24 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (5)| Link Here's an article on the CIA getting written approval from CIA lawyers to destroy the interrogation tapes. What i want to point out is that the lawyers used to be known as the "Directorate of Operations" which apparently wasn't kewl enough because Yeah. Where's my branch of clandestine services? By min | December 11, 2007, 2:05 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Investors are expecting policymakers to cut rates Tuesday afternoon for a third straight time, and perhaps indicate that more might be forthcoming. Most economists are expecting a quarter-point cut in the federal funds rate to 4.25 percent -- though there are some hoping for a half-point cut in the Fed's last meeting this year. What happens when we get to zero? By min | December 11, 2007, 1:57 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link I thought this was a no-brainer, but here's an interesting argument against allowing Supreme Court oral proceedings to be filmed and broadcast. By fnord12 | December 6, 2007, 2:35 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Atrios on the mortgage rate freeze program: Also: And you don't qualify if:
The last one is the kicker, as it kicks out the class of people who might actually be able to refinance on their own. I became increasingly skeptical that such a broad-based bailout would be workable for various reasons, but as is usually the case with anything the Bush administration gets involved in, they aren't even really trying. By fnord12 | December 6, 2007, 2:32 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Joe Klein is what passes for a "liberal" pundit on the cable news shows. He's also a columnist for Time magazine. When the liberal pundit is such an embarassing flack for the president that Joe Scarborough has to step in and correct him, you know something is seriously wrong with our media. By fnord12 | December 6, 2007, 2:27 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link By fnord12 | December 6, 2007, 2:24 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link Stocks Rally on Strong Economic Data: That means you worked harder and got paid less. That makes investors happy, so stock prices rose. Keep up the good work! By fnord12 | December 5, 2007, 7:51 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | December 5, 2007, 3:51 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Abramoff was the same kind of creature. He and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed were all these very ardent College Republican intellectuals who had a lot of crazy dreams about how they were going to foster this right-wing revolution. And they were extraordinarily successful very early on in their careers. Abramoff is a wet-behind-the-ears college student in the early '80s. Then immediately in 1983 he's off - where it looks like he was working as a bagman for this neo-Nazi organization in South Africa. He ends up going to South Africa and hanging out with people like Russell Crystal, a South African crypto-fascist, and they're funneling money for the South African army. Not your everyday 23- or 24-year-old kid goes off and does this stuff. They took this student politics thing really seriously. You have to give them credit, it wasn't just a popularity contest. With lefty-liberal political activists in college, the stereotype is a bunch of kids who go canvassing for PIRG or for Greenpeace or something like that and get baked afterwards. These guys are obviously sociopathic and have a lot more serious character flaws, but they were much more focused on the real power aspect of politics early on. They brought that to bear in their real go-around with politics when they finally did get power. Again, if you look at these guys - Abramoff and Norquist and Reed - they weren't out to use politics to get girls or to hang out and trade stories over the keg. They were using their networking skills in college to find real opportunities for themselves in the world and to really learn lessons about how power politics works very early on. They were way too serious -far more serious than people should be at that age, but it was productive for them personally. Whereas with lefty politics, unfortunately, there's no pipeline that takes committed ideological young progressives and puts them in positions of power. That's probably because there is no progressive power structure in this country that is really seeking those people. People in politics and in the media, they're extremely vain and they're very, very sensitive to criticism. If you level some intellectual criticism of somebody like Thomas Friedman and say, "Well, this is a rich guy who is advocating for the rich under the guise of economic populism" or whatever, he's going to shrug that off, he's not going to worry about it. But if you say that he's a buffoon who can't speak the English language and has a porn star mustache, it's going to bother him for sure, you know what I mean? You said somewhere that the perfect symbol for the press corps of the 2004 presidential campaign was Candy Crowley from CNN sitting on the bus with cookie crumbs spilling out of her mouth, talking about how ugly Dennis Kucinich was. Is there any reason to hope for a better media performance this cycle round? What happened with Cindy Sheehan - it started out as this movement that had a really clear and unambiguous and simple, emotionally powerful message that was connected to this woman who had really lost a son overseas. And it morphed into something that was different. I hate to criticize antiwar protestors or people who showed up and gave their time to this whole thing - but one of the things that happens there is that you have Cindy Sheehan alone to start with, and then within like three days you have the Cuban Five and the Free Mumia people and every circus act of the protest crowd that came to plant their flag. It's not that I'm taking issue with anything that the American left stands for or how it behaves. It's really a class issue more than anything else. The people who are the public face of the American left tend to be people like me. They're upper class, liberal arts-educated white people, for the most part, who come from a certain background where the things that are important to them are these mostly intellectual issues - like the environment, or social issues like abortion, feminism, that sort of thing. The historical basis for the American left, if you go back to Roosevelt, is sort of a patrician structure where you had these upper-class people advocating on behalf of a wider working class base. What's happened now is that it's kind of splintered and the upper-class portion is overemphasizing the things that are important to them and deemphasizing the things that are important to their base. That's why the party orthodoxies right now aren't things like free trade and credit policy, for instance - like the bankruptcy bill. You would never find a celebrated lefty politician who is pro-life but voted against NAFTA, for instance. It's always the other way around. What's happened because of that - because the orthodoxies are all backwards - is that the American left has alienated its natural constituency, which is this vast, middle-to-working class underclass that has been fucked over by modern global capitalism. By fnord12 | December 5, 2007, 1:27 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Not sure if this is all that funny or if i'm just suffering from Daily Show withdrawal, but the last second definitely makes it worth it. By fnord12 | December 3, 2007, 2:19 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: November 2007 | Main | Liberal Outrage: January 2008 » |