The Carpetbagger Report � Give until it hurts? Not these days

The Carpetbagger Report � Give until it hurts? Not these days: "I fear that the cancer of extreme individualism, planted by President Ronald Reagan and nurtured by Bush I and now Bush II, has grown so much that it can no longer be excised from the body politic. . . If this is true, if we really have lost our national ability to sacrifice for the common good, we’ve lost more than Social Security and Medicaid. We’ve lost something vital to the American spirit. We’ve lost something that, in the past, made us a great and enviable nation."



This exemplifies an alternative to the coming of the storm, a narrative that accepts that the country has changed, and is not changing back any time soon. The extreme individualism, which characterizes Republican ideology, has its foundation not in the personalities of Republican Presidents, but in deep cultural shifts, which have been underway for a very long time.



Americans were once great joiners. Through most of American history, fraternal societies and organizations were vitally important and involved vast numbers. Heck, the "Sons of Liberty" and the Committees of Correspondence brought about American independence. No more. The Shriners, and Elks, and Tammany Hall are all but gone.



The American People are fat and lonely.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Compromise or appeasement?

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Compromise or appeasement?: "What makes me saddest is that no one seems to care what the Constitution actually says on the subject. That's not a healthy situation for a constitutional republic."



The theme of this blog is expression of the rhetorical thesis that the right-wing Republicans will overstep in their program to build the fascist State, and in so doing, bring down their whole enterprise, shocking the country into supporting rationality, liberalism, motherhood and apple pie.



The trouble is, if rationality, liberalism, motherhood and apple pie are not supported in the first place, there's no context in which to overstep. Power is honored, principle is but a distant memory.

Conservative Overreach

The Washington Monthly: "Conservative overreach is clearly one of the best hopes liberals have at the moment, and anything that slows down their apparent desire to sail merrily over a cliff is probably a bad thing."



Once again a liberal Democrat calculates the politics, based on an assumption that the Republicans, busy building the fascist State, will go off a cliff. If the Republicans do not go off a cliff, and the fascist State is established, . . . well, let's not think about that.

Bush's Last Chance - Is the president finally ready to talk to Pyongyang? Let's hope so. By Fred Kaplan

Bush's Last Chance - Is the president finally ready to talk to Pyongyang? Let's hope so. By Fred Kaplan: "So, what should President Bush do? Stay on his high horse, refuse to negotiate (or, as he once put it, to 'reward bad behavior'), and watch one of the world's loosest cannons go nuclear? Or acknowledge the risks, get ready to be annoyed, and sit down at the table? There's still time, maybe one last time, to make a choice."



It is perfectly obvious, after even a few minutes of thought, that the U.S. should offer economic aid and security guarantees to North Korea in return for curtailing their nuclear program. There really is no other good option, and that a large part of the Republican Party, including Bush and McCain, as well as nutcases like Bolton, will not face up to it, reveals them to be hopeless incompetents.



Bush has, as far as I can tell, even spent even a few minutes in actual thought. Certainly, not about a matter of government policy. And, I doubt he will make an exception in this case.



Maybe his good luck will hold. I doubt very much that U.S. intelligence has any good assessment of real Korean capabilities. And, I don't know enough about the difficulties of building a bomb to know if they can really do it. The North Koreans do not have a depth of technical capability; this is not Russia, with vast resources and, poor as Russia is, with mathematicians playing chess on every street corner. North Korea is a country of 22 million, living in poverty so severe that a signficant part of the population is on the verge of starvation. They do have the ability to build ballistic missiles in small numbers; whether they could really build any significant numbers of bombs has to be considered dubious. The danger to the U.S. and the world is that they might, in economic desperation, put together a nuclear bomb or a "dirty" bomb, and sell it. The U.S. needs to have sufficient intelligence capability in the region to detect such an export and intercept it. Are we building such a capability? I doubt it very much.



And, the U.S. needs North Korea to accept economic aid of a kind, which will jump start the country's economic development. Any opening to the world is going to be subversive to regime. We should want to aid them, because aiding them undermines them, if done in the right way. Will we be that smart? Are you kidding?

Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias: "As I see it, three different things were at stake. One was the high-level principle about whether or not it was okay for the Senate to operate under Calvinball rules. Democrats seem to have made no progress on this front. Another was the low-level issue that several of these nominees, and Janice Rogers Brown in particular, will make horrible judges. Democrats gave ground on this front. In the middle was the pseudo-principle that the filibuster is a pillar of American democracy. It was here -- on the party's most questionable contention -- that they seem to have made all their gains. That seems pretty dubious to me. I would much rather have made 'concessions' on the filibuster as such as gains on the question of who gets to be a judge."



I am holding out hope that the moderate Republicans agreed, as is rumored, to vote Janice Rogers Brown down.



Democrats have repeatedly made the point that they have rejected only a small percentage of President Bush's choices, but no one makes the point that the Republicans, after rejecting 60 of Clinton's nominees, have not rejected a single one of Bush's. That's an appalling record. The Senate is not doing its job, if it takes its marching orders from President Bush. If the moderate Republicans reject at least one nominee, they will have demonstrated their willingness to do their jobs as Senators.

Paul Krugman forecasts Storm

America Wants Security - New York Times: "So where will change come from?



Everyone loves historical analogies. Here's my thought: maybe 2004 was 1928. During the 1920's, the national government followed doctrinaire conservative policies, but reformist policies that presaged the New Deal were already bubbling up in the states, especially in New York.



In 1928 Al Smith, the governor of New York, was defeated in an ugly presidential campaign in which Protestant preachers warned their flocks that a vote for the Catholic Smith was a vote for the devil. But four years later F.D.R. took office, and the New Deal began.



Of course, the coming of the New Deal was hastened by a severe national depression. Strange to say, we may be working on that, too."

Almost Unnoticed, Bipartisan Budget Anxiety

Almost Unnoticed, Bipartisan Budget Anxiety: "With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina's economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago."