I’m going to let Frank open in his own words, because I think they’re not only telling of what Arizona’s “Papers Please” law means (I’m going to refer to it this way from now on) but also what this might mean for the rest of America:

Don’t blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

If many of Arizona’s defenders and critics hold one belief in common, it’s that the new “show me your papers” law is sui generis: it’s seen as one angry border state’s response to its outsized share of America’s illegal immigration crisis. But to label this development “Arizona’s folly” trivializes its import and reach. The more you examine the law’s provisions and proponents, the more you realize that it’s the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal immigrants — and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of America’s two major political parties.

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

That’s right – the primary issue here is not one of immigration, or even legality, or even resources and costs associated with illegal immigration – we know that now that we’ve seen proof that Arizona has subsequently – and quietly – banned ethnic studies from its classrooms. This is an all out attack on all things American that aren’t white, pale, and Christian, and you can bet that Latinos in America, legal or not, won’t be the last people to suffer this kind of blow.

We’ll see weaking of anti-discrimination laws around the country, we’ll see the broadening of police powers and discretion, the same way we saw in the Jim Crow days. We’ll see more laws popping up where the sentiment is essentially “if you’re white and not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” and if you’re of any other religion, creed, race, or even remotely different appearance or socio-political persuasion, there’ll be hell to pay. Make note of this – these people want to tear apart the United States as we know it and remake it in their own black-and-white “Leave it to Beaver” image.

Think I’m kidding? Rich continues with what these same people think of President Obama – they’re still convinced he’s not an American citizen, and that they can somehow invalidate his Presidency by wishing that he weren’t:

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama criticized Arizona’s action. “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers,” he said. “Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his.” Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week: “What has he said that sounds like American?”

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.

Now then, Rich dives into the tricky topic of race itself, and how as much as the Tea Party wants us to believe they’re not racially motivated, they entirely are. He’s absolutely right – this isn’t about Arizona, it’s about a wave of nationalist, far-right conservative hatred that’s sweeping across the country, piggybacked on the anger of white men that people they don’t resemble are starting to take their rightful place alongside them as the people who steer our country. His own remarks can close:

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama is. Even conservatives as seemingly above reproach as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina now invite the nastiest of blow-back if they fail Tea Party purity tests. When Graham had the gall to work with Chuck Schumer of New York on an immigration reform bill, the hard-line Americans for Legal Immigration punished him by spreading rumors about his private life as loudly as possible. Graham has been backing away from supporting the immigration bill ever since.

It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has “no idea where Obama was born.” The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in 1988, and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in other states. Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix’s convention hotels if you want to punish Arizona, but don’t for a second believe that it will stop the fire next time.

[ If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem ]
Source: The New York Times

An open letter from Frances Beinecke, of StopGlobalWarming.org, calls out the people who are out rallying against clean and sustainable energy because they somehow think that clean air and water is somehow a political debate and not a scientific one (or really, a matter of basic human rights). Quite honestly, the fact of the matter is that the mountain of evidence for climate change – and the fact that the so-called “climategate” scientists have all been absolved of their so-called doubt (proving the controversy was more political than scientific anyway) – has been largely ignored by the people who would rather stick their heads in the sand and ignore the real changes in the world around us is getting to the point where their ignorance is starting to threaten all of us.

Even otherwise progressive groups like minority groups in Washington are taking aim at clean energy and climate legislation because they fear for the economic impact on their communities. To aside to this for a moment, I completely understand and empathize with the black community and the latino community; anything that will put a strain on the economy will hit minorities disproportionally, but this kind of short-sightedness is what’s caused progressive movements for racial equality and opportunity to stall in the past. Unfortunately it’s the old guard of civil rights leaders who are more interested in their personal position than the best interests of the community that resist these kinds of efforts and then whip up their followers into a frenzy with fears of massive job losses and economic tragedy – rather than embrace the promise of the future, educate our children in new technologies and industries, send them off to be engineers and scientists instead of businessmen and women, in order to be ready for a changing world – we’re stuck clinging to the past, and to old ideas.

What was true in the black community then is true in the latino community now – as much as our respective minority communities rail against progress in America, we thus seal the coffins of our own social placement. When the rest of the world leaves us behind and the privileged minority in America is the only group with the wealth to keep up with it, we’ll still be left behind because we insisted on not adapting as opposed to staying ahead of the curve, where we really ought to aim.

And to people who seem to think this is a political debate, where opinion can be flung about as fact? Beinecke has a message for them:

Saying the Earth is flat doesn’t make it so. Nor does ignoring climate change make it go away. Still, we haven’t heard the last of the deniers. Now that clean energy and climate legislation is moving through the Senate and has the backing of the White House, we will likely hear more talk of “hoaxes” and “cons.” The fossil fuel industry, which has the most to gain by delaying climate action, is eager to amplify these false claims.

But next time you hear them, email, call, or write to the journalist or politician and demand to know where they get their facts from. If their standards are higher than the IPCC’s then they should be happy to share their evidence.

And when you want to get the truth behind the counterfeit theories, visit this great Union of Concerned Scientists’ Fact Checker site, where real climate scientists assess questions through the lens of science not politics.

But back to point; energy and climate are scientific realities that we need to acknowledge. Instead of clinging to an antiquated way of life, we need to collectively acknowledge that our current fuel sources and energy sources are unsustainable and work to forge new industrial paths that will help us live in tune with the world around us instead of in contrast with it. I, like a number of people who are both minorities and scientists as well as pundits, believe this is not only possible, but necessary for our collective survival.

[ Climate Change Is a Scientific Reality, Not a Political Debate ]
Source: StopGlobalWarming.org

I’ve heard this call in the past: that conservative America used to stand for something different than the fearmongering, warmonger, evangelical nonsensical rambling that prevails today, but I always have difficulty with the notion – the conservative America that I see today seems to have always been there, even back through the days of the civil rights movement – but according to some people conservatism used to not be as paranoid and hateful as it is today.

Russell King, for example, recalls his youth growing up in a very conservative part of America, and seeing a set of beliefs and principles that fit in well with the American consciousness as opposed to today, where they’ve seem to completely run amok:

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation: Come back to us.

Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from yours; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples – by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

He’s absolutely right, but then again, this open letter has always been an invitation to the political right. They’ve always stood on that ground; the side of fear and isolation, of homogeneity, assimilation, repression, and conformity, as opposed to diversity, education, liberation, and understanding. I’m always wary of commentaries like this because it makes me wonder whether or not the perspective of where conservatism has gone astray is ever not tinted by the rose colored glasses of the so-called “good old days,” which were great for the socially-sanctioned privileged minority.

Even so, King makes excellent points about exactly what it is about conservatism today that seems to awkward and crazy when viewed by people who are more aligned with mainstream politics. There was a time when even the staunchest conservatives wouldn’t find themselves in the forests of Idaho with machine guns training to kill all the brown people in America, or sending threatening letters to governors around the country with rambling, self-contradicting rants and manifestos about how America is clearly a corporate state.

Conservative America has without a doubt gone off the deep end, and while I take King’s letter with a grain of salt, I also acknowledge the fact that he has an excellent series of points about where they need to go if they want to rejoin the rest of us.

[ Exposing the Deep Swamp of Republican Hypocrisy -- How a Party Alienated the Nation ]
Source: AlterNet

I think we’re all angry, but John Cory, writing for Reader Supported News, is specifically angry at political coverage in the media today, and the way the media’s own language and methodology for reporting the news has changed the way politics in Washington is conducted.

Cory’s essay sparks the same kind of passion and insight that made me found Not So Humble so many years ago now, and keep updating it every time there’s something worth calling out to the masses.

Because I really can’t cut him up, here’s the essay in its entirety, with urging from me to go see the original at Reader Supported News and to support their efforts to bring sanity to political news coverage on the web:

I am angry.

I’m tired of pundits and know-nothing media gasbags. I’m tired of snarky “inside politics” programming. I am sick of the bigotry and hatred of “birthers” and faux patriotic cranks and their GOP puppet masters. And I’m really pissed at the Democratic Party that confuses having a plate of limp noodles with having a spine.

I’m going to vomit if I hear the word “bipartisanship” one more time.

It was “bipartisanship” that gave us this activist conservative Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that says money is free speech and corporations are persons except when real people try to hold them accountable for their greed and poisonous ways.

“Bipartisanship” gave us the Patriot Act and FISA and illegal wiretaps and two wars and “free speech zones” and “no fly” lists. God bless bipartisan America.

I get nauseated every time the Senate explains how it takes a super majority to do anything for the American people. Tell you what Senate Bozos, if it takes 60 votes to pass legislation than it should take 60% of the popular vote to get you elected.

When some Tea Party crank says, “I want my country back,” I respond, “No madam, you want your country backward.”

When a deficit-mongering politician says, “How do we pay for this?” Why not ask, “What did you Republicans do with the surplus we Democrats left you?”

When a compassionate conservative says, “Healthcare reform is socialism,” why not answer, “No, sir it is the moral and American way to care for people.”

Yes, I can hear it now: “You are naïve and simplistic. These are complicated matters and require sophisticated solutions. Democrats are a big tent and strive for balance. But Republicans block our path at every turn. We are thinking and considering new ways to work in harmony with everyone.”

Bite me.

The only thing you get with “harmony” is a Barbershop Quartet.

Democrats stop being Republican Lite. Stop whining about that mean GOP and their nasty messaging. Grow a pair, get a message, get a bumper sticker and hang it out there. Get some strong vivid talking points.

G-O-P = Greed Over People.

Greed Kills – jobs, people and the economy.

Terrorism is Viagra for Republicans: The more fear – the more excited they get.

When a soldier dies for America, who dares ask if they were gay or straight?

Don’t act so shocked, Democratic Party. Have you looked around lately?

You’re losing the young vote that showed up to elect Obama. You’re losing those old enough to remember real Democrats. Why? Because you don’t talk to them any more than you talk to me. You talk at me. You talk around me. You talk down to me. You talk about me. You don’t talk with me. And you don’t inspire and you don’t champion and without that you are nothing more than an arbitrator of compromise and abdication.

You are facing a bully. Deal with it!

Republicans want the country backwards. They champion superstition over science because it entrenches ignorance and bigotry and captures the easily frightened.

Republicans treat the Constitution the way they treat the Bible, with selective interpretation and selective application to others while exempting themselves from judgment and accountability.

Republicans preach the gospel of fear because fear is darkness and darkness covers their theft of civil liberties and Constitutional principles.

For thirty years the Republican Party has claimed the mantel of law and order but now quake in dread of the American judicial system when putting terrorists on trial. How criminal is that?

Torture is illegal. Period. John Wayne and Jack Bauer were not our Founding Fathers – only in the make-believe world of Republican drugstore-patriots.

DADT needs to be repealed. Now. It is unconscionable, immoral, and disgusting.

Empathy, compassion and equality are not pejoratives. They are American values proven again and again throughout our history.

Republicans believe that bake-sales and cookies for chemotherapy best determine the value of life and healthcare because life is a pre-existing condition and the “free market” should not have to take on such a high risk – after all, no one gets out alive, so why should the corporation be left holding the bag? Unless of course the price is right.

Republicans believe that government should keep its hands off healthcare but should put its hands inside a woman’s body.

Republicans believe in small government – small enough to hold the “right” people and small enough to be owned and operated by the “right” people. And who are the “right” people? Them. Not you.

Democratic Party, DNC, DLCC, DSCC or whatever your acronym – I have only one question for you: Really?

You can’t win against these guys? You can’t get your message out against these guys? You can’t give America leadership against these guys?

Really?

[ I Am Angry ]
Source: Reader Supported News

I’m with Marc Ash here – I still like President Obama, for a number of reasons, not just the ones he outlines here – personally, I think the President is doing an amazing job, especially against a disjointed Republican party that’s intent on just stopping any positive improvements he can make because they know the whole “saddle him with the problems and then blame him for all of it when he fails to fix it” isn’t going to work. He can fix it, he has the agenda, and he has the people behind him – they have to stop his activity and slow him down at all costs so they can continue to blame him for any negativity in the state of affairs.

President Obama also has to deal with a fractured Democratic party, a good portion of which is too conservative for its own good and unwilling to get in line behind some of America’s most needed priorities, like health care, jobs, and climate change. He’s got a lot of gridlock to deal with, and yet he manages to spend time pushing his agenda – and all without the help of his party, which is so busy defending itself.

Anyone who enrages Republican wing-nuts as effectively as Barack Obama can’t be all bad. In fairness, he does it without trying. In fact, just the opposite, he reaches out to them, which infuriates them all the more.

…

All of which can be argued to be “business as usual” for the American President. I guess what I like about Obama is that I get the sense that he would like to, for lack of a better word, change things. The missing link here is what kind of pressure is Obama facing behind closed doors? Even in the public realm we’re seeing unprecedented resistance to Obama’s attempts at reform, from conservative Republicans and Democrats alike.

I like the things Obama has tried to do: Health care reform, foreclosure mitigation, his comments on the outrageous decision by the Supreme Court’s five corporate lawyers to essentially duct-tape a for-sale sign to America’s electoral system. All of these things are a departure for an American President. He is indeed trying.

What concerns me are the things Obama has agreed to: An extension of the US Campaign in Afghanistan, an acceptance of the Bernanke-Geithner “Wall Street must be saved,” mantra, a don’t-ask don’t-tell policy on torture past and present.

I guess what redeems Obama for me is that he agrees to these things without losing his disdain for them. I wanted change, and in fairness change really hasn’t come yet. The intriguing thing is that Obama may actually want these changes too, and seems to. My impression is that he is meeting resistance in a number of significant forms.

Ash dives into the nature of the presidency and of how Obama may not have completely met up to the sweeping progressiveness that brought him into office (part of which I think is somewhat imagined frankly – I think a lot of progressives and liberals – myself included – made him into a super-liberal that he really never was, and never sold himself to be) but he’s pushing as hard or harder than anyone else could in this situation.

Ash also calls out a group that I’ve mentioned before too – fellow progressives.

The tea party crowd is merciless and relentless in their condemnation of Obama, but there is another group that stands just as ready to indict and convict Barack Obama: Progressives. Progressives are just as unyielding in their judgment of Obama, just as determined to derail, to thwart, to oppose, what they see as unacceptable governance. Progressive social objectives may be better reasoned and better argued, however, at the end of the day we may be seeing a Faustian synergy developing between two groups with diametrically opposed social agendas. Progressives and tea-baggers working on separate but parallel tracks to discredit the same president. Strange bedfellows indeed.

We now have a bona fide intellectual in the Oval Office – such things are rare. This is a man of understanding and insight, but his power to achieve change for good is not greater than the dedication of his supporters. Obama has to rally his supporters through a visible commitment to action, and his supporters must be willing to stand tall beside him.

[ I Still Like Obama ]
Source: Reader Supported News

Republicans are literally cheering over their victory in Massaschusetts – they’ve taken to caling Cosmo model turned Senator Scott Brown “Number 41,” meaning they now have the votes required to filibuster any and every Democratic bill that comes to the floor of the Senate, and they’ll gleefully use the power if they feel like it.

A number of Democrats really are ready to pick up the wrong lesson from this – it’s not that their agenda is too bold, it’s not that their agenda is too radical or out of step with what people in America want, it’s that there’s a conservative minority that’s very good at message control and spin, and they’re exceptionally good at framing any debate so the populist path looks like some horrible ideal. The only thing they’re better at than this is at turning out loud, angry, ignorant people to town hall events, and yes – now to the polls.

What’s needed here isn’t for Democrats to turn and tuck tail at the possibility of losing seats, what’s needed is for strong progressive voices to stand up and speak loudly and clearly to the American people – not just in support of progressive, populist policies, but also in support of President Obama. I’m not really a “candidate before principle” person, but the cannibalization among progressives of Obama and his platform has a lot to do with all of the recent criticism he’s received. The right is capable of unifying around a candidate they may not entirely like just so they make sure they have a seat at the table – the left is already starting to forget that before Obama came to the table, they couldn’t unseat the most unpopular President in modern history – it’s time we reminded Obama of his platform and the people he represents…without tearing him down and letting the right laugh at how little we support our own leadership.

Speaking of that constructive criticism, I’m not the only one who has some – Dan Kennedy, writing for the Guardian, has some choice words for President Obama as well:

Obama’s attempts to find compromise solutions did not stop Republicans from labelling him as a radical – or their nutty tea-party allies from calling him a “socialist” and worse. And, in retrospect, that was going to happen no matter what he did. His real problem has been that, to his supporters, he looked as though he’d been sucked into the very system he was elected to reform. Thus an Obama ally like Martha Coakley, a loyal Democratic apparatchik who’d long been criticised for her reluctance to take on political corruption in Massachusetts, became the perfect foil. (Coakley is best known for prosecuting Louise Woodward, a British nanny accused of killing a baby in her care.)

For Obama, the lesson of Coakley’s defeat is that he needs to start fighting for principle the way he did during his campaign. Had he demanded and won a stimulus package big enough to restart the jobs engine, and if he’d insisted on a stronger healthcare bill and pushed for quick passage, he’d be in far better shape politically right now.

There are signs that he and other Democrats understand their dilemma. The House of Representatives may pass the Senate version of the healthcare bill intact, thus bringing the months-long process to a merciful close. Maybe then they can start explaining to the public what’s in it for them – something they have failed at pathetically for many months.

Even more promising, Obama is finally starting to go after Wall Street. Now Obama is proposing a tax to recoup some of the billions of dollars in bailout money the bankers received, and has referred to bonus payments as “obscene” at a time when many “continue to face real hardship in this recession.”

In a sense, Obama may be lucky in comparison to Clinton 16 years ago. The Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich in 1994 snuck up on the Clinton administration. The Republican revolution symbolised by Scott Brown, on the other hand, is an early-warning signal.

The White House and the Democratic Party still have time to change course. Surely Obama knows his strategy of reaching out to Republicans was an utter failure. It’s time to try something new – not necessarily a lurch to the left, but a move toward passion and populism and idealism of the sort that impressed so many millions of Americans during Obama’s historic presidential campaign, and that we’ve seen so little of since then.

Hear hear. This is the key – Obama may not need to march left-wards just to please his progressive base (although I’d be happy to see it) – what he really needs to do is get the voices that helped get him elected back up front and center stage to help sell his policies and his case to the American people as the historic agenda that it is – and the one that will reassure the American people that his path is not the last guy’s path, and his path has a light at the end of the tunnel – and regardless of what those on the right want to say, it’s not an oncoming train.

[ Time for Obama to Fight Back ]
Source: The Guardian UK

Writing for TruthOut, Henry A. Giroux has penned a pretty thick piece about reclaiming the values that make America the great nation it is. In a time where so many Americans look at capitalism as a God-given right and not a privilege of a productive and healthy society, and assume that capitalism and democracy are somehow synonymous (they are absolutely not) it’s difficult for people to understand that the prosperity of the individual is immutably tied to the prosperity of the overall community. But how do we reclaim those values? How do we remember how important the community is when it comes to our personal achievements, and how much we should give back to the community when we do well for ourselves? How do we shake off this notion that when you’re successful you’ve “done it yourself” and “pulled yourself up by your bootstraps” and subsequently completely forget the people who inspired you and the places you came from or even worked your way free of?

Giroux describes the problem in eloquent detail:

This is a difficult time in American history. The American people have every right to demand to live in peace, enjoy the comforts of economic security, have access to decent health care, be able to send their children to quality schools and live with a measure of security. And yet, at a time when public values are subordinated to the rationality of profits, exchange values and unbridled self-interest, politics and the institutions and culture that support it become corrupt, devoid of agents and reduced to empty rituals largely orchestrated by those who control the wealth, income, media and commanding institutions of American society. As we have just witnessed in the debate on health care reform, the interests of the vast majority of American people for a public option and the extension of Medicare have been totally lost on a Congress that has been corrupted by power and its comfortable and shameful relations with those who control the military-industrial-academic complex. Public values, public spheres and the notion of the common good are viewed by politicians of both major parties as either a hindrance to the goals of a market-driven society or they are simply treated as a drain on the society, viewed as a sign of weakness, if not pathology. Ethical considerations and social responsibility are now devalued, if not disdained, in a society wedded to short term investments, easy profits and a mode of economics in which social costs are increasingly borne by the poor while financial and political benefits are reaped by the rich. Unchecked self-interest and ruthless, if not trivial, modes of competition now replaces politics or at least become the foundation for politics as complex issues are reduced to a friend/enemy, winner/loser dichotomies. The crass social Darwinism played out on reality television now finds its counterpart in the politics of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. For instance, the Republican Party’s only identifying ideology is that it is against anything that supports the common good and undercuts the profits of corporations and the rich. At the same time, Democrats have given up any vestige of a progressive politics and vision, aligning their ideals to conform to the interests of the lobbyists who now represent the not-so-invisible shadow government.

But how do we fix it?

Any progressive understanding of politics must challenge the assumptions that a transformative, democratically inspired notion of politics is in terminal arrest. While the conditions for such a politics may be under assault in what might be called a progressive administration, the basis for expanding and deepening democracy must be part of an ongoing struggle of engaged critique and civic courage. Critical knowledge grounded in pressing social problems offers individuals and groups an important resource for shaping the conditions that bear down on their lives, enabling them to resist those forces that want to narrow the meaning of political freedom and social citizenship. The production of such knowledge must be connected to the urgent call to revitalize the language of civic education and ethical imagination as part of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in a global world. Reclaiming the connection between the political and the ethical imagination as a pedagogical act may be one of the most crucial challenges facing the American public in the 21st century. If the institutions and conditions for a critical formative culture of questioning and civic engagement necessary for thinking beyond the narrow framing mechanisms of casino capitalism, militarism and religious fundamentalism do not come into play, it is conceivable that the current economic recession will be repeated within a few short years, and American society will slip into a form of authoritarianism that will give up even its most dubious claims on democracy. The current crisis has systemic and ideological origins, and both must be addressed through a new political language in which ethical imagination couples with a sense of educated hope and the need for collective agents willing to build alternative public spheres and viable critical social movements.

We currently live in a society in which the coupling of cynicism and multiple forms of illiteracy undermine the possibility of critical thought, agency and action. Public values or the public good when they are invoked are often couched in a nostalgic discourse about the New Deal or the Great Society. Rather than viewed as a legacy that needs to be reclaimed, reimagined and renewed, visions of the public good and the public values they embody are sequestered to the historical past, put on display like a museum piece that are worth viewing, but not an ideal worth struggling over. Without an urgent reconsideration of the crucial place of public values in the shaping of American society, the meaning and gains of the past that extend from the civil rights movement to the antiwar movements of the ’60s will be lost, offering neither models nor examples of struggles forged in the heat of reclaiming democratic values, relations and institutions.

Drilled down? Education, involvement, self-determination. The American people need to be awake and informed, reclaim their values as things that aren’t bygones or movements of years past, and they need to stay passionately engaged on the public discourse in order to hold public officials accountable without hesitation. The more informed the public is, the better off our community is, and the rapidly we move in the direction of a strong society, not just a strong private sector.

[ Reclaiming Public Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism ]
Source: TruthOut

Uh oh. Something’s going on in the conservative base, and it’s not pretty. Even though the article title may be misleading to the point where you might think that this so-called collapse is a good thing, it’s actually more likely that in order to prevent collapse the GOP will resort to even more underhanded and dirty political tactics and lies, and they’ll probably spin even more far-right wing than they already do on all of their core issues, everything from health care to equal rights to defense.

And make no mistake, an out of control far-right GOP that more resembles this so-called “Tea Party” would be incredibly dangerous to all Americans, not just to the more centrist Republicans they’re looking to oust. These people see the political center as too far left, and politicians like Bobby Jinda and Olympia Snowe are people who have betrayed their interests by even daring to work with Democrats on anything. It’s terrifying how much power is brewing in the far political right, and we need to shine the light on it before it’s too scary and dark over there.

Need more proof that I’m right?

According to a poll by Rasmussen Reports, likely voters in the 2010 congressional elections would rather cast a ballot for a candidate bearing the Tea Party brand than one on the Republican line.

In a national survey of likely voters, Rasmussen asked respondents to choose their favored political party for the congressional contests in what pollsters call a generic ballot. In a three-way contest, Democrats fared best, with 36 percent, while a hypothetical Tea Party came in second at 23 percent, and Republicans pulled up the rear with 18 percent. But there is one wrinkle in the Tea Party triumph scenario: There is no political party called the Tea Party, which might lead one to question whether Rasmussen is stirring the simmering pot of Republican Party politics.

Although the poll results look awful for Republicans, the absence of an actual established political party called the Tea Party makes the GOP the likely host party for Tea Party-endorsed candidates. While this could lead to some losses in 2010, the net effect will likely be to move the establishment GOP further to the right-wing Tea Party agenda of small government, lower taxes, union busting and virtually no social safety net.

Because there’s no political party yet formed under the Tea Party banner, Tea Party movement groups are supporting primary challenges to establishment Republican candidates, such as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who faces challenger Marco Rubio in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat. Tea Party activists could also, as they did with the Conservative Party in New York State during a special election last month in the state’s 23rd congressional district, work with an established third party in areas where the Republican Party machinery is locked up.

It’s really really terrifying. They don’t need to form their own party, they just need to hijack the one they already have, and considering how loud they are right now and with the support of the blind independents that will throw their votes behind anyone willing to don the mask of libertarianism or address their own privileged positions on social justice, (eg, the “I worked hard to get where I am even though I’m a white male gunowner who refuses to acknowledge his own privilege”) they have a chance of doing it.

[ Has the GOP Collapse Begun? Hypothetical "Tea Party" Outpolls Republicans ]
Source: AlterNet

Let’s start off with some of the opening text from this article, written for The Campaign for America’s Future by Natasha Chart:

Sen. Claire McCaskill said last week that the Senate wasn’t going to tackle the Clean Energy Jobs and American Protection Act this year because it would be “really, really hard.” If the Senate doesn’t handle it this year, will they deal with it in an election year? I think everyone working in progressive politics has heard the ‘it’s an election year’ excuse for why something terribly important can’t be done.

While McCaskill’s comment in particular was frustrating, she has a lot of colleagues in the Senate who obviously feel the same way. So I’d like to talk about some of the hard things people who aren’t Senators are facing that the CEJAPA legislation could begin fixing.

Chart goes on to discuss a number of amazing points – all things that the Senate really needs to take up before they get bogged down in election-year politics in 2010 and wind up doing little, if nothing at all in order to try and save their skins for re-election. Whether it’s health care, climate change, jobs, or transportation, all the Republicans need to do in order to prove to the public that the Democrats haven’t brought the change they swept in promising is continue to be obstinate and block any progress they can, and all the Democrats in the Senate have to do to play into their hands is do nothing for fear or not being bipartisan. At the same time, if they’re too aggressive, they risk earning the same rep that Republicans earned when they tried to push through changes using dirty tricks. It’s a fine line, but I’d rather see them push the barriers of progress than do nothing at all.

Let’s take a look at some of those issues that need to be addressed, shall we?

Earlier this year, a report came out on how the bottom 15 percent of the work force was having its wages stolen to the tune of $2.9 billion per year in, if you can believe it, three US cities. Workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are getting almost $3 billion dollars per year stolen from them by their employers. Workers can try to fight wage theft, but they can lose their jobs in the process, and face having to fight court battles against employers who lie and falsify records.

…

Speaking of climate, scientists’ concerns over the state of our planetary life support system are growing. While the scientific community was hopeful even three years ago that we could hold warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a global temperature increase that would already mean the loss of the Arctic sea ice and heat waves that might end corn production in the US Midwest, more of them are seeing signs that a business-as-usual approach will get us 6 degrees Celsius in global warming. If 6 degrees of warming happen, not only will many coastal cities go under water, but the North American and Eurasian temperate zones could become uninhabitable.

As some 350.org activists wrote, “There is no Planet B.”

…

The world can’t wait, and neither can Americans who need good jobs and fair pay. Our leaders need to step up and correct these problems responsibly, which they were hired to do by a public that is increasingly too sick, broke and tired to keep hounding them about it all the time.

The Senate needs to do its duty by the planet and their voters. They need to start cranking the gears down on emissions and get America back to work with all possible speed.

This is critical – the issues of climate change and jobs and unemployment are closely related – they can be fixed with some of the same forces, and those forces don’t involve leaving people to fend for themselves or shaming them into vanishing into the shadows away from the light of the public. Smarter energy solutions and green energy technologies could go a long way to putting the millions of Americans currently out of work back to work in high-paying, high-skill jobs that, as the President so often says, cannot be outsourced. It’s absolutely true – if only we have the political will to make it happen and private industry would get moving on it.

I’m doing Chart a horrible injustice here by snipping her post up to snag some of what I think are her most poignant paragraphs. You should very definitely head over and see her post in its original context. In the end though, her critical point is that the Democrats in the Senate can’t shy away from the issues in front of them because they’re “hard,” or because they require a great deal of political will. We elected them to do the hard things, work through the difficult problems, and help make America a better place. There’s a lot of work to do, I understand, and there are some seriously obstructionist Republicans on the other side, I understand that as well, but if anything that only adds to the urgency.

[ The Hard Things We Elect Them To Solve ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

I’m actually pretty tired of the hubub running about over Sarah Palin – like others have said, there’s a lot of focus on the messenger here that’s detracting from the lunacy of the message – we’re all so focused on beating up Sarah Palin for being a nutjob – and don’t get me wrong, she is – that we’re missing the idiocy of the message and the ideology that she represents in the far-right – an ideology that a dangerous number of gun-toting, moose-shooting, global-warming-denying, high-on-revolver-oil people actually represent. It’s terrifying, and we as a progressive community should be leveling our sights (lot of gun puns today, sorry) on the mindset and the masses behind her. The fringe right isn’t like a snake (as much as they might seem to be) – you can’t cut off their head and the rest simply dies.

But to that end, and to prove that point, it’s true that the rest of America simply doesn’t like Sarah Palin – and yet her book is a New York Times bestseller. It’s not that there’s anything good in there – there really isn’t – it’s that the combination of idiocy that she represents and the forces behind her are catapulting her to a kind of moronic success that we’d only seen in the George W Bush political years:

Really, Palin should be celebrating the America-hating, liberal media that keep that stupid thing in the news. Especially since Palin’s love is kind of unrequited. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, a majority of Americans don’t like her that much, and very few would vote for her if she absurdly ran for President.

The poll reveals that 52 percent see the former governor in unfavorable terms. Only 9 percent say they would definitely vote for her if she were a candidate for President in 2012. 53 percent said they would definitely not vote for her. According to the Washington-Post/ABC analysis of the poll, about half as many Americans said they would definitely not vote for John McCain in Spring 2006.

There’s a lesson in this for Palin and the GOP; that lesson is obviously that only 9 percent of Americans really love America.

Thus sayeth Tana Ganeva, AlterNet editor. It’s absolutely true, and while it’s a terrible opportunity to bring up Sarah Palin, it’s a great opportunity to sit with some of the more sensible minds in the progressive community and say “let’s stop attacking her, and let’s move on to what she stands for and the ignorance that is the bedrock of her and her followers’ ideologies.”

[ Guess What? Americans Don't Like Sarah Palin ]
Source: AlterNet