Is The Goal To Fight Trump Or Is It To Fight Evil?

There were always people who made the argument that the Hillary wing wasn't stealing every single primary battle, that there were some decisions that were legitimate. I didn't discount that and there may well have been a few primaries she actually won fair and square-- like in the South. But it was the whole process that was corrupted from start to finish and that makes her-- in my mind at least-- and illegitimate nominee. The latest manifestation, of course, was her crony at the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, rigging the primary elections from the top even before they got going. The existence of Wasserman Schultz alone, still at the head of the DNC, is enough to guarantee that no one connected with her even tangentially well ever get a benefit of the doubt from me. Tainted by the rancid stench of Debbie Wasserman Schultz? Prove you're not as vile and corrupt and unworthy of public office.

I guess now we all know why even a politically right-of-center Democrat like Tulsi Gabbard had no choice but the quit the nest of vipers the DNC had become under Wasserman Schultz. Now it's clear that everyone on the DNC e-mail chain where they discuss weaponizing religion to take down a Democratic primary candidate needs to be fired and banished from Democratic politics.

In the YouGov poll of Bernie voters I referred to earlier, you saw that as of now, 23% of the people who voted for Bernie in the primaries say they will vote for Jill Stein. It's likely that Hillary's announcement last night that TPP- backing, Wall Street shill Tim Kaine will be her running mate, coupled with the latest scandal involving Wasserman Schultz's rigging of the primaries, will increase that percentage. Stein certainly thinks so. A Green Party press release emphasized that "Democratic Party elites have been caught red-handed sabotaging a grassroots campaign that tried to bring huge numbers of young people, independents, and non-voters into their party. Instead, they have shown exactly why America needs a new major party, a truly democratic party for the people... After such betrayal, if Senator Sanders repudiates the Democratic Party, I would welcome him into the Green Party to continue this political revolution. We now see that this movement is more urgently needed than ever. The leaked emails underscore why a revolutionary campaign can not survive within a counter-revolutionary party, and the urgent need to build the Green Party as a political vehicle to build the revolution."

Even Trump realized the Wasserman Schultz scandal is a good wedge for his points about endemic Democratic Party establishment corruption. It may not win him any votes but he wins by driving Bernie voters to Stein or to sit out the election. Is it still tenable for Hillary and those around her to keep Wasserman Schultz on as DNC chair? Again, from the Green Party press release:

The damning DNC emails released by Wikileaks include one from DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach to communications director Luis Miranda discussing how to create a narrative in the media that Sanders’ campaign was “a mess”; an email from DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall to CEO Amy Dacey proposing having someone ask Sanders about his religious beliefs in Kentucky and West Virginia, saying that Southern Baptists “would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist”; and an email in which DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz discusses how Hillary For America proposed using Israel as “an ideal issue to marginalize Sanders on,” exposing that the DNC was collaborating with the Clinton campaign on anti-Sanders strategy.

We can't count on the establishment-- Obama, Biden, the Clinton Machine-- to remedy the Wasserman Schultz contagion. Silly petitions won't do it either. Only one thing will: electing Tim Canova to replace her in the Broward/Miami-Dade 23rd congressional district in Florida. Please consider contributing to his grassroots, anti-corruption campaign here.

This morning, in his essay, Explaining the Problem with Lesser Evilism, David Swanson took on one of the two reasons-- the other being gender identity-- for progressive to consider voting for Clinton:

According to supporters of Hillary Clinton, anything other than a vote for her is "a vote for Trump," and according to supporters of Donald Trump, anything other than a vote for Trump is "a vote for Hillary." Whether you declare that you will vote for Jill Stein, vote for Gary Johnson, write in LeBron James, swear off elections, move to Canada, commit suicide, or take a job for a corporate media outlet that frowns on participation in democracy, no matter what it is you do, it's "a vote" for the undesired candidate. (Sorry to go morbid with that corporate media option!)

What is the appropriate reply to this?

First, I think it is usually going to be critical to get your lesser evilist friend to believe you understand what they are saying. Of course what they are saying is quintessential common wisdom pounded into everybody's head year after year. There's no way you could possibly not understand what they are saying. Nonetheless, it's important that you let them tell it to you in painful detail, and that you then repeat it to them with some variations. Go over the "reality" of the two-party system. Rehearse the existence of discernable differences between the two candidates. Take deep breaths during the demonization of Ralph Nader. Just listen and agree.

It's not as if their logic is wrong. Try very hard to get them to understand that you understand that, that you see their points, that you acknowledge that they make perfect sense, that you grasp their way of thinking. And, perhaps more importantly, thank them for giving a damn. Explain to them that you would much rather have a world of lesser evilists who care passionately about making the world evil at as slow a pace as possible, than a world of people who just don't care at what speed the world becomes more evil.

At this point, in about 50% of cases, you may be able to tease out, before having made any argument at all, that your lesser evilist does not actually believe in lesser evilism, that in fact he or she has more or less convinced himself or herself that either Clinton or Trump is actually good. If that happens, you'll have to turn to page 163 in this choose-your-own-adventure story. You're not on this page anymore. What someone who believes in the goodness of Clinton or Trump needs is a supply of critical information selected to fit their needs. Do they believe war is good or that one of these candidates opposes war? Do they support corruption or racism or corporatism or authoritarianism or plutocracy or environmental destruction or do they imagine that one of these candidates opposes some of those things? Or do they believe that their candidate is pretending to hold awful positions while secretly harboring good intentions? Depending on the particular case, each such person can be provided facts and historical background to bring them into touch with reality.

In the other 50% of cases your lesser evilist really does think of their candidate, at least when pressed, as evil. Even if they believe that a candidate who was any less evil could not compete in the U.S. election system, they are still a lesser evilist choosing one evil over another one. Now, your lesser evilist may not see their preferred candidate as being quite as evil as you see them, and may see the other candidate as being even more evil than you believe. There is a time and place for debating these details. It will be important for you to bring your friend to see the full measure of their candidate's evil. But it is important that first you get them to understand that you are able to see differences, that you don't believe their candidate is identical to the other one-- which would be ridiculous but is nonetheless what your friend will tend to think you think.

Only after you've convinced your lesser evilist friend that you are aware of differences between the two candidates, then you should begin to suggest the possibility that a less evil candidate might still be too evil. Ask your friend to try a few thought experiments. Let's say they are a Hillary Clinton supporter. Ask them if they can imagine a candidate worse than Donald Trump. If they claim to be unable to do it, ask them to consider whether they are really being rational about this. Suppose you had a candidate identical to Trump except that he insisted on the need to sacrifice infants on the steps of libraries to appease the god of children's books. Which of the two would be the more evil and which the less evil candidate? Now ask your friend, in a situation in which Trump was the less evil candidate, would your friend campaign for and vote for Trump? If not, why not? Isn't the logic of lesser evilism as solid no matter the details and no matter how evil the less evil candidate may be?

If your friend sticks to his or her lesser evilism, try this. Consider an election between a candidate who proposes immediate nuclear war and a candidate who proposes immediate nuclear war and encourages everyone to commit vicious crimes before the world ends. One is more evil and the other less evil. But both will quickly destroy all human life. Would you campaign and vote for the less evil one?

How about an election between a candidate who promises to make herself empress for life and a candidate who promises to make herself empress for life and to eat live mice. One is more evil and the other less evil, but both quickly create a situation in which, if your friend wants to continue to be civically engaged, he or she will have to try something other than voting.

Through these types of arguments it ought to become possible to bring your friend to see that there might be such a thing as too evil even while being less evil, and that there might be a situation in which something other than voting was required. From there it's not such a huge leap to the possibility that even in a situation in which voting is possible, something else might be needed in addition to or instead of voting. Now it still might not be time yet to argue the details of exactly how evil your friend's candidate is. Just getting them to accept that some candidate might be too evil is the critical first step. And you still may not have succeeded in that. Or you may have succeeded only in the case of a candidate that your friend thinks of as millions of times more evil than theirs.

We've arrived at the heart of the matter. You must now try to explain to your friend the real damage that lesser evilism does. This may be very difficult, because the main damage it does happens outside of voting, distant in time and space from the voting booth. There is a reason that many lesser evilists turn out to actually think their candidate is good, and that many others resist acknowledging the full extent of their candidate's evil. When you become a supporter of a candidate, even for lesser evil reasons, you enter into a particular universe. If you volunteer for that candidate, you encounter nothing but praise for them and denunciations of their opponent. Even if you never leave your house, your web searches gradually begin finding only news sources that slant everything in favor of your candidate. Millions of people put up yard signs and bumper stickers promoting their candidate, and virtually nobody puts a second sign beside the first one protesting some of that candidate's evil agenda. You can claim that lesser evilism leaves you independent and uncompromised, but you can't actually protest your evil candidate's evil in their local office-- you'll be off the team instantly.

Many lesser evilists claim to flip a switch within themselves after a particular period of time. For two weeks or six months or two years they choose to utter not one word against their evil candidate, while swearing that the rest of the time they will bring outside independent pressure to bear on the government without distorting anything in favor of one office holder or party over another. This is at best self-delusional in most if not every case. Right now we have the two parties in Washington, D.C., directing their "grass roots" groups in what to ask for and what to say about it-- the complete inversion of representative government. And this is because election season never ends and lesser evilism never ends right along with it. In January of 2007, the Democrats had just taken over Congress with a clear mandate to end the war on Iraq, and Rahm Emanuel told the Washington Post that the Democrats would keep the war going for two more years in order to run "against" it again in 2008. And so they did. And people who preferred having Democrats keep the war going to having Republicans keep the war going stuck tape over their own mouths and lay back and took it.

This is the problem. It's not that lesser evilism isn't logical in a voting booth. It's that it never ever stays within a voting booth. It poisons political activity every day of every year.

To grasp that point, one has to be brought to share the perspective in which voting is not the only important political activity. Now, I'm not against elections. I think we should have one some day! That would require some of these changes that cannot be voted in under the broken system that lacks them: public funding of elections, no bribery, free air time for candidates, automatic voter registration, open debates and ballots, no gerrymandering, hand-counted paper ballots, international monitors, no electoral college, no delegates, no superdelegates, and a three-month election season with a bit of actual governing before the next one.

You cannot vote those things in any more than women voted themselves the right to vote or children voted an end to child labor or any major change has come about through voting. Voting is a critical component in applying public pressure in a system lacking direct democracy, but it is only one small piece-- and it's even smaller when it's as broken as the current U.S. presidential election system. Why does someone like Hillary Clinton switch from opposing LGBT rights to supporting them? Not because she or someone else was elected to anything, but because a movement that has used dozens of different nonviolent tools has changed society.

Look for a minute at the Democratic Party primary system. On Friday WikiLeaks released emails from the DNC that made clear, as we all knew, that the DNC slanted the playing field for Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Not only might Sanders very well have won without that cheating, but polls for many months have shown him to be the stronger candidate against Trump. When Democratic Super Delegates throw their votes to Clinton they are, by lesser evilist logic, casting votes for Trump. Of course that doesn't change your options, doesn't give you the choice of Sanders on your ballot (unless you write him in). But if Clinton really wanted to defeat Trump she would drop out, and if you really want to defeat Trump you're expected to vote for her.

Maybe that's just the way it is. But try now to get your friend on the same page with you in terms of the extent of Hillary Clinton's evil. Provide some missing material in whatever area it's lacking. Seriously discuss some points like these:

• She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013.
• She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011.
• She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009.
• She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan.
• She voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
• She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq.
• She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing.
• She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel.
• She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi.
• She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran.
• She is not afraid to antagonize Russia.
• She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine.
• She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers.
• She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation.
• She supported President Bill Clinton's wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress.
• She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria.
• She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did.

Go into similar points on trade or environment or healthcare or wherever it's needed. Then trace back through a bit of U.S. history. Compare the positions and actions-- not the public images-- of past presidents. I'd take Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, Ford, or Nixon over Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton any day. I'd take the presidents who came before them over them too. And it's not as though people haven't been doing lesser evil voting and lesser evil living all these years. But when you elect a less evil candidate and do little else to improve your politics, the result is another election with a worse pair of candidates, both of them more evil than was the less evil candidate before. This course is unsustainable and leads inevitably to candidates that more and more of us will recognize as just too evil.

Too evil because we need independent uncompromised activism and can expect it to have an impact on whoever is in office. And too evil because we actually can swing this or some future election to an actually good candidate if we put our minds to it. We don't have a lot of time to play around with. While neither Clinton nor Trump has promised immediate nuclear war, both are eager to risk it and to exacerbate the crisis in the earth's climate. If we elect one of them, followed by someone else worse, we're pretty well doomed. If we elect someone actually good either now or next time, who knows?

The chance of electing a good candidate within the Democratic Party is very low. This election saw a perfect storm: a hugely unpopular candidate standing unopposed, and a single exceptional candidate jumping into the election with a stellar record and an independent streak. And it wasn't enough. For it to be enough would require the same perfect storm plus major systemic reforms within the party.

But 60% of the public cannot stand either Clinton or Trump. If a significant portion of those people back Jill Stein, she could mount a serious challenge and even win. Just saying you support her now while planning to turn against her in November would put her into televised debates with Clinton and Trump, thereby requiring both of them to speak to all kinds of critical issues they'd rather avoid.

So we arrive at two basic questions for your friend the former lesser evilist. First, do you see that non-electoral activism can be more important than elections? If so, are you willing to put your energies there? Second, if you stay focused on this election, would you support Jill Stein if you cast the only vote and effectively selected the winner by yourself? What about if she only needed a few more votes to win? What about if she had a slim chance? What about if a decent showing might help elect a good candidate next time around?

Why Alan Grayson's Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act Is The Way To Go After Obama's Disappointing Speech Yesterday

After Obama's speech defending the incompetent and corrupt U.S. spy agencies, Democrats who disapprove of the way he has continued the Cheney NSA agenda that completely guts the Constitution, were in an awkward position. How to disagree with his bullshit authoritarian stand without completely trashing him. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley gave it a try:

“It is unacceptable that our government has indiscriminately swept up millions of cell phone records of law-abiding citizens. This is an outrageous abuse of Americans’ privacy. I’m glad the President has acknowledged the concerns with bulk collection and will explore options to remedy those concerns. It remains to be seen whether significant changes will be made, and I vow to continue to advocate for substantive reforms to protect Americans’ privacy.

“The FISA court also needs dramatic reforms. I support the President’s proposal of a public advocate in those court proceedings for the constitutional privacy rights of American citizens. I also appreciate the President’s commitment to declassify FISA court opinions, which is the principle embedded in my 2012 amendment to the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization. Secret law cannot be tolerated in a democracy.

“Our nation is stronger when our civil rights as Americans are respected. I will continue to work with the Administration, Senator Wyden, and other colleagues to ensure our constitutional rights are honored in our laws and by our government.”

Civil libertarian David Swanson was less diplomatic in his assessment: "President Barack Obama gave a eulogy for the Fourth Amendment on Friday, and not even his fans are proclaiming victory.  In this moment when Obama is actually doing one thing I agree with (talking to Iran), more and more people seem to be slowly, agonizingly slowly, finally, finally, finally, recognizing what a complete huckster he is when it comes to pretty speeches about his crimes."

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald, writing for The Guardian yesterday, laid bare Obama's sad, tired tactics of deception.

In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled out over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised." They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.

This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.

But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.

Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols."

As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA's in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.

CREDO was more diplomatic, but the effect was similar. They released a statement that is likely to anger and discourage the Democratic base and further point to a low turnout among Democratic voters in 2014. "As a former constitutional law professor who campaigned against warrantless surveillance of Americans when he ran for office in 2008, it should be a no-brainer for President Obama to put an end to the unconstitutional dragnet that captures data about the phone calls of virtually all Americans."

CREDO CEO Michael Kieschnick wrote that “Whether the president moves his telephone data dragnet to AT&T and Verizon, to some other third party, or keeps it at the NSA makes no difference. It’s still clearly unconstitutional and must be dismantled.”

As you can see in the video up top, Alan Grayson has already moved towards remedying the situation. He introduced a bill in Congress, likely to gather wide bipartisan support from Members (if not from the leadership of either corrupt Beltway party, the Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act (H.R. 3883). Following the recommendations of Obama's own blue ribbon report on how to deal with an out of control, Cheney-enabled NSA, Grayson's will would end the whole idea of mass warrantless data from U.S. citizens not suspected of any criminal activities. Grayson: "This is what it all comes down to: Are we going to live as men and women, as free autonomous beings, or are we cattle? I vote for human beings… The Fourth Amendment requires particularity and probable cause whenever the government gets anybody's private information. And that includes cellphone calls, websites you browse, your physical location and so on.  In neither case is the NSA adhering to those rules."

Grayson's bill, which Boehner and Cantor will probably try to bury in committees run by their cronies, is very simple and straight-forward, basically, just two sentences:

(a) Required Action-- The President and all Executive Departments and Independent Agencies shall take all such actions, including all necessary rulemaking, needed to implement the 46 enumerated recommendations of the report entitled “Liberty and Security in a Changing World” issued on December 12, 2013, by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.

(b) Grant Of Authority-- The President, Executive Departments, and Independent Agencies are granted all statutory authority necessary and proper to implement the recommendations referred to in subsection (a).

Hubris... Still No Accountability-- Forget Bush And Cheney, What About Steny Hoyer And Steve Israel?

Rachel Maddow's presentation of Hubris lived up to the promise. Maddow explained why the film is so important in her introduction when she pointed out how LBJ hoodwinked Congress into going to war against Vietnam. 40 years later it happened again. In the clip above, Bush and Cheney are shown still refusing to admit they were wrong or even to apologize to the families of thousands of Americans and Iraqis whose lives their perfidy destroyed. I was touched that the one person who was truly remorseful, Rep. Walter Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, a Republican who has, since then, been one of Congress' most independent voices on either side of the aisle. Walter Jones voted for that war because he was duped by his president. What about the 81 Democrats-- a minority among Democrats in Congress but without whose support there would have been no war-- who voted for it? Hubris doesn't deal with them.

Did they vote for the war because they were too stupid and incompetent to know they were being duped? Or were they in on the scam? In either case, shouldn't they be held to account by the voters? They haven't been. Instead, Iraq War-mongers like Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Steve Israel (D-NY) and Joe Crowley (D-NY) have climbed the ladder of party leadership and now run the congressional Democrats. What a disgusting, repulsive political party! Will we ever hear an apology from Steny Hoyer or Steve Israel? Sure we will-- the same day we hear one from John McCain or Dick Cheney. Our political elites failed us. David Swanson agrees that Hubris could have gone a lot further.

As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air. The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week, and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world, as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people.

From there, MSNBC proceeded to support the war with mild critiques around the edges, and to white-out the idea of impeachment or accountability.

But now MSNBC has seen its way clear to airing a documentary about the fraudulent case it assisted in, a documentary titled Hubris. This short film (which aired between 9 and 10 p.m. ET Monday night, but with roughly half of those minutes occupied by commercials) pointed out the role of the New York Times in defrauding the public, but not MSNBC's role.

Yet, my primary response to that is joy rather than disgust. It is now cool to acknowledge war lies. Truth-tellers, including truth-tellers rarely presented with a corporate microphone, made that happen.

  ...[U]sing Maddow as the presenter and narrator of a film about Republican war lies during a period of unacknowledged Democratic war lies unavoidably gives the thing a partisan slant. Watching Hubris, I was reminded of something that Michael Moore tweeted last Friday: "Senate Repubs: U started 2 illegal wars that broke the treasury & sacrificed the lives of thousands of our troops & countless civilians."

Of course, the Senate that gave us the two wars in question was in reality controlled by Democrats, and the war lies were pushed hard by Senators Kerry, Clinton, and their comrades.  Hubris touches on this reality but not with sufficient clarity for most viewers-- I suspect-- to pick up on it.

...The Hubris version of Colin Powell's lies at the United Nations is misleadingly undertold.  Powell was not a victim.  He "knowingly lied."

The same goes for Bush, Cheney, and gang. According to Hubris it may have just been incompetence or hubris. It wasn't. Not only does overwhelming evidence show us that Bush knew his claims about WMDs to be false, but the former president has shown us that he considers the question of truth or falsehood to be laughably irrelevant. When Diane Sawyer asked Bush why he had claimed with such certainty that there were so many weapons in Iraq, he replied: "What’s the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger."

What's the difference?  In a society based on the rule of law, the difference would be a criminal prosecution. MSNBC and Hubris steer us away from any ideas of accountability. And no connection is drawn to current war lies about Iran or other nations.

  But the production of programs like this one that prolong Americans' awareness of the lies that destroyed Iraq are the best hope Iran has right now. MSNBC should be contacted and applauded for airing this and urged to follow up on it.

Monday we looked at the list of some of today's DC powerbrokers-- like the aforementioned Hoyer, Israel and Crowley-- who backed Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, either because they were too stupid to see through the tissue of lies or because they were in on the con. They're nearly as responsible as Bush and Cheney for the deaths and destruction and for the three trillion dollars in tax payer money wasted. The implication, of course, is that they shouldn't be in Congress today. I'd also like to reiterate that the majority of Democrats in the House voted against the war, including, to name a few who are often in the news these days, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Jim Clyburn (D-SC), John Conyers (D-MI), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), John Lewis (D-GA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Jim Moran (D-VA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Hilda Solis (D-CA), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM) and Maxine Waters (D-CA).

Many of these Democrats have also climbed the leadership ladder. Nancy, even if someone hemmed in by war-mongers and corporate whores Hoyer, Israel and Crowley, is the House's top dog and half a dozen are now in the Senate. Clyburn is also in the top rung of House leadership and Becerra may be one of the only hopes for a post-Pelosi progressive Democratic House leadership. Meanwhile of the 6 Republicans who voted NO that day, 5 (including Ron Paul) are no longer in public service and only one is still in the House, libertarian Jimmy Duncan (R-TN), still a backbencher after 25 years in Congress... although he is co-chairman of the Congressional Friends of Scotland Caucus.

Bush and Cheney got a lot of the appearance of public momentum and support for their evil little project from the most simple-minded and easy to manipulate dullards in the population: evangelicals. According the Max Bumenthal's reporting in Republican Gomorrah, the regime had a strategy for mobilizing the religionists on the far right.

When Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House deployed [convicted criminal Chuck] Colson to market the war to fellow evangelicals in the context of St. Augustine's Just War doctrine-- a dubious exercise considering Augustine's explicit rejection of preemptive, unilateral warfare. Meanwhile, the popular televangelist and former Southern Baptist Convention president Charles Stanley warned, in a February 2003, sermon, that those who opposed or disobeyed the U.S. government in its drive to war "will receive condemnation upon themselves" from God.

...Evangelicals rallied to Bush's side with unmatched fervor, supporting the invasion and its eventually discredited justifications in a greater percentage than any other demographic group. The Christian-right leaders who orchestrated this PR push waited patiently for their reward, hoping that the appointment of far-right nominees to the federal bench and Supreme Court was not far off.

As long as groupthink encourages people to approach reality "independent of accuracy," is there any hope for reasoned discourse? (A: Nope)

On RT'S Alyona Show, Chris Hayes talks about the present extreme distrust of authorities he describes in his new book Twilight of the Elites. He asks (at 3:38), "Under this environment, in which we can't find anything that we have consensus trust in, can we produce the level of social consensus necessary to make the scale of change that we need?" Here's my answer, now that I've been introduced to the concept of "motivated reasoning": not a chance in hell. (Note: Chris's conversation with Alyona continues here.)


"Once group loyalties are engaged, you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence."

-- NYU psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, to Ezra
Klein, in his New Yorker piece "Unpopular Mandate"

by Ken

Does the phrase "motivated reasoning" set off any alarm bells with you? It sure didn't with me, and I had to remind myself, every time I encountered it in Ezra Klein's invaluable New Yorker piece "Unpopular Mandate" that it is in fact psychological/social-science jargon for a process that, as far as I'm concerned, makes human civilization a virtual impossibility.

And I'm afraid I did a poor job of explaining that in my post last night, "The rapid reverse polarizing of the public view of the individual mandate can tell us something deeply important and troubling about our politics." What I really wanted to write about was a piece whose title had caught my eye as passed on by Nation of Change: "Why Did Occupy Protesters Spend So Much More Time in Prison Than Tea Partiers?" I didn't know that Occupy protesters are "spend[ing] so much more time in prison than Tea Partiers," but I was certainly prepared to believe it, which I suppose is itself an illustration of the workings of "motivated reasoning" on the left side of the political spectrum. And the joke was on me, I find now, since there doesn't seem to be an actual piece here, just the nevertheless-interesting extended "infographic" I've reproduced so poorly here. By all means check it out onsite, either at Nation of Change or on Upworthy, where I gather it originated.

Certainly the title, this business about Occupy protesters being handled far more harshly by the criminal-justice system than Teabaggers, shouted out to me about the country's pervasive tilt to the right -- no, not tilt, we're way beyond a "tilt," we're perched atop a precipitous Right-plunging vertical. And in this context, I was sitting on Ezra Klein's New Yorker piece, which I knew I wanted to write about eventually, because it opened a huge window for me onto why people "think" ("think" emphatically in quotes) the way they do, based heavily on an apparent human genius for persuading ourselves, when it's convenient to do so, that we believe what our group believes, no matter how blatantly the belief may conflict with readily observable reality.

So I couldn't help bringing in a couple of especially pregnant portions of that piece, which wound up taking over, without really conveying what had really excited me about the piece, and of course horribly depressed me. Which is the price one pays for doing things in such a half-assed way.

A lot of my problem came back to that term "motivated reasoning," which sounds so innocent, but is anything but. First off, the use of that word reasoning suggests a decision-making process that involves some sort of, you know, reasoning, as in the faculty of reason. But no, all it seems to mean to the fancy-pants intellecutals who use the term is any process by which people arrive at decisions -- in other words, "reason" in the sense of the reason why people do stuff, no matter how contrary to reason. So you see, "reasoning" in this sense can me the exact opposite of what sane people understand by it. Frankly, I'm still stunned to learn that any responsible person, let these large cohorts of professors, could (mis)use the word in such corrupt fashion.

Then there's the "motivated" part of "motivated reasoning." Nothing suspicious about "motivation," is there? Motivation is a good thing, no? Who isn't always looking for, hoping for motivation? It's a pretty neutral term, right? Certainly doesn't convey anything dangerous, right? Except that in this particular usage, it means arriving at a conclusion by any means other than reality. Apparently, as we'll see in a moment, the preferred term for un-assisting factors is "accuracy," a curiously dumbed-down-sounding version of what's apparently meant: reality. In this sense, the "assistance" not only can but does apply to any kind of lies, manipulation, and any other damned bullshit.

Put it all together, and "assisted reasoning" means "arriving at beliefs that may be partly or entirely at odds with reality simply because . . . well, because whatever, because I feel like it, what's it to you? And Ezra, in this New Yorker piece, provides a vivid outline of the way in which "motivated reasoning" has come to dominate our political reality, and since it's a process that defies any connection to actual "reason," it appears to be beyond realistic reach.

THE FATAL ATTRACTION OF "MOTIVATED
REASONING": "IT FEELS LIKE WE'RE THINKING"

With that background, I offer you portion of Ezra's piece that deals with what I consider the huge subject of "motivated reasoning," with just a driblet of highlighting from me.

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University's business school, argues in a new book, "The Righteous Mind," that to understand human beings, and their politics, you need to understand that we are descended from ancestors who would not have survived if they hadn't been very good at belonging to groups. He writes that "our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players."

One of those mechanisms is figuring out how to believe what the group believes. Haidt sees the role that reason plays as akin to the job of the White House press secretary. He writes, "No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Sometimes you'll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you'll never hear is: ‘Hey, that's a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.' Press secretaries can't say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They're told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public." For that reason, Haidt told me, "once group loyalties are engaged, you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence."

Psychologists have a term for this: "motivated reasoning," which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as "when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy" -- an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology at Stanford, has shown how motivated reasoning can drive even the opinions of engaged partisans. In 2003, when he was an assistant professor at Yale, Cohen asked a group of undergraduates, who had previously described their political views as either very liberal or very conservative, to participate in a test to study, they were told, their "memory of everyday current events."

The students were shown two articles: one was a generic news story; the other described a proposed welfare policy. The first article was a decoy; it was the students' reactions to the second that interested Cohen. He was actually testing whether party identifications influence voters when they evaluate new policies. To find out, he produced multiple versions of the welfare article. Some students read about a program that was extremely generous -- more generous, in fact, than any welfare policy that has ever existed in the United States -- while others were presented with a very stingy proposal. But there was a twist: some versions of the article about the generous proposal portrayed it as being endorsed by Republican Party leaders; and some versions of the article about the meagre program described it as having Democratic support. The results showed that, "for both liberal and conservative participants, the effect of reference group information overrode that of policy content. If their party endorsed it, liberals supported even a harsh welfare program, and conservatives supported even a lavish one."

In a subsequent study involving just self-described liberal students, Cohen gave half the group news stories that had accompanying Democratic endorsements and the other half news stories that did not. The students who didn't get the endorsements preferred a more generous program. When they did get the endorsements, they went with their party, even if this meant embracing a meaner option.

This kind of thinking is, according to psychologists, unsurprising. Each of us can have firsthand knowledge of just a small number of topics -- our jobs, our studies, our personal experiences. But as citizens -- and as elected officials -- we are routinely asked to make judgments on issues as diverse and as complex as the Iranian nuclear program, the environmental impact of an international oil pipeline, and the likely outcomes of branding China a "currency manipulator."

According to the political-science literature, one of the key roles that political parties play is helping us navigate these decisions. In theory, we join parties because they share our values and our goals -- values and goals that may have been passed on to us by the most important groups in our lives, such as our families and our communities -- and so we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues. But parties, though based on a set of principles, aren't disinterested teachers in search of truth. They're organized groups looking to increase their power. Or, as the psychologists would put it, their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy. And you can see the results among voters who pay the closest attention to the issues.

In a 2006 paper, "It Feels Like We're Thinking," the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels looked at a National Election Study, a poll supported by the National Science Foundation, from 1996. One of the questions asked whether "the size of the yearly budget deficit increased, decreased, or stayed about the same during Clinton's time as President." The correct answer is that it decreased, dramatically. Achen and Bartels categorize the respondents according to how politically informed they were. Among the least-informed respondents, Democrats and Republicans picked the wrong answer in roughly equal numbers. But among better-informed voters the story was different. Republicans who were in the fiftieth percentile gave the right answer more often than those in the ninety-fifth percentile. Bartels found a similar effect in a previous survey, in which well-informed Democrats were asked whether inflation had gone down during Ronald Reagan's Presidency. It had, but many of those Democrats said that it hadn't. The more information people had, it seemed, the better they were at arranging it to fit what they wanted to believe. As Bartels told me, "If I'm a Republican and an enthusiastic supporter of lower tax rates, it is uncomfortable to recognize that President Obama has reduced most Americans' taxes -- and I can find plenty of conservative information sources that deny or ignore the fact that he has."

Recently, Bartels noticed a similar polarization in attitudes toward the health-care law and the Supreme Court. Using YouGov polling data, he found that less-informed voters who supported the law and less-informed voters who opposed it were equally likely to say that "the Supreme Court should be able to throw out any law it finds unconstitutional." But, among better-informed voters, those who opposed the law were thirty per cent more likely than those who supported it to cede that power to the Court. In other words, well-informed opponents realized that they needed an activist Supreme Court that was willing to aggressively overturn laws if they were to have any hope of invalidating the Affordable Care Act.

Orin Kerr ["a George Washington University professor who had clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy," who we learned in the opening paragraph said in 2010, "There is a less than one-per-cent chance that the courts will invalidate the individual mandate"] says that, in the two years since he gave the individual mandate only a one-per-cent chance of being overturned, three key things have happened. First, congressional Republicans made the argument against the mandate a Republican position. Then it became a standard conservative-media position. "That legitimized the argument in a way we haven't really seen before," Kerr said. "We haven't seen the media pick up a legal argument and make the argument mainstream by virtue of media coverage." Finally, he says, "there were two conservative district judges who agreed with the argument, largely echoing the Republican position and the media coverage. And, once you had all that, it really became a ballgame."

Which is more or less where I picked up last night.

DAVID SWANSON ASKS, "CAN WE GET ALONG WITHOUT
AUTHORITIES?" SORRY, DAVID, APPARENTLY NOT

I probably still haven't communicated what seem to me the overwhelming implications of the application of "motivated reasoning" to our national political discourse. It simplifies my life in one way, though. For a couple of weeks now I've been trying to find a way to write about an absorbing piece that David Swanson posted on the "War Is a Crime" (formerly "AfterDowningStreet") blog: "Can We Get Along Without Authorities?" David was writing with enthusiasm about Chris Hayes's new book, Twilight of the Elites.

Hayes charts a growing disillusionment with authorities of all variety: government, media, doctors, lawyers, bankers. We've learned that no group can be blindly trusted. "The cascade of elite failure," writes Hayes, "has discredited not only elites and our central institutions, but the very mental habits we use to form our beliefs about the world. At the same time, the Internet has produced an unprecedented amount of information to sort through and radically expanded the arduous task of figuring out just whom to trust." Hayes calls this "disorienting."

David did have a reservation, though. There's no reason to feel disoriented, he suggested, unless you've fallen into the habit of trusting these co-called authorities. And he proposes some common-sense ways of screening such authorities for credibility that calls for further inquiry. And he fixes on the obviously important subject of climate change.

I think people are listening to authorities -- they're just the wrong ones. Rather than listening to scientists about science, they're listening to jackasses with radio shows who know nothing about science. Back in the heyday of belief in authorities (whenever that was) people didn't always listen to scientists about evolution; many preferred to listen to charismatic charlatans rejecting evolution. Perhaps as much as restoring a willingness to trust authorities, we need to instill a desire to learn from would-be authorities enough to judge which ones deserve our trust on matters beyond our own comprehension or direct knowledge.

Climate change is not theoretical. There is evidence that can be shown to people, if they can get beyond the rejection of pointy-headed scientists that Hayes notes, and if they can also get beyond the religious belief that humans couldn't harm the earth if they tried, not to mention the religious belief that harming the earth is unimportant or desirable.

Climate change increasingly can be shown to people up-close-and-personal. And when it can't, the magic of video and photography can show it to us from elsewhere on the planet. Learning to look beyond the borders of the United States would do as much for our society as trusting intellectuals would.

And then he brings the climate-change example back to the problem of war, which he says to him resembles climate change.

Either can destroy us. Either can be better understood by looking outside the United States. Hayes, in describing well the gap between those in power in Washington and the other 99% of us, describes in particular the gap between the war deciders and that sliver of the U.S. population that actually fights the wars. But what about the gap between us and the victims of our wars? What about the power of patriotic flag-waving to overcome concern for troops, even among the troops themselves, who could and should refuse illegal orders?

This is really, really smart stuff, and it leads to this:

I suspect that the key to avoiding disorientation is to expect shortcomings. We probably shouldn't worry as much as Hayes does about whether baseball players use steroids. We should probably expect a church that lies about the finality of death to lie about other things, including child abuse. It's not all the members of the church that did that; it's a small group of very powerful people at the top. In politics too, we should recognize the corrupting influence of power. But we shouldn't fault humanity because presidents are murderous thugs. We should recognize the elite, as Hayes defines them, as elite. We should be aware of their patterns of wrong-doing, rather than fantasizing that half of them, belonging to one of the two big political parties, are our close friends and role models. That way lies disillusionment and disorientation.

We don't need to get the mechanics right. We won't fix our government by ending the filibuster or by amending the Constitution to point out that corporations aren't people and buying stuff isn't protected speech. I'm in favor of those things, but fundamentally we need to change our culture, create and follow better models, develop social capital of trust and community.

And yet, we'll need to get some of the mechanics of government right too. The founders of the United States, for all they got wrong, got power right in many ways. Presidents were denied the power to launch wars. The people's representatives were given the power to impeach presidents. The rule of law was placed above the law of rulers. We need to recover all of that. And doing so will require -- as Hayes recommends -- placing the power of the people to control the elite higher on our agenda than cheerleading for the half of the elite belonging to one of the two parties.

Hayes' book -- as is fairly typical of political books -- has a title that at first sounds optimistic, but 215 of its 240 pages are devoted to describing the disaster underway, while the last 25 pages are set aside for the topic of what we might do about it. Basically, Hayes recommends that we build a movement for progressive taxation by joining forces with upper-middle-class rightwingers. This might not be as crazy as it sounds. We don't need to find rightwingers who favor progressive taxation, but we do need to create them. No doubt that sounds extremely "elitist," but we can create such people out of their own beliefs.

This is not just smart but exciting stuff, and as I said, I've been trying to find a way to write about it. It's still an absorbing piece, and I can't encourage you strongly enough to read it. However, just now it seems beside the point. "Fundamentally," David says, "we need to change our culture, create and follow better models, develop social capital of trust and community." Oh, really?

In a culture saturated with "motivated reasoning," what's the chance of any of that happening? I would answer this the same way I answered Chris Hayes's question up top: not a chance in hell.

#

Norman Solomon-- No Coaxing Necessary

I spend a lot of time talking with candidates for Congress. Sometimes you have to coax good answers out of them. Some are just learning what it means to be progressive. Some even lie to you and tell you what they think you want to hear. The easiest question we ask at Blue America is about choice. It's our only "yes" or "no" answer. Is there any circumstance, we ask, that the government should tell a woman and her physician what she can and can't do about her reproductive health. If someone answers NO, they have a chance to get on this page. If they hem and haw and give a different answer than NO, they don't get on the page... even if we otherwise like them. That's the easy question with the easy answer. Questions about war and peace are far more difficult and sometimes more subtle and nuanced. And I'm not the only person who talks about these questions with candidates. My friend David Swanson does as well... a lot. This week he wrote about vetting and said it was ok for me to share it with you.

I recently wrote about a conversation I'd had with a fairly typical Democratic candidate for Congress (O.K. perhaps he was below average)-- a former military officer who claims to be for peace, but whose every solution involves war. I asked him to make commitments on what sort of things he would vote for or against, and he evaded every such question, while maintaining that he held a desire for peace somewhere in his heart.

The suspicion might arise in a reasonable reader that candidates simply don't make commitments and perhaps shouldn't. Every situation is unique. Candidates can't know the details of a future bill or the context in which it might be brought to a vote. They can simply tell you what values they hold dear, what accomplishments grace their resumes, and how utterly worthless their opponents are.  More than that one should not ask.

This suspicion can be set aside in one of two ways. The first would be a commonsense belief in democracy. How the hell can you elect people to do what you want done if they refuse to tell you what they'll do? If they won't tell you how they would have voted on past bills, or whether they would cosponsor existing bills, and if they consider looming wars that are constantly in the news to be "too hypothetical," you can bet they're hiding something, and you can bet that something stinks.

The other way to set aside the suspicion that candidates won't make anti-war commitments is to find candidates who do. I'd like to point out one who is probably at the top of the list. It's almost unfair to compare him with one of the worst candidates his party is fielding. Yet he is almost certainly the best example of a new candidate running for an open seat and making a commitment to peace a central part of his platform.

Norman Solomon's background involves decades in the peace movement. He's studied and written books and produced films about peace and war. He's traveled to war zones in an effort to prevent wars. It shouldn't be surprising that he would favor peace when he decides to run for office. Yet there is a widespread and growing notion that those who most favor peace and can best work for peace are members of the military, or retired members of the military. Electing these warriors for peace almost always leads to bitter disappointment, and yet the notion remains in the back of people's heads that the best peace makers are the experts on war. The idea that there might be experts on peace, that there might be value in the expertise that caused certain of those experts to draw the right conclusions about our current wars before they started-- this is all off the radar screen of our public discussion.

Norman Solomon, Democratic candidate in California's Second Congressional District (the north coast), is committed to supporting two bills that have been introduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland. One of them, HR 780, which has 70 cosponsors, would limit Afghan war funding to paying for troop withdrawal. The other, HR 4173, which has 27 cosponsors, would create diplomatic talks with Iran and forbid (with narrow exceptions) any unconstitutional attack on Iran not authorized by Congress. 

Solomon would not only have voted no on this year's National Defense Authorization Act and its provision of presidential power to indefinitely imprison, but Solomon publicly opposed it when it was up for debate.

Solomon would defund the current wars and has publicly lobbied Congress to use the power of the purse to defund immoral, illegal wars since the days of the war on Vietnam.

Solomon is committed to the struggle to restore to Congress its constitutional authority to declare and authorize war.

As you probably know, Norman Solomon is one of the candidates Blue America has endorsed and is working hard to help elect. As Glenn Greewald explained at Salon, "When it comes to Congressional candidates, it just doesn’t get any better than Norman Solomon." And he's in a perfect deep blue district that would easily sustain an outspoken and independent progressive leader like himself.Swanson went on in his post to quote several of Norman's most memorable declarations about war and peace, like "For decades-- as an activist, author and nationally syndicated columnist-- I have detailed how big money in politics promotes everything from war and environmental degradation to economic injustice and unfair trade treaties to media conglomeration and corporatization of healthcare. In my largely volunteer-driven campaign for Congress, I have implemented a grassroots approach to fundraising: raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from several thousand (mostly small) donors, while refusing to accept a penny of corporate PAC money. As a member of Congress, one of my top priorities will be to back legislation and a constitutional amendment aimed at removing money from politics."

And "Real national security involves shifting much of our perpetual military spending to programs that create sustainable jobs, expand education and opportunity, and rebuild our economy and our communities" and "As national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign (along with Congressman John Conyers and Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association), I support significant cuts in unnecessary military spending-- with commensurate increases in funding for healthcare, education and other human needs." Later today we have a long post about a Democratic hack from El Paso, Texas, an old time Military Industrial Complex shill named Silvestre Reyes. He may be a "Democrat" but he'll never understand what a progressive like Norman Solomon is talking about. Never.

In their effusive endorsement of Norman this week, the San Francisco Bay Guardian made it clear he wasn't just the best choice between a bunch of career politicians. They acknowledge that the "top two contenders are Norman Solomon, an author, columnist and media advocate, and Jared Huffman, a moderate member of the state Assembly from Marin." And then they explained why Norman is the better choice.

Solomon's not just a decent candidate-- he represents a new approach to politics. He's an antiwar crusader, journalist, and outsider who has never held elective office-- but knows more about the (often corrupt) workings of Washington and the policy issues facing the nation than many Beltway experts. He's talking about taxing Wall Street to create jobs on Main Street, about downsizing the Pentagon and promoting universal health care. He's a worthy successor to Woolsey, and he deserves the support of every independent and progressive voter in the district.

Blue America and Progressive Democrats of America are just finishing up on a fun fundraising promotion for Norman and fellow true-blue progressive, Dr. David Gill (IL). Someone is going to win a Barenaked Ladies autographed guitar as a thank you for helping out these two great candidates. Take a look-- and please consider helping us getting Norman and David into Congress. Here's the guitar:




UPDATE: New Polling Numbers Are Auspicious

The best polling firm in the nation, Lake Research, released a new poll showing that the corporate shill, Jared Huffman, will be in a runoff with Norman after the primary. The clownish self-funder that EMILY's List is pushing, Stacey Lawson, may be spending the most cash but she's polling just 5%... still better than the Republicans in the primary but not even in the top 3. What a joke EMILY's List has made itself in recent years!

How Does One Get To A Politician If You Can't Write A Big Check?

More than ever-- thanks to an astonishingly partisan, corporate-oriented Supreme Court-- the easiest way to influence public policy is through legalistic bribes to Members of Congress. The Republican Party, one of the two mainstream political parties, has been 100% captured by this business model and it's only arguable by what percentage the other party-- the one that's supposed to represent ordinary Americans-- is in the same bag. Some say it's less than half but most observers say they're far closer to the GOP when it comes to systemic corruption and that the Blue Dogs, New Dems, DLC, Third Way and all that faux-moderate crap is just window dressing for the same out-and-out corruption racjet that rules the roost over in top Republican circles.

Of course it isn't only check book politics that determines the Republican agenda. Never forget the importance of Hate Talk Radio and Fox. Yesterday at Roll Call Christina Bellatoni wrote that the media has "an increasing sway on how Members shape their agenda." And she wasn't talking about rational information from Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Thom Hartmann or Nicole Sandler. "To be fair"-- it's an Inside-the-Beltway outlet she's writing for with an Inside-the-Beltway readership-- she does do the false equivalency-boogie, if just half heartedly.

At a time when Rush Limbaugh reaches as many people as vote in Florida and California combined, and when Jon Stewart can draw several hundred thousand people to the nation’s capital, these outsized personalities based far outside the Beltway have become as much a part of Washington’s political ecosystem as the lawmakers themselves.

...A Republican strategist and former top Republican National Committee aide told Roll Call that Members have one of two reactions when constituents start a message with “I just heard on Rush today ...”-- “joy and panic.”

Limbaugh has more than 20 million listeners, and most Members couldn’t dream of their message being so widely spread back home, the GOP strategist said.

“You’ve got to break eggs to make an omelette, and if you’ve never been mentioned on these shows in either a favorable or less than favorable context, one has to wonder, are you actually making an impact?” the strategist said.

If Limbaugh or Beck pushes an issue, his audience picks up the phone and taps out e-mails, asking lawmakers to take action. “These Members understand that their constituents are listening to this, and the consequence will elicit action that will place pressure on them,” the strategist said.

Ron Bonjean, who was a top aide to then-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) before the Democratic takeover in 2006, said outside influences have ballooned at almost warp speed over the past few years.

“It used to be that if Rush said something on the air and the Washington Times wrote an editorial, it was earth-shattering. But now there is so much competition and [Members] are hearing from a lot more voices,” Bonjean told Roll Call.

Bonjean said Republicans frequently assert their independence from conservative talkers, but he admitted, “The show hosts definitely have an influence over the decision-making of leaders.”

The liberal watchdog group Media Matters has compiled examples of Limbaugh and Fox themes that made it from the airwaves to the floors of the House and Senate.

After Fox replayed “sting” videos showing alleged fraud at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) introduced a measure to cut ACORN’s government funding. Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) wrote a resolution honoring James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles for producing the ACORN videos, and 31 of his GOP colleagues signed on. It never received a vote.

When Beck suggested on his show in June that an Obama administration drilling decision helped liberal billionaire George Soros, two Republican Members repeated the claim using similar language on the House floor. Limbaugh called the BP oil spill fund set up last year a “slush fund,” a term repeated by Members in television appearances and during floor debates.

With the addition of the tea party movement to the national conversation, the spin cycle has added a setting that could be labeled “outrage.” Ideas that hosts use to gin up their base go from television to the House floor to the cardboard signs displayed by tea partyers on the National Mall.

“The ecosystem of each ideological movement within the political parties is much bigger than just the elected officials,” said Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House who now leads the progressive group New Democrat Network.

Rosenberg identified religious groups, community organizations, labor unions and activist outlets such as MoveOn.org as holding more influence over the agenda. On the left, he sees MSNBC, progressive blogs and Stewart’s Comedy Central as dramatically changing the conversation in Washington, and he said their influence has increased in recent years.

Late last year, Stewart used The Daily Show to advocate the passage of the 9/11 responders bill. It was going nowhere but somehow was resurrected in the eleventh hour of the lame-duck session after his show highlighted first responders in a highly rated segment.

Several Republicans privately admitted Members carefully monitor what’s being said on conservative airwaves to make sure they aren’t contradicting it or enraging talkers.

Democrats needled the GOP in early 2009 over whether Limbaugh was actually the leader of the Republican Party. When then-RNC Chairman Michael Steele said Limbaugh was an “entertainer” and not one of the party’s leaders, he was forced to apologize after days of negative headlines and backlash on Limbaugh’s show. Steele relented: “There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

Allen West, on the other hand, seems to be taking on the role of right-wing entertainer-- even even makes haters and sociopaths like Beck and Limbaugh look nearly sane.




UPDATE: Another Way To Exert Pressure

I don't imagine this one will work-- but I lent my name to it because I believe in the cause. David Swanson at War Is A Crime organized over 150 prominent activists, authors, and academics who are launching a petition drive. Here's how it begins. Please read the whole thing-- and sign it if you'd like-- at the link above.

We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced.  This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously.  We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination for another term in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he reverses them. 
Since he became president, Obama has had three opportunities to work with Congress to reduce military spending, but instead has championed increases in that spending each time, despite the fact that this spending represents a clear threat to the economic future of our country.  He has continued as well to try to hide the true costs of the wars by funding them with off-the-books supplemental spending bills, despite the fact that he campaigned against this very practice.

The President has escalated a war on Afghanistan in which rising civilian deaths and atrocities have become routine.  

Among the signers are:

Elliott Adams, president, Veterans For Peace
Nellie Hester Bailey, Harlem Tenants Council & Black Agenda Report
Medea Benjamin,  cofounder, Code Pink*
Frida Berrigan, War Resisters League*
William Blum, author of books on U.S. foreign policy
Patty Casazza, 9/11 widow, former 9/11 Commission Family Steering Committee Member
Jeff Cohen, author/media critic
Sibel Edmonds, founder & director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
Roy Eidelson, past president, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Daniel Ellsberg, former State and Defense Dept. official, whistleblower of Pentagon Papers
Lisa Fithian, convenor, United for Peace and Justice
Chris Hedges, author, Death of the Liberal Class
Steve Hendricks, author, A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial
Dahr Jamail, journalist/author
Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence*
Howie Klein, publisher, DownWithTyranny.com
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives
David MacMichael, Ph.D., former CIA analyst
Ethan McCord, IVAW, VFP, former army specialist from "collateral murder" video
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy*
Bruce Nestor, past president, National Lawyers Guild
Gareth Porter, author and journalist
Bill Quigley, Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law, Loyola University New Orleans*
Jesselyn Radack, former Department of Justice legal adviser
Garett Reppenhagen, chair of the board of directors, Iraq Veterans Against the War
Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent, one of TIME's 2002 Persons of the Year
Michael Steven Smith, Law and Disorder Radio; board member, Center for Constitutional Rights*
John Stockwell, former intelligence officer, author
Elizabeth De La Vega, former assistant U.S. attorney, author
Marcy Winograd, former Democratic congressional candidate
Ann Wright, US Army Reserve Colonel and former US diplomat

*for identification only

Tangled Up In Yoo

Last week David Swanson wrote this really great song, "Tangled Up In Yoo." This version was sung by Margaret Flowers. I thought watching the video would be an uplifting way to start the week.



Not everyone is enamored of the use of anthemic songs like this for social and political causes (although you rarely hear people crying anymore when their favorite classic turns up in an ad selling a crappy car or detergent). Kay Bailey Hutchison, a right-wing Texas senator running against a further right secessionist governor for his position, uses songs on YouTube clips, as does the secessionist. The secessionist has an air of corruption around him-- a well-deserved one-- and Hutchison has been using the O'Jay's For the Love of Money. "Political campaigns like ours have long considered the use of such songs in Web videos as acceptable under fair use rules," Hutchison campaign spokesman Joe Pounder said. The secessionist's spokesperson agrees. "It's an inexpensive way to put out a message. The goal in the campaign is to use every outlet possible to get your message out." Usage like the one above isn't for narrow political gain, but for the benefit of mankind.