As Kevin Drum notes, Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head with regard to Howard Dean’s election as DNC head.
For a while, Mr. Dean will be the public face of the Democrats, and the Republicans will try to portray him as the leftist he isn’t. But Deanism isn’t about turning to the left: it’s about making a stand.
Indeed. On both counts.
Is Al Franken going to run for the soon to be vacated Senate seat of Mark Dayton? I really hope not.
I have nothing against Franken. I enjoy his work and generally agree with his politics. But for him to seriously run for office would not be a good idea. I’m not up to speed on who might be an appropriate candidate (although the idea that David Wellstone might run sounded intriguing), but I’d definitely like to see someone less likely to be turned into fodder for a thousand fundrasing drives by the Right.
I could be wrong, of course. We shall see.
UPDATE: He’s not running.
I had Accounting class last night, which gave me the perfect excuse to ignore the President’s SOTU speech. Not that I would have watched it anyway.
Best morning-after quote goes to Jesse at Pandagon:
I honestly do think there was a typo in the propoganda sheet: this is the pwnership society, where we all get pwned by the government.
If that makes no sense to you, here’s a translation. In the wonderful world of gaming, when you utterly and completely kick someone or something’s ass, you ‘pwn’ it.
Seriously, though, what on earth is BushCo thinking with these proposed changes to Social Security? An ‘ownership society’ where you do not in fact own your own private account and any money left in it goes right back to the goverment when you die? If you’re not going to make a real change in the structure of Social Security, then why do it at all?
On a personal note, the debate about Social Security has gotten Scott and I to talk a bit about retirement planning. We’re going to have to ramp up our savings somehow, although how exactly we’re going to do that with me in school and a bunch of debt already is unclear. We do have several 401ks already but haven’t done much contributing the last 3 years or so due to our lowered incomes. Realistically we won’t be able to save much of anything until I’m back in the workforce full-time, and that’s 2 years off (and another student loan to pay off). It’s a little scary when I think about how badly we’re doing in retirement planning. So I try not to.
The one thing I do know is that should the BushCo plan come to pass, this family is not diverting one penny of their $ into a so-called ‘private account’.
Today’s must-read link is Ezra Klein on the politics of branding.
Although Democrats have often been called the party of identity politics (in the sense that a significant part of Democratic party politics has been built around a coalition of ‘identity blocs’ such as women, gays, Latinos, etc), Ezra contends that actually it’s the Republicans who have done a much more complete and successful job of it:
Over the past 30 years, Republicans have successfully merged identity with politics, the importance of which is almost impossible to overstate. When your party affiliation becomes enmeshed with your sense of self, attacks on your candidate become attacks on your person, and thus ends any hope of being convinced out of your position. No longer are you dealing with policy or evaluating arguments, now your personal defenses are up, your worth is being called into question, and the rightness of your original position is transcendentally important.
And he’s got a really good point. One big problem with identity politics as practiced by Democrats has been that it has not yet managed to promote a sense of overall party unity.
In some ways the Republicans have had it easier. Their membership is not very diverse, so it’s easier for them to create that feeling of commonality that has allowed so many republicans to feel their political identity is a part of their core self. Democrats have not done a very good job of convincing people that, say, a working-class Latino union member and a tenured gay university professor have a true common cause despite all the surface differences. It’s certainly not an easy job, but it’s more and more obvious that it is a vital one.
Markos and the gang over at Daily Kos are taking a stand on Alberto Gonzales’ nomination for the post of Attorney General. In light of my post earlier today about making a difference, sign me up, too.
Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.
As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales’s advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Convention, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales’s legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law’s undoing.
In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales’s endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”
Legal opinions at the highest level have grave consequences. What were the consequences of Gonzales’s actions? The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality – views which he expressly reasserted in his Senate confirmation hearings – inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world.
Michael Posner of Human Rights First observed: “After the horrific images from Abu Ghraib became public last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the world should ‘judge us by our actions [and] watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.'” We agree. It is because of this that we believe the only proper course of action is for the Senate to reject Alberto Gonzales’s nomination for Attorney General. As Posner notes, “[t]he world is indeed watching.” Will the Senate condone torture? Will the Senate condone the rejection of the rule of law?
With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.
Signed,
Fiat Lux
Supposedly it’s the “hook ’em, horns” of the Texas Longhorns, but who knows for sure. It’s definitely not a very Presidential thing to do.