Author: PsiFighter37

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

Last week, the increasingly irrelevant Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) released a platform called the American Dream Platform. As it is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pet project for the DLC, one might be interested to see what the intellectual heavyweights that claim the ‘centrist’ mantle of the Democratic Party (despite hiring people who sound oddly like foaming-at-the-mouth Republicans) had to offer. When one clicks at the above link, you get this optimistic editor’s note:

Editor’s Note: Due to the large size of these files, and increased website traffic, these files may take a few moments to load.

One would think that such a foreboding warning could mean that this document may carry some intellectual heft to it. But alas, if you actually read the PDF version of the ‘book’, it’s a mere 12 pages long. For a document that had the backing of such think tanks as the Center for American Progress, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the New Democratic Network, I would have thought that some real thought would have been put into this so-called ‘initiative’. Instead, what you end up with are populist-sounding claims that have absolutely no concrete policy proposals backing them up.
The introductory paragraph goes a little something like this:

Over the past six years, America has seen far too much politics and far too few ideas. When our leaders fail to provide an opportunity agenda, the whole country pays the price, from businesses struggling to create good jobs to the hard-working American middle class struggling to provide a better life for their children.

The American Dream Initiative is a challenge to the nation to remember what too many of our current leaders forgot. America’s strength in the century to come rests on the strength of the dream that got us this far. America will be a richer, safer, smarter, and stronger nation when everyone willing to work for it has the chance to get ahead.

Aside from the fact that the DLC has no ability to frame a compelling message, you will notice that there is a conspicuous absence of foreign policy content in this matter. Admittedly, this isn’t the stated goal of the ADI; it explicitly states that it is about economic policy. However, considering that Americans consider the war in Iraq to be the main issue leading up to this year’s elections, it’s just another example of the tone-deafness that the DLC has repeatedly demonstrated. It could also have to do with the fact that they were one of the biggest cheerleaders in the run-up to the war, and their star – Clinton – is the target of much anger in the grassroots do to her non-position on the war.

Let’s delve into the ‘substantive’ matters, though. Here are what the DLC calls the ‘pillars of a new opportunity agenda’:

• Every American should have the opportunity and responsibility to go to college and earn a degree, or to get the lifelong training they need.
• Every worker should have the opportunity and responsibility to save for a secure retirement.
• Every business should have the opportunity to grow and prosper in the strongest private economy on earth, and the responsibility to equip workers with the same tools of success as management.
• Every individual should have the opportunity and responsibility to start building wealth from day one, and the security and community that come from owning a home.
• Every family should have the opportunity to afford health insurance for their children, and the responsibility to obtain it.
• In order to expand opportunity for all Americans, we must demand a new ethic of responsibility from Washington: to put government’s priorities back in line with our values–and its books back in balance–by getting rid of wasteful corporate subsidies, unchecked bureaucracy, and narrow-interest loopholes; collecting taxes that are owed; clamping down on tens of billions

of dollars in improper payments and no bid-contracts; and restoring commonsense budgeting principles like pay-as-you-go.

You will notice that every point includes the words opportunity and responsibility except for the last point, which denigrates the government’s fiscal irresponsibility. I think they need some framing lessons – telling people they have the responsbility to do something sounds fairly condescending. Look at health care, for example. Most progressives would tell you that being entitled to affordable, universal health care is a right, not an opportunity – and it’s not just for children either. This is just one example of a meek step put forth, one that all Democrats can agree on – health care for all children. Hell, that was John Kerry’s first post-election policy campaign (although, ironically enough, his home page now touts universal health care). Additionally, the implication that parents are responsible for obtaining suggests that those who don’t are bad parents – even if they can’t get it for financial reasons or for other problems.

I’ll skip over the portion on government’s fiscal irresponsbility, as there’s really nothing worth commenting on there – it’s a safe subject, and there is nothing worth mentioning that wasn’t in the above statement. However, they do have some ideas for college education:

We propose a new, performance-based American Dream Grant that will award states money each year based on the number of students that attend and graduate from their colleges and universities. Over the next decade, this block grant will provide states $150 billion to increase graduation rates and reduce the cost of college. This grant will complement initiatives already under way in the states and enlist the national government as a partner in an effort that is vital to the nation’s economic interest.

[…]

We should simplify the tax code by replacing the HOPE tax credit, the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit, and the higher education deduction with a single, refundable $3,000 college tuition tax credit to help offset undergraduate and graduate costs for all families.

[…]

In return for this unprecedented increase in college assistance, we must raise expectations for colleges and students alike, and address the high proportion of college students who leave without a degree.

It sounds great, but it leaves out a lot of inconvenient issues. The first is this: where are we going to get the money? The obvious answer is to stop pissing it away in Iraq, but that could cause a political conundrum for ‘centrist’ Democrats who have a staggering inability to openly admit the problems with the war. Talk of simplifying the tax code is great – but when one considers that families could receive more than $3,000 in tax deductions from the HOPE tax credit and the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit alone, one wonders if this will have a net beneficial effect. Furthermore, colleges will never agree to some sort of nationalized standard. It’s not even clear that standardized testing in regular schools does a good job of assessing capability. The ADI also mentions helping ‘non-traditional students’, but beyond stating that Pell Grants should be extended year-round, there’s mention of any sort of plan.

Now it’s on to talking of a ‘secure retirement’:

Americans deserve to know that a lifetime of work will ensure a secure retirement. We need a new approach that requires every employer to open a retirement account for every worker; enrolls workers automatically unless they opt out; increases their contribution automatically over time unless they direct otherwise; gives employees the advice and guidance to allow them to invest wisely; and enables workers to take their pensions with them when they change jobs.

[…]

Saver’s Credit. Instead of more breaks for those at the top, we should provide saving incentives to hard-working Americans who can least afford to put money aside. We should make the Saver’s Credit permanent and refundable so that working- and middle-class families receive a 50 percent matching contribution for retirement savings of up to $2,000 a year.

The first point sounds an awful lot like the Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security in that it calls for people to have accounts that are based in stock investments, not a guaranteed government payment. Although the ADI makes no mention of scrapping Social Security, one wonders why they would advocate people putting their money in company savings accounts, considering the risk. Just look at how well the employees of Enron fared. The second point is another tax cut. It’d be nice if there was mention of how these are getting funded – say, by repealing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts – but there’s nothing about it. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The pro-corporate aspect of the DLC shows through with its advocacy for having people’s retirements in company-managed accounts. We cannot risk leaving retirement benefits in anyone’s hands except for the U.S. government.

Here’s what the DLC thinks about helping out the middle class:

To unleash the power of innovation and enterprise, we need to restore fiscal responsibility, open new markets, and make smart economicinvestments–such as broadband, basic scientific research, alternative fuels, and an advanced research projects agency for energy–that will spur the creation of new, high-wage jobs.

With a smart energy policy, we can create millions of good jobs, ease the burden on middle-class pocketbooks, and lead the way against climate change, all at the same time. To put the United States at the cutting edge of new, energy-efficient technologies, we should create a strategic energy fund that will sponsor research into the potential of cellulosic ethanol, bio-diesel, and other flexible fuels; support the development of plug-in hybrids, cleanburning diesel, and other high-mileage vehicles; and launch an advanced research projects agency for energy to spur innovation.

[…]

Giving Every Worker the Chance to Get Ahead.

[…]

To give the investing public an understanding of whether a CEO’s pay is fair relative to the firm’s overall performance, and to provide greater accountability, the SEC should require that public corporations disclose…

[…]

The pension and mutual fund managers who do the actual investing work in financial markets that are obsessed with short-term
movements in stock price, sometimes at the expense of investments in corporations that create genuine long-term wealth. These intermediaries should be held more accountable to long-term investors…

The first point is actually a good one – we could create many new jobs if we started researching new energy technologies. However, the DLC fails to address the core problem America has – education. Considering how the U.S. is falling behind in educating our future scientists, it’s a bit difficult to consider this to be viable until we fix our public education system. In addition, these are not jobs that people can simply switch into – they are highly skilled jobs that would take years of re-education and retraining to ensure adults could transition easily. The second point – that is literally the only thing worth mentioning. The rest is without substance, with one suggestion of giving employees stock options. How the hell does that help people ‘get ahead’? The call for increased oversight of corporations is nice, but there’s someone who’s been doing that for several years now – and given he’s from Hillary’s adopted home state, the DLC should be familiar with him. His name is Eliot Spitzer.

For a ‘stake in the American dream’, the DLC offers up these ideas:

The United States should follow Tony Blair’s lead in Britain by providing a Baby Bond to each of the 4 million children born in America each year. A $500 savings bond at birth and again 10 years later would give young people from low- and middle-income families a stake in upward mobility. We should give families with incomes of $75,000 or less the option of directing their existing annual children’s tax credit into these accounts, tax-free. The money could be used for college and training, a first home, and retirement savings.

[…]

We should make sure the mortgage deduction helps those who need it most–middle-income and working families–by making the deduction available to those who do not itemize their taxes. This would enable an additional 10 million Americans to take advantage of the primary incentive to help individuals purchase homes.

[…]

As Hope Street Group has proposed, we should provide a $5,000 refundable tax credit for down payment assistance, which over the next 10 years will make homeownership possible for 7 million modest- to middle-income home buyers with good credit who would otherwise slip into the higher-interest rate subprime mortgage market or be rejected for a mortgage altogether.

[…]

We need to raise the FHA loan limit to 100 percent of the area median home price, so that families in areas with high housing costs are not priced out of affordable, secure FHA mortgages.

[…]

We should give employers a 50 percent tax credit for qualified employee housing assistance programs, and let working families exclude such housing assistance from their taxable income.

Giving $500 to every newborn child is a good idea – but considering that a year ago, each newborn inherited $34,000 in debt, it doesn’t really add up to much. There is more talk of tax credits, but as is the running theme throughout this proposal, how do we possibly pay for these? Most of the policies here sound good on paper, but there is no backing analysis as to how this can be achieved. Perhaps the DLC is counting on triangulation to eventually guide it to a solution as to how they can make it happen.

Finally, the DLC gets around to talking about health care:

It is time to pass bipartisan legislation to develop a secure, interoperable health information infrastructure that makes patient privacy paramount.

[…]

Small businesses need access to stable, affordable health insurance so they do not have to worry whether they can provide coverage from year to year. We should allow small businesses to pool their workforces–much like large businesses–so they have the power to obtain cheaper health insurance for themselves and their employees.

[…]

As we save money by reining in the cost of health care, we will be able to afford the next big step toward universal coverage:
making sure every child in America has health insurance. First, we must reauthorize and increase funds for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program so that all eligible children are covered.

[…]

We should train health care professionals to prevent, diagnose, and treat obesity, overweight conditions, and eating disorders; provide the resources for community-based programs that promote healthy eating behaviors, improve nutrition, and increase physical activity; and close the loophole on the sale of junk food in schools.

[…]

We should create a National Center for Cures that targets and coordinates our research dollars, encouraging better communication within the National Institutes of Health and between the NIH and the private sector.

[…]

Strengthening the Medicare Trust Fund is essential to Americans’ long-term health and the nation’s longterm fiscal stability.

Patient privacy is great – but how does this make health care more affordable or ensure that everyone has access to it? Just about every policy proposal here is agreeable on some level or another, but there’s no intellectual lifting behind these bullet points. They’re things that can be thrown out on the campaign trail, but they do not answer how all Americans will be insured. If anyone reads nyceve’s diaries at Daily Kos, you know that our current system is a nightmare. Can anyone imagine things being markedly better under what the DLC has proposed here? I can’t, and that’s not even addressing the issues of implementation.

In conclusion, what you see here is an exercise of timidity. There’s nothing truly bold that is advanced, and the DLC avoids discussing any sort of real discussion as to how any of these policy proposals would be realistically implemented. It’s one thing to talk about the problems and a solution, but the middle part – figuring out how to get legislation passed – seems to elude them. They don’t even mention raising the minimum wage. Perhaps it’s not surprising; since Clinton was in charge of designing these policies, it’s pretty much in line with her attempt to not offend either side too much. But the result is that the ‘American Dream Initiative’ comes out as a big fat pipe dream that has no base in reality.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

If that doesn’t look too familiar, you’re not alone. That is a methanol gasoline pump, back when California funded it as an alternative to our most common source of gasoline, crude oil. It was a blend of 85% methanol and 15% gasoline – a hybrid blend that is similar to our efforts today to blend gasoline with ethanol. However, the experiment didn’t last too long; it became one failure in a long line of attempts that California has tried to fund alternative energy sources to get the state moving towards cleaner fuels. In today’s Wall Street Journal, there is a fascinating article about California’s numerous failures to get the state off of its dependence on oil. It reveals a state whose attempts have been ineffective for several reasons – but mainly due to the oil lobby and a shift of focus from alternative sources of energy to making gasoline cleaner.

For a quarter century, California has pursued petroleum-free transportation more doggedly than any other place in the U.S. It has tried to jump-start alternative fuels ranging from methanol to natural gas to electricity to hydrogen. None has hit the road in any significant way. Today, the state that is the world’s sixth-largest economy finds itself in the same spot as most of the planet: With $75-a-barrel oil, and increasing concern about the role fossil fuels are playing in global warming, 99% of its cars and trucks still run on petroleum products.

[…]

California launched its alternative-fuel drive as an energy-diversification effort following the 1979 global oil shock. When oil prices fell back, the state shifted its emphasis to fighting air pollution. Since then, California has rolled out mandates and subsidies for alternative-fuel demonstrations along with broader rules forcing the oil and auto industries to clean up their conventional fuels and internal-combustion engines. The assumption was that the one-two policy punch would induce the industries to shift away from oil.

But the market hasn’t responded the way California intended. The oil and auto industries got the state to kill or water down the alternative-fuel mandates, arguing that making the technologies viable would require big public subsidies — something most Californians didn’t support. Meanwhile, the industries made their conventional products clean enough to meet the state’s pollution limits.

The upshot: The alternative-fuel push has helped scrub California’s air, but it has done so by forcing improvements in fossil fuels and the cars that burn them. It hasn’t curbed California’s oil consumption, because it hasn’t meaningfully deployed alternative fuels.

It’s not even clear that the air quality in California has necessarily been improving in recent years. According to the California Air Resources Board, it seems that ozone concentration has been increasing in most parts of the state in the past few years. Ozone is one of the chemical components that makes up smog, of which Los Angeles is notoriously known for. It’s clear that even if we enforce limits on pollution, it does not necessarily mean that this will result in increasingly cleaner skies. If one looks at the data in California for the year to date, all the regions in California except two counties (Lake and Santa Barbara) exceed the state mandated level at the 1-hour time measurement, and those same two counties are the only ones that don’t exceed the federally mandated level of pollution at the 8-hour mark.

However, the auto industry makes it plainly clear why it believes it shouldn’t have to produce cars based on alternative sources of energy:

Oil and auto companies say they’re justified in resisting government mandates to roll out alternative technologies when they’re not convinced consumers will buy them. Donald Paul, Chevron’s chief technology officer, says California regulators essentially tell industry officials, “We know what the answer is. You guys just spend the money and everything will work fine.” He adds, “History has not shown that that works very well.”

John Wallace, who dealt closely with California officials as head of Ford Motor Co.’s alternative-fuel program throughout the 1990s, agrees. “Beating up the car companies doesn’t accomplish very much,” says Mr. Wallace, who left Ford in 2002. “If you’ve got a pull from customers, the car companies will beat themselves up to try to satisfy it.”

One wonders what it will take for companies to recognize that they have a moral imperative to change the way in which they act. If you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth, you’ve seen what coastal flooding in regions around the world like Manhattan, Shanghai, and Calcutta would cause if the planet reaches that point – it would be devastating. Perhaps companies shouldn’t worry just about whether or not people will buy their cars; they should educate consumers on the dangers of climate change and explain why new technology is needed. And given the fact that you have people pawning off their possessions to pay for gasoline, it might be a sign that people would be amenable to a solution that wouldn’t humiliate them.

This image puts into visual form a startling sight: even though California has generally been acknowledged to be a leader in America when it comes to alternative energy, alternative fuels make up 0.29% of fuel consumption. We are extremely underprepared for the day that comes when oil runs out or when global warming forces us to change our ways. You have solar-powered cars, but these are not practical for traveling in yet. Fuel cell cars would be extremely clean, but they’re not viable right now – probably because of their prohibitively high cost and the difficulty in perfecting the technique of efficiently converting hydrogen to energy.

While California has tried over the years to overcome its addiction to gasoline, it has failed in large part because of lobbying efforts on behalf of the oil and automobile industry – just another reason why politics in money is corrosive.

In 1987, a state legislator introduced a bill to require that, by 1994, all cars and light trucks sold in California either “operate exclusively on methanol fuel” or meet emission requirements essentially as low as those that did. Oil lobbyists got the bill watered down to call merely for a methanol study. In one meeting during the study, a top official of Arco, a California-based oil company later acquired by BP PLC, announced that Arco had figured out how to brew a gasoline that burned as cleanly as methanol, recalls Mr. Boyd, who was at the meeting.

That helped embolden California and the federal government to roll out requirements for cleaner-burning gasoline. By the late 1990s, auto makers had stopped building cars that would accept methanol, and oil companies no longer were putting in new methanol pumps. “That was the death of methanol,” recalls Mr. Boyd. “Gasoline won.”

California continued to search for oil alternatives. In 1990, as California regulators were putting the finishing touches on new clean-air rules, GM unveiled at the Los Angeles auto show a bubble-shaped car that ran on electricity and thus emitted no pollution. It was called the Impact.

[…]

The oil industry formed a coalition that sent letters to commission members and legislators opposing what it dubbed a “hidden tax” to subsidize alternative fuels. The California Public Utilities commission ruled that, while utilities might be able to spend ratepayers’ money to roll out alternative fuels in the utilities’ own fleets, they couldn’t spend that money to try to commercialize alternative fuels more broadly.

This is not to say that methanol should be reconsidered as a solution – after all, it’s been revealed to have its own problems. Aside from being an inefficient source of fuel (it was only 60% as efficient as pure gasoline), it also has toxic side effects, which led to its removal as a main method of producing the gasoline additive methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE). However, corporations and lobbyists have vigorously opposed attempts to truly move us away from our addiction to oil. As soon as they associate such requirements to undertake development of alternative technology with the notion of a tax, they are able to successfully derail such legislation.

In 2001, GM sued California to block the zero-emission vehicle rule. Its suit, later joined by DaimlerChrysler AG’s Chrysler unit, argued that by shifting their focus from electric cars to gasoline-burning hybrids, California regulators had turned their clean-air rule into a veiled attempt to improve fuel economy. And fuel economy, the auto companies noted, is something only the federal government has the legal power to regulate.

GM and Chrysler later dropped their suit when California officials further softened their rule.

Largely as a result of the zero-emission-vehicle mandate, California now accounts for 26% of the U.S. hybrid market, far more than any other state. Still, the approximately 52,000 new hybrids registered in California last year amounted to only about 2% of all new light-vehicle registrations there, according to R.L. Polk & Co., an industry consultant. As for the vaunted electric vehicles, there are about 15,000 on the road today, state officials say, but the vast majority are “neighborhood” versions, which resemble golf carts and aren’t allowed on highways.

Automobile manufacturers are not really pushing the idea that people should be buying hybrid cars and other vehicles that run on alternative fuels. If you wonder why the ‘Big Three’, particularly GM and Ford, have been doing fairly shitty business as of late, the answer doesn’t lie solely with pension costs and rising health care benefits, as their executives may like you to believe. No, the problem is that their business models are based on the premise that they will continue to sell SUVs and heavy-duty trucks at the levels seen earlier in this decade. With gasoline prices at their current levels, people don’t want to buy cars that will burn a hole in their pocketbooks. As the WSJ article mentions, despite the rise in ethanol production, the practicality of moving to something such as E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, is very low at the time being:

Today there’s just one E85 station in California that is open to the public. It sits beside a highway interchange in San Diego. It was opened three years ago by Pearson Ford, a San Diego Ford dealer that was convinced alternative fuels would be the next big thing. The station offers gasoline and diesel, natural gas, propane, electricity, biodiesel and E85.

What it sells, though, is mostly gasoline and diesel. On a recent morning, it was offering E85 for $3.10 a gallon, about 6% less than the $3.30 per gallon it was charging for regular gasoline. But, because a gallon of E85 contains about 25% less energy than a gallon of gasoline, the E85 actually cost more per mile. Only a handful of cars pulled up to the E85 pump.

As I had written in a previous entry, ethanol isn’t going to be the solution we’re looking towards. However, with a complete lack of investment in alternative energies – and an unwillingness by car companies to implement cleaner technology – one has to wonder what we are going to do to face this problem. Led by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, an initiative will be on the ballot this fall that will impose a tax on oil companies, which in turn will be used to fund research in cleaner alternative fuel sources. It’s called Proposition 87. It shouldn’t come as any surprise who is opposing this measure:

Proponents of oil alternatives are pressing ahead. An initiative set for California’s November ballot would hit oil companies with an “extraction fee” on every barrel of oil they pull out in California, a top oil-producing state. The fee would range from 1.5% to 6% of the oil’s value, depending on the prevailing per-barrel price. Backers say the measure would raise $4 billion, which would fund research into alternative-fuel technologies and incentives for consumers and fleets to buy alternative-fuel vehicles.

[…]

The oil industry has formed a committee to fight the initiative. The biggest donor is Chevron, which so far has given $3.8 million, according to state records.

The measure has an impressive list of backers, including California Democratic gubernatorial nominee Phil Angelides and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom. The bill sets increased pollution limits, gives customers incentives to buy cleaner cars, and most importantly, takes a piece from oil companies’ record profits to make a substantial move towards getting away from our dependence on crude oil and fossil fuels as a source of powering our cars. California, like the rest of America, has had great trouble in breaking the habit. But with 61 percent of Californians supporting Proposition 87, perhaps they may bring California to the forefront of the move away from gasoline once again. All addictions need to be broken sooner or later, and this is one addiction that could kill our planet.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

In an entry I wrote last week, I argued that ethanol doesn’t do much to solve the root problem, which is to wean America off of its addiction to oil. On the heels of an environmental conference held in California between the state and Great Britain, it seems that there may be an agreement in place for program for trading carbon credits – essentially, a capitalist solution to the problem of excessive pollution.

Mr Schwarzenegger wants California to cut its emissions to 2000 levels by 2010, and has mooted a “cap-and-trade” system to achieve this.

The European Union already operates such a system, issuing companies in energy-intensive industries with permits to produce a set amount of carbon dioxide.

Those wanting greater emissions must then purchase permits from other businesses in the scheme.

It sounds like a great idea at first – if companies feel like they need looser restrictions on their pollution levels, they can pay for it by purchasing credits from another company. Those that pollute less get rewarded by selling off their extra credits to companies that are dirtier, who are essentially paying a fine for their increased amount of pollution. But does this really align the goals of businesses with the real task at hand – making the environment markedly cleaner? While there are caps that are set on the amount of pollution, that merely sets a ceiling that can be easily surpassed by wealthier companies who have the money to buy extra credits. To me, it’s an extension of the laissez-faire/libertarian ideal that the free market can solve any problem – and in this case, it’s wrong to make such a declaration.
The main problem with such an idea is that it doesn’t do enough to move the world away from carbon-based emissions, which is one of the main sources of global warming. From the International Emissions Trading Association, here’s a brief overview of the current instances where carbon trading currently exists:

In January 2005 the European Union established the European Emissions Trading Scheme. This scheme is mandatory for all 25 EU member states. National governments allocate EU allowances in national allocation plans (NAPs) to energy-intensive plants and installations according to fixed reduction targets.

As part of its overall Kyoto climate change obligations Canada plans an emissions trading programme that will cover greenhouse gases from large final emitters (LFEs). In addition, Canada is developing a domestic offsets system that in principle could generate offsets from any emitting activity in Canada that is not covered by the LFE trading system.

Much of the basis for industrialized areas such as the European Union and Canada creating such programs is to gain compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect in February 2005, despite the United States’ adamant refusal to ratify the agreement. However, I would argue that the Kyoto protocol was not meant as a strict floor that should have to be attained merely because countries feel compelled to. Indeed, it should only be a start, with more countries looking towards using clean, alternative, renewable sources of energy. It doesn’t even seem clear that the program that the EU has set up will even even get off the ground:

The EU’s ambitious greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme (ETS) is in further disarray as 11 of its 25 governments, including Britain, face warnings of legal action from the European commission for failing to meet last Friday’s deadline for submitting their plans to cut carbon dioxide between 2008 and 2012.

[…]

Last Thursday, a day before the deadline, David Miliband, the environment secretary, proposed UK targets for the second phase of the ETS that would cut emissions by 8m tonnes a year and allow industry to emit 238m tonnes annually. The government, which dropped legal action against Brussels last year over revised plans to raise allowances to industry, hopes to escape punishment by submitting its “challenging” plan “as soon as possible”. The EU expects this in mid-August.

Britain also hopes for lenient treatment by cutting more emissions than Germany, the EU’s biggest polluter, which is cutting just 15m tonnes a year from its targets, and France, which is due to propose a 4.2% cut but would still have an emission total 20m tonnes higher than actual output in 2005. Both missed the Friday deadline but may be exempted from a formal warning.

What good is an agreement if the biggest players in the EU are allowed exemptions and leniency? It’s one thing to exempt developing countries such as China and India from the requirements of Kyoto (that’s a whole different discussion in and of itself), but what this shows is that there is a clear lack of cohesive agreement between the countries to clean up their acts quickly. To me, it’s almost the equivalent of campaign finance reform – there was popular support for such an issue, but when it actually came down to it, both sides bemoaned the new rules for their own reasons. You have environmentalists who don’t support this program because it injects an economic component into something they feel is morally based. On the other side, you have industrialists who complain about the costs of regulation – which is something to consider, since the regulation is going to be spent not only on ensuring that emissions are capped, but that the carbon credits are valid:

In one, the regulators measure facilities, and fine or sanction those that lack the licenses for their emissions. This scheme is quite expensive to enforce, and the burden falls on the agency, which then may need to collect special taxes. Another risk is that facilities may find it far less expensive to corrupt the inspectors than purchase emissions licenses. The net effect of a poorly financed or corrupt regulatory agency is a discount on the emissions licenses, and greater pollution.

In another, some different agency, usually a commercial agency licensed by the government, verifies that polluting facilities have licenses equal or greater than their emissions. Inspection of the certificates is performed in some automated fashion by the regulators, perhaps over the Internet, or as part of tax collection. The regulators then audit licensed facilities chosen at random to verify that certifying agencies are acting correctly. This scheme is far less expensive, placing most regulation in the private sector. In addition, auditing can be performed on well-paid contracts by persons, such as university professors or anti-pollution activists, whose reputation is more valuable to them than any practical amount of graft.

In a recent editorial, Peter Bunyard, the editor of The Ecologist, makes the same point – there are better, more effective ways of dealing with the necessity of reducing carbon-based emissions:

It is questionable whether carbon emissions trading will bring a certifiable reduction. As now embodied in the EU emissions trading scheme, fossil- fuel-burning companies such as power utilities, steelworks or cement factories are granted substantial carbon credits that they can sell – on the basis that they have emitted less than expected. That may provide some incentive to look to more efficient technologies, but the assumption is that someone elsewhere, even in another country, is going to buy that credit in order to pollute.

In addition, the use of tradeable carbon units combined with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – whereby the Kyoto signatories from industrialised nations can invest in emission-reduction projects in developing countries – has huge potential for environmental damage and fraud.

How relevant are such schemes when deforestation, particularly in the tropics, results in tens of times more carbon emissions than putatively captured by all CDM schemes put together? Perhaps a carbon tax that could be ploughed back into carbon-reducing schemes, even by the original emitter, would be much fairer and less prone to abuse.

One can apply similar thinking to other suggested solutions to reducing carbon emissions, such as carbon sinks – storing carbon dioxide underground. What this allows for is for fossil fuels to continued to be burned. Additionally, when one reads of the problems that deforestation and afforestation may bring, it may not be the best idea to store our carbon emissions underground when it could lead to deadly consequences for our planet. These problems seek to slow the rate at which we emit pollution – but they don’t attack the source, which is our dependence on fossil fuels, our inability to slow the rapid deforestation of forests that support the delicate balance in the biosphere, and the inability to allocate proper money towards developing clean energy sources.

The Democratic Leadership Council, in the tradition of its cautious, pro-business spirit, has endorsed carbon emissions trading. The Bush administration and the Republican Party, which doesn’t even believe that global warming exists, won’t consider a program because of the limits it puts on a company’s pollution, believing that will increase the cost of regulation. Indeed, no one except for Al Gore has been pushing the issue of climate change. With California’s and Britain’s nonbinding agreement, there may be increased momentum put behind the idea of trading carbon credits as a way to promote environmentally friendly behavior. The fact is, it doesn’t promote the positive aspects so much as it merely serves to enable the negative behavior. With reducing carbon emissions, we need to summon the moral fortitude to address the problem for what it is – a moral issue, not just another economic policy.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

There is no greater disaster than to underestimate your enemy.

–Lao Tzu

It’s 8 days until the momentous primary on August 8. For all intents and purposes, this race will have a huge impact no matter what the outcome. As Chris Bowers wrote earlier, the blogosphere is going to come out a loser in one way or another:

Now, whether Ned Lamont wins or loses this election, in the days immediately following August 8th, there will be a flood of negative press about the netroots and the progressive movement. If Lamont wins, we will be crucified for sending the Democratic Party to its doom, and defeating one of the greatest Democratic politicians in history: Joe Lieberman. If Ned Lamont loses, we will once again be called ineffective, irrelevant, and crazy by the establishment, even though we clearly scared the crap out the establishment and even though this campaign was supposed to be a blowout win for Lieberman.

The enthusiasm on the Internet has been great – we’ve been raising money and have made a race that would have been dismissed in the past a national sensation. But I get the feeling that aside from the bloggers who are in Connecticut and those who have actually done some work for the campaign, many people think that Joe Lieberman is finished. And you know what, he may very well be – I keep asking the Lamont staffers what the plans are post-August 8 because I do feel so good about his chances. They don’t have an answer, though – they are focusing solely on the primary and putting in 70-hour weeks to make this final push in getting Ned across the finish line. Things may seem rosy now, but a lot can happen in 8 days. One only needs to read about the Lieberman campaign’s intended push to get out the vote to know that this is going to be the longest 8 days anyone has.

It’s all part of the plan laid out by Tom Lindenfeld of LSG Strategies of Washington, D.C., which was brought in by Lieberman to get out the vote in the final sprint to the polls.

Smith said they now have between 200 and 300 volunteers and paid staff, to canvass daily. Democratic workers in New Haven said the campaign told them it hopes to hire up to 4,000 workers by Election Day.

[…]

Meanwhile, New Haven Alderwoman Jacqueline James, D-3, said a young, mostly white staff from New Jersey was in charge of canvassing for Lieberman, and that hundreds of people were turned away July 22 after being told the campaign was looking for 16- to 21-year-olds.

The alderwoman estimated 56 young people were hired out of about 500 people who showed up, attracted by the $60 a day fee, or about $800 for the duration.

She said LGS does not know the demographics of the city at all. James suggested that they match inexperienced teens with more savvy workers, but this was rejected.

“They kept saying this is how we do it in New Jersey. I kept telling them, `This is not New Jersey,'” said James, who no longer volunteers for Lieberman.

One may say that it’s naive to apply the same canvassing model in Connecticut that is used in New Jersey – it probably is, given that New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country, while there are a few big cities in Connecticut, with several rural areas. Nevertheless, you cannot underestimate the impact of 4,000 workers, whether they are paid or not. That is a lot of people. During his gubernatorial run, we got paid a decent amount per hour for canvassing for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, but there is no way there were 4,000 people canvassing for him, despite his immense personal wealth. You can bet that these volunteers will be concentrated in the big cities – Stamford, Bridgeport, Hartford – to turn out the vote for Lieberman. His access to the political machines, which have pledged fealty to him despite a campaign that has seemingly been imploding, will guarantee that there will be a huge drive there. As I mentioned yesterday, there was a sighting of the vans that the Lieberman campaign will be renting out for the duration in support of their canvassing operation. The Lamont campaign has no such advantage; we drove down to Stamford in two cars and walked around the spacious neighborhoods, a much more exhausting task than getting an air-conditioned van to drive you around. I know the person who is coordinating Lieberman’s out-of-state canvassing effort very, very well – and this person is driven to win this race like none other.

In addition, do not underestimate the outside support Lieberman is pulling in. He is bringing in all sorts of big guns to campaign for him – Bill Clinton, Chris Dodd, Ken Salazar, Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, Daniel Inouye, and Frank Lautenberg will have made campaigned for him – and of those, Inouye and Salazar will back Lieberman even if he follows through with his plan to run as an independent. It’s true that Lieberman’s race-baiting tactics will largely be negated due to the likes of Maxine Waters and now Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as they campaign for Ned. Nevertheless, we underestimate the effect of an ex-president and sitting senators at our own risk. People love star power, and the Senate is a club – they don’t want an outsider crashing their party. Chris Dodd has lent Lieberman his own political advisors when it became clear that the senator’s own campaign was too inept to handle the surprising charge Lamont was mounting. The current members of Connecticut’s Democratic Party elite are fully-heartedly backing Lieberman (although it seems that both John DeStefano and Dan Malloy, the gubernatorial candidates, are slowly backing away from him). Additionally, the biggest interest groups – the AFL-CIO, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood, to name a few – have endorsed Lieberman despite his questionable record. It helps that Lamont has the backing of the teachers’ unions, NOW, and the Connecticut head of NARAL, but the campaign is shut out from the access, the manpower, and the money that these connections provide.

So why am I saying all of this? Simply enough, it’s great that there are a dozen or so college-aged staffers and volunteers giving a ridiculous amount of time to help Lamont win this primary. But we need to do better. And this is where the blogosphere has to step up. It’s one thing to post about this issue from the outside and to send money. But it is not the same as having warm bodies hitting the pavement. You can bet the Lieberman campaign is canvassing every single day with its paid workers. From what I know from my experience in the 4th District, we have only canvassed on the weekends. There simply aren’t enough office staff to send out everyday to make sure people spread the word. I know that a good deal of the blogosphere is concentrated in the Northeast. This means that, barring a prior obligation (such as work) or financial issues, you have no excuse for not coming to Connecticut and helping out, especially on the weekends. It’s one thing to comment on the race from afar – but it’s a completely different story when you’ve been there upfront, talking to people when you’re on the phone or hitting the blacktop. As Tim Tagaris said earlier, nothing else is going to matter except for the votes. And starting from Thursday up through August 8, that is all the Lamont campaign will be doing. No, it may not be as glamorous as hounding Joe at every stop on his bus tour. But at this point, the campaign needs you more than ever.

Daily Kos, MyDD, Firedoglake, Eschaton, My Left Nutmeg, LamontBlog, Spazeboy, CTBlogger, CT Bob, and the one that started it all, Dump Joe, have done a great job of making sure you know about this race. Now it’s time for all of us to get out and do something about it if possible. For me, it has always made a big difference when you stop passively supporting an effort and begin to actively participate. You become emotionally invested in it, and it means a lot more than it ever did before. The weather might be crappy – it’s been awful weather as of late back here. You might have to put a few things you wanted to get done on the backburner. But this is an experience you will never forget – because this could very well be the race that announces that the blogosphere has truly arrived. And you don’t want to miss it for anything in the world.

So please – come to Connecticut and make sure that when the clock strikes midnight on August 8, Joe Lieberman is hearing the fat lady sing loud and clear.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

Yesterday, I did some phonebanking for Ned Lamont’s campaign. Today, it was time to hit the streets once again, going door to door to find out what prospective Democratic primary voters thought about the primary in 9 days. Last week, a group of us did canvassing in what I’d describe as a middle-class neighborhood in Stamford, Joe Lieberman’s hometown. This week, we headed back to Stamford again, but this time, we were canvassing in a more upscale neighborhood of Stamford – as you can see, the area we covered was close enough to the Long Island Sound to smell the aroma of seawater. The area was smothered with signs for Dan Malloy, the mayor of Stamford who is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. At first, we had trouble figuring out where we were going, as none of us were familiar with the Stamford area. However, once we found a place to park, Keith, my canvassing partner-in-crime today, and I set out on a 3-hour trek that yielded some surprising results.
There were more people home this time than last – including the people who did not have an opinion or did not want to talk about their preference, I’d say that we had roughly a 35% response rate, which was fairly good considering it was a beautiful (albeit hot) Sunday afternoon. It started off on an excellent note: the first household I spoke to were strong supporters of Lamont; in fact, their close relatives (who we canvassed but were not home at the time) had recently hosted a breakfast fundraiser in support of Ned. They eagerly asked for a lawn sign (something other Lamont supporters were hesitant to do, given that Stamford is largely pro-Lieberman), and I said that someone would drop it off. Another person I spoke to eyed me suspiciously as I began talking about how I was going around the neighborhood. “Who are you with?” he asked, a slight buzz of hostility on his voice. When I revealed I was volunteering for Lamont, the man became enthusiastic. “Well, you’ve got two votes from this house,” he said. “Keep up the good work.” And for a group of largely college-age staffers and volunteers, the campaign has done a very damn good job – certainly better than the paid group over with the Lieberman campaign does.

It seems like the Democratic Party still has trouble making Iraq their top issue. While Lamont has been broadening his policy portfolio on health care, education, and other subjects, there is no doubt that the war is the top issue. One household I spoke to said they were supporting Lamont because of the war. I attempted to launch into a discussion of Ned’s positions on the other issues, but I got cut off – they were a single-issue voting household, and Iraq was that issue. I spoke with one pleasant old lady whose daughter was on my list to speak with. Although she was not sure who she would vote for, it was clear that she was extremely disappointed with Lieberman’s position on Iraq. At another household that I classified as a ‘lean Ned’, the war was the top priority for voting for Lamont. Interestingly enough, this person’s spouse said that their top reason for voting against Lieberman? He was far too uncomfortable with Lieberman’s political beliefs, which he felt were far too influenced by religion. One woman I spoke to was undecided. She knew that being Lieberman’s hometown, it was difficult to support someone who she had voted for before, particularly when he ran for vice president. That being said, she was sorely disappointed by some of his statements of late, notably the war in Iraq. I spoke about how it was necessary to bring our troops home and spend our money on policies that will help Connecticut – investing in our public education, providing universal health care to all Americans, and ensuring that our jobs stayed in the country and were not outsourced. She was still undecided afterwards, but I think that I may have influenced her and helped sway her position towards supporting Ned. One old lady I spoke to wouldn’t tell me who she was voting for, but she thanked me for getting out and talking about the primary. I have a feeling that she may be supporting Lamont, but it was difficult to tell. One of the more pleasant sites was towards the end of the day – I hadn’t seen a Lamont sign yet, but the last bunch of houses that I canvassed told me who was supporting who – even though no one was home:

Being Stamford, there were bound to be a few Lieberman supporters. Most of them were kind enough to me. One said they were voting for Lieberman and asked who I was campaigning for. When I replied Lamont, she nodded and had the courtesy to say, “Have a good day”. Generally, most Lieberman supporters, as I wrote yesterday, don’t seem all that enthusiastic about their support for the senator. Keith (my canvassing partner) ended up speaking with a Lieberman supporter – but the person was kind enough to let him inside the house, and although he was supporting Lieberman, he said that he supported what we were doing – that it was a good thing that Lieberman was being challenged. Unfortunately, these kind of Lieberman backers seem few and far between; most of them tend to act in the same manner that their candidate does – in a self-righteous, obnoxious manner. I asked someone at one household whether their spouse supported Lamont or Lieberman. The reply? “[name redacted] has repeated over and over, to the best of my knowledge, that [they] will be voting for Joe Lieberman, not that wealthy [unintelligble].” While I still thanked the person for their time, why is being wealthy a reason to be against someone? If they made their money in an honest fashion, good for them. I thought that was what the American dream was about.

Being the hot day that it was, it was wonderful to get some more support from some of the households we canvassed. Two other people I drove down to the Stamford area received bottles of water from a household that was supporting Lamont. I got some mist sprayed on myself by a leaner who felt bad that we were trudging around the neighborhood and sweating our asses off. The Lamont campaign is by the people, for the people. We set out in two cars, with six people in total, to go canvassing today. We don’t get reimbursed for the gas, and although we can take some water, on a hot day like today, it was bound to run out quickly. We leave xeroxed copies of a Lamont brochure at households with people who aren’t home. On the other hand, a Lieberman van was roving the neighborhood today, and they were leaving glossy doorhangers with people. They touted Lieberman’s commitment to working families, and it prominently mentioned the AFL-CIO endorsement. But you know what? Who gives a damn about the vans that the Lieberman campaign is purportedly renting up until the date of the primary? Who cares about the fancy literature they leave at people’s houses? At the end, what this campaign comes down to is connecting with the people – and Ned Lamont does that. Earlier on in the day, I was walking through an intersection when a car came to a stop. The window rolled down, and the woman driving asked me, “Who are you working for?” I answered that I was volunteering with the Lamont campaign (I forgot to put a sticker on my shirt), and before she made her turn, she said, “Cool.” Cool, indeed. I was dehydrated, I was sweating to the point where I couldn’t see clearly, and I had hardly any energy left – but it was cool.

In the end, I had 13 households supporting or leaning towards Lamont for a total of 24 votes, against 5 households and 7 votes for Lieberman. In the incumbent’s hometown, that’s a pretty damn good record. For what it’s worth, some of the other staffers canvassed someone who is related to a Connecticut politician that has endorsed Lieberman (but has been loathe to appear with him as of late). They were supporting Lamont.

We are going to win this election.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

Last weekend, I volunteered with the Ned Lamont for U.S. Senate campaign for the first time. My summer job is prohibitive to making monetary donations to candidates, and being a mere 15 minutes from Connecticut, I decided to stop sitting on my ass and go do my own part. Canvassing and phonebanking certainly isn’t as noticeable as the efforts of deservedly-lauded bloggers such as Spazeboy and the bloggers who put together the “Kiss” buttons and the now-legendary “Kiss” float. Nevertheless, it’s still a critical part of getting out the vote ahead of the August 8 primary, which, as the entrance to the 4th District office in Norwalk shows, is a mere 10 days away.

I got to the office a little too late to go canvassing up with most of the field staff in Bridgeport, so instead of baking in the hot, humid weather today, I got to do roughly 4 hours of phonebanking and had a great time chatting with the remaining staff and the volunteers who came in for the day.
Even moreso than canvassing, it seemed like phonebanking was even less successful than the canvassing last Sunday afternoon. Perhaps people are much more wary of answering their phones and speaking to strangers. One of the women I spoke to got quite angry at me, yelling at me and demanding to know what I was trying to sell her (in the end, she was one of the undecided voters). The additional trouble of speaking over the phone is that it’s more difficult to convey a sense of genuine feeling. After all, with such a small time frame to make your case, there has to be a quick, concise sales pitch – and what I discovered was that most people didn’t really give a damn about what I thought to begin with. Another additional problem is that I don’t think everyone understands what a primary is. Many folks stated, “I’m going to vote for the Democrat”. While this may be a rich lead-in to discussing who is the bona fide Democratic candidate in the Democratic primary, elaborating further didn’t seem to clear up much of the misunderstanding. Of course, of those who picked up their phones, most didn’t want to be bothered. One person was in the middle of a card game, many just hung up on me, and overall, it ended up with me shaking my head and wondering if the blogosphere overplays the impact this race is having among your average citizen.

That being said, I probably ended up having more Lieberman supporters than Lamont backers by the time I finished calling roughly 200 households. One of the disadvantages of calling the bigger cities is that this is where Lieberman’s ‘support’ is the strongest, as he has the backing of the local political machines. That being said, none of the Lieberman supporters seemed overly enthusiastic about backing the incumbent. The Lamont supporters, on the other hand, had a little piece to say. One person said that they’d be voting for Lamont because they felt it was ‘time for a change’. The other person I spoke to who supported Lamont (as does his spouse) said that we needed to ‘kick the bums out’. His take was that everything was a mess, and everyone – Bush and the rest of Congress – deserved to be ‘thrown out’. There was never such an aggressive stance taken by Lieberman supporters; indeed, they sounded fairly curt when answering who they were supporting. One of my fellow volunteers said when they called a particular person, that person was extremely angry – until they heard that we were calling on behalf of Lamont. Then they said that they were supporting him and wished us the best. To me, this is the vital difference in what I’ve noticed to date – Lieberman supporters don’t seem overly enthusiastic about their candidate, but those who feel strongly about this race – those who have their piece to say about what’s going on – are voting for Lamont. There’s a passion on our side that simply doesn’t exist in the other campaign.

I should add that another fortuitous benefit added for the Lamont campaign is using volunteers who are fluent in Spanish to call various households. I’m not sure how many people they converted, but it definitely helped; their conversations seemed to go on longer than ours did. My last call for the afternoon was to someone who said they didn’t speak English. So I handed it over to the volunteer next to me, and she spoke to the person in Spanish, and she was able to turn someone who would have otherwise gone ignored into a voter leaning towards casting a vote for Lamont. It may just be luck, but to me, this is genius.

We called it a day around 5 PM, as there was much data entry to be done. Additionally, some people were contemplating heading up to New Haven for the Temptations concert tonight, where both Ned and Joe were in attendance (as far as I know). Tomorrow, I’ll be out hitting the pavement again, doing my little part to ‘kick the bums out’.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote an entry entitled Poverty is a moral issue. The fact of the matter is, though, is that it’s not just poverty that is a moral issue. Far from it – in fact, every single political issue can be framed by a moral argument. Having recently finished former president Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, it becomes clear that we need to battle the Republican Party on the ground that is their supposed strength. Whether it be social issues – reproductive rights, gay marriage, affirmative action – or economic issues – the estate tax, Social Security, loans to college students – these all have a moral foundation. As opposed to the capitalistic notion of survival of the fittest, regardless of the circumstances, the core beliefs of the Democratic belief embody the spirit of justice, equality, and community. Our political philosophy can be embodied by the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” What the Democratic Party needs to realize is that all politics is moral.
In reading Carter’s easy-to-read recollections of his past and his observances of the present, one can tell that religion has heavily influenced what he believes. The use of religion in politics is something that many liberals are loathe to support – but morals are not derived from religion. Instead, morals are simply a standard code of principles, independent of any given set of religious principles. Take a look at the various instances of the Golden Rule – it has a basis in numerous religions around the world, as well as more secular-based beliefs such as humanism. Talking about why we believe in policies such as having a fair, progressive tax system or defending the rights of homosexuals should not sound forced. The reasons we believe in them are grounded in our sense of what is right and wrong, of equality and freedom for all. The war in Iraq is immoral for several reasons, as Carter mentions: it denies people their human rights, as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have illustrated; it was based on false premises and deliberately misleading statements by our leaders; and it played upon the fears of Americans instead of to their hopes. Apply the Golden Rule to it: would we ever want another country making preemptive accusations and striking us without a factual basis? Of course not.

People support our agenda (and that’s a Fox News poll) – with the exception of dealing with terrorism, Americans prefer the Democratic Party to do a better job of dealing with the issues. And yet we’ve lost seats in Congress the last two elections, along with the presidency, despite our purported edge on the policy matters that affect average Americans the most. The Republican Party has been able to draw votes based on talk of their version of ‘moral values’ and their fiscal plan of neverending tax cuts, even though most, with the exception of corporations and the wealthiest of Americans, will never see any money, and the so-called ‘wedge’ issues don’t alter one’s life radically. To me, it’s a problem of coming off as genuine. The GOP doesn’t talk in policy-specific terms; instead, they often resort to sweeping, idealistic-sounding talk of a utopian (largely Christian) society. What do we sound like when we discuss our platform? Like salesmen:

In an interview Tuesday with USA TODAY, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi previewed the “New Direction for America” platform hammered out by Democratic members of Congress, mayors and governors. She and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid plan to formally unveil the plan today.

“The American people need to know, if you win, what are your priorities,” she said. Reid said the party is standing “with the people we have always stood with: seniors, students and the hardworking families of America. We intend to tackle the issues that matter most.”

The Democratic Party often speaks about what it will do for various constituencies, but it comes out sounding like a sales pitch. Having gone to a couple of rallies during John Kerry’s presidential campaign, there was a striking inability to weave together any sort of narrative. There’d be a mention of controlling the Supreme Court for those who were interested in protecting abortion. You’d hear about outsourcing as a bone to labor groups. There’d be a bit about protecting Social Security to reassure the AARP and those set of interest groups. Indeed, we have no sweeping narrative; instead, we come off sounding like we’re pitching a bunch of assorted ideas to different customers. We don’t come off sounding like we are speaking to the average American, who may care a lot about one issue but has a vested interest in many others as well.

In particular, the ability to speak to Americans of all stripes is something our party would be well-served to learn from Barack Obama. Politics aside, the senator from Illinois clearly has a way with words. If you examine his classic speech from the 2004 DNC, you will see that he is able to tie everything together:

Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father — my grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.

[…]

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our Nation — not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That is the true genius of America, a faith — a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — at least most of the time.

[…]

It is that fundamental belief — It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us — the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

The need for an overarching theme that aspires to the best within Americans, that there is something for everyone, that our problems can be solved together – this is what we need. For Obama, the moral foundation for his beliefs, like Carter, comes from his religion. But other politicians have proven that there are other ways by which we can instill moral value into our beliefs. John Edwards is a good example – his humble upbringing as the son of a mill worker serves as the underpinning for his quest to alleviate poverty in America. Al Gore melds what he learned in college with the life-altering experiences he had with his the death of his sister and the near-death of his son to powerfully argue that global warming is a moral issue that the world must confront. Bill Clinton – the man from Hope – had a powerful sense of empathy that allowed him to be admired by many around the world and in America, even when his personal life was distracting from the real issues.

Ultimately, what our party needs to recognize is that it doesn’t have to lay out a platform for this election. It doesn’t need a cautious proposal for making America incrementally better. What Democrats need to do is to understand that we need to take bold steps forward, and that we need to do it in a fashion that everyone, from the Ivy League graduate to the high school dropout, from those who follow current events closely to those that watch the local news once in a while, can understand. And what we can all understand are the appeals to people’s sense of morality – the one that is ingrained in humanity, not necessarily the kind ingratiated by religion. If we speak to others as they would speak to us, then the Democratic Party will have no problem winning elections. All it requires us to do is speak the language of Americans and understand that inherently, all politics is moral.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

Until the years after World War II, America has always seemed to be a reluctant player in foreign policy. Granted, there are exceptions – whether it be our rush to incite a war with Spain at the end of the 19th century, or Theodore Roosevelt’s uncommon penchant for emphasizing our military might and declaring America to be the ‘policeman’ of the Western Hemisphere – but for the most part, our country has always had an isolationist streak about itself. A lot of that may stem from the formation of this country, when we threw the British and the German mercenaries known as Hessians out of the country (albeit with France’s help). It may be best to recall that the country’s first president under the current Constitution set the tone for a policy of non-intervention.

“The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”

Throughout America’s early history, there were several events that led to an increasing sentiment towards isolationism. The XYZ affair led to a loss of goodwill American and its former allies in the Revolutionary War. In addition, we refused to support the backers of the French Revolution, choosing to stay out of their affairs. Hostilities escalated between the U.S. and Great Britain to the point of a second war with our former colonial masters. Although we occasionally interacted with other countries, such as the Adams-Onis treaty of 1819, it was usually to resolve border disputes within our own country. With President James Monroe’s address on December 2, 1823 that later became better known as the Monroe Doctrine, we reaffirmed our isolationist roots:

In the discussions to which this interest has given rise, and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers….

[…]

But, in regard to these continents, circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent, without endangering our peace and happiness: nor can any one believe that our Southern Brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition, in any form, with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves, in the hope that other powers will pursue the same course.

While there were various foreign policy affairs America got involved in, in particular the Mexican-American war, the Spanish-American war, and Roosevelt’s Big Stick diplomacy, America never strayed far from its isolationist roots. The various tariffs that have been passed throughout American history are an economic form of isolationism. With World War II, Woodrow Wilson won a narrow re-election in 1916 largely on the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.” Eventually, though, America felt compelled to enter the first global conflict. Once Wilson converted, he recognized that international involvement would be a crucial part of America’s future. His Fourteen Points to peacefully end World War I was an idealistic document that ended up failing to garner any support. Wilson was prescient beyond his time, seeing that America had to take a leading role in international affairs.

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to admit of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.

Unless this principle be made its foundation, no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other principle, and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything that they possess. The moral climax of this, the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own integrity and devotion to the test.

The Treaty of Versailles, a much more punishing treaty, was negotiated, and Wilson failed to even have the watered-down document pass in the Senate, failing by 7 votes. The United States never joined the League of Nations, arguably one of the reasons that World War II came to pass two decades later. Warren Harding took office, and a policy of isolationism became the norm until the deadly attacks on Pearl Harbor gave America no choice but to enter the Second World War. Since then, it has been American policy to be highly involved in international affairs – whether it be the United Nations, the Bretton Woods monetary stabilization system (no longer in existence), and other international agreements. The Vietnam War may have moved the nation back towards isolationism, but even after that tragic catastrophe, America has never shied away from being involved intimately in foreign affairs. During the Clinton administration, we nearly brokered a deal for a Palestinian state (the merits of whether it was fair or not is debatable), signed an environmental accord to combat the growing problem of global warming (but it has never been ratified by the Senate), and stopped a murderous dictator’s bloody purge in the Balkans.

One might argue that the Bush administration’s foreign policy has been more interventionist than usual – and it has been, despite his campaign claim that he would not do so. However, despite whatever neoconservative pipe dreams may be in store for Iran and other countries in the ‘axis of evil’, it seems clear that the American people want no part of it:

By a wide margin, the poll found, Americans did not believe the United States should take the lead in solving international conflicts in general, with 59 percent saying it should not, and 31 percent saying it should. That is a significant shift from a CBS News poll in September 2002 — one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — when the public was far more evenly split on the issue.

What has become of Ronald Reagan’s belief that America is a beacon for the rest of the world? What of the goodwill that our country brings when it helps solve the problems around the world? The Bush administration is solely to blame for this turn in attitude. We have lost our moral standing in the world due to the scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe. We have bullied our way to starting a preemptive war against a country that was of no threat, and our leaders fail to seriously address the other problems in the world – of which there are many. From the same New York Times article:

A majority said the war between Israel and Hezbollah will lead to a wider war. And while almost half of those polled approved of President Bush’s handling of the crisis, a majority said they preferred the United States leave it to others to resolve.

The Middle East, long an area of simmering tensions, has exploded over the violence between Israel and Hezbollah. And our official position? Let it go on without making any sort of meaningful push towards ending the conflict that has claimed the lives of innocent civilians on both sides. It seems that after abandoning the historically conservative position of isolationism, the Republican Party is beginning to retreat from its hyper-interventionist stance on matters where we are actually needed the most. Some may argue that it’s best that America doesn’t get involved in foreign matters until we ‘complete the mission’ in Iraq, whatever that entails. However, caving to isolationism, a policy that has never ended well for the country, would be a regressive American foreign policy that may well set back decades of progress.

Indeed, the lasting legacy of the Bush administration’s fuck-up in Iraq may not be destabilizing the Middle East. It may be that America voluntarily abstains from foreign policy in the future, leading to a world that will indeed be less safe.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

That may seem like any other factory, but it is in fact a factory where ethanol is produced. Earlier this year, Bush went around the country, touring in support of ethanol production. The main arguments were in favor of fuel efficiency and in having cleaner emissions from cars. The facts look impressive, to say the least. It’s a renewable source of energy (it is mainly produced by corn, but there are plans to produce ethanol from alternative sources, such as sugar cane), it reduces emissions from cars by 12-19%, and it lowers the level of carbon monoxide released from an automobile’s tailpipe.

Al Gore makes an important point when he says that environmentally friendly policies can coincide with the goals with corporations, which is, quite plainly, to maximize profit. However, at what point are these goals too much aligned with one another? In particular, I am speaking about the rising price of ethanol to the point where it doesn’t alleviate the pain of filling up at the pump – it aggravates it.

Ethanol has been touted by President Bush and others as a possible long-term cure for Americans’ addiction to fossil fuels, especially expensive gasoline. But right now it is pushing pump prices higher in the U.S.

Ethanol, a plant-based fuel, is being used in the U.S. primarily as an additive to blend with gasoline in proportions of up to 10%, not as an outright substitute. Demand for ethanol as an additive has caused its price to soar about 65% since early May to around $4.50 a gallon in U.S. spot markets, according to the Oil Price Information Service. That makes it far more expensive than gasoline, which costs about $2.90 a gallon at the pump on average, according to the AAA driving club.

[…]

“We’d probably have retail gasoline prices between $2.30 and $2.40 a gallon if not for ethanol,” estimates economist James Glassman of J.P. Morgan.

Ethanol trader Sal Gilbertie of brokerage firm Fimat USA agrees the additive is pushing up gasoline prices — but he pegs ethanol’s impact at only around eight cents a gallon, including such factors as a federal tax credit refiners get for using it. He expects ethanol’s influence won’t fully abate until sometime in 2008, when supplies are expected to increase.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I am not arguing that we should not be making ethanol, as it gasoline that is blended with ethanol is friendlier to the environment. It’s clear, though, that by richly subsidizing an industry that would not exist without government help, we have exacerbated the pain being felt in our pocketbooks. When investing in new technologies, start-up costs will obviously exist, making the initial price quite hefty. The problem with artificially creating a market, though, is that this is inevitably going to lead to the bankruptcy of companies that jump into the game, only to find at some point that demand for the additive is reached. What’s more, it’s clear that firms that produce ethanol are raking in huge profits. Do we really need to give them any more money at this point?

 Welcome to the ethanol boom, the closest America’s farmers may get to an investment bubble. Since the pro-ethanol State of the Union address in January, shares of Fresno-based Pacific Ethanol Inc. (PEIX ) have doubled, to 37. Green Plains Renewable Energy has risen 40%, to 46, since it began trading in March.

[…]

The fuel, renewable and more environmentally friendly than gasoline, is already being used as a gas additive, replacing another additive that was found to pollute groundwater. The result: a squeeze on supplies that has doubled ethanol’s wholesale price, to $2.75 a gallon, about what gasoline costs at wholesale. With corn prices low and gas prices high, ethanol’s profit margin per gallon is at a record of more than $1. “You don’t need Willie Nelson organizing concerts for these farmers,” jokes Tom Kloza, an analyst for the Oil Price Information Service.

The kicker is this little nugget – so much for fuel efficiency…

What of the promise of ethanol replacing gas? Don’t count on it. General Motors Corp. (GM ) and Ford Motor Co. (F ) have made a push this year to promote vehicles that can run on gas or E85, a fuel that’s 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. But E85 gets worse mileage than gas, a problem if ethanol is costlier. And right now there are only about 600 E85 pumps nationwide.

Minnesota, which has its own state-run subsidy program, faces a similar problem as well:

But taxpayers are still being billed $26 million a year to subsidize the state’s 11 privately owned ethanol plants, even though they’re generating unprecedented profits.

Wally Tyner, a Purdue University economist, calculated that at today’s fuel prices, an ethanol plant that cost $100 million could be paid off in a year. “They’re hugely profitable, that’s why so many of them are being built,” Tyner told the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

While it’s become increasingly clear that we’re giving away money to ethanol producers instead of providing useful assistance to a nascent industry, there’s an unpleasant dilemma that ethanol has created. Producing ethanol requires energy to begin with, and to cut down on high energy prices (and maximize their profits, of course), companies are turning to the worst polluter of all: coal.

Coal is cheaper than natural gas, the fuel used most to make ethanol. A coal-fired ethanol plant can also generate electricity that can be sold onto the grid, which increases the efficiency of both ethanol and electricity production.

In the most striking example of this efficient combination, Blue Flint Ethanol, a North Dakota producer, is building a plant next to Coal Creek Power Station, a 1,200-megawatt facility owned by Great River Energy. The plant will rely on excess heat from Coal Creek’s boilers to run the ethanol plant. The heat will be used to create the steam necessary to refine corn into 50 million gallons of ethanol each year. Blue Flint Ethanol is a joint venture between Great River and Headwaters Inc.

“This whole concept of having an energy complex is a very efficient way to minimize carbon-dioxide emissions and take advantage of the waste heat from a power plant,” said Bob McIlvaine, president of energy consulting firm McIlvaine Co.

Any sort of contribution that ethanol makes to decreasing air pollution will be negated many times over by coal. This may be an inconvenient truth to many of us, who thought that E85 and other hybrid energy solutions could at least slow down the problem of global warming. Without any sort of regulations on how ethanol can be produced, we may have opened a Pandora’s Box in letting coal be considered a viable energy source again, even though it is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. In addition, businesses see a side business that could be very profitable for them.

Other companies are pursuing a similar strategy of building small coal-fired boilers that will run ethanol plants and generate electricity. Great River is helping build a 40-megawatt coal-fired boiler in Spiritwood, N.D., that will sell electricity and power a 100-million-gallon-a-year ethanol plant. A group of investors in Goodland, Kan., is building a 20-megawatt boiler that will generate electricity and power ethanol and biodiesel plants. Coal-burning ethanol plants are also under construction in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri.

For the short-term benefit of ethanol – let’s face it, blending ethanol with gasoline does not solve our larger problem of depending on oil; it just makes the time we can depend on oil even longer – we could be incurring a deadlier risk of seeing more and more coal-fired power plants eject massive amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. And the reason? We have given corporations a few too many points of making a profit. You’ll see various taxpayer watchdog groups and right-leaning think tanks rail against ethanol purely from a fiscally conservative point of view. But we failed to defend any sort of environmental standards when it came to producing the additive. Now, we face a situation where gas prices are higher, corn prices are higher, corporations are raking in record profits (both gasoline and ethanol producers), and our air pollution could stand to get much worse before it gets any better.

It’s an inconvenient truth, but ethanol is going to hurt us more than it will help us.

(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom and Daily Kos)

The blogosphere has gained influence exponentially since its inception. This has confounded the mainstream media, which has seen blogs like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo surpass readership of so-called ‘papers of record’ such as the New York Times. Perhaps it’s due to the threat they pose to their business that they continue to this day to brand us as nothing more than a bunch of angry, leftist, anti-war bloggers who are the liberal equivalent of Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, or other conservative bombthrowers. The fact is, though, that the top liberal blogs are hardly a bunch of treehugging, pot-smoking hippies (okay, some of you may be). Our lack of any sort of cohesive ideological goal – aside from withdrawing from Iraq as timely as possible – has worked to our benefit (whereas our party is mercilessly panned by the media and the right wing for being a party without ideas, even though most of the policies that affect our everyday lives are a direct result of Democratic measures.

In this piece at The Nation (and cross-posted at Huffington Post), former Kerry staffer Ari Melber writes a brilliant piece explaining the inner workings of the blogosphere by examining the seemingly ideological contradiction of being critical of Joe Lieberman’s Democratic loyalties while supporting a former Reagan appointee, Jim Webb, as the Virginia candidate for Senate.

As progressive bloggers focus on ousting Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman from office for his alleged disloyalty to Democrats, in Virginia, another candidate who embodied the Republican cause has infiltrated the Democratic Party. But ironically, the bloggers support this former Reagan official.

Jim Webb, a Vietnam combat veteran who served as Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, is not only the new darling of the national netroots in his challenge to Republican incumbent George Allen; he was recruited to run for office by Internet activists. Webb, an iconoclastic, progun, prochoice, antiwar, libertarian, economic populist from a rural military family, recently declared his membership in the Democratic Party. In a summer campaign season punctuated by talk of purges and ideological purity, online enthusiasm for Webb’s candidacy tells a different story about blog activism, raising fundamental questions about the netroots’ emerging electoral strategy.

In the current frame that the MSM sets the blogosphere within, this would confound them. After all, Lieberman has never been a part of the Republican Party (officially), while Webb served in the administration of Ronald Reagan, someone who garners little love from the left, and by association, the blogosphere. Even this claim could be disputed, though. If one examines their economic policy, one can argue that Webb’s economic populism is more in line with traditional Democratic Party values than Lieberman’s corporate-friendly agenda that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) espouses. On foreign policy, Lieberman is a neoconservative through and through, as evidenced by his co-chairmanship on the resurrected Committee on the Present Danger; Webb argues for withdrawing from Iraq and having a more focused foreign policy. The media will never see past that, though; they only see things in terms of parties and see that Lieberman votes 90 percent of the time with the Democratic Party (a highly, if inaccurate, subjective measure, to be sure), while Webb was a Republican in the conservative ascent to power during the Reagan years.

The GOP obviously thinks that framing the blogosphere as the far left, on par with MoveOn.org and other easily-referenced ‘radical liberals’ will work:

After Webb entered the race, he shot up the list for total netroots donors through ActBlue.com (ranking fifth at this writing). The Webb campaign clearly appreciated Feld’s initiative and results–he was hired this month as netroots coordinator. Virginia Republicans counter that Webb’s relationship with the netroots is a liability. Allen Campaign spokesman Bill Bozin told me, “Liberal blogs like Daily Kos are in the same extreme category as MoveOn.org. They’re completely out of the American mainstream, and if Jim Webb wants to continue cozying up to the far left, our campaign welcomes it.” (The Allen campaign recently hired an e-campaign manager, Philip Guthrie, to lead its Internet outreach.)

Head over to Raising Kaine, the Virginia blog prominently referenced by Melber, along with the site’s founder, Kossack, and person most responsible for drafting Webb, Lowell Feld, and you won’t see too much ‘out of touch’ people there. The blogosphere is filled with people who are acutely aware of their surroundings and what it takes to win races. It’s not the same old paradigm, where a Democratic candidate absorbs the shots from the other side and is largely defanged. Remember Steve Jarding’s badass response to the Allen campaign when they tried to make flag burning and other irrelevant issues important? Indeed, it’s not about ideology; it’s about reforming the Democratic Party into a combative force that will stand up to the GOP and their right-wing lackeys when they spout one of their many falsehoods and half-truths.

Even supposed Democrats don’t even know what to think of the blogosphere. They look at the issue in the same light as the GOP, unable to understand that the blogs are utilizing a new political model.

Webb and Lieberman are different in many ways, but it is their positions on the war that captivate people. Joe Eyer, the political director for Lieberman’s 2004 presidential campaign, says it “defies logic” for bloggers to tout a former Republican like Webb while savaging Lieberman’s Democratic credentials, and he believes the only explanation is the war. “[Bloggers say] they are bringing different perspectives to the table, but Webb proves there is a litmus test for their support,” he said. The punditocracy has also been castigated antiwar “litmus tests.” For example, the centrist Progressive Policy Institute’s Marshall Wittmann, a recovering Republican himself, recently derided top bloggers as “McGovernites with modems” who have “only one issue, the war.”

Perhaps they’d do best to check out the bimonthly straw polls over at Daily Kos. Mark Warner, someone who has an undecidedly unpleasant non-position on Iraq, is polling far ahead of John Kerry, who co-sponsored the resolution with Russ Feingold to leave Iraq within a year. It’s true that Feingold is at the top of the list, but it’s largely on the basis of other attributes: willingness to censure Bush over warrantless wiretapping, taking a principled stand against the Patriot Act, taking on campaign finance reform, and so on. Additionally, just because John Edwards has a similar position hasn’t vaulted him anywhere close to the 38% Feingold has garnered (although some think that the revamped primary schedule will help him greatly).

It is undeniable to say that Iraq isn’t a consequential issue in the blogosphere (or the rest of the country) – it is the biggest issue by far. However, Melber makes a point that the blogosphere is not one-dimensional:

Yet if netroots activists have a litmus test on the war, it is not rigorously applied. The netroots hold very favorable views of several incumbents and potential presidential candidates who either were for the war or still support it, according to a recent MyDD survey. Besides, antiwar candidates hold a view that is overwhelmingly supported not only on the left but across mainstream public opinion. A majority of Americans believe that it was a mistake to invade Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and promote democracy and that the United States should end the occupation soon. That position may be politically potent, but popularity is not a litmus test.

[…]

The diverging paths of Jim Webb and Joe Lieberman suggest a netroots strategy that is driven as much by political pragmatism as ideological purity, where the Iraq War is critical but not paramount, and joining the party late is far more acceptable than leaving early. It also proves that if netroots Democrats care about one thing more than aggressive partisanship, it’s winning.

That is all one needs to know about the blogosphere. We may have our individual pet issues, and we definitely don’t agree on everything – just examine the highly flammable debates on the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah – but after being out of power for 6 years and watching the Republican Party do everything but literally destroy America, we want to win. There is no time for ideological purity tests; that can come if we ever consolidate our majorities to such a point in the future.

Even the mainstream media is beginning to learn for themselves that we aren’t that wild-eyed. It should have been evident after Yearly Kos, but they are slow learners. However, they seem to be understanding what the blogosphere is about, if this MSNBC article is any indication:

Those who see the Lieberman-Lamont contest as a liberal inquisition or a battle for the soul of the Democratic party tend to forget one thing: that outside of this particular race, the left-wing blogosphere this election cycle has often been more concerned about winning races against Republicans than battling over ideology — which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given that Democrats don’t control either chamber of Congress and haven’t won the last two presidential elections.

“There’s more pragmatism among the bloggers than they get credit for,” says Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of The Hotline, a nonpartisan political newsletter.

[…]

Case in point: the much-hyped Senate race in Pennsylvania, where liberals have embraced Democrat Bob Casey, despite his conservative views on abortion and gun rights. The reason why is because Casey has a very good chance of defeating an archenemy to liberals, conservative Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.  “Like it or not, Casey has the clearest path to victory of any Dem Senate challenger this cycle,” wrote liberal blogger and founder of the Daily Kos blog, Markos Moulitsas, after Casey came out in support of then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. “We need this seat.”

Or take the Virginia’s Senate race, where Moulitsas and other liberal bloggers supported the Democratic primary campaign of former Reagan Navy Secretary James Webb. While Webb has vocally opposed the Iraq war (and used his military credentials to bolster his argument), he’s also a former Republican who backed President Bush and U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., in 2000 — hardly your typical Democrat. But bloggers, and also the Democratic establishment, saw Webb as the best chance to defeat the incumbent Allen in the fall.

And then there is Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, widely regarded as the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, whose re-election campaign is running a television ad that features President Bush praising him. The left hasn’t laid a finger on the Nebraska Democrat.

Kudos to Alex Isenstadt, who wrote this article. If the mainstream media can comprehend what we are about, the old frame of the blogosphere as a bunch of people on the fringe will dissipate rapidly. Perhaps they realized after the vicious smackdown that The New Republic deserved when it tried to discredit Kos, Jerome Armstrong, and the entire blogosphere, that we are a force to be reckoned with. Whatever the impetus may be, it’s a welcome one. Because once they open their eyes, it’s not so hard to see why we are largely supportive of Jim Webb but so disdainful of Joe Lieberman.