Mydd.com has some things to say about Clinton 2.0. The post was obviously written by a man. Many believe that a Clinton candidacy would actually split the women's vote deeply over the work/stay-at-home divide. I tend to agree with them.

But it if this blogger is right in his assumption that Hillary will definitely have the nomination in 2008, then we better start thinking about how she can win right now.

First step: let's figure out their strategy. If you thought I was being funny about the ability to come up with Republican strategies in five minutes, then you haven't read what E.J. Dionne had to say this spring:

The late Lee Atwater pulled the first George Bush from a 17-point deficit to a clear victory in the 1988 election. A relentless political strategist, Atwater was brilliant at finding killer issues that buried political opponents.

Atwater told his campaign's crack research director, Jim Pinkerton, to assemble his staff of "35 excellent nerds" to unearth the attacks that could defeat Democrat Michael Dukakis. Pinkerton was instructed to fit them all on a 3-by-5 card. Atwater generously allowed his lanky top nerd to use both sides of the card.

The nerds' exertions produced this: Dukakis was a "high-tax,
high-spending" governor who opposed nearly every defense program. The Massachusetts governor was skeptical of the Monroe Doctrine. He was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" who opposed the death penalty. He presided over a flawed prison furlough program that let a convicted murderer out of prison, and he vetoed a bill requiring students to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Dionne went on to talk about how Rove operates the same way. Read it. It will blow your mind, man.

Therefore, most important question of all for you in any election is this: WHAT IS GOING TO BE ON THAT EFFING CARD??!??!

I'll take a stab at Hillary 2008: Hillary Clinton is a feminazi: a selfish woman who is too career oriented to care about traditional motherly things. This combined with her frigidity drove Bill, weak and un-Christian as he is, to his sinful, adulterous lifestyle. The Clintons are therefore an example of a broken liberal family, which is the inevitable result of taking women out of the home and kitchen and God out of the schools. It is the inevitable result of 1960s radical feminism and Seven Sisters elitism. (Note: find stories about her well connected lesbian friends from Wellesley.) Hillary is also that cold, calculated ambitious women that every man hates to work with and that every woman loses out to in the office place. She is your cold, cozying up to the boss, backstabbing professional woman, your nemesis at work. And, unlike you, professional exurban woman, she is in a position of unimaginable power. (Note: find stories from women who knew her and can attest to her ruthlessness and obsession with power.) Finally, she is a lesbian and Bill and Hillary simply had an arrangement that he could do whatever he wanted and she would suckle off his rise to power and have some lesbian sex on the side. And she killed Vince Foster and Whitewater was shady.

There it is. Campaign 2008 if Hillary is our nominee. Good news is that we are now hip to this. If we do a good enough job building liberalism back up, we may have a shot. But always remember, this can no longer be about elections. I think we will lose 2008 and even if we get elected, we will still not have a liberal majority. We are in the wilderness. In this sense, I do think Hillary symbolizes some of the best things about our party even if she will lose.

So bring it on. We are at war and I think the battle of Hillary is an important battle for us to fight even if we lose.

Folks this is easy. If you are pro-life, then you should be liberal for a simple reason: law does not dictate behavior, common sense does. Your morality is attached to the behavior aspect of abortion, not the legal aspect, (ie, the act of aborting a life is wrong).

We have had drug laws in this country for about 100 years but anyone who has been to high school knows that the law does not stop people from using drugs. Prostitution has been shunned for hundreds of years, yet finding a prostitute is as easy as going to the phonebook or looking in the weekend guide. No, I am not Bill O'Lufa. I don't look, but that is kind of the point. You don't even have to want one in order to know where to find one. Hell, all of Texas still speeds on the highway even though it is against the law. Abortion is the same way: blanket mandates will not decrease abortions and never have.

This column presents a great way to frame this debate for liberals.

Step one: admit that in most situations, you oppose abortion just like most people. You think it is wrong.

Step two: argue that mandates don't dictate behavior. We all speed and take rolling stops.

Step three: abortions decrease with five very liberal policies: adequate health care, employment, education, access to contraception and sound sexual education, which is like a form of preventative medicine. And when they are allowed medical care prevents the deaths of mothers.

The point is this: most people are anti-abortion even if they are pro-choice. Unless you are liberal, however, you favor policies that directly cause more abortions and more deaths attempting them.

Therefore, if you believe abortions are morally unjustifiable then it is morally unjustifiable to be a conservative.

So many blank eyes and bored faces, so little time.
Walking thru New York during the aftermath of the Election 2004, I couldn't help notice that it seemed like another terrorist bomb had exploded. Those on the front line voted against Bush, partially in fear of their safety, yet they weren't the ones who got to decide who was their president.

Now, more than ever, people have truly given up on politics. The young people, my generation, didn't save us from Bush. They are either too misinformed or possibly too bored to go to the voting place.

I am working on a screenplay that explores the possibility of winning an election based on the youth vote, but after watching this unelection unfold, I somehow doubt myself. We want to have faith in my generation, but there is something seriously wrong about us.

Whatever the answer is, and we will find an answer, the current democractic strategy does not work. Let's all cut thru our egos and pride: we lost the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and what's looking to be the Supreme Court. Democrats have totally, completely lost.

The Republicans are better.
Now we can all just go back into our holes and worry about our own direct lives, or we can start getting smarter. My own personal life is in the toilet right now, with a recent break up and just a lack of purpose, and, if you may let me hypothesize, I would assume your own life is not doing that great, thank you very much.

So let's put some of our nervous energy towards trying to save the world from ourselves.
Oh, I gotta go, I have to do some overtime today (Saturday) because I can't afford to live in NYC.

Here is your information. This is "Dr." McIntyre's number: (334) 353-8473 or email mmcintyre@medicaid.state.al.us. Courtesy of Atrios.

Let's refocus a bit. What is the aim of this blog? I set it up to do two things:

1) Engage in a discussion of fundamental liberal values and how they relate to fundamental conservative values. Where do they clash? Where are there chances for liberals to persuade people who believe they are conservative but may not be at heart? How do we best frame liberal values and issues and how do we best do battle against fascist conservatism? In short, this blog will help us get our philosophy in focus for the purpose of communication and dissemination of our ideas and ideals.

2) Compare notes about on the ground activism with the intent of powering local response and local activism whether that is in a Red or Blue state. Here we share ideas about how to fight the good fight and get our message out, not simply think about it and post about it. Which fights do we pick? Who do we hold accountable? How precisely to we create more liberals in our communities and across the country? What does effective GOTV entail and how do we speak with people with whom we vehemently disagree?

These are the two aims of this discussion. If we keep at it, this blog can be a center of learning for us. We are all energetic, smart and dedicated citizens. We must convert that into action and bust through the bottlenecks.

Don't worry. I love you.

Why do they insist on calling it talk radio? To bloviate is not to talk, even though it is how Bill O'Lufa's describes his job every night.

Anyway, some people may be wondering what to do about talk radio. There is some talk about pressuring the FCC to revoke local station licenses because of the gross unfairness in their programming. I am not entirely sure what I think about the free speech issues involved in that, but if you want to hold grassroots as well as possibly federal political sway against local talk radio, here is how to start:

1) Get a few folks together. Power in numbers. I suggest starting a blog and attending some kind of meetup of local citizens and talk about it there. With the blog, you monitor local talk radio. Record all of the awful things they say, and why they are bad for democracy.

2) Decide on a specific goal. Do you want to target a specific host for saying something particularly bad? Do you want to push the station into taking fairness more seriously? Do you want them to stop a particular thing? Decide on these things. I am thinking that a good aim would be to pressure them on the issue of fairness and push for them to pickup an Air America Radio show or to seek out a local liberal talk show host. I don't know just yet.

3) Draft a petition for the station and a boycott notice for the station's advertisers. Local media make their money mainly through advertising revenue. The quickest way to get them thinking is to pull their purse strings. Get this petition signed and sit on it. Have the boycott notice ready to go. If you are going to use the appeal to FCC fairness rules, make sure you research the specific things you believe they are doing to violate them and what the rules are.

4) On your blog, post a list of all advertisers on the station. You can either listen to the station and write it down or you can do a Google search. The info may be on the station websites, too. I am not sure.

5) Place a phone call to the advertising sales manager and very politely tell him/her that you have a group of citizens who are organized and ready to take action based on the grievances laid out in your petition. This action will be a boycott of businesses advertising on their station.

6) Have your GOF (group of folks) call the advertisers and tell them that you intend to boycott them because they support a company that is abusing public airwaves for private pursuits. Talk to them about your numbers and why you think your grievances are important. Talk values with them! This is a chance to engage in a discussion about conscience.

7) Keep on it. There will be movement in your direction. This is almost precisely what made Sinclair Broadcasting back down in the final weeks of the campaign. They were going to run an hour-long Swiftie movie and they were ultimately unable to do so because of this method.

Always remember, however, that it is your values that drive you so talk about them positively and forcefully. Always be polite. Never yell. We are on the side of the public, so there is no need to get angry with the public.

I do need to note that I didn't make this method up. I read about it at talkingpointsmemo.com (Josh Marshall's blog). But, I do know that it can work. I followed the SBG story very closely. Any other suggestions are welcome in the comments section.

Conservatism frequently attempts to destroy rational thought, for example, by using language in ways that stand just out of reach of rational debate or rebuttal.

Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality. The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations.

The main idea of public relations is the distinction between "messages" and "facts". Messages are the things you want people to believe. A message should be vague enough that it is difficult to refute by rational means. (People in politics refer to messages as "strategies" and people who devise strategies as "strategists". The Democrats have strategists too, and it is not at all clear that they should, but they scarcely compare with the vast public relations machinery of the right.) It is useful to
think of each message as a kind of pipeline: a steady stream of facts is selected (or twisted, or fabricated) to fit the message. Contrary facts are of course ignored. The goal is what the professionals call "message repetition". This provides activists with something to do: come up with new facts to fit the conservative authorities' chosen messages. Having become established in this way, messages must also be continually intertwined with one another. This is one job of pundits.

To the public relations mind, the public sphere is a game in which the opposition tries to knock you off your message. Take the example of one successful message, "Gore's lies". The purpose of the game was to return any interaction to the message, namely that Gore lies. So if it is noted that the supposed examples of Gore lying (e.g., his perfectly true claim to have done onerous farm chores) were themselves untrue, common responses would include, "that doesn't matter, what matters is Gore's lies", or "the reasons people believe them is because of Gore's lies", or "yes perhaps, but there are so many other examples of Gore's lies", or "you're just trying to change the subject away from Gore's lies", and so on.

Oh yes, it does get better. It is glorious. I am blinded by the sheer luminosity...

Paul Fussell wrote a history of the impact of the Great War on Western culture entitled The Great War and Modern Memory. Here is an interview in which he discusses some of his ideas. Fussell drills down to the very heart of the conflict between war and society, despair and optimism, cold facts and ideal pursuits.

I think that modern society is still very much reeling from the impact of World War I; it has never gone away. It was the great disappointment surrounding that fantasy of the benign march of progress, guiding us toward true freedom and harmony through mutual interdependence. It still stands as a touching and frighteningly close to heart tragedy. If you thumb the grains of our hopes and fears, you will find the imprints of World War I still there, the original sin of our age.

It would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. How easy is it to write bigoted half-truths? I bet if I were shameless that I could too, although admittedly most of my natural tendencies to be prejudiced ended in my early years of schooling when I learned about Rev. Martin Luther King and his Civil Rights movement. I mean, this is basic stuff, but do I get to head one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington? No. Maybe I should think about it though...

Anyway, apparently homosexuals are really just communists. This according to "Dr." James Dobson:

This is the real deal: Most gays and lesbians do not want to marry each other. That would entangle them in all sorts of legal constraints. Who needs a lifetime commitment to one person? The intention here is to create an entirely different legal structure.

With marriage as we know it gone, everyone would enjoy all the legal benefits of marriage (custody rights, tax-free inheritance, joint ownership of property, health care and spousal citizenship, and much more) without limiting the number of partners or their gender. Nor would "couples" be bound to each other in the eyes of the law. This is clearly where the movement is headed.

Thank you "Dr." Dobson of Focus on the Family. So gays want to get married so that they don't have to get married? Whaaaaa? Why? Oh, I see, because they just want state money to sleep with lots of people... See, he doesn't mean to do this, but this exposes the class war that conservatives only dare speak about in coded terms: he hates the idea of extending legal rights to consenting adults in long term relationships precisely because it would cause more litigation as those rights were supported by social services and the Dept. of Justice, etc. just like civil rights.

Bad for bidness=totally immoral, apparently. See these folks don't want to admit it, but they just don't want businesses or the state to have to pay benefits to more people regardless of whether it is fair or not. Well, at least we got that cleared up.

Now, can we go on and extend these BASIC RIGHTS now? Please? Thank you!

Just a quick preview of what is to come...

I am continuing conversations with friends of mine who worked on GOTV efforts this year. There is a lot of frustration out there with the Democratic Party apparatus and both people who I have had extensive conversations with worked in independent groups of very different organizations. I will give a thorough rundown of these conversations soon. If you have anything to add in this capacity, post a comment.

I am also looking into Democratic prospects of knocking off Warren Chisum, a Texas State Representative who has proposed a Hate Amendment to the TX Constitution. Last time he ran for reelection unopposed and got about 29,000 of 38,000 votes cast in his district. His district also has 38,000 Hispanic residents according to state information. I need to do more research into the local Democratic Party there and whether or not recruiting a good candidate is viable. But, this is part of what I think might be a good grassroots strategy of ours: punishing specific politicians for specific proposals that highlight our value differences. It is kind of a variation on Karl Rove's preference for hitting them where they believe they are strongest.

In very red states, this could be a way to tear down uncontested conservative frames publicly without the risk of loosing a whole lot (because we are already in the minority). A way to build positive frames may be to become involved in issues like this, with solutions like this. Anyway, even if we lose fights, fighting the good fight intelligently (meaning complete commitment to active framing of liberalism) will make a difference.

Christopher Hitchens has not only had a glass of Kool-aid, he took a dive in the industrial vat so it could seep into his skin through osmosis. Sweet, sweet Kool-aid.

I can go into other aspects of this piece later if it generates discussion, but this piece fundamentally betrays a conservative hostility to an important component in eventual victory in the war on terrorism and totalitarianism worldwide: understanding our enemies. Conservatives have used outlandish rhetoric and charges to intimidate anyone who tries to explain terrorist behavior in a social scientific manor. They say that seeking the truth, whatever it may reveal, on this issue is tantamount to apologizing for terror.

Let that bounce around in your head for a bit and you might realize the enormity of the anti-truth, anti-science impulses alive in our society today. Any discussion of our enemies' motivations and patterns of behavior beyond "they are evil and therefore do evil things," no mater how revealing it may be, is denounced as closeted support for OBL. I don't think anyone would call Hitchens a scientific thinker. He is a very impulsive and passionate commentator, though I am sure he would disagree. But, when he claims that Bush is a force for secularism and that leftists support totalitarian terror, my brain just wants to s h u t d o w nnnn...

Surprising that Bush opposes equal rights for homosexuals because he is soooo in bed with Osama Bin Laden.

"Whaaaa?" you say? Read more here...

If there is any doubt, which I doubt there is, that we are dealing with a president that doesn’t understand how pivotal a time we are living in, then check this out.

As a fundamental tenant of liberalism, we must reject corporate greed as a suitable policy player. Indeed, we might not even have a planet to work in if we don't win out soon.

Arianna Huffington is smoking something here. Folks arguing that Kerry should have done this or that and there would have been a landslide must have gone to the same college as the Iraqi Information Minister. Remember him? There are no Americans in Baghdad...

First, this was a close election and a landslide was probably never really in the cards anyway. More importantly, the Republican noise machine (their continuing long term framing effort) is flexible, kind of like a certain insurgency we can't seem to break. It has a well established (I should say well bloviated) meme for everything liberals try to throw at it.

Let's experiment: We put up Wesley Clark. "Mike, he's a well decorated General. He would be impervious to their attacks!"

But, I can make up the Republican strategy in five minutes here: they will start floating rumors about why he was fired, how he must be the latest in a line of lilly livered liberal generals who go "extreme peacenik" in later years (like World War I French generals who wanted to avoid war with fascists at all costs) and how he is a weak willed flip flopper who used to be a Republican and just wants to be President and has an axe to grind. And Rove is brilliant? I think he is just shameless.

Back to Arianna. Bottom line is this: until we have the power to frame debates, every candidate we run with every possible style (stiff MA senator to smooth talking Southerner) will either meet the same fate or will have to govern as a Republican-lite once in office.

It was too late for Kerry to compete on those grounds even as early as the end of the primary campaign in March because the frames had already been set (as they had in 2000 and 2002). If he had come out as an anti-war candidate, they would have deployed their predictable Dean strategy- tying him to every fuming anti-war person ever caught on tape saying something outrageous. Some well-paid opinion "elites" still seem to believe that the Democrats could have won this election. I am highly skeptical. And there was no scenario for a landslide. Keep puffing away...

If you want to look at a political stance that can adequately incorporate both Christians and politics, and remain faithful to the liberal cause, then the Christian Socialist Party in Great Brittain is a prime example.

Their website claims about the party: "Christian social teaching has led many people into politics. 150 years ago Christian socialism made connections between the teachings of Christ - justice, equality, compassion - and socialism. The Christian Socialist Movement is the organisational voice of Christian socialism today, promoting values based socialism and faith based action. It publishes the Christian Socialist magazine as well as policy pamphlets. It organises educational events to help the Churches and other faith communities' work with politicians for the common good."

On a lighter note:

I once read something about conservatives, and it went something like " If you are a conservative, You have to believe that socialism hasn't worked anywhere, and that Europe doesn't exist." How true, how true.

Well, this is a nice depressing read for bedtime. While I do think there are benefits to the internet, I think that this guy has zeroed in on some disturbing aspects of internet culture. I don't think these concerns should be taken lightly. The internet creates a giant sea of information and if you are floating on it, that sea moves in huge swells. Unlike wave patterns in the ocean, I think the internet inflates the importance of every minor ripple, regularly creating impressions more in the manner of tsunamis, whose compounded energy smashes the shore indiscriminately.

If there was a check to the kind of mob described in the piece, it might be a credible media establishment that actually set itself apart qualitatively from internet gossip. But they will do anything for a story, from giving hatchetman John O'Nixon of the Swift Boat Vets a hearing as if he is a journalist to showing beheading videos made precisely to use the media for fear (meaning the media quite clearly has complicity in terrorism of the lowest sort).

Anyway, the world is definitely a place of far more limited possibilities now than it was in the 1990s as the internet is being harnessed more for hate and anger than freedom and liberation. And it only took September 11 to unleash the demons.

Is there a way out? Maybe we should talk more about framing humanity than even framing liberalism. I am shaken by this. I think humanity is headed down a very dark path here, indeed. And yes, this goes way beyond George Bush.

Why do they "recommend" that he do things he clearly will never do? Is it some psychological need to seem fair to the guy? And why is that need still there after this election? Bush is the worst president we have had in 100 years. His character flaws are not calculated, they are inherent. It is really important that liberals stop pretending that they can appeal to some common ground with him. There really is none. He is not interested. Let's get to building a real opposition.

And I really hope Ruy Teixeira and Ron Brownstein are not saying what I think they are saying, which is that Democrats need to move to the right in order to win elections. We hear panicky versions of this argument every single time we lose. I will forgive them; they are political scientists meant to crunch numbers. But as activists and citizens, we cannot surrender ourselves to this style of thinking any longer.

Why?

Because people are simply not convinced by obvious pandering. And as long as the conservative frames dominate in national political discourse, we will always look like we are pandering if we don't fit those frames (frames which are necessarily set up to make us look bad).

Case in point, Kerry's athleticism. He is well known amongst people close to him as a physically fearless person. But every time he rode a bike, or went windsurfing or did that hunting thing or went to a ballgame, it looked like he was pandering because the frame "liberal=cosmopolitan wuss" was at work even when it wasn't invoked by Republicans. And come on, they were practically calling Edwards gay just because he was friends with him. Once he became the "fourth most liberal member of the U.S. Senate" his gayness (wow, I still don't believe they got that one going) vastly drowned out even his Southern drawl.

At the grassroots we must work tirelessly to remind people of our essential values every time we speak about politics, which will help create positive (and largely correct) frames for liberalism. I am sorry, but if we simply view this as being about elections and not about a very real war of ideas in this country, then we will continue to lose.

Frames, people, frames!

If you can get past all the advertisements, this article is worth reading. I think it addresses some important questions that the evangelical and social gospel Christians should be asking and answering. If nothing else, it offers a perspective of the world that I share being both quite religious, and quite liberal.

I will say, however, that the article does not go far enough - while it is good to expect President Bush to address these concerns, he would have to fundamentally alter his political position to do so. Instead, we need to work to "create" (I recognize that is a problematic term) our own candidates that share the value systems that were important to Christ - peace, compassion, healing, focus on the margins etc. and create (much less problematic here) a vocabulary that addresses those concerns across political spectrums.

Any suggestions on how we can do that? I feel like I am a lot of talk, and not much implementation.

I will stop quoting Chris Bowers from mydd.com, but it is good to know that some of our discussion is matching up with some of the major bloggers. I sense the beginnings of a unifying values message:

Liberals stand for a humanitarian worldview maintained by a strong commitment to good works as the backbone of public policy. We are inclusive of other beliefs on other issues because these are our essential unifying positions. We believe in this: to the extent that you have something extra to give, give a little to your neighbor. Use your gift most effectively by giving it to a government populated with people who will see to it with great care that your money is spent lending a helping hand to your fellow man in the best possible way. Remember, the government should act as a broker for the people's interests. Don't give all, give some. And demand that your representatives are guardians of the cause you elected them to serve.

If there is any doubt, this Hate Ammendment is going to happen. Why? Because the fight will highlight the culture war that the bigot-in-chief loves to keep smoldering. That, Rove and Co. bet, will keep the Republicans in power for a generation. Hey, and if they lose, even better because it'll make it a bigger issue and bring more people over to his side in coming years. The bigger the loss, the bigger bigot-in-chief's gain.