BartBlog

Ralph Nader has decided to once again jump into the race for President. I was stunned watching the once respected Nadar, appearing on Meet The Press this morning, telling Tim Russert he was running for President. Fucking stunned I was. Not the announcement itself, that we all saw coming, but the incredible ego of it all. The man has no shame. There is not great movement for a Nadar campaign, just one man’s fragile ego. Nadar uses sketchy statistics from his website claiming that because the people agreed with the some of the policies he has up, he should run for president. Most of his issues are already being addressed by the Democrats, just not like Nadar wants them to be.

Russert asked Nadar if he should take the blame for siphoning votes away from Al Gore in 2000 effectively giving Bush the presidency. Nadar, the egotistical bastard, of course said no. Instead he blamed the Democrats, Republicans and everyone else that didn’t vote for him fro the ravages of the Bush administration. Nadar called the Bush/Cheney an administration with the possibility for multiple impeachment opportunities, but he blamed the Democrats in the Congress for Bush’s sins and the continuity of the Iraq war. Nadar forgets that if he hadn’t run in 2000 there would be no Iraq war.

Nadar refused to take any responsibility for putting his personal agenda ahead of the needs and desires of the country. Like in 2000 and his other attempts at running for president, Nadar has absolutely no chance to be elected. All Nadar is dong is massaging his fragile ego, pushing his notion that he can create a viable third party in America. Bullshit. He isn’t even backed by one. A third party in America would be a welcome addition to a stagnant political system, but Nadar is not the person to lead that movement.

All I can say is this. If you love your country and are angry and pissed about what has been done to it over the last seven years, do not cast a ballot for Ralph Nadar. Send Ralph a real message from the people. Take your ego and go home.

Nir Rosen, Rolling Stone Magazine, March 6, 2008

It’s a cold, gray day in December, and I’m walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city’s no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs. The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama’s, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

“The Mahdi Army was killing people here,” Osama says, pointing to a now-destroyed Shiite mosque that in earlier times had been a cafe and before that an office for Saddam’s Baath Party. Later, driving in the nearby district of Baya, Osama shows me a gas station. “They killed my uncle here. He didn’t accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him.” Under siege by Shiite militias and the U.S. military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance. Others turned to Al Qaeda and other jihadists for protection.

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Glenn Hurowitz, Maisonneuve Press, February 22, 2008

Like many progressives, I’d heard all the explanations for Democratic failings, and they all boiled down to this: a lack of smarts or competence. But was that realistic? After all, we’re the egghead party, the party of science, the party of the PhD. Could we really just be as stupid as we say George Bush is? What I’ve seen is something quite different: a lack of courage that makes Democrats afraid of implementing the strategies that work. It’s why even when Democrats win, they lose.

After Democrats took back Congress in 2006, Republicans still manage to bully Democrats and the media into controlling their agenda. It seems like Democrats forgot James Carville’s basic lesson of political summer school “It’s hard for your opponent to say bad things about you when your fist is in his mouth.” Unfortunately, too often, the Democrats are the ones coughing up fingernails. What follows is an excerpt from my new book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party (Maisonneuve Press), which illustrates this debilitating weakness in the Democratic Party.

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“The senator agrees with you, but he’s not sure about the politics,” the senior Democratic Senate aide told me. “But if the politics changes, the senator would definitely like to vote your way — so good luck; we’re behind you.” The aide was explaining to me why his boss, a Democrat who represents a rural, Republican-leaning state, hadn’t supported higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks in a recent vote. The aide told me that though the senator agreed with the environmental group I was working for that increased auto mileage made sense, he was afraid that his constituents might not support his stance, especially after being bombarded with auto industry ads on the airwaves.

It was a response I would hear over and over again from Democrats as I went from leading local and state level environmental campaigns to helping direct those campaigns on the national level. When Democrats voted against us, it was rare to hear them say they didn’t agree with us on the merits. Instead, they’d tell us they were afraid: afraid that their constituents wouldn’t support a pro-environment position; afraid of defying President Bush and the Republican noise machine; or they’d even admit they were afraid of angering this or that corporate lobby and losing campaign contributions to the Republicans.

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Robert Scheer TruthDig, February 19, 2008

The resignation of Fidel Castro is more promising for the burnishing of his legacy than the mostly septuagenarian Cuban hard-liners in Miami and their fawning allies in the Bush administration would like to believe. After all, Mao Tse-tung is still honored in communist China, the fastest-growing capitalist power in the world, and former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, at least for now, a very popular elected Russian leader.

Those hoping for a “freedom flotilla” of Cuban exiles returning to remake Havana in the image of 1959, threatening the very future of Las Vegas with legalized prostitution as well as gambling, are likely to be disappointed. Odds are that Castro’s successors, beginning with his rhetoric-weary brother, are likely to finally get serious, after decades of fitful starts and reversals, about ending the grip of a moribund statist economy. Reform leading significantly down the path of the Chinese model, or more appropriately that of Venezuela, which has thrown a lifeline to the ailing Cuban economy, is more likely than sudden upheaval.

But those changes will come too late to justify the suffering of the Cuban people for half a century at the hands of a revolutionary, as arrogant as he is idealistic, who witnessed his vision flounder on the rocks of an incredibly cynical U.S. policy. Prime responsibility for that suffering does go to the Colossus of the North, which in the pursuit of economic exploitation and Cold War paranoia consistently preferred Latin American dictatorships to serious experiments in popular rule and strangled the Cuban economy with an embargo in place for the almost five decades since Castro dared move against the U.S. corporations that claimed to own much of the island.

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Howard Zinn, The Progressive, March 2008 Issue

There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held-security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.

Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail:

“Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”

On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ’07.”

The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ’06 rate.”

A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.

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Jon Ponder, Pensito Review, February 22, 2008

Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio entertainer and provocateur, used the New York Times article suggesting John McCain had a too-cozy relationship with a female lobbyist a decade ago – a story sourced to, and apparently leaked by, Republican operatives in the 2000 McCain presidential campaign – to castigate McCain with a rambling discourse on his dark and paranoid view of Americans who do not share his political views:

The lesson is liberals are to be defeated. You cannot walk across the aisle with them. You cannot reach across the aisle. You cannot welcome their media members on your bus and get all cozy with them and expect eternal love from them. You are a Republican. Whether you’re a conservative Republican or not, you are a Republican. At some point, the people you cozy up to, either to do legislation or to get cozy media stories, are going to turn on you. They are snakes. If the right lesson is not learned from this, then it will have proved to be of no value. There’s a great opportunity here for Senator McCain to learn the right lesson and understand who his friends are and who his enemies are. He’s had that backwards for way too long. He has thought the New York Times is his friend. He has thought Chris Matthews and these other people in the Drive-By Media are his friends. They aren’t. That’s the lesson today.

The story is not the story. The story is the Drive-By Media turning on it’s favorite maverick trying to take him out. The media picked the Republican candidate. The New York Times endorsed that candidate while they sat on this story, and now with utter predictability, they are trying to destroy him. This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. Why should any of us be surprised or even angry at what the New York Times is doing here trying to take out John McCain? Those of you who listen regularly should have been expecting this all along because it’s utterly predictable. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. It’s as predictable as Ted Kennedy finding a bar at happy hour.

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BradBlog, February 21, 2008

In response to critical comments by former Republican Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, rightwing talker and self-proclaimed “Dean of the Limbaugh Institute for Conservative Studies,” Rush Limbaugh, offered a fresh and perhaps telling explanation this morning for his ongoing attacks on presumptive Republican Presidential nominee John McCain.

“We’re trying to avoid a fifty state landslide!” Limbaugh shouted angrily in reply to the comments from Eagleburger, who had slammed him and fellow Republicanist entertainer Sean Hannity of Fox “News” and ABC Radio.

“I don’t know who elected Rush Limbaugh or Hannity as the heads of this conservative movement,” Eagleburger says at the beginning of a clip from MSNBC last night that was aired on today’s radio show. “They throw that word around as if it was theirs and theirs alone.”

“I thought I was a conservative, but that doesn’t mean that I have to buy off on everything these poobahs thinks is what’s necessary to be a conservative,” continued the former Sec. of State, before defending what he sees as McCain’s conservative national security credentials.

Eagleburger’s slam would lead to a telling outburst in reply from Limbaugh.

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As the elections approach and we are almost certain of our candidates, it is time to start asking serious questions. Ok, not of John McCain, because we already know his answer and its pretty much what he tells his Senate colleagues when he disagrees, “Go F***yourself.” But we do need to pressure our candidate and not let him assume he has our vote unless he can convincingly assure us of answers.

Other than healthcare, Iraq, the economy, we need ironclad commitments of a return to Democracy. (more…)

Allex, Koppleman, Salon, February 20, 2008

In December of last year, Matt Drudge reported that John McCain — who was then in the midst of a surprising comeback in the Republican presidential race — was desperately trying to convince the New York Times to kill a story about “charges of giving special treatment to a lobbyist,” and that McCain had hired a prominent attorney to work on his behalf. For the Arizona senator, who has built a good part of his reputation as a straight talker on his efforts toward campaign finance reform and cleaning up the lobbying culture in Washington, D.C., such a story could theoretically prove quite damaging.

Well, apparently we’ll see just what kind of harm the story will do to McCain’s campaign, as on Wednesday evening the Times published the article on its Web site. The Times piece, written by a team of reporters, suggests not just special treatment for the lobbyist in question — Vicki Iseman, 40 — but the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two, beginning in 1999.

“Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of [McCain's] top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block [Iseman's] access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity,” the Times reports.

Both McCain and Iseman deny that their relationship was romantic. But the Times describes McCain’s campaign at the time as being very worried about appearances when it came to the two. In February of 1999, the Times says,

Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.

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David Sirota, In These Times, February 20, 2008

During one of the mind-numbing arguments between the candidates, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was fighting off the claim that his universal healthcare proposal might not cover up to 15 million Americans. As an academic issue, it was an important exchange. But I suddenly realized: In real-world terms, the back-and-forth didn’t much matter.

In this epic race for the Democratic nomination, the most minute policy differences are extrapolated into bombastic TV ads, direct mail pieces and debate one-liners. Amid the noise, few remember that what candidates say or propose can bear little resemblance to what ends up happening once they are in the Oval Office.

As proof, look no further than candidate Bill Clinton who said, “I’d be for [the North American Free Trade Agreement] but only-only-if [Mexico] lifted their wage rates and their labor standards and they cleaned up their environment so we could both go up together instead of being dragged down.” And yet, he subsequently steamrolled NAFTA through Congress.

Of course, every presidential election is, in that way, a leap of faith. But we can make an educated guess about what the different candidates’ relationship to Congress will likely be-and that relationship dictates the possibilities for progress far more than any campaign promises. For example, in 2000 and 2004, a vote for Bush was a vote to centralize more government power in the hands of the White House, and, just as importantly, to create a rubber stamp for an extremist Republican Congress. With Bush vetoing the fewest bills of any president since the Civil War, movement conservatives were emboldened by the Bush administration to wield as much raw legislative power as the president himself.

For voters trying to distinguish between Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Obama, the question should be who is more apt to empower a Democratic Congress whose seniority and power rests in the hands of committed progressives.

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Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, February 20, 2008

Lenny and Squiggy were nowhere in sight.

But Hillary was doing her best to come across as a “Laverne & Shirley” factory girl as she headed away from not-a-chance Wisconsin and on to gotta-have Ohio.

She was drinking red wine and talking up the virtues of imported Blue Moon beer with a slice of citrus on her plane and putting up an ad in Ohio about how she works the night shift, too, just like the waitresses, hairdressers, hospital workers and other blue-collar constituents that she’s hoping to attract.

And she doesn’t mean that being married to Bill Clinton is what keeps her up all hours. She’s talking about burning the midnight oil in her Senate office.

At any minute, she might break out into the “schlemiel, schlemazel” “Laverne & Shirley” theme: “Give us any chance, we’ll take it.

Give us any rule, we’ll break it.

We’re gonna make our dreams come true.

Doin’ it our way.”

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Doug Kendall, The Huffington Post, February 18, 2008

A close look at John McCain’s Senate voting record on judicial confirmations makes it painfully clear that progressives need to ignore the rantings of the Ann Coulter crowd and believe John McCain when he says he will listen to Sam Brownback and appoint judges like Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia. On judges, McCain’s no moderate: if given the chance, he will appoint justices that move an already conservative Supreme Court sharply to the right.

Indeed, one looks in vain for a judge who is too ideologically conservative for McCain: he voted to confirm Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and, unless I’ve missed something, every other Republican judicial nominee voted on in his 22 years in the Senate.

Even more tellingly, as part of his negotiation in 2005 of what has been dubbed the “Gang of 14 Deal” (more on this later), McCain pushed, hard, for the confirmation of both William Pryor and Janice Rogers Brown, the two hardest-edged conservatives appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush.

Pryor famously said of Bush v. Gore: “I’m probably the only one who wanted it 5-4. I wanted Governor Bush to have a full appreciation of the judiciary and judicial selection so we can have no more appointments like Justice Souter.” As the Washington Post editorialized in a piece called “Unfit to Judge,” that statement indicates such a nakedly political view of judging that it alone should have been disqualifying for a lifetime position on the federal bench.

Brown’s views were even more outlandish. In speeches given to the Federalist Society and the Institute for Justice, Brown railed against judicial opinions in the 1930′s upholding the New Deal as “the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” Brown, almost alone among lawyers, openly yearned for a return of the so-called “Lochner-era” in which a conservative court routinely struck down labor, health and safety laws in the early 20th century. In the words of Robert Bork (no liberal he), Lochner is an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.” No one in the Senate is more responsible for Brown’s confirmation to a lifetime seat on the all-important DC Circuit Court of Appeals than John McCain, a fact he touts on the campaign trail.

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