Month: October 2013

The Republicans could barely agree to giving us a cloture vote to debate the confirmation of the freaking general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board. That is seriously unhinged behavior. And even fewer of them actually vote to confirm him.

This insanity has to stop.

J-Rube has always been shrill, but her bile is now focused largely on other Republicans. I don’t know who she thinks her audience is, but her columns are more enjoyable now that she’s saying sensible things to mental cases rather than inane things to sane people.

I took a look last night at the Senate seats up for reelection in 2016, and I think the Democrats could potentially net a gain of ten seats if their presidential candidate wins a convincing victory. I don’t know how well the Democrats will do next year, but assuming that they don’t lose their majority, the next president could be a Democrat who has more than 60 senators. Maybe when I have more time, I will spell out which seats I think the Democrats can win, but the seats are going to be there for the taking.

As to the House, it may take two elections to get back the majority, but it looks like we’re approaching the point where it might be possible in 2014. The catch is that we don’t know how much damage the Republicans plan on doing to their brand between now and next November. If the elections were held today, I’d bet against winning enough seats, but I’d expect that Republicans’ majority to be whittled down to something like 223-212. That’s doesn’t give them much of a cushion.

Pachacutec writes a much more measured and accurate post-mortem of the Netroots movement than Jerome Armstrong managed to do. But he’s still hung up on the idea that Barack Obama had contempt for the Netroots, didn’t need us, actively attacked us, and sucked all the organizing power out of us. So much of this is about pride. A lot of people in the Netroots worked hard to build infrastructure and organizations only to look up and see that Obama had created the best political organization in our lifetimes without their help. And they resented not being a part of it. Some of the ListServs I belonged to back in those days were non-stop bitchfests from organizers and opinion leaders (the “professional left”) who felt disrespected and unneeded. They interpreted it as contempt, but the truth was that Obama was building a brand that didn’t have much use for the most vituperative voices on the left. It wasn’t about ideology so much as it was about tone.

Obama offered the promise of a post-partisan kind of politics, which many partisans took to be a rebuke. If you have read The Audacity of Hope, which is itself a major branding effort, you can make your own decision about the degree to which Obama sincerely believed in the possibility of a post-partisan political world versus the degree to which he was tapping into something that people were longing for in a savvy and successful effort to win the nomination and the presidency. I believe it was a mix, with some measure of sincerely aspirational naivety definitely involved. His strategy worked like a charm from an electoral point of view, but set him up for a rude awakening when he actually took office in the midst of an epic economic collapse. Partisan progressives had the right to say “I told you so,” about the hopelessness of dealing with Republicans in good faith. But they didn’t have the right to say “I told you so” about the effectiveness of his campaign messaging. Obama had won, and won with enough coattails to enact the most progressive agenda in his first two years that this country had seen since the height of Lyndon Johnson’s powers in 1965-66.

Pachacutec is correct about the limitations of the Netroots, both financially and demographically, but he hasn’t identified the most important failing. The Netroots split into Establishment and Anti-Establishment factions as soon as Barack Obama was elected and started naming his cabinet and chief of staff. This was partially a natural thing that is just in the nature of the left. Some people believed in American institutions and wanted to seize control of them, and some people didn’t believe in American institutions and wanted to transform them. For the latter group, the financial crisis was an opportunity to nationalize the banks and the health care fight was a chance to snuff the medical insurance industry out of existence. And they immediately moved from an anti-Bush posture to an anti-Obama posture. I respect the people who felt morally or intellectually compelled to go that route, but they chose to write themselves out of the progressive Establishment. They didn’t have the right to expect jobs or that their strident criticisms would be welcomed. And they never had the right to speak for all progressives. The vast, vast majority of progressives wanted to support the new president, and still do.

Ironically, Paracutec doesn’t seem to realize the implications of the following:

Progressive blog audiences mostly reached more educated white boomers, and, with some exceptions, more men than women. Progressive blog audiences geographically reached all over the US, but their very dispersion made it difficult to get anything going on the ground where people of like mind could coordinate together. That limited audience reach and growth that could translate into coalition building and political power.

It’s true, as Ian hints, that our white boomer audiences were still mostly people who believed in institutions. They grew up that way. They were collectively shocked at the direction of the country and the corruption of media and government in the Bush years, but they were not radicals. They still believed in these institutions. Most wanted reform, not fundamental systemic change. They still listened to a lot of NPR.

That the Netroots audience was filled with mostly male well-educated white boomers who believed in American institutions meant that they were a natural fit for Obama’s presidency, which is why most of them supported him and continue to support him. But the progressive movement is dominated by younger people and people of color and unionized workers, many of whom are not all that well educated. These groups have been, in the main, substantially more supportive of the president than the Netroots audience. The Anti-Establishment wing of the progressive movement is influential but vanishingly small when compared to the overall American electorate. They are so suspicious and contemptuous of power that they run away from it even as, in many cases, they resent not being offered a place within the system.

This group was an important part of the Netroots movement, but they were always a minority within it. And the portion of the shunned Anti-Establishment wing that moved from supporting Hillary Clinton to being holier-than-thou progressives? Those folks are just hucksters.

Progressives now have more power in Congress than at any time in most of our lives, and I don’t see that as a failure for the Netroots.

Pachacutec writes a much more measured and accurate post-mortem of the Netroots movement than Jerome Armstrong managed to do. But he’s still hung up on the idea that Barack Obama had contempt for the Netroots, didn’t need us, actively attacked us, and sucked all the organizing power out of us. So much of this is about pride. A lot of people in the Netroots worked hard to build infrastructure and organizations only to look up and see that Obama had created the best political organization in our lifetimes without their help. And they resented not being a part of it. Some of the ListServs I belonged to back in those days were non-stop bitchfests from organizers and opinion leaders (the “professional left”) who felt disrespected and unneeded. They interpreted it as contempt, but the truth was that Obama was building a brand that didn’t have much use for the most vituperative voices on the left. It wasn’t about ideology so much as it was about tone.

Obama offered the promise of a post-partisan kind of politics, which many partisans took to be a rebuke. If you have read The Audacity of Hope, which is itself a major branding effort, you can make your own decision about the degree to which Obama sincerely believed in the possibility of a post-partisan political world versus the degree to which he was tapping into something that people were longing for in a savvy and successful effort to win the nomination and the presidency. I believe it was a mix, with some measure of sincerely aspirational naivety definitely involved. His strategy worked like a charm from an electoral point of view, but set him up for a rude awakening when he actually took office in the midst of an epic economic collapse. Partisan progressives had the right to say “I told you so,” about the hopelessness of dealing with Republicans in good faith. But they didn’t have the right to say “I told you so” about the effectiveness of his campaign messaging. Obama had won, and won with enough coattails to enact the most progressive agenda in his first two years that this country had seen since the height of Lyndon Johnson’s powers in 1965-66.

Pachacutec is correct about the limitations of the Netroots, both financially and demographically, but he hasn’t identified the most important failing. The Netroots split into Establishment and Anti-Establishment factions as soon as Barack Obama was elected and started naming his cabinet and chief of staff. This was partially a natural thing that is just in the nature of the left. Some people believed in American institutions and wanted to seize control of them, and some people didn’t believe in American institutions and wanted to transform them. For the latter group, the financial crisis was an opportunity to nationalize the banks and the health care fight was a chance to snuff the medical insurance industry out of existence. And they immediately moved from an anti-Bush posture to an anti-Obama posture. I respect the people who felt morally or intellectually compelled to go that route, but they chose to write themselves out of the progressive Establishment. They didn’t have the right to expect jobs or that their strident criticisms would be welcomed. And they never had the right to speak for all progressives. The vast, vast majority of progressives wanted to support the new president, and still do.

Ironically, Paracutec doesn’t seem to realize the implications of the following:

Progressive blog audiences mostly reached more educated white boomers, and, with some exceptions, more men than women. Progressive blog audiences geographically reached all over the US, but their very dispersion made it difficult to get anything going on the ground where people of like mind could coordinate together. That limited audience reach and growth that could translate into coalition building and political power.

It’s true, as Ian hints, that our white boomer audiences were still mostly people who believed in institutions. They grew up that way. They were collectively shocked at the direction of the country and the corruption of media and government in the Bush years, but they were not radicals. They still believed in these institutions. Most wanted reform, not fundamental systemic change. They still listened to a lot of NPR.

That the Netroots audience was filled with mostly male well-educated while boomers who believed in American institutions meant that they were a natural fit for Obama’s presidency, which is why most of them supported him and continue to support him. But the progressive movement is dominated by younger people and people of color and unionized workers, many of whom are not all that well educated. These groups have been, in the main, substantially more supportive of the president than the Netroots audience. The Anti-Establishment wing of the progressive movement is influential but vanishingly small when compared to the overall American electorate. They are so suspicious and contemptuous of the halls of power that they run away from it even as, in many cases, they resent not being offered a place within it.

This group was an important part of the Netroots movement, but they were always a minority within it. And the portion of the shunned Anti-Establishment wing that moved from supporting Hillary Clinton to being holier-than-thou progressives? Those folks are just hucksters.

Progressives now have more power in Congress than at any time in most of our lives, and I don’t see that as a failure for the Netroots.

It would be easier to understand Jerome Armstrong’s argument if he wrote in English because I don’t know what he means by “I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time” or “I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign.” The premise of his word salad is that the Netroots movement somehow failed. And I don’t really see it that way.

I think we were an organization that came together organically to achieve certain limited aims that we all pretty much agreed about, and that the movement splintered once those goals were accomplished because it turned out there were things we didn’t agree about.

There were technological and economic reasons that the Netroots didn’t endure as a united force into the Obama Era, too, and I’d say that our primary failure in that regard was an inability to realize that advertising wasn’t the right model. Obama showed the way with his army of small donors. If we had insisted on and worked collectively to build an army of subscribers who were willing to sign up to pay for free content, we might have been able to thrive economically enough to have actual political pull. But we directed our donors to give more to political candidates than ourselves. And then the advertising dried up. The users grew accustomed to free content and even learned to filter out our advertising so that our own most loyal readers were denying us revenue. But there were progressive values at play that hampered our vision. We weren’t doing it for the money, and our readers would have been suspicious of our motives if we had tried both to profit handsomely and assign ourselves as political leaders directing their money with prudence and wisdom.

But, back to Jerome’s argument, I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner’s agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn’t where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson’s libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.

I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama’s presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.

It’s telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand.

It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

According to his own telling, he moved from Edwards to Clinton not because of any policy differences but because Obama didn’t seem accountable to the Netroots Movement. I saw that complaint from the consultant class a lot around that time, and it always struck me that these people expected Obama to pander to them and offer them jobs. I would have liked that, too, but I never resented Obama for not needing me. I’m not sure what the Politico resentment is about in this context, but I don’t like the sound of “identity-politics cult” because it sounds an awful lot like he’s arguing that people only liked Obama because he was black.

I do know that he definitely lost me when he argued that the Netroots met its demise when it went all-in for Bill Halter’s primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln. I think everyone was frustrated with Blanche Lincoln, but by the time the decision was made to put chips into Bill Halter’s campaign, the progressive movement had been split into one giant camp that wanted to make ObamaCare work and one tiny camp that wanted to keep fighting over the public option long after it was dead.

As I see it, the Netroots arose in reaction to the push for war in Iraq. People who had been forced to scream impotently at their television sets suddenly found like-minded people in online forums and were given the ability to publish their ideas. We discovered that there was a huge population of people who could see the con that was going on and the role the traditional media was playing in pushing that con. We could see how complicit the Democratic Party had become, but also how beaten down they had become. They didn’t have the political courage to challenge the lies or the craziness of the Bush administration. It became our mission to tell the truth that wasn’t being reported on the cable news and the newspapers. It became our mission, first to prevent the war, then to tell the truth about it, and then to end it. That was the core of the mission. It spread into everything else the Bush administration and the congressional Republicans were doing.

After John Kerry failed to defeat Bush, we began to really get organized for the 2006 midterms, and we won that battle very decisively. Then (most of us) geared up to defeat the candidate in the Democratic primary who had authorized the war. We were successful in that, too. That was what we were built to do. That was what almost all of us agreed about. Yes, there were progressives who supported Clinton, some of them quite enthusiastically. And not all of them thought of the Obama supporters as an “identity-politics cult.” But online progressives preferred Obama in large numbers, and the offline progressives were even more emphatic in their preference for him.

What happened next is that progressives split up, with some still primarily concerned with continuing to take the fight to the Republicans and working to make Obama’s presidency as successful as possible, and others deciding to continue their fight in an anti-Establishment mode.

That the Netroots didn’t endure as a politically united force doesn’t mean that it wasn’t one of the most successful political movements in the last forty years.

When the movement got started, there were few progressives in the Senate. Off the top of my head, they were limited to Russ Feingold, Barbara Mikulski, and Tom Harkin. Today, we have Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono and Tom Udall and Al Franken and Martin Heinrich and Jeff Merkley. We don’t have to deal with Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson anymore.

And if you want to talk identity politics for a moment, we not only elected the first black president, but we got two women (one, a Latina) on the Supreme Court, the first black Attorney General, the first second black U.N. ambassador, and now the first black Secretary of Homeland Security.

The gay rights movement has had one giant success after another during the Obama Era, and tens of millions have been or will be helped by the health care reforms. I’m not going to list all the things that have been accomplished, nor will I try to imagine what would have been accomplished if the Republicans hadn’t decided to use scorched-earth tactics of obstruction.

All I know is that the Netroots changed the trajectory of American politics for the better, changed the Democratic Party for the better, and changed the media for the better. We have nothing to be ashamed about. We should actually get a lot more credit than we do.

Lastly, I don’t think I’ve said much of anything critical of Edward Snowden and I have no idea what Jerome means when he says that I defended bailing out the banks. I supported avoiding a complete collapse of the financial sector and defended on a limited basis how Tim Geithner handled TARP, although I began calling for his resignation at some point in Obama’s first term. In any case, I don’t feel the need to defend myself against charges I don’t even understand.

It would be easier to understand Jerome Armstrong’s argument if he wrote in English because I don’t know what he means by “I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time” or “I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign.” The premise of his word salad is that the Netroots movement somehow failed. And I don’t really see it that way.

I think we were an organization that came together organically to achieve certain limited aims that we all pretty much agreed about, and that the movement splintered once those goals were accomplished because it turned out there were things we didn’t agree about.

There were technological and economic reasons that the Netroots didn’t endure as a united force into the Obama Era, too, and I’d say that our primary failure in that regard was an inability to realize that advertising wasn’t the right model. Obama showed the way with his army of small donors. If we had insisted on and worked collectively to build an army of subscribers who were willing to sign up to pay for free content, we might have been able to thrive economically enough to have actual political pull. But we directed our donors to give more to political candidates than ourselves. And then the advertising dried up. The users grew accustomed to free content and even learned to filter out our advertising so that our own most loyal readers were denying us revenue. But there were progressive values at play that hampered our vision. We weren’t doing it for the money, and our readers would have been suspicious of our motives if we had tried both to profit handsomely and assign ourselves as political leaders directing their money with prudence and wisdom.

But, back to Jerome’s argument, I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner’s agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn’t where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson’s libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.

I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama’s presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.

It’s telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand.

It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

According to his own telling, he moved from Edwards to Clinton not because of any policy differences but because Obama didn’t seem accountable to the Netroots Movement. I saw that complaint from the consultant class a lot around that time, and it always struck me that these people expected Obama to pander to them and offer them jobs. I would have liked that, too, but I never resented Obama for not needing me. I’m not sure what the Politico resentment is about in this context, but I don’t like the sound of “identity-politics cult” because it sounds an awful lot like he’s arguing that people only liked Obama because he was black.

I do know that he definitely lost me when he argued that the Netroots met its demise when it went all-in for Bill Halter’s primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln. I think everyone was frustrated with Blanche Lincoln, but by the time the decision was made to put chips into Bill Halter’s campaign, the progressive movement had been split into one giant camp that wanted to make ObamaCare work and one tiny camp that wanted to keep fighting over the public option long after it was dead.

As I see it, the Netroots arose in reaction to the push for war in Iraq. People who had been forced to scream impotently at their television sets suddenly found like-minded people in online forums and were given the ability to publish their ideas. We discovered that there was a huge population of people who could see the con that was going on and the role the traditional media was playing in pushing that con. We could see how complicit the Democratic Party had become, but also how beaten down they had become. They didn’t have the political courage to challenge the lies or the craziness of the Bush administration. It became our mission to tell the truth that wasn’t being reported on the cable news and the newspapers. It became our mission, first to prevent the war, then to tell the truth about it, and then to end it. That was the core of the mission. It spread into everything else the Bush administration and the congressional Republicans were doing.

After John Kerry failed to defeat Bush, we began to really get organized for the 2006 midterms, and we won that battle very decisively. Then (most of us) geared up to defeat the candidate in the Democratic primary who had authorized the war. We were successful in that, too. That was what we were built to do. That was what almost all of us agreed about. Yes, there were progressives who supported Clinton, some of them quite enthusiastically. And not all of them thought of the Obama supporters as an “identity-politics cult.” But online progressives preferred Obama in large numbers, and the offline progressives were even more emphatic in their preference for him.

What happened next is that progressives split up, with some still primarily concerned with continuing to take the fight to the Republicans and working to make Obama’s presidency as successful as possible, and others deciding to continue their fight in an anti-Establishment mode.

That the Netroots didn’t endure as a politically united force doesn’t mean that it wasn’t one of the most successful political movements in the last forty years.

When the movement got started, there were few progressives in the Senate. Off the top of my head, they were limited to Russ Feingold, Barbara Mikulski, and Tom Harkin. Today, we have Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono and Tom Udall and Al Franken and Martin Heinrich and Jeff Merkley. We don’t have to deal with Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson anymore.

And if you want to talk identity politics for a moment, we not only elected the first black president, but we got two women (one, a Latina), on the Supreme Court, the first black Attorney General, the first black U.N. ambassador, the first black national security adviser, and now the first black Secretary of Homeland Security.

The gay rights movement has had one giant success after another during the Obama Era, and tens of millions have been or will be helped by the health care reforms. I’m not going to list all the things that have been accomplished, nor will I try to imagine what would have been accomplished if the Republicans hadn’t decided to use scorched-earth tactics of obstruction.

All I know is that the Netroots changed the trajectory of American politics for the better, changed the Democratic Party for the better, and changed the media for the better. We have nothing to be ashamed about. We should actually get a lot more credit than we do.

Lastly, I don’t think I’ve said much of anything critical of Edward Snowden.

It would be easier to understand Jerome Armstrong’s argument if he wrote in English because I don’t know what he means by “I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time” or “I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign.” The premise of his word salad is that the Netroots movement somehow failed. And I don’t really see it that way.

I think we were an organization that came together organically to achieve certain limited aims that we all pretty much agreed about, and that the movement splintered once those goals were accomplished because it turned out there were things we didn’t agree about.

There were technological and economic reasons that the Netroots didn’t endure as a united force into the Obama Era, too, and I’d say that our primary failure in that regard was an inability to realize that advertising wasn’t the right model. Obama showed the way with his army of small donors. If we had insisted on and worked collectively to build an army of subscribers who were willing to sign up to pay for free content, we might have been able to thrive economically enough to have actual political pull. But we directed our donors to give more to political candidates than ourselves. And then the advertising dried up. The users grew accustomed to free content and even learned to filter out our advertising so that our own most loyal readers were denying us revenue. But there were progressive values at play that hampered our vision. We weren’t doing it for the money, and our readers would have been suspicious of our motives if we had tried both to profit handsomely and assign ourselves as political leaders directing their money with prudence and wisdom.

But, back to Jerome’s argument, I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner’s agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn’t where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson’s libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.

I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama’s presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.

It’s telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand.

It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

According to his own telling, he moved from Edwards to Clinton not because of any policy differences but because Obama didn’t seem accountable to the Netroots Movement. I saw that complaint from the consultant class a lot around that time, and it also struck me that these people expected Obama to pander to them and offer them jobs. I would have liked that, too, but I never resented Obama for not needing me. I’m not sure what the Politico resentment is about in this context, but I don’t like the sound of “identity-politics cult” because it sounds an awful lot like he’s arguing that people only liked Obama because he was black.

I do know that he definitely lost me when he argued that the Netroots met its demise when it went all-in for Bill Halter’s primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln. I think everyone was frustrated with Blanche Lincoln, but by the time the decision was made to put chips into Bill Halter’s campaign, the progressive movement had been split into one giant camp that wanted to make ObamaCare work and one tiny camp that wanted to keep fighting over the public option long after it was dead.

As I see it, the Netroots arose in reaction to the push for war in Iraq. People who had been forced to scream impotently at their television sets suddenly found like-minded people in online forums and were given the ability to publish their ideas. We discovered that there was a huge population of people who could see the con that was going on and the role the traditional media was playing in pushing that con. We could see how complicit the Democratic Party had become, but also how beaten down they had become. They didn’t have the political courage to challenge the lies or the craziness of the Bush administration. It became our mission to tell the truth that wasn’t being reported on the cable news and the newspapers. It became our mission, first to prevent the war, then to tell the truth about it, and then to end it. That was the core of the mission. It spread into everything else the Bush administration and the congressional Republicans were doing.

After John Kerry failed to defeat Bush, we began to really get organized for the 2006 midterms, and we won that battle very decisively. Then (most of us) geared up to defeat the candidate in the Democratic primary who had authorized the war. We were successful in that, too. That was what we were built to do. That was what almost all of us agreed about. Yes, there were progressives who supported Clinton, some of them quite enthusiastically. And not all of them thought of the Obama supporters an an “identity-politics cult.” But online progressives preferred Obama in large numbers, and the offline progressives were even more emphatic in their preference for him.

What happened next is that progressives split up, with some still primarily concerned with continuing to take the fight to the Republicans and working to make Obama’s presidency as successful as possible, and others deciding to continue their fight in an anti-Establishment mode.

That the Netroots didn’t endure as a politically united force doesn’t mean that it wasn’t one of the most successful political movements in the last forty years.

When the movement got started, there were few progressives in the Senate. Off the top of my head, there was Russ Feingold, Barbara Mikulski, and Tom Harkin. Today, we have Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin and Mazie Hirono and Tom Udall and Al Franken and Martin Heinrich and Jeff Merkley. We don’t have to deal with Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson anymore.

And if you want to talk identity politics for a moment, we not only elected the first black president, but we got two women on the Supreme Court, the first black Attorney General, the first black U.N. ambassador, the first black national security adviser, and now the first black Secretary of Homeland Security.

Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is opposed to confirming any of President Obama’s three nominees to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. When told that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts supported filling the positions back in April, Sen. Sessions was incredulous:

Also an advocate of filling the court’s empty slots: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He backed the court keeping all 11 seats in an April 5 report issued by the Judicial Conference of the United States, which is headed by Roberts. Sessions, for one, hadn’t heard about Roberts’ support.

“I want to see that quote. Where’d he say that?” Sessions asked, jumping out of an elevator he’d just hopped into. When HuffPost cited the April 5 report, Sessions grumbled about Roberts not being a real Republican.

“He’s always advocating the court. He wants pay raises for staff,” he said. “Otherwise, he’s supposed to be conservative.”

That’s right. John Roberts isn’t a real conservative because he wants pay raises for judicial staff and thinks judges should serve in slots reserved for judges rather than having multiple vacancies just because Sen. Sessions is a dick.

The more that I inspect the 2014 outlook for sequestration, the more I believe that incumbent lawmakers will take an absolute pounding in the midterms if they don’t spend a lot more money. People are going to be furious.

Yes, to a large degree, there will be a blame game between the two parties, but I think it will be about why we can’t spend more money, not less. In particular, the hit to military readiness will be hard for Republicans to explain, even to their own base. And how can the Republicans plausibly argue that they haven’t fixed the sequester because the Democrats were unwilling to compromise?

They keep thinking that budget negotiations are a trap that will force them to increase revenues. I think that they desperately need that trap. The consequences of their ideology and of losing the presidential election are rapidly coming to a head.

I think the simplest way of looking at this is that the government is almost to the point where it will simply start breaking. Airports won’t be able to operate. Military divisions won’t be able to deploy. Massive inefficiencies will develop and become obvious. Manpower issues will make it hard to certify the safety of food, mines, and bridges. The government is no position to meet it’s legal obligations with the sequester level of funding in 2014.

Money cannot be moved around anymore.

So, once again, we can have a functional majority in the House, but it can’t be a Republican majority. These next six months are going to be messed up.