Edwards certainly probably put the nail in the casket of the Democratic party as it has existed for the last few elections. I can’t say anyone should be too sad over that given recent buffoonery. I do agree Edwards would have made a much different dynamic and at this point I have trouble believing he wouldn’t be getting all the votes from boths side that are not cultist zombies.

Not that the 60’s were without problems, but our current movement could use more opportunities to get together, listen to music, get high and dance around in the mud together.

Assuming you’re still speaking to me. Best, I thought, to jump on this Kumbaya moment before it closes. Good to know you’re well. Come back soon. ((()))

You’re talking sense again, chicago dyke. Thanks for returning from the garden to present us with this bouquet.

As for this:

“Reach out your hand to those who are on the side of Good. Learn to say, ’I’m sorry. Let’s get down to business.’”

Maybe everyone isn’t ready for so much warmth and wonderfulness. I’m willing to pass on the apologies and the reaching out if some folks would prefer to simply focus on undermining oppression to the extent possible, roll up their sleeves, and cut straight to getting down to business.

And this:

“Iraq will slog on; none of us will enjoy universal health care or cheap gas any time soon/ever. No Bush Administration crony will go to jail for a long, deserved time, and the rich are going to get richer, at least until the Revolution comes.”

You manage to combine a sunny disposition with a bleak outlook. Good for you. Don’t be too sorry.

If you can’t stomach Obama or his followers there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in a positive way. All over the country there are plenty of good candidates around who need help, especially after Obama and Clinton have sucked up so much money and attention this year.

If venom is all that will come out of your keyboard these days McCain and every single Republican candidate for federal office deserve your ire.

beauty. But..and you know there’s a “but” ….the reasons we/I didn’t support The Chosen One thus far are the same reasons we won’t support him in the General, if he gets there.

He has to address the following:
- Sit Mi/FL
- take privatization of SS off the table
- prosecution of the Bush crime clan
- promotion of women’s and LGBT’s rights
- progressive economic policies
- Universal health care
- repeal of no child left behind, no merit pay plan
- out of Iraq / no bombing of Pakistan
- reinstate habeas corpus
- commitment to appointing progressive judges on SCOTUS, no waffling
- commitment to repeal the partial birth abortion law, no waffling
- no telco immunity

Because if he can’t it’s only four years until the next election and should he make it to the WH, which I don’t think he will, he won’t have a second term. He won’t make it to the WH because he can’t debate his way out of a paper bag and, trust me, that’s not hard against a septogenarian who can’t remember what day it is. It takes him four minutes to address one question, dangerous.

So instead of sending HRC supporters an olive branch/love note/blow job/bribe save your breath and figure out how you/we can make this presumptive Nominee (ala Timmy Russert) a winner. ’Cause right now, he isn’t.

“Or, not. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you do the work of the Evil for them, you have no one but yourself to blame. “

So I’m to blame because BO can’t earn a vote from anyone other than a rich liberal, a college student or an AA? I’m to blame because he can’t debate for shit? I’m to blame because he can’t close the deal and needs the MSMs help screaming WWTSBQ 24/7 so he won’t lose too badly? I’m to blame that your candidate alienate the very people he needs to win the nomination?!!!

Oh, my.

I love this job!

He writes:

If you can’t stomach Obama or his followers there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in a positive way. All over the country there are plenty of good candidates around who need help

I can’t, and I can’t, nor can I stomach the tactics. Unless a new NWP starts up ;-) he’ll get my vote in the fall. Period. If there are down-ticket races, especially ones that forward universal health care, that’s where’ll I’ll put my energy.

And unless my candidate quits, I will continue to advocate for her as forcesfully as I can, which is not only my right but IMNSHO my duty.

Meanwhile, CD, my tulips and daffodils came in beautifully, and I just doubled the size of the garden. Tomatos in, I hope, but the first full moon this month.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

We’ve all missed you, but I want you to know that thinking about you working in the garden, and gardens provide one of the increasingly fewer venues where real, profound, self-directed hard work can still take place, has been a real comfort to me.

I’d only add my own defense of electoral politics, because politics is how we do business in a democracy, (as I’ve pointed out before, there were no politics in the Soviet Union, except inside the Kremlin), while noting that it is not the only, or even the best way to effect change. Activism needn’t always be played out in electoral politics. Look at the fairly spontaneous grassroots protests against the pending invasion of Iraq in 2002, which was a world-wide phenomenon.

Since we’re dealing with an inspiring post, yours, I hope you won’t mind if I use this thread to post a rather long excerpt from an essay by Terry Tempest Williams that talks about this difference. It’s part of a triptych of essays she did under the Title, “The Open Space of Democracy.”

This one, “Engagement,” the third of the series, was about a local community in Utah organizing itself to resist an alliance between government and a corporation with commercial designs on a piece of the local environment.

In the middle of the essay, Williams describes a protest in Florence against the impending Iraq war which she attended because she was living in Italy then, in an Italian village.

I hope some of you will read the whole essay, which I’ll link to below, but because I consider what CD has gifted us with in this post to be very much what Terry Tempest Williams is about in this essay, and in particular this description, which I return to again and again whenever I begin to doubt that real change is possible, I’m going to quote the whole section of this part of the essay. I’m also doing it in a thread rather than a post because I consider that a “fair use” of such a long quote, whereas i might feel less comfortable putting it on the front page in post.

Okay, here’s Terry Tempest Williams.

“IN THE FALL OF 2002, I was living in Italy. There was a growing fear that America was going to wage war in Iraq. There was also a growing resistance throughout Europe to the militant Bush-Blair partnership. An estimated one million people gathered in Florence; they walked the streets of Firenze, creating a body politic seven kilometers long.

This news was not being reported in America.

I wrote a letter home in the form of an op-ed piece for the Salt Lake Tribune. I wanted my community to know about this calm manifestation of willful resolve demonstrating a simple fact: Even if our political leaders cannot read the pulse of a changing world, the people do. The European Social Forum had just held its meetings in Florence, where issues ranging from health and the environment to international trade to the possibility of a war in Iraq were discussed. It ended with this gesture of movement, much of it along the banks of the Arno River, creating a river of another sort, a river of humans engaged in a diverse dialogue of peace.

Train after train stopped and emptied itself of the working middle class. Men, women, and children from Italian towns and villages gathered to participate with citizens from all over Europe. Massimo Sottani, a former mayor of Regello whom I had met in the village where I was staying, had invited me to join him with his family and friends. “It is not only our right and obligation to participate in civic life, it is in our best interest,” he said as we stood outside the station waiting for more of his friends.

Lorenzo Becawtini, a businessman in Florence, joined us. “Antiglobalization is not a slogan,” he said, “it is a rigorous reconfiguration of democracy that places power and creativity back into the hands of villagers and townspeople, providing them with as many choices as possible.”

With antiglobalization in Europe often tied to anti-Americanism, there were the inevitable placards of George W. Bush disguised as Hitler next to banners that read “drop bush not bombs” and a Big Mac being driven on top of a hearse. But for the most part, the focal point of this massive demonstration remained on positive changes for a changing world.

At one point, an elderly Florentine man who held memories of Mussolini stepped out on his balcony above the wave of people and draped a white bedsheet over the railing in support of peace. As participants waved to the old man, the crowd spontaneously began singing ”Ciao, Bella, Ciao,” the song of the partigianos, the Italian resistance against the fascists in World War II. Neighbor after neighbor repeated the gesture, draping white sheets and pillow cases over their balconies until the apartment walls that lined the streets appeared as great sails billowing in the breeze.

Albertina Pisano, a twenty-five-year-old student from the University of Milan, said, “My generation in Europe doesn’t know what it means to be at war. I came to the forum to listen and participate.” When I asked her if she thought this would make any difference, she answered, “It is making a difference to me.”

Looking over my shoulder from the rise on the bridge, all I could see was an endless river of people walking, many hand in hand, all side by side, peacefully, united in place with a will for social change. Michelangelo was among them, as art students from Florence raised replicas of his Prigioni above their heads, the unfinished sculptures of prisoners trying to break free from the confines of stone. Machiavelli was among them, as philosophy students from Rome carried his words: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Leonardo da Vinci was among them, his words carrying a particularly contemporary sting: “And by reason of their boundless pride… there shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued and molested or destroyed.”

The hundreds of thousands of individuals who walked together in the name of social change could be seen as the dignified, radical center walking boldly toward the future. As an American in Florence, I wondered, how do we walk with the rest of the world when our foreign policies seem to run counter to the rising global awareness of a world hungry for honest diplomacy?”

I lived through the sixties as an adult, a very very young adult, and I know it can’t be replicated, which isn’t entirely a bad thing, but the nature of reality, in any case, so no point pretending it can, but William’s description of that joyful, playful, witty, “endless river of people walking, hand in hand,” embodying both the very notion of peace on earth, and, at the same time a commitment to radical change, which Williams’ rightly labels as centrist, is as exciting and meaningful as anything I experienced in the sixties.

The problem with the anti-war movement here is that once it had failed to stop the Iraq war, it seemed to give up and go home. A mistake, I think. But more about that in an actual post.

Here’s the link to Williams entire essay; I urge all of you to read it, especially now, because Williams is able to describe a process at the local level which allowed people with very different cultural values and political commitments, or so they and we would have thought, to come together and make real change by stopping undemocratic change.

I feel so passionately about this that I’m going to include a small quote from Williams’ summing up of that experience in local organizing as a tease to get you to click on the link.

AS I LOOK BACK OVER the story we have been living in Castle Valley, it does not begin to convey the power and empowering nature of the process. It is through the process of defining what we want as a town that we are becoming a real community. It is through the act of participation that we change.

This is not simply a story of not-in-my-backyard. It is the unfolding tale of how a small community in the desert is rising to its own defense, saying, we believe we have a stake in the future of our own community, which we choose to define beyond our own boundaries of time and space and species.

A crisis woke us up. A shared love of place opened a dialogue with neighbors. We asked for help. We found partners. We used our collective intelligence to formulate a plan. And then we had to search within ourselves to find what each of us had to give.

edit

Social change takes time. Communities are built on the practice of patience and imagination—the belief that we are here for the duration and will take care of our relations in times of both drought and abundance. These are the blood and flesh gestures of commitment.

Go read the whole thing.

In virtually every forum I’ve seen, unity is ultimately defined as getting on the Obama bandwagon or, at the very least, refraining from pointing out his flaws.

Refraining from defending Hillary has also been an important part in the call-to-Kumbaya.

Well, now that — IMHO — the race for the nomination is over, I expect to be holding my fire.

But I’m not sorry for speaking out against Obama’s accommodationist message or manifold insults of folks like me and whom I care about, nor of defending HRC for running a campaign that reinvigorated her populism.

Please explain to me, if you would, how my premise is wrong, how “unity” hasn’t long meant rolling over for Obama.

If there’s one thing progressives should have learned from the past eight years, it is that the American political system cannot be reformed in any significant manner. It is what it is, and it is the way it has to be because it is what our economic system requires.

At this point one cannot effectively participate in our political process unless one has access to billions, and raising that kind of money will turn you into the very devil you are trying to fight.

I stayed out of the primary debates for the most part because for me, the choice between the false populist Clinton and the anti-populist Obama was no choice at all. Yet I’ll vote for whoever emerges from this mess in November, because as Lambert put it so effectively the other day, we should vote against sociopaths.

Is all lost? Only if you spend too much time concentrating on the national picture. As the national grid continues to deteriorate, the local will become that much more important. The churches have it right, at least in terms of their ability to provide social services without a great deal of direct government support. One problem I keep being told progressives have by my non-progressive friends is that they see us as disconnected from our own local communities. Right now, if you want to make a difference, forget influencing the outcomes of elections. Work in a homeless shelter. Volunteer in a soup kitchen or a food bank. Give your old clothes to the poor. Teach a disadvantaged child to read. If you’re particularly ambitious, use some of your money to set up an organization to pay the utility bills and/or medical bills of the poor. Donate your time and money to causes you see as worthy; they’ll appreciate your support a hell of a lot more than the Democratic Party ever will.

I’m well aware of the weaknesses of charity; I’m anticipating responses that will point them out. It’s just that charity is the only thing our system will permit right now, perhaps ever. The Revolution doesn’t come without getting people involved, and that doesn’t happen until we go back to our own local communities, roll up our sleeves, work alongside our neighbors, and make them more aware of our society’s weaknesses.

Remember, actions speak louder than words.

…for the rest of us

Leah, go to hear from you, please start posting again!

Feet on the ground, head in the sky, hands in the dirt.

Good for the soul.

I’ll supply the basil & goat cheese:

Why the Planet is Worth Saving…

Lambert might accuse you of being in the “creative class” if you bring goat cheese. I’d stick to Velveeta if I was you.

Alas. Incidentally, what Leah is saying is yet another reason I changed my sig.

Sorry “goat cheese” was a trigger for you, dmd76. Anybody who reads the post will be able to recognized your dull-edged snark for what it is…

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

You caught me. I was hoping to slide past class-check check-in with an “I forgot it was there” ploy, er, uh…lie. You must be in the security-class.

Truth be told, I’m not really “creative class” [didn’t go to college, does watching PBS qualify?] but I am in the “investor class,” what with the $4.47 used to buy the you know what & earned last year as interest from my checking account and fully reported on Schedule “B” as required by the IRS.

Just trying to keep everyone in line here. PBS is pretty “creative class”-ish, but we’ll have to defer to Lambert for the final word on just where you belong.

By the way, your tomato sandwich ingredients look delicious. I’m going to make one when I get home.

I didn’t make up “creative class” — A group of people, all Obama supporters, self-identified that way. If whaleshaman chooses to self-identify that way, then that would be up to him. I’m not the gatekeeper.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Months spent painting Hillary as some sort of class warrior by distinguishing between her working class supporters and the “creative class” OFB, and now you’re not a gatekeeper? You’ve been telling us OFB what we are for far too long to take this out.

Hillary has not left the race yet and already you’re pulling back on all of your greatest hits. First, you were just following shystee’s lead on the whole cult thing, now “creative class” is just a name some Obama supporters used to describe themselves that you happened to note. How utterly inoffensive.

what exactly did you mean by this….

Fight for your candidate! Yes! Be Nasty, be dirty, say untrue things, even…this is the age of the Bush Republican. I believe in “The Chicago Way;” if your enemy kicks you in the balls, you knife him in the back, send his to the morgue, etc. But not within the family. Goddess no. No, it’s just not worth it.

what do you do when the person a family member does “knife him in the back, send him to the morgue” is another family member.. and nobody got kicked in the balls to provoke a knifing?

my enemies are not my family, my family is not my enemy. my family, the blood/gay set, has pissed me off, crossed The Line, shit on me, etc., many times. perhaps this makes me “weak” and “soft,” but i still love them. and fight for them, and work with them, and believe and hope with them as we all walk to the better future we can still dream. obama is not my enemy yet. he’s trying to lead my political “family,” and so far has worked/gamed/enjoyed the SCLM favor to get closer to that position. like your blood family, sometimes, you can’t choose who your political ’father’ will be. i didn’t get my choice, not this time nor in 04, or 00. now that “it’s over,” (and i’m not even saying it is) it’s time for people like me to step up and do what we can to begin the healing, and lead in the hard work effort that lies before us all.

i’ll end with a quote that you, paul, because of your terrific expertise and understanding of the real numbers, *must* help deal with and combat:

“I don’t trust Obama and I won’t vote for him if he’s the nom, because he’ll appoint too many minorities over the white race.

that was from a dem party official. so: if it’s going to be BHO despite your efforts to have someone else, what do you suggest we do to change minds/make up for lost votes from people like that?

God. All I wanted to do on the Shystee thing was stop your endless repetition by pointing out that a far less polemic figure than I was happy to put my views under the heading of “good reasons,” and maybe we could, as the saying goes, agree to disagree. “Olive branch,” right? But you want to keep on with it. I take back none of it. You, in fact, confirm me in my views. Stuck pig squeals.

As far as “creative class” goes, its members are self-identified, and I didn’t invent the term. But given the reaction to calling bullshit on it, I’m thinking that there may be more “creative class” wannabes than I thought. An interesting result. Stuck pig squeals, again!

Dull, dull, time consuming, off point….

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

If you spend 6 months raving that one union supported centrist Democratic candidate is immoral, unethical, evil beyond all historical parallel, insulting, and odious - it should not be at all surprising that you end up surprising yourself at how reasonable Fox news starts to sound.

Don’t worry, it’s not you who have left progressive values, it’s progressive values that have left you.

“Rhetorical irresponsibility” == “Watch what you say.”

Thanks for the warning.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Let me translate…
new
Submitted by lambert on Fri, 2008-05-09 09:08.

Thanks for the warning.

Well, in a sense. It is instructive to see how a bunch of relatively insightful progressive posters circa 2005 have frightened themselves into near winger status by wild misuse of rhetoric.

Believe me, if things work out as you claim, nobody will be happier than I am. However, nothing I see makes me sanguine about the outcome — and watching the destruction of the media critique is the canary in the coal mine for me. Therefore, we lay down the record.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.