OneMind

On Huffington Post today, leading progressive thinker Robert Kuttner says out loud and clearly what i’ve been thinking and saying perhaps not so clearly for a long time. If the Democrats want to regain the real power the electorate clearly wants them to have, they need to start sounding and acting like Democrats instead of Republicrats or Demublicans.

He calls for two immediate steps to be taken if the Dems want to retain their majorities in Congress.

First, he says, scrap the filibuster. Amen.

Second, he says, it’s time to strip committee chairmen of their powerful roles if they don’t step up to the podium and act like Democrats. He points specifically to Max Baucus (Finance) and Chris Dodd’s likely successor on Banking, Tim Johnson. Dodd is retiring and Johnson, aka the Senator from Citigroup, is next in line for the chair of that powerful committee. Dodd’s been weak enough. Johnson would be a disaster, effectively giving the Republicans a strangle-hold control of the group for the foreseeable future. There are probably a handful of other Democratic Senators who should be unseated from chairmen’s jobs but perhaps something less drastic — like imposing some party discipline for a change — would work just as well with less emotion and in-fighting.

I like these ideas, both because they are overdue and because they are things the Democrats can control. If they don’t want to be turned out of control for their complete inaction, they must grow a spine and start acting like the power brokers they are. If they don’t, then we get the kind of government we deserve.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

The Republican National Committee (RNC) plans to vote in January whether to require any GOP candidate seeking party funds and support in an election bid to subscribe to at least 10 of the party’s proposed conservative principles. Party purity is the aim here and that’s not necessarily a bad thing (though it will almost certainly result in fewer Republican electoral victories). But some of these principles seem to me to have some pretty deep flawed thinking. Many are not legitimate conservative positions and those that are, are often misstated and misrepresented positions that are poking at straw men at best and dissembling at worst.

Read on for my point-by-point commentary and rebuttal:
Read more

The Republicans’ latest tactic for trying to derail real health insurance reform is to say we should “start over.” I’m starting to think they’re right, but not in the same way or for the same reasons they claim.

Since the GOP has made it abundantly clear they will not provide one iota of support for any health insurance reform bill, let’s go back to the drawing board and draw this one up the way it should have been done in the first place. Medicare for everyone. Single-player plan. Private insurance for supplemental coverage only and that only for a transition period. Call it socialized medicine. Who cares what you call it since you won’t support it regardless of label?

Public option is bad? Cool. Make it public mandatory. Let the GOP go on record as opposing extending the most popular government program in history to everyone (including them and their families, by the way; no more special coverage for Congress) and see how many seats they end up with at the mid-term table.

Enough is enough. These Republican scoundrels are voting for their own pocketbooks, not their constituents’ best interests. Make that clear and obvious and then work to get every single one of them tossed out on his keester.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

The GOP have become masters of the Big Lie in recent years, and when they go for it, the Dems typically try to take the high ground. It almost never works.

This time, with the Right engaging in some of the most disgusting and revolting tactics i’ve seen in many decades as an American political activist, Democrats are being advised to keep revealing the lies for what they are, speaking the truth, avoiding the confrontations the Right is trying so hard to create, and generally try to win on the merits. Typically, this approach has not worked well for the Left but this time the country is in such bad shape and the GOP is appealing to such a small and shrinking minority, it just might work and carry the day on Health Care reform.

If it does, it will be a rare victory and it my be enough to set the GOP on its backside for the next couple of election terms. I think the American people are really fed up with the lunatic fringe and that’s about all that’s left in the Republican party activist ranks any more. And the horribly uncivil way they are disrupting Congressional town meetings during the August recesses is so despicable that even many members of the Grand Old Party are cringing and disavowing any knowledge of their actions. Couple that with the coming spate of bad news about the Bush Regime and Prince Machiavelli Cheney’s back-room machintions, and you have the ingredients for the first Democratic sweep in a lot of years.

The trouble, of course, is that the American voting public have extremely short memories. If the country turns out to be anything less than perfectly run over the next 7+ years the GOP will rally with another negative campaign and perhaps the rise of some honest conservatives and the pendulum could well swing the other direction. So we have to enjoy the fruits of our victory while we can still taste them, assuming this “try to be honest” bit actually works.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

My friend Tony Seton, a long-time ABC News producer who is practically unique in my circle of friends and acquaintances in his stubborn refusal to toe any particular party or philosophical line, yesterday talked about media responsibility in covering the news. Briefly, Tony’s daily podcast “SetonnoteS”, took the national media to task for their focus last week on the deaths of Farah Fawcett, Ed McMahon and Michael Jackson when there was other, clearly more vital news to report.

This is a perennial battle. Tony says, citing an L.A. Times essay by Timothy Rutten, that “the editors and publishers are feeding the uninformed masses what they want, not what they need.” While that point seems valid on its face, it presumes that there is someone, somewhere who can determine with certainty and impose on the masses his or its own definition of what the people need. It smacks of elitism, something I know Tony doesn’t endorse wholeheartedly but in which I suspect he has a secret confidence.

Stories like the revolution in Iran, the major uptick in Iraq bombings as the date for U.S. withdrawal draws near, a Supreme Court ruling that favored privacy rights over government interest, and the legislative morass that is the U.S. Congress should, in Tony’s view, have been given higher play and more treatment than the human-interest stories surrounding the lives of celebrities of a nearly bygone era.

I’m inclined to agree, but I always hesitate at the brink of a blanket statement on that subject. It seems to me the topic is a bit more nuanced than Tony’s brief essay had time to discuss. For example, I have some perfectly intelligent friends who choose deliberately not to be too well-informed on topics such as war and poverty and crime because they’d rather stay focused on positive news and thoughts. In their belief system, such focus stands a better chance of helping to fix the problems of which they remain essentially uninformed than does focusing on them and fretting over them or even attacking them or declaring war on them. I’m not entirely unsympathetic to that view, either.

Another argument against Tony’s well-reasoned position revolves around the media’s need to make money. Back in the days when I was a daily newspaper reporter-editor, I recall a conversation with a grizzled old veteran boss in which I complained about his decision to kill an unflattering story I’d done on a city councilman who was also one of the paper’s biggest advertisers. “What about the right of free expression?” I demanded in my youthful passion for journalism. He put his pencil on his desk, removed his half-glasses, looked at me slowly and said, “Son, you’ll learn in time that the first right of a free press is the right to remain solvent.” I didn’t agree with him and I still don’t, but the viewpoint certainly has some credence, particularly at a time when print media in particular are disappearing down the drain of fiscal instability.

At the end of the day, though, I’d prefer to live in a society where media professionals (by which I decidedly do not mean the likes of either Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann, who are single-minded commentators rather than journalists) make reasoned and objective judgments about what I really need to know than one in which all journalism outlets are entertainment sources far more interested in audience share than in educating the public. The marketplace of ideas suffers when all the ideas are mundane.