[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

The background of tension and reticence that has been dogging Netroots Nation came to a boil yesterday morning when attendees were threatened with having their convention badges revoked if they disrupted Speaker Pelosi.  The issue dogging the convention is that Congressional Democratic failure reached a tipping point with FISA and the base, there is no significant trust or faith anymore in our Party leadership, not to mention quite a bit of anger.

Convention attendees were obviously not trusted to be civil to Speaker Pelosi, either, and things had the potential to get really ugly yesterday.  I was actually late for Speaker Pelosi’s introduction, so I didn’t hear warning, and although I probably would have accepted it I also would have been seriously provoked by it, to me it had the distinct feeling of being pushed around.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

07/18/08 1457.31 cst
Austin, Texas

Given a very handy 2-hour head start from the Pacific time zone I have suddenly made myself into a Night Person for Netroots Nation, staying up well past midnight, but unfortunately I still snap awake with the dawn, so I’m burning some reserves here, something I’ll likely being doing all day and night.

I’m having a wonderful time here at the Hilton, it is so very good to see all these great writers I have known in the screens all these years.  As I was waiting for this morning’s panel to start a nice woman moved past my aisle seat and settled in.  "All right, Lady," I growled jokingly as stuff was put down, pleasant smiles all around.  We chatted a few moments and then she opened her laptop, and there was The Left Coaster in the screen.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Eight incredibly long years ago the Democratic Party base watched their candidate and all the Party’s chance for leadership in the new century get stolen right in front of them.  Instead of standing up for the base, the Party gallingly played along with Bush with tax cuts while Condi Rice blew off blaring warnings the US about to be attacked.

The base not only had to put up with no accountability from this horrifying negligence¹, they then had to watch a viciously implacable trap close upon eternally cowardly Democratic Partly leadership about being soft on terrorism.  Tom Daschle stood on the Capitol steps and led the caucus in God Bless America, right before he signed away huge chunks of the constitution with the Patriot Act, a scene good hard-working liberals have had to watch in sickening basic repetition over the years.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

07/12/09 0632.11 pst
San Jose, California

Very soon I am to perform the ultimate triumph for any blog, for my machine-chained soul is soon to be actually teased out of the house by blog activity, away from the ether and into the real oxygen of day, quite an accomplishment considering I’m such a webhead homebody.

Tailgating at the Oakland Coliseum this afternoon for Athletics Nation V, an annual event day for Athletics Nation, this time a big party in the eastern lot before playing the hated arch-rival Angels from Los Angeles.  I love baseball, July coastal weather, hickory smoke, family and friends...I feel very privileged indeed that the ol’ college try has worked out so well, I got extremely lucky, it is very good to be alive, yes.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

I am sorry to be so quiet lately, I was briefly ill and then very busy, so I am still, with just a few minutes available before I scurry off to my ethereal structures.

It is a dark day, a dawn of smoldering fury in a smoke-shrouded California, yet another day when my own people willingly shred the constitution—our precious rights—for nothing but stupid criminality and fear.  FISA is an easily seen core 4th amendment issue by recent history and current judicial rulings, but the Democratic Party leadership won’t care if the press ignores it.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

In a political summer of 2003 with "nothing to do" Howard Dean started a candidacy out of Vermont with a visionary internet campaign manager, Joe Trippi.  I had an easy cube job in the Valley that summer and happily joined in, thrilled with a Democrat who at last would fight, feeling more like a demi-god every day as the code I toiled in transformed a political world, eventually to garner the endorsement of a real political god, Al Gore.

That marked a turning point for all the political forces possible to whap this upstart back, and well all know how that worked out.  A pep talk after defeat in Iowa for earnest Deaniacs who had not a clue how to caucus was not the greatest of ideas, no, but the flaying of a candidate in the stocks with the Dean Scream is still a painful memory for me.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Poor Tommy Friedman in today’s New York Times suddenly noticed—nearly eight years after the penultimate event heralding all the disastrous indicators he trots out ¹—that America is in "debt and decline."  It all happened so fast, just in 2001 we had a terrific savings rate and budget surplus, and now well hell, all of mighty sudden we’re at "a 34-year low."  Thanks for telling us how screwed we are, Tommy, it’s so news to us.  When your brain can tell the reader why this happened with empirical proposals to fix it we might even think of you as a journalist.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

However much I am displeased with the agenda and behavior of Senator Barack Obama at times there is no doubt that, in his way, he seeks progressive incremental solutions is a classic liberal governance worldview.  The "new" in this framework is the Millennial Generation agenda, devoid of Vietnam and Watergate and raging cultural tactics based upon sexism and racism, but more critically in my mind is absent fear as a motivating tactic.

Senator John McCain, however, is a classic right-wing authoritarian, as outlined so brilliantly by the incomparable Sarah Robinson of The Big Con.  Authoritarian intellectual structures inherently defy change, the Republican Party is full of big oil interests who won’t even acknowledge global warming, for instance, let alone help to solve it.  These general characteristics alone garner an instant vote for Senator Barack Obama, irrespective of any other single variable.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Regrettably lost in the various Supreme Court-sparked uproars in the last week in what is for permissible in American’s behavior in killing each other was the stupid, regressive, juvenile, and infinitely offensive sanctioning of the US-Mexico border "fence," another sad racist chapter of stupidity in US immigration policy.

In the past I have sneeringly wrote of this travesty as the "tortilla curtain," something I will no longer do, for it grants the proposal a human legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.  The Fence is simply a twisting stab backward into dark times that serve no human in any good purpose.  When we as a people attempt to build physical walls to shut out our problems we have entered the hells of Berlin and Palestine.  We are showing everyone in the most blatant way possible we don’t deserve to live here or be shepherds of the earth, we can’t even figure out how to live with other countries.

Although the LA Times and Newsweek bring happy news to the Obama campaign with strapping double-digit leads, the LA Times also spells out disaster for McCain in another polling element:  McCain is performing disastrously among Republicans, his own base.  Compared to 2004, McCain is 26% behind Bush among Republicans at this time in the cycle.  (h/t Liberal Oasis)

Another demographic disaster is shaping up for McCain among evangelicals, formerly the most fiercely loyal Republican voters ever to be found.  James Dobson, the choleric Christian leader of evangelicals, issued a statement in February that he would not vote for McCain and would stay at home if Obama were the nominee.  Apparently that message sunk in very well and an amazing 40% of evangelicals polled are seriously considering Obama.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

06/22/08 0638.32 pst
San Jose, California

A day after I lamented that the FISA debacle had ruined my much-anticipated quadrennial event of implanting presidential candidate signs into the yard—such grievous wounds America can inflict upon her citizens, yes—the package actually did arrive.  Sulking, I chucked the box into the office and refused to look at it for a day.

Finally acknowledging I was being ridiculous and un-worthy even of drama queens in the matter, I simply asked myself:  what would Digby say?  Don’t be ridiculous, paradox, handle this at once and put them in the yard.  You’re voting for him, aren’t you?  I’m impressed with your current issue agenda today, paradox.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

When the FISA scandal first broke in 2005 I had an embarrassing evolution of crestfallen naiveté, for some basic searching of Bush video archives soon turned up a 2004 clip of Bush babbling a series of FISA rationalizations, followed by a total 100% screaming lie by Bush that in regards to American government surveillance on its citizens since 9/11, why, "nothing’s changed."

For an earnest Democrat beaten silly with the clip I did not have sex with that woman my heart soared with an absurd hope that here was a presidential video lie of real substance and horror, finally our media would work and nail this lying bastard by airing the clip over and over again, day after day, week after week until some form of accountability was cranked out, truth and justice bravely shone forth to every soul in the country from the Woodstein heroes of my youth, our intrepid brave journalists.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

An alliance of bloggers, activists and organizations spearheaded by the ACLU, Strange Bedfellows, has been formed to stop the sick insanity of FISA Telecom immunity.  The movement has quickly taken root and raised nearly $200,000 almost instantly to illuminate the gross betrayal to the Constitution instigated by Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and other Blue Dogs in our nightmare FISA travesty.

The vote is set for tomorrow.  To join the list supporting Strange Bedfellows click here, the press release from the ACLU is here.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

With an ever-present sense of incredulous disbelief I have watched over the past three weeks as Telecom immunity for FISA lawbreakers has somehow been reborn in the House.  President Bush feloniously chucked the FISA statue down the toilet, telecoms broke four more statutes to heinously take America into the habits of dictatorship, they got caught before the election but were enabled by the New York Times, and ever since Congress has beat back attempts to change the law and let the telecoms off the hook.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Jedi blogger Digby of Hullabaloo noted yesterday the American Presidential race is still in its formative media narrative stage, an excruciating period when charlatans who are held in the lowest esteem in the land (journalists are held in lower regard even than lawyers) make up some complete bullshit and proclaim it as the "narrative," a broad absurd generalization of the candidate that has no bearing to reality but that conveniently manages to screw Democrats.  Al Gore is a liar is their claim to fame so far, but they haven’t settled on what to knife Barack Obama with yet, we should know soon.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Over the last eight weeks as the Presidential "journalism" coverage increased I’ve watched with growing dismay a corresponding ineptness and base incompetence in the political reporting.  A New York Times reporter absurdly states Jewish voters have been drifting to the right while there zero evidence of it, while a few days later another New York Times reporter cites harm from polling margin of error, but without citing the margin or even the base result if the poll.  A USA Today reporter cannot inform the reader of a 20-10 Republican/Democrat ratio for veteran House candidates until 267 words into the story when the title in fact stated the ratio was the story, while Saturday a San Francisco Chronicle reporter blamed Michelle Obama for being the victim of racism.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

I’ve been amused in the last 24 hours to the latest manufactured uproar in the corporate and right-wing blogs to the tough-guy beat ‘em up rhetoric of Senator Barack Obama, who said if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun at a fundraiser Friday.  Wry smiles result not from the classic corporate and Republican bleating from the confrontation, but from the Obama supporters who proclaim a Democrat who fights is actually a new modern phenomena, coupled with a semi-snooty huffiness that whatever you thought new meant relative to Senator Obama’s politics, liberal, well, of course it means badass fighting.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

It’s inexplicable to me how such alleged stewards of the crown jewels of Democracy—habeas corpus, the 4th Amendment—could harbor such hatred for America, but the Iraqi people hate us because we lied to war on them and exploit their resources, that much is crystal clear, the worst President of all time trying to jam permanent bases down their throats without even seeking approval of his own Congress.