Most politicians who take money from corporations for junkets do so under the table. They don't want us to know that they're crooked. But the Governator is throwing all pretense aside: he's actively and publicly soliciting money from his many corporate donors for a trip to China with the excuse that it 'will save the taxpayers money'.

SACRAMENTO — To pay for a coming trade mission to China, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political allies are raising tens of thousands of dollars from businesses whose names are largely being concealed.

In addition, at least two of the three public relations firms playing a role in the visit have political ties to Schwarzenegger. One has a West Coast affiliate co-owned by the governor's chief fundraiser.

Those arranging the weeklong trip, which will follow the special election next month, are crafting an itinerary that potentially offers the traveling business delegation exclusive access to Chinese officials and a private reception with Schwarzenegger. The list of companies joining him is not yet complete.

Schwarzenegger and his supporters want donations to two tax-exempt groups that have championed his interests, and to a government fund meant to boost overseas trade. The money will help cover expenses for the governor's tour of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The administration says the fundraising effort saves taxpayers money, but experts in public ethics question the governor's practice and the access it affords private interests.

All due respect to Peter Nicholas, the LAT reporter, we didn't used to need 'ethics experts' to tell us this sort of thing was WRONG. Before the Emperor and the party that made him, we understood corporations act on quid pro quos and pay for such things only when they expect to get something out of them that's worth more than they put in. Before the Emperor and his Publican corporate puppets took over and made such transactions as common as houseflies around a garbage can, we used to think such things weren't just unethical but illegal.

But that was in the old benighted days pre-Bush when there were rules about corruption in govt that people actually paid attention to. Now, in BushAmerica, anything goes. The GOP doesn't even feel it has to hide its corruption. In fact, it's bragging about it: if corporations pay for govt activities, the taxpayer doesn't have to and that's all that counts. That the corporations who donate are going to expect--demand--preferential treatment in return is unimportant. That that preferential treatment will cost taxpayers far more than the cost of the trip doesn't matter either. After all, that's what taxpayers are for--slipping corporations money on the side.

The Governator is worth watching because he's on the cutting edge of Publican planning, almost always one of the first--if not the first--to aggressively attack the next victims of the Publican agenda: unions, public employees, environmental groups, the educational system, and now the law itself. And he does it very simply: he ignores it.

If he gets away with it, we can expect the radicals running the GOP these days to jump on the bandwagon pretty quickly. His success will prove that all you have to do to make corruption acceptable is be open about it and claim it's on behalf of 'the taxpayer'. An Orwellian turnaround that simple is bound to prove absolutely irresistable, especially at a time when the biggest honchos in the Publican firmament are in deep legal trouble for doing more or less exactly the same thing.

This is a great loss, though not unexpected.

Shirley Horn, a smoky-voiced jazz balladeer and pianist who was resigned to being a musical fixture in her native Washington before emerging as a national presence in her fifties and winning a Grammy Award, died Thursday of complications from diabetes at Gladys Spellman Specialty Hospital and Nursing Center in Cheverly. She was 71.

With her slow, meditative ballads, Horn was one of the leading jazz singers of her generation and unquestionably was Washington's preeminent jazz musician. After reviving her dormant career in the 1980s, she made a series of triumphant concert appearances and strong-selling recordings that earned nine Grammy nominations. Her performances at the White House in 1994 and at New York's Lincoln Center in 1998 were broadcast nationally on PBS.

An uncompromising perfectionist, she worked hard to develop a personal, pensive sound. Her artistry had long depended on the interaction between voice and piano, but in 2001, Horn's right foot was amputated because of her diabetes. As a result, it was difficult for her to use the elegant pedal work that marked her piano style.

Later, she would sometimes remove the shoe from her prosthetic foot and manipulate the piano's sustain pedal with the force of her hip. In her final public appearance, in December at the Kennedy Center, she climbed from her wheelchair to the piano and performed what had become her signature song, "Here's to Life."

Shirley was an inspiration to all us Boomers. Though she was originally noticed by Miles in 1960, it was not until another 20 years had gone by that her career really began. Shirley may have started late but she shot to the top in record time (no pun intended). Her delivery was as original, as emotional, and as effective as Billie's or Bessie's or Betty's. I first heard her in the late 80's, and she knocked me out.

While her singing seemed as simple and as straightforward as Ella's, under the surface roiled an emotional complexity and even contradiction that lifted her interpretations into a territory so rich that you could hear the same song three times and interpret it differently each time. You Won't Forget Me, one of my favorites, manages to combine the longing and lingering love from a broken affair with the anger and disappointment of a jilted lover, and all in a slow, torchy tempo that made it sound--superficially--like a standard love song.

That was Shirley all over--the emotions we feel may be unambiguous (pain, anger, joy); their sources are anything but. She was the most emotionally mature jazz singer since Billie, and she will be greatly missed.

Though the NYT's Sam Dillon tries to put the best face possible on it, what comes through in his report today is that Bush's NCLB is an unqualified disaster. Math comprehension has improved only slightly and reading comprehension--wait for it--has actually gotten worse!

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 - The first nationwide test to permit an appraisal of President Bush's signature education law rendered mixed results on Wednesday, with even some supporters of the law expressing disappointment.

Math scores were up slightly but eighth-grade reading showed a decline, and there was only modest progress toward closing the achievement gap between white and minority students, which is one of the Bush administration's primary goals. In many categories, the results indicated, the gap remains as wide as it was in the early 1990's.

This will come as no surprise to teachers and school administrators. Teachers have said from the very begining that eliminating anything in the curriculuim that doesn't apply to the test--'teaching to the test'--was a terrible idea and more likely to hurt learning than help it. School administrators have complained that dumping a massive unfunded mandate on the nation's educational system at a time when an irresponsible tax-cutting fever was running amok was a recipe for failure. After five years of this Republican educational voodoo, we now have the answer: they were both right.


On the left, scores before NCLB; on the right, scores after 4 years of NCLB

Margaret Spellings, Bush's hack Secretary of Education, followed the usual administration procedure by immediately declaring that black-is-white and the numbers proved the NCLB is a 'success'. The Emperor said he was 'pleased' and Spellings blamed the poor showing on immigrants.

Mr. Bush, meeting with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at the White House, said he was pleased with the test. "It shows there's an achievement gap in America that is closing," Mr. Bush said.

In an interview, Ms. Spellings called attention to the improvement in math by fourth graders. She said the less robust increases and outright declines in some reading scores were understandable in part, because the nations schools are assimilating huge numbers of immigrants.

"We have more non-native speakers, there are lots of so-called at-risk, hard-to-educate students, and in spite of that, steady progress is being made," she said. "We're on the right track with No Child Left Behind."

The comparatively small number of immigrant kids in the school system is hardly large enough to skew the results of a national test, but it makes a convenient excuse that the administration's brain-dead right-wing supporters will accept without thinking, which is what they do best.

Unfortunately, Mr Dillon doesn't bother to break down any of the numbers by region, cherry-picks the results he deigns to report, and asks for comment only from people or groups who have backed the NCLB from the beginning, not its real critics. But that's standard for the NYT propaganda machine: take dismal results like these and pretty them up to make another Bush cock-up seem at least marginally successful.

The truth is that the NCLB is a trick, a snare and delusion designed to turn schools into outright corporate training factories where only information necessary to getting a job is considered relevant. The old idea of a well-rounded education is being thrown out the window in favor of rote learning and courses restricted to the corporate values embodied in the test. Arts? Citizenship? Forget it. The first has nothing to do with employment and the second could conceivably produce citizens who aren't sheep. Neither is acceptable. Kids who know how to think critically don't grow up to be Republicans.

The bad news here is that these catastrophic results don't mean the NCLB is in trouble. It isn't. Conservatives love tests. The NCLB is going to be with us for a long time and, like everything else the radcons in the administration are doing, will continue to inflict a lot of damage it will take years, maybe decades, to overcome once the voters come back to their senses.

If they ever do....

Byzantium's Shores has turned John Scalzi's list of the 50 sci-fi films you must see before you die into a meme (via archy) wherein one prints the list and then bolds the ones they've seen. Nobody asked me to do this (my understanding is that memes like this are by-invitation-only) but I'm going to do it anyway because I was struck by how many I've seen--worse, how many I own.

Now, I am NOT a geek, self-confessed or otherwise, as John is. It took me 40 years to learn how to do my own oil changes, a decade to get over my antipathy toward computers (which I still have problems with), and I have yet to master VCR programming. When I was a kid I read Sherlock Holmes, not Jules Verne; the Hardy Boys, not Tom Swift; Moby Dick and The Deerslayer, not War of the Worlds and Looking Backward. I didn't discover sci-fi lit until I was in high school when I read 1984 and Brave New World. I have never been a devotee, though over the years I've read most of the masters from Verne and Wells to Philp Dick and Rafferty (one of my faves), yet I have seen almost every one of the films on this list and own many of them. To whit (seen--bolded; own--*asterisked*):


*The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
*Back to the Future
*Blade Runner
*Brazil
*Bride of Frankenstein
*Brother from Another Planet
*A Clockwork Orange
*Close Encounters of the Third Kind
*Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
*The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
*Escape From New York
*ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
*Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
*Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
*Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
*The Matrix
*Metropolis
*On the Beach
*Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
*Robocop
*Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
*Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
*The Stepford Wives
Superman
*Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing from Another World
Things to Come
Tron
*12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
*20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
*2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
*War of the Worlds (1953 version) (**I also own a transcription of Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio version)

Some of this is explained by the fact that I'm a film buff and there are classics on this list that transcend their genre (Metropolis and A Clockwork Orange, for example) but for many of them there is no explanation whatsoever. Why, for instance, did I see, let alone buy, Terminator 2, a piece of boring, SFX-heavy eye-candy that isn't as good as the first Terminator and barely surpasses Vixens on Venus in quality? I can't say. I don't watch it. I've never even cracked the celophane it's wrapped in--and I've had it for almost 10 years.

It's a mystery. I went to see Khan, I don't remember why, thought it was silly and never went to another Star Trek movie even though I liked the tv series. I went to see the last two Matrix films and was heartily sorry I had wasted the money. I'm not a fan, I don't haunt second-hand bins hoping to find a clean copy of The Body Snatchers, I don't attend conventions, and I stopped waiting breathlessly for the latest Star Wars movie after the second one (which should NOT be on the list, imo). Yet still I own all these sci-fi flicks. Much to my shame, I even own Independence Day.

I can't explain this patent character flaw. Perhaps it's a glitch in my programming. Perhaps I surrendered to being surrounded by it all my life. Perhaps it's a weakness, like gambling or scarfing chocolate cream pies at a single sitting. I don't know. I suppose it must say something to me or I wouldn't have bothered, but for the life of me I can't imagine what. I am not by nature a fantasist, a geek, or any form of scientist. I've never read Popular Science and technology baffles me. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov when the other kids were reading Childhood's End. Nothing about sci-fi suits anything in my tastes or my emotional make-up, yet there they are: three dozen out of 50, most of which I own.

Go figure. Personally, I don't get it.

I was going to write a long post yesterday about Fair Judy's self-serving report in the NYT of her testimony in front of the grand jury but decided against it. It's such transparently self-congratulatory tripe pretending to be factual and objective confession, and there are so many holes in it, that I found I actually had very little to say about it except 'Bullshit'. Jeff Alworth at Low on the Hog, who has more patience for such things than I do and anyway is better at it, does a nice job of tearing it apart (here and here) if you're interested.

Let's deal first with Miller, whose story is fairly straightforward, if elusive. Miller uses language bordering on comic it's so neutral: "During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak's article." She's in just-the-facts-ma'am mode, posing as the courageous journalist who may be telling all, but not gossiping. Yet there's something decidedly evasive in the prose.

That about sums it up. Nothing in Miller's 'explanation' can be trusted, not because she's necessarily lying (although she does) so much as because she's leaving out or glossing over key questions, and what's left presents a false picture of high-minded journalistic ethics. As Jeff points out, you have to read between the lines to get at anything like overall accuracy.

Take for instance this little gem that Jeff doesn't mention, being concerned with weightier matters: she met Libby 4 years ago when he asked for her autograph. How she must have glowed with pride! The new Veep's right-hand man! Golly. I bet she blushed.

Want an asset to be loyal? Flatter them from a position higher than their own. There's nothing like the great bending a knee to the near-great for cementing obedience. And it must have worked because the very first note she took during their very first meeting relevant to the Plame Affair was a dutiful rehash of the administration line Libby had brought her there to feed her.

On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby, who was known to be an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments, which were already coming under fierce criticism. The first entry in my reporter's notebook from this interview neatly captured the question foremost in my mind.

"Was the intell slanted?" I wrote, referring to the intelligence assessments of Iraq and underlining the word "slanted."

I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the C.I.A. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show

So Scooter, 'an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments', was supposedly unhappy with CIA 'intell' (she's the only one I've ever seen who spells intel with 2 ll's) that said Iraq was full of WMD's and might be 'slanted' that way for cover. Our Judy conscientiously writes this down as if it were important. Well, it was important: it was her mission.

This meeting has few of the earmarks of a reporter/source meeting. It does, however, have all the earmarks of a meeting wherein a covert control gives one of his joes her new assignment. Miller doesn't have anywhere in either her notes or her memory anything relating to questions she might have (should have) asked Libby about the administration's position. Serious questions had been raised for months about the accuracy of Scooter's boss' insistence than he knew where those WMD's were, yet she has just come back from the unsuccessful search for them and apparently doesn't question Libby for a second when he blames it all on the CIA. He tells her the intel was slanted and she writes it down. That's not a reporter probing, that's an agent/operative getting her marching orders.

We know now (and there were reports at the time) that Scooter's boss had spent much of the run-up to the invasion running back and forth to Langley trying to intimidate CIA analysts who were insisting there was no evidence of WMD's in Hussein's Iraq into reversing themselves and going along with the admin position that there were WMD's in abundance. Miller could NOT have been ignorant of that attempt to stack the deck, or at least of the reports, yet she never displayed the slightest doubt that Scooter's spin was legitimate. (For an almost-comprehensive list of lies, misdirections, and evasions in Judy's piece, see The Left Coaster.) Conclusion: Miller wasn't then and isn't now a 'reporter'. She went there to get the admin TP's from one of her controllers so she'd know what they wanted her to write.

What came across to me from reading between those lengthy lines was that at best Miller was a wide-eyed dupe breathless with awe about her inclusion in top govt circles, a rube so clueless that all they had to do was call her to the WH and she'd do anything they told her to do. The is the woman, remember, who once defined a journalist's job as 'reporting the administration's positions' as if a reporter's job was to be a govt stooge. A belief like that would make her a perfect and perfectly blind pawn, a self-consciously unconscious puppet they could use at will.

But I don't think so. I think her own report shows she was an op. I think she knew what she was doing and, like Armstrong Williams, did it quite consciously, quite deliberately, on orders. Jeff makes it pretty clear that her story doesn't hold water and her credibility is thin-to-anorexic. Seems to me that an innocent dupe would at this stage be trying to explain how she got caught in the web, not making up more lies to cover her ass, but that's just me. I'm such a pollyanna.

Well, wha'd'ya need a Census for, anyway?

Cuts the Senate has proposed for the U.S. Census Bureau's budget next year may make it harder for the government to prepare for natural disasters, fund public schools appropriately or understand this country's complex and mobile population, according to those who rely on census data.

The fiscal 2006 spending plan approved in the Senate includes a 17 percent cut from the $879 million the Bush administration wanted to allocate for the census. That cut would push census spending for fiscal 2006, which began Oct. 1, below its spending in fiscal 2005.

Cutting census spending would impair the government's ability to calculate gross domestic product, poverty rates and the true size of populations that have traditionally been undercounted -- including children, rural residents, American Indians and other minorities, according to the bureau.

"The census is the nation's fact finder," said Mary Jo Hoeksema, public affairs specialist for the Population Association of America, a professional organization of demographers, sociologists, economists and public health professionals.

"If Americans care about funding for their roads, their schools, their health and housing programs, then they need to care about what kind of data the nation's fact finders are collecting and disseminating to policymakers," Hoeksema said. "Because that's how those decisions get made."

No it's not. In the Pub-dominated Congress, those decisions are made by corporate lobbyists working hand-in-glove with conservative ideologues--anti-taxist crony-capitalists who hand out pork to their contributors and the Treasury to the rich. They'll decide where the money we borrow will go, thank you very much, and the Census just gets in the way by being objective and suggesting that public money should be used where the public needs it. Who needs that?

Of course, they can always subvert the Census findings just like they've subverted science and change the numbers to suit themselves and their agenda, but that's so much work. A lot easier and less complicated to subvert it by simply defunding it. More efficient, too. Once the Census is gone, what will dissenters and the (so-called) opposition do for objective information? Not that they do much with it now, but why give them ammunition to fight corporate decisions with? This is a war in which facts are the bullets, and in a war you cut off the enemy's supply lines and blow up his ammo dumps if you can. De-funding the Census over the next several years will cripple a major enemy arms depot in a way that the enemy may not even notice. I mean, who pays attention to the Census, anyway, except malcontents and troublemakers?

Screw it. The Toad will tell us what we can do with our tax money. The Census is a waste of precious govt debt. Much better to use the money to fund McDonald's campaign to insinuate Chicken McNuggets into China, don't you think?

I've been saying for years that Americans are too proud of their naivete. They think it means the same as 'innocence', which they're also too fond of. Both have prices attached to them and it may be time to finally give them up. We've seen on the national level what happens when a gullible population swallows whole the lies, evasions, and tricks of an administration without a discernable conscience--illegal wars, cronyism, the piecemeal destruction of the Constitution, and the metamorphosis of an economically strong country into a gigantic copy of Argentina in the 70's with bankruptcy and financial collapse hanging over its head.

Yet people can't seem to connect with the way their naivete opened the door to abuses like these. Yes, the Emperor's numbers are in the toilet but that's largely because he's finally being seen as the incompetent he's always been. Nobody I know is reproaching themselves for backing such an obviously ill-qualified candidate. As far as they're concerned, they're responding to new information. Like the Emperor, they're convinced that nobody could have predicted it was this bad, entirely ignoring the fact that lots of people predicted exactly this five years ago when Bush bought the Pub nomination and then stole the election. Even as the illusion that is the Bush presidency falls apart, we are absolving ourselves of our responsibility for it by leaning on our innocence. How could we have known?

That's not good enough any more, and maybe this little item will bring home to us the dangers of being naive at a level we can actually relate to.

Somebody has been conducting strip-searches by phone.

She was a high school senior who had just turned 18 -- a churchgoing former Girl Scout who hadn't received a single admonition in her four months working at the McDonald's in Mount Washington.

But when a man who called himself "Officer Scott" called the store on April 9, 2004, and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse, Louise Ogborn became the suspect.

"He gave me a description of the girl, and Louise was the one who fit it to the T," assistant manager Donna Jean Summers said.

Identifying himself as a police officer, the caller issued an ultimatum: Ogborn could be searched at the store or be arrested, taken to jail and searched there.

"I was bawling my eyes out and literally begging them to take me to the police station because I didn't do anything wrong," Ogborn said later in a deposition. She had taken the $6.35-an-hour position after her mother lost her job. "I couldn't steal -- I'm too honest. I stole a pencil one time from a teacher and I gave it back."

Summers, 51, conceded later that she had never known Ogborn to do a thing dishonest. But she nonetheless led Ogborn to the restaurant's small office, locked the door, and -- following the caller's instructions -- ordered her to remove one item of clothing at a time, until she was naked.

"She was crying," recalled Kim Dockery, 40, another assistant manager, who stood by watching. "A little young girl standing there naked wasn't a pretty sight."

Summers said later that "Officer Scott," who stayed on the telephone, giving his orders, sounded authentic. He said he had "McDonald's corporate" on the line, as well as the store manager, whom he mentioned by name. And she thought she could hear police radios in the background.

Summers shook each garment, placed it in a bag and took the bag away. "I did exactly what he said to do," Summers said of her caller.

It was just after 5 p.m., and for Ogborn, hours of degradation and abuse were just beginning.

The perp is a sick puppy alright, but what does it say about us that we're so willing to do what a person who claims to be in authority tells us to do? And over the phone, without having the sense to check? This is not an isolated incident. Whoever is doing this has made calls all over the country, and he was smart enough to concentrate on Red states where unquestioning obedience to authority is an article of faith.

The fact that he came across as legitimate doesn't excuse the managers' behaviour, it makes it worse. It means that they would allow a genuine police officer to break the law and that they would go along with him simply because he was wearing a badge. The assistant manager in the story above isn't a callow youth. She's over 50, yet even though she apparently had doubts that the call was genuine, she went right ahead and made her employee strip to his orders. It never seems to have occurred to her that a genuine police officer making a call like that would be breaking the law as well as violating procedures familiar to everyone from tv cop shows, nor did it occur to her that she didn't have the legal right to conduct the strip-search of an employee.

Naivete like this is no longer acceptable. It isn't cute, it isn't funny. It's dangerous.

Why do we fight so hard against maturity? Are the Red states suffering from some form of incurable Peter Pan syndrome? Do we value our childish ignorance so highly that we're willing to violate everything we believe and the rights of our neighbors to protect it? What's so attractive about the kind of ignorance that doesn't question authority even when it's being patently absurd?

Thirty years ago, psychologist Stanley Milbank did an experiment in which he had students give electrical shocks to other students who gave the wrong answers to questions. The shocks weren't real and the 'students' receiving them were actually actors but the students doing the shocking didn't know that. Milbank discovered that even when the 'students' being shocked were apparently writhing in pain, unable to breathe, and the subjects doing the shocking were in tears over what they had done, they continued to up the voltage when told to do so. Milbank concluded that his subjects were so trained to believe in authority that they wouldn't question much less refuse clearly illegal orders that purported to come from that authority.

Nothing much has changed, it seems, at least not in the Red states. Naivete intact, we are prepared to humiliate and abuse if told to do so. Why? Behaviour like this goes against everything this country has ever stood for, yet we do it. Why?

Until we get a handle on why Americans are so attached to and proud of their ignorance and supposed innocence, we will always be fodder for tricksters and con artists whether on the phone or in the White House.

It is with some trepidation that I return to blogging with flaccid writing muscles weak from disuse to take on the likes of Jeff Alworth. I should probably work my way back more slowly with posts on safer topics like the coming Rove indictment or the Miers nomination, and get the muscles back in shape. On the other hand, there's something to be said for just diving into the deepest water you can find when jumping off a cliff, and anyway, blogging is about saying the things you think need to be said and responding to whatever needs responding to, and a post Jeff wrote on Friday had me thinking all weekend until the words started tumbling out and I found that I was talking to myself. Out loud. A sure sign that blogging is required to vent the potential implosion. So here goes.

In a post called 'Democratic Party: Which Direction?', Jeff analyzes the current state of the party and then offers some thoughts about the direction it should go in. The analysis is spot-on, as usual--

The question about the direction the Democratic Party is timely. This weekend, the Oregon Dems (my home-state party) will gather to discuss the question (characterized as Winning the West). As if on cue, a group closely aligned with the Democratic Leadership Council yesterday released a report that offers a defense of the moderate position.

The problem, as I see it, is that both camps have approached strategy in reaction to the success of the GOP machine. The liberal base thinks it's adequate to brush off the old mid-century ideas (from our three-letter champions, FDR, JFK, and LBJ) and re-sell them to a duped population. Moderates think we can borrow the most popular planks from the GOP platform--those that don't make a mockery of our own platform--and repackage them as Democratic ideas.

--but his solutions, while better than usual, still manage to make the same basic mistake that everybody else's solutions make.

So we need to redifine politics again--not by reacting to the definitions set by the Republicans. There are two challenges confronting the country in the 21st Century, and both are new. The first is the collapse of the environment. Far from an abstract problem, as we've seen with Rita and Katrina, its effect can be to kill hundreds and sack an economy--all within a matter of days. The second is the threat of terrorism, which the GOP has been uniquely incompetent to address. There are other important issues as well--the economy central among them. Democratic views on the economy, however, have not substantially changed over the course of 50 years. The Party still depends on labor and will always side with the interests of the middle-class and poor over the wealthy and corporate. Whatever waffling we've seen is mostly political maneuvering. Social justice issues, likewise, are not up for discussion. We will never abandon a woman's right to choose nor equal rights nor civil liberties.

In addressing all of these issues, we must return to the language of equality and connectivity, but transform it to 21st Century realities. The environment and the war on terror are problems whose solutions can't be solved by cowboy politics. They cross regional and national boundaries, and they tie us together--through the air, water, and through our increasingly mobile society. We the Bush administration to thank for at least one thing: they've shown the cowboy politics frame--that we can shoot our way to peace and buy our way to climate stability--is an undeniable failure.

He may ultimately be right but he's still putting the cart before the horse by talking about 'issues'. He's also underestimating the debilitating effect of the DLC on the thinking of the party as a whole. Let's take the last first.

The Democratic party has at this point absorbed the idea that America has turned to the Right--which it has--and adapted its policies to suit. It believes it has to do that to get elected and getting elected is its first priority. That belief pretty much traps them in a reactive mode: they are following what they think people believe, not leading them. All that does is convince people now trained to believe it that the Dems are opportunists who will say whatever they think they have to say to get elected. More importantly, that's what it makes them.

The modern Dems don't just waffle, they follow trends and they vote the polls. The DLC makes policy and direction decisions based on polls. There are very few modern Democrats who have demonstrated a lick of immutable principle or marked a line they won't cross. They've continually violated core Left values with votes for the bankruptcy bill, tax 'reform', the war in Iraq, and annual budget bills that attack the poor, the environment, and labor and favor corporate interests over the public interest, to name a very few out of the many in the last five years. Those votes weren't forced on them. Nobody held a gun to their heads. They were perfectly willing to throw their traditional constiuencies to the wolves in the name of expedience. That make them precisely what conservatives label them: gutless cowards who will bend whichever way the wind blows.

Moreover, the effect of the DLC's propaganda over the past two decades or so, along with their support for candidates with similar mindsets, means that the modern Dermocratic Party is shot through with right-leaning corporate 'centrists' who actually believe the Pub agenda is correct but think it 'goes too far too fast'. Even if they learn to talk 'the language of equality and connectivity', they won't act on it because it goes against their core beliefs and the core beliefs of their corporate sponsors. This--'The Party still depends on labor and will always side with the interests of the middle-class and poor over the wealthy and corporate'--is, unfortunately, mythology. It isn't true. Time and again the DLC-dominated Dems have done exactly that: sided with the wealthy and the corporate over the middle-class and the poor. There is no sign that they are going to abandon that policy of betrayal anytime soon. And personally, I wouldn't be willing to bet that they wouldn't at some point abandon the rest of your issues as well if those, too, offended their corporate backers.

Face it, Jeff: the DLC has had almost 20 years to make the Democratic party lazy and scared, a shadow clone of the Pubs, and it has succeeded. The Democratic party isn't pretending to be the Republican-Lite party. it is the Republican-Lite party. That's how it sees itself and that's who gets promoted in it, Dean notwithstanding. They'll do less damage than the radcons if they take over, but the party's direction will not fundamentally change.

As for the first proposition--the cart before the horse--it's undeniably true that the radicals on the Right have brow-beat the American electorate into believing a bunch of hooey about how Social Darwinism is some form of tough-love and that corporate interests are their interests, too. Before we can get them to even listen to rhetoric about 'inclusion' and 'equality' and 'connectivity', we're going to have to explain what the terms mean and then convince them all over again that those are laudable goals worth fighting for. The radical Pubs have put us in the position of having to first educate the population to the idea that 'freedom' means more than being allowed to make more money than your neighbor, that 'equality' is about more than quotas, that 'the public interest' isn't code for 'ripping off the taxpayer', that 'liberty' is more than an obligation to defend greed, and that 'security' is more than protecting yourself by using your neighbor as a shield.

That's a long-term effort that's going to require courage and being willing to lose to make your point. The modern Democratic party is flat not up to it. In fact, it's not even interested in it. Any discussion like this is wasted if it's pegged to a party that won't listen much less act.

I've been pretty sick the last couple of weeks and haven't been up to blogging--or much of anything else except sleeping. I'm feeling a little better now but while I still can't take on a substantial post, I've been reading a bit and ran into some things I wanted to pass on.

* Mustang Bobby, who has a theatrical background, watched the Emperor's press conference and has some thoughts about how he looked.

He seemed bored, frustrated, and he repeated his lines as if he was tired of saying them over and over again. He appeared to be defensive without being provoked, even handling the part about showing compassion for the poor and the destitute as if it was somehow a tough thing for him to own up to acknowledging that there was a problem. More than once I thought of one of Bob Newhart's old routines, even down to the stammer and the REM.

* Juan Cole takes on the Plame Affair and minces no words.

The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department official, had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. Everyone should remember that when former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill decided to come out with a tell-all memoir about being in the Bush cabinet for a year, he proclaimed, "I'm old, I'm rich, and there is nothing they can do to me" (or words to that effect). Then all of a sudden the Bush administration was finding signs of classified documents in O'Neill's book, implicitly threatening him with spending the rest of his life in jail for having revealed government secrets. O'Neill feebly protested that he had not had access to classified documents. But all of a sudden he disappeared from the airwaves. He had discovered that there were, too, things that could be done to him. He must have been astonished that the Bushes of Kennebunkport would behave like Vladimir Putin. Everyone always underestimates the malevolence of the Bushes of Connecticut.

* Rob from realtique went back to New Orleans a couple of days ago to try to rescue some animals belonging to friends. His description of what they found is as spare, tight, and enlightening as anything Hemingway ever wrote.

We drove down Carrollton, in Mid-City, searching for a house not far from the initial 17th St. levee breach. The sister of the man who lived in the house had called me while we were driving to New Orleans, asking us to rescue her brother's cats. He'd been injured in the storm and, she said, needed something to live for. Along the way, we ran into a couple of official animal rescue volunteers in a white van. We gave them the address of a 9th ward Yorkshire Terrier on our list, the pet of a nursing-home resident, who was sure her dog was dead. They gave us air-filter masks and agreed to check on the dog.

After driving down a few streets covered in a dingy film, past innumerable abandoned cars detoxing from the flood waters they'd bathed in, we found the house. The water line almost reached the top of the first floor. An old car in the back of the driveway looked like someone dumped their trash on it. We made our way through an obstacle course of absurd litter on the outside stairs--the sort of stuff that would be on a porch, hinting at all the stuff that the waters had moved from one home to another.

The door was locked. Breathing through an air-filter mask (without it, the air smelled like sewerage), I tried to pry open the door with the crowbar. Several frustrating minutes later, I switched to the axe. But it's a stubborn door and the wood on the other side of the frame is strong. Kicking helped a bit, especially when I accidentally hit the panes of glass in the middle. They shattered on the other side and we crawled through.

* Ron Bryneart looks at HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson's certainty that "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

Along with his responsibilities at H.U.D., Alphonso Jackson is one of the top officials charged with rebuilding New Orleans after the devastation incurred by Hurricane Katrina.

But Jackson plays another role for the Bush Administration: civil rights offender.

* Mark Schmitt on the Miers nomination:

The reaction from the right to the Miers nomination should be a reminder of just why the Rove strategy of playing to the hard-right base is such a dangerous and unwise political choice: There's no turning back from it. It's like a Ponzi scheme, you have to continually borrow new money/enthusiasm to pay off the old, and you can never turn back. You can never decide to turn your Ponzi scheme into an ordinary business, because you're in too deep. And that's exactly what's happening on the right: they have been continually promised that the big payoff would come with a Supreme Court nominee to replace O'Connor, and instead they get a giant, "Trust me, it'll work out," at just the moment when "trust me" won't work anymore.

And like any Ponzi scheme, when it collapses, the collapse is total, and absolute.

* xymphora goes after the largely-ignored Scooter Libby.

Scooter Libby sports the name of a child and has the relatively innocuous title of Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, but he is really the second most powerful man in the United States, and thus the second most powerful man in the world (I don't count the Alcoholic-in-Chief). He is the architect of the web of lies which led to the attack on Iraq...

Adam, who lives in Austin, warns that Miers isn't the 'centrist' she's projected to be.

Others have pointed this out, too. To fatalistically accept Harriet Miers as "the best we can get" is foolish. She's hard-core Texas Mafia, she's been an associate and reliable Go-To-Gal for Bush since his run for governor of Texas in 1994. Bush nominated her for one reason, and one reason only: he knows she'll deliver. What she'll deliver hasn't yet been specified, but she knows where her bread is buttered, and she's gonna dance with the one what brung her. Like Roberts, like Rice, like Gonzales, like every goddamn single other appointee, Bush and Rove know exactly what they're going to get. They don't care about actual skill or talent (if they did, why John Bolton for UN Ambassador? Why is Rummy still at Defense?) - they want compliance.

And that's what they'll get, because you've got people like Harry Reid doing everything but spooging on Miers. Don't take her at her "word" that she doesn't have an agenda. The Dems' performance on Roberts was pathetic enough - I've seen tougher questioning on Oprah, fer chrissakes.

* Lindsay Beyerstein thinks DeLay is going to jail, maybe for a long time.

Tom DeLay's fancy lawyer Dick Deguerin appears to have made a colossal tactical blunder.

DeLay probably had a deal with the prosecutor to plead guilty to the relatively minor charge of conspiracy (maximum sentence, 2 years). Then Dick Deguerin tried to fight the charge that DeLay was supposed to plead guilty to. Hours later DeLay was indicted on two much more serious charges, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering (maximum sentence, life and 20 years, respectively).

Finally, Michael Berube raids Google's 'Future Search' function and discovers what Miers will do since we have no idea what she's done because she hasn't, well, done anything.

It’s all right there on the Future Internets: her famous declaration in early 2006 that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided . . . and that a woman’s reproductive rights should be predicated on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment instead! Pro-life groups were especially outraged when Justice Miers closed her opinion with a sentence that many legal analysts interpreted as a repudiation of the American religious right: “Psyched you all out, didn’t I?” Justice Miers then followed this decision with a stunning series of rereadings of Fourteenth Amendment case law, reaching all the way back to the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which first established the principle that corporations are “persons” under the Constitution. “No way are corporations persons,” wrote Miers in June 2006, deftly undoing 120 years of precedent and restoring to the Fourteenth Amendment its original function of extending the scope of U.S. law to actual living people (particularly freed slaves). “Check out Section Three of the Amendment if you don’t believe me,” Miers wrote, in the famously colloquial style that won her legions of admirers and epigones throughout the legal profession. “There’s no question that ‘person’ means ‘a guy’ or ‘a woman,’ not ‘a commercial entity.’ How could Acme Corp. or Amalgamated Products Inc. serve in Congress or as an elector, or be a state legislator, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, et cetera et cetera et cetera? It doesn’t make any damn sense.”

As for me, I'll be back to posting by next week, though with stuff like this to read, you probably won't notice.

If there was any doubt left that the extremists nutbags are running the Publican party, this should erase it.

A political dustup over congressional efforts to name a Berkeley post office for a longtime councilwoman and left-wing activist intensified Wednesday when Republican leaders accused Maudelle Shirek's supporters of being soft on communism.

"Cardoza votes for naming U.S. post office after reputed communist,'' blared the headline of a release sent out late Wednesday afternoon by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The attack was aimed at Rep. Dennis Cardoza of Atwater (Merced County), Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Garden Grove (Orange County) and 43 other Democrats in districts that could be in competition in the 2006 elections.

"I think when people know that Dennis Cardoza voted to name a post office after a communist who is also in favor of cop killers, they'll be shocked, even in San Francisco,'' said Carl Forti, a committee spokesman.

Cardoza and Sanchez were among 181 Democrats who voted for Rep. Barbara Lee's effort to name Berkeley's main post office after the 94-year-old Shirek, who spent 20 years on the Berkeley City Council and decades as a union organizer, anti-war protester and senior activist.

With the support of the entire California congressional delegation, Democrats and Republicans alike, Lee put the measure before the House on Tuesday for what she expected to be pro forma approval as is done for most requests to name post offices across the country.

But when Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, stood up and demanded a roll call vote, Lee's GOP support evaporated and the House voted 215-190 against Lee's measure. King accused Shirek of supporting the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer and, in an interview, of having "an affiliation with the Communist Party" for her support of Berkeley's Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library.

In a lengthy telephone call to Lee, King said that he "would not want children to go by the post office and see that woman as a mentor and leader," Lee said Wednesday.

"How can an Iowa member of Congress say who a California city should honor?" the still-angry Lee asked. "This was outrageous.''

Being outrageous is nothing new for King, who is known as the conservative's conservative in the most heavily Republican district in western Iowa.

King, 56, lives just outside Kiron, Iowa, population 269. He spent six years in the state Senate and ran his own construction company before being elected to Congress in 2002. He was re-elected last year with 62 percent of the vote in a district that is more than 93 percent white.

Earlier this year, he called for blocking off the Mexican border with a 2,000-mile chain-link fence, topped with razor wire. He wants to see the income tax replaced by a national sales tax. One of his bills would require the federal government to conduct its business in English, while another would bar union organizers from seeking work at nonunion businesses and trying to organize them.

He has called for Congress "to assert its rightful constitutional authority over the courts'' so that they respect the law and the Constitution and described the alleged torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as "what amounts to hazing."

While in the Iowa Legislature, he sued Gov. Tom Vilsack to block efforts to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in state government and led the fight to make English the state's official language. King tried unsuccessfully to pass what he called a "God and Country" bill that would have made schools recognize the United States "has derived its strength from biblical values and the forces and philosophies of free enterprise capitalism and Western civilization."

---

"The whole world is to the left of Steve King,'' said James Hutter, a political science professor at Iowa State University and secretary of the state Democratic Party. "But being conservative is expected in his district.''

It was the support King received that bothered Lee most, however.

"He's on the fringe,'' she said. "But it was interesting to see how even the (Republican) moderates bowed to him and all but nine voted with him.''

What moderates?