My letter to Sen. Gordon Smith from Oregon, a Republican and so generally my political adversary, but one who seems a cut above the general GOP horde, which I think says something nice about good ol' OR:

Though I often find myself at odds with your politics, I have come to understand and respect the manner in which you conduct yourself in the Senate as a worthy representation of the independent and high-minded traditions which my beloved home state of Oregon holds dear.

And so, to keep it short and sweet, I sincerely hope that if this business with filibusters comes to a head in the next days, you will find the courage to stand apart from the dictates of your party leaders and their thirst for absolute majority rule. It seems clear to me that such a historic change in Senate rules should be conducted as normal (with a 67-vote requirement) and not as a 51-vote "point of order." It also seems clear to me that Sen. Frist is engaging in this first and foremost to further his own presidential ambitions, and not out of any sincere desire to better govern our country.

I trust you know the issues, and I'm sympathetic to the pressure you must be under from GOP leaders and some of your most passionate constituents. This is a miniscule gesture on my part -- writing you this e-communique -- but I hope it may in some small way embolden you to stand up for the long-term health of our government and political process.

If you need it, here's some backstory on the filibuster issue. States with Republicans who might stick up for the integrity of the political process over Bill Frist's presidential ambitions (he's doing all this to curry favor with the fundimentalist hardliners like Jim Dobson in preparation for a 2008 run) are Maine (Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe), Nebraska (Ben Nelson), Ohio (Mike DeWine), Oregon (Gordo), Pennsylvania (Specter), Rhode Island (Lincoln Chafee), Virginia (John Warner). If they represent you, take five minutes to reach out and lobby.

He's one smart cat, and I particularly enjoyed his latest on the Kos, Three Chances for Progressives. It's a good overview of the opportunities which exist for progressive Americans to make big gains in the next few cycles. I particularly liked this bit:

The conservative, in the sense of having a conservative outlook, needs to be appealed to by showing how progressivism values the same things that he does: thrift, hard work, maintaining continuity, tradition, community and earning one's place. Most real conservatives would be progressives if they thought it could work. By showing them that the threat isn't cheating poor people, but people being poor because they were cheated, it changes the dynamics of the equation: most conservatives feel that they have been cheated by the outside. That's why the are conservatives.

Stoller once told me, "Imagine you've been able to predict the future for the past ten years, but no one will listen to you. That's Stirling." Well, it would seem that people are starting to pay attention now. Good thing, too.

The sad thing is that Dennis Prager gets paid to write this kind of ignorant drivel, while a bunch of ankle-biting liberals who are barely old enough to drink (legally) tear him up gratis. Welcome to Dick Cheney's America. Prager prattles:

In fact, the only large body of Jews with a mission are the Jews with the least Jewish religiosity. Such Jews have been disproportionately involved in secular ideologies such as Marxism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, animal rights and every other ideology of the Left.
...
Most Jews are still running away from their divine mission and causing storms in many places as a result.

Riiiiiight... The Pandagonians lay down the smack. Liked this comment in particular:

Meh, I think the reasons for this kind of trash column are pretty obvious. The conservative hack starts with two unargued postulates:

1. Liberals and liberalism are bad.
2. Some other thing X (in this case, religion, and specifically, Judaism) is good.

Then all that's left is to draw the obvious conclusion:
Liberals who are X can't really be X. In this case, liberals who are Jews are "betraying" Judaism.

Let's try it again:

1. Liberals are bad.
2. Cute little puppies are good.

Thus it's obvious: Liberal puppies (and puppies of liberal owners) aren't really puppies. Personally, I think they're actually secret, church-burning canine robots designed by liberal mad scientists.

What I want to know, however is whether or not Dennis will step up and address the real issue with the Hebrew people: Huckapoo.

Tikkun Olam. It’s the Jewish term for 'healing the world', or turning this once Christian land into a Jewish pig sty... And their favorite targets are our little girls, which they do their best to turn into racemixing dykes and sluts.

Note: the ugly and pointed anti-semitism above is meant to be taken in contrast to the ignorant and hazy anti-leftist/semitism from Prager at the top. The two dingbats may not agree with one another, but both are also wrong. The point is that there's not a great deal if distance from saying "Liberal Jews are ruining the world" to saying "LiberalJews are ruining the world." It's also the point that statements like "LiberalJews are ruining the world" are just as nuts.

You might have already seen Conor Oberst (a.k.a. Bright Eyes) on Leno this week, but if not, clicky-clicky.

I'm lukewarm on Conner's music at this point. I think if he keeps doing it he could really grow into a pretty formidable artist. Although the instrumentation and rhythm could stand development, there's no denying the echos of Dylan and Guthrie and Ochs in some of these lines: "No they're lazy George, I say we don't. Just give 'em more liquor stores and dirty coke! That's what God reccomends." Acid sharp.

While I'm lukewarm, plenty of kids in my generation are hot for this 25-year-old from Oklahoma. This could be good.

Local church kicks out all Democrats for "sin" of voting for Kerry. This is a Bad Thing. Hopefully it will not catch on.

In this little ditty called British Politics Dives Into the Web, WaPo reporter Robert MacMillan puts his ignorance on display with a little quotational backup from a academic at Oxford:

Despite predictions in the United States that 2004 would usher in an era in which Web campaigning would rival the 30-second TV spot in importance, elections are still about knocking on doors and glad-handing on the sidewalks. The same appears to be holding true in Britain.

"I think it would be a mistake to assume that the Web has become a significant campaigning tool either at the national level or at the constituency level of candidates," said Stephen Coleman, a professor at Oxford University's Internet Institute and an expert on the use of the Web in elections. "They have a fairly symbolic value. You need to be seen to have one, but [the parties] are not quite sure what to do with them."

Dutton might be right in that the parties are not quite sure what to do with the web, but MacMillan's obliviousness to the connection between a campaign's online life and it's on-the-street activities betrays a profound ignorance of what happened in the US in 2004. Either he never bothered to investigate the Dean campaign (beyond fundraising), Meetup or GOP Team Leader, or he's taking the inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom over the evidence.

The reality is that a number of campaigns in 2004 (Dean, Clark, Kucinish and Bush) made highly effective use of the internet. Fundraising grabbed a lot of headlines, but that's an old story. John McCain raised a million dollars in two days in 2000; the GOP has been raising tens of millions through direct-mail for years. What happened in 2004 was that the effective campaigns were the able to turn donors into activists by giving people a sense of ownership in return for their online donation. The $20 donation helps keep the campaign alive not just by adding to the bank account, but by more effectively binding the donor to the campaign.

The effective online campaign maximized this by providing opportunities to contribute via sweat-equity (aka volunteering) in combination to a direct financial gift. They used their online presence to recruit, organize and monitor these volunteers, as well as to seed dense grassroots networks which helped support their campaign without technically being a part of it. While this is not exactly a revelation in politics, the changing ways in which the net allows a campaign to communicate with its constituents are integral to the deployment of these tactics in 2004.

The conventional wisdom on what drives a campaign is broken. TV ads do not put people in the street or knocking on doors. To do that, you need organization. The internet is opening up new ways for campaigns to organize constituents, and more excitingly for "regular people" to self-organize independely of campaigns. TV and print ads are and will remain important for the sake of visibility and framing. Though the net is transforming those aspects as well, the old media remains dominant (object lesson: the Dean scream). However, when it comes to organizing, there's no question that the internet plays an integral role for savvy campaigns and parties.

The ironic thing is, until old-media reporters begin to understand and respect this distinction, the current frame around internet campaigning will remain largely intact. That provides some opportunities as well as frustrations. The GOP did very well in 2004 by keeping a lot of its organization off the mainstream radar. While I find journalistic ignorance to be annoying, I also kind of hope people keep underestimating the internet.

Mr. Markos has been having a little back and forth with Russ Feingold, Senator from Wisconsen and prominent crusader against big money politics, over the way in which the FEC should regulate political speech on the internet.

It's a pretty important debate to keep track of, because anything which might have a chilling effect on citizen-participation -- the kind of stuff we just began to tap into in 2004 -- would be a major downer.

Feingold seems to have the best of intentions, and his willingness to engage in a public debate on the subject is admirable, but he seems to be working within the confines of the old media paradigm. Kos lays out a position I wholeheartedly endorse here:

Can a bunch of concerned citizens launch a wave of pro-social security television ads? Of course not. Can a wave of concerned citizens launch sites supporting social security? Of course, and we have dozens of them to prove the point. And in fact, citizen activism has, by and large, proven far more successful than anything sponsored by big money.

The Internet is a medium that allows anyone to be a journalist or an activist. We can fight Big Money on this medium and win, and we have been doing so.

What's going to happen, if the FEC attempts to regulate the medium, is that people who are openly and legitimately engaging in online activism can be shut down by frivolous complaints, while the truly nefarious forces will be doing what I describe above -- working in the shadows and using the web's inherent anonymity to ply their dirty wares with impunity.

This is exactly right. Even the current regulations for offline participation favor large-scale players who can hire lawyers to decypher the rules and insure compliance. They also favor large-scale players who can hire lawyers to bring complaints (frivilous or not) against upstart competitors. Extending this balance of power to the net would effectively kill the ability of online communities to go against the will of the established political powers, which is, let's be clear, fundimentally undemocratic and unamerican.

Part of the dynamic that needs to be understood here is the scale and scope of human involvement. When you're talking about broadcast media, you're dealing with a fantastically small number of people on the production/participation end hitting potentially millions on the message-recieving end. When you're talking about the internet, you're really talking about a lot more participants on the production end, even in a coordinated campaign. The metrics are a lot closer to canvassing than to running some media spots.

The practical effect of this is that it's going to be difficult to run large-scale internet political messaging campaigns that are out in the open but which obscure their source. The sheer number of people involved as well as the standard of transparency (as well as the practical transparency of most internet services) means that keeping soemthing really "anonymous" is going to be quite hard, and anything that takes pains to do so will be opening itself up for all kinds of suspicion, which isn't what a successful political campaign wants to generate.

To sum up, the only way to protect "the little guy" online, and more importantly to let the little guy knock the big guy's block off, is to keep regulations off their backs. Some guards against massive corporate financing might be good. Some recourse for "truth in advertising" might also be welcome. But any regulations which are imposed must be simple and clear; easy to comply with and not limiting on people's ability to speak their mind. They must not create a chilling effect, and the must not be a tool for established interests to harass political upstarts.

We'll see what we get.

Krugman's latest missive on the health care situation: Passing the Buck. It's another tight piece, hits all the important points, but one of the most important bits to me is this:

...private insurers generally don't compete by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they "compete on the basis of risk selection" - that is, by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.

PK and I both know the biggest barrier to public health insurance is ideological subservance to "Market Forces." We have to change this equation to allow for a positive role for Public institutions. We also need to be clear about just how the Market does work for Heath Insurance.

Competition in the Health Insurance industry is not over providing the best medical care for the best cost, but rather over who can keep the largest amount of premiums unspent on care. That's what delivers shareholder value: not providing care. The market drives insurers to not insure people who are likely to get sick and to push back against doctors' attempts to provide treatment to patients who are covered. The net result is that billions are spent in a war of paperwork, and the most vulnerable citizens are the most likely to be left out in the cold. The net result is more money spent by everyone, which is also good news from a pure Market perspective.

All of this is bad for people, though. It's time we joined the rest of civilization and started taking care of our sick and injured. Not only is this the right thing to do morally, but it's a boost to business, and will cost the country less overall than the current Insurance Regime.

Kos points me to a timely reminder by Steve Gilliard as to what's been going on in Iraq. It's mostly out of the news as far as I can tell, but not really going well either.

If you want a strategic position, I think the big crunch comes when the insugency figures out how to take down our C-130s, meaning they get someone to sell and train them with portable SAM systems and start working in teams of two or three.

Hopefully we'll be able to get out before then, but with the neo-con plans for a permanent footprint, I'm not counting on it.

Markos has posted one of his longest and most interesting blog's in a while. Coming off some lefty get together -- I don't even know which one, that's how out of it I am -- he writes Half-baked observations of a VLWC conference. VLWC stands for Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, and it's a bit of a joke. Here are my favorite paragraphs:

So there were the crazies, some of them in leadership positions of fairly prominent organizations. Fucking obnoxious, and clearly a reason why our side can seem out of touch.

But there was another wierd dynamic at play -- this one generational. There were leaders, all of them older, of extremely prominent liberal interest groups. We're talking labor, environmental, economic justice, things like that. And some of them were genuinely awesome.

But there was a large contingent of them that were obsessed with one thing -- their pet issue. It was about them, them, them. Why wasn't their issue being addressed? Did they have to stay in some meeting if their issue wasn't being discussed? Etc.

Wow! Their self-centerdness and lack of interest in working together (unless it revolved around their issue) was breathtaking.

On the other hand, most of the younger activists at this retreat ran community-style groups. They weren't focused on any single issue, but on using the collective force of their communities to bear pressure on various issues.

That's something I've been seeing and feeling for over a year. I would add that in addition to being more community-centric, younger activists are more outcome oriented. What's the point of being a community pillar if you're not capable of bringing home the bacon. "What is effective?" is a question I've heard thrown around quite a lot lately.