Digby

So all day long I'm hearing the gasbags blather on about how this lame, off year election is a referendum on liberalism and Obama and things are looking grim, grim, grim.

The Democratic blue dogs have it all figured out:

"It looks as though the anger that has been boiling up the last couple of months is going to lead to a pretty high turnout from Republicans and from people who are concerned about increased spending," Altmire said Monday evening during an appearance on Fox Business Network.

"And I do think that if the results show Republicans have a pretty good night, that probably is going to lead some Democrats to think that, going into next year, we need to take a second look at the way that we've done a lot of bills we've addressed up to this point," the Pennsylvania congressman added.

Oh, Golly let's hope this radical eight month experiment in slightly less corporate conservative governance has run its course and we can get back to tax cutting, deregulating and bloodletting, which is what the government does best.

The rich people, anyway:

As you know, under criticism for allegedly failing to "expose" ACORN, The NY Times recently made (yet another) commitment to following the buzz generated on the right wing noise machine.

Peter Drier and Todd Gitlin have written an important story in Columbia Journalism Review that will set any media critic's teeth on edge. It's so infuriating to find out what utter creeps the people who decide what you need to know are.

Dean Baker raises a very important point about health care reform without a public option: what happens to the mandate? He argues that for political reasons, if they jettison the public plan, the Democrats should not include mandates either, since they will only line the pockets of the insurance companies until the political pressure becomes so great that a public option will have to be formed anyway. The best thing would be to get rid of mandates now and bring that day closer.

One of progressive politics' greatest challenges is to continue to evolve and expand even as its allies in government are in power. All the incentives change and motives and direction get complicated. It's a nice problem to have, but it's a problem nonetheless.

Marcy Wheeler hosted a panel on torture at the AFN conference featuring Rep. Jerry Nadler and Christopher Anders of the ACLU, in which Nadler set forth a couple of ideas that are illuminating about the thinking among political players on the subject.

Marcy writes about one of them here:

Yesterday, Jerrold Nadler announced he will hold a hearing on state secrets on Thursday.

I was talking to Darcy Burner yesterday, who filled me in on the exciting work she's doing as the new head of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation (APCPF), which is:

So all day long I'm hearing the gasbags blather on about how this lame, off year election is a referendum on liberalism and Obama and things are looking grim, grim, grim.

The Democratic blue dogs have it all figured out:

"It looks as though the anger that has been boiling up the last couple of months is going to lead to a pretty high turnout from Republicans and from people who are concerned about increased spending," Altmire said Monday evening during an appearance on Fox Business Network.

"And I do think that if the results show Republicans have a pretty good night, that probably is going to lead some Democrats to think that, going into next year, we need to take a second look at the way that we've done a lot of bills we've addressed up to this point," the Pennsylvania congressman added.

Oh, Golly let's hope this radical eight month experiment in slightly less corporate conservative governance has run its course and we can get back to tax cutting, deregulating and bloodletting, which is what the government does best.

The rich people, anyway:

As you know, under criticism for allegedly failing to "expose" ACORN, The NY Times recently made (yet another) commitment to following the buzz generated on the right wing noise machine.

Peter Drier and Todd Gitlin have written an important story in Columbia Journalism Review that will set any media critic's teeth on edge. It's so infuriating to find out what utter creeps the people who decide what you need to know are.

Dean Baker raises a very important point about health care reform without a public option: what happens to the mandate? He argues that for political reasons, if they jettison the public plan, the Democrats should not include mandates either, since they will only line the pockets of the insurance companies until the political pressure becomes so great that a public option will have to be formed anyway. The best thing would be to get rid of mandates now and bring that day closer.

One of progressive politics' greatest challenges is to continue to evolve and expand even as its allies in government are in power. All the incentives change and motives and direction get complicated. It's a nice problem to have, but it's a problem nonetheless.

Marcy Wheeler hosted a panel on torture at the AFN conference featuring Rep. Jerry Nadler and Christopher Anders of the ACLU, in which Nadler set forth a couple of ideas that are illuminating about the thinking among political players on the subject.

Marcy writes about one of them here:

Yesterday, Jerrold Nadler announced he will hold a hearing on state secrets on Thursday.

I was talking to Darcy Burner yesterday, who filled me in on the exciting work she's doing as the new head of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation (APCPF), which is: