Hold Fast

Drew Westen has a big piece in Alternet about the current political climate and the anger fueling populist backlash. First, I think this is spot-on:
The “Obama Doctrine” should have been that Americans who want to work and have the ability to contribute to our productivity as a nation should have the right to work, and […]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sq0176-yFg

Steve Aufrecht of What Do I Know? shot this video of Alaska’s Democratic Senate nominee Scott McAdams in Anchorage on Wednesday. McAdams is the mayor of Sitka, Alaska, and though he isn’t widely known across the state like a couple other Alaskan mayors, he is the real deal.
Dave Weigel at Slate asks a good question:
Do […]

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Peter Daou has an uncharacteristically short, yet characteristically good post  on why he thinks the rightwing dominates our national debate. The short version: because “Democrats run away from the left.” Daou writes:
Forget the thousand explanations pundits have offered for the administration’s beef with the left; this is the single biggest reason the left is furious […]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mhaQ21ULjo

Via Digby. Transcript below the fold.

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In an otherwise awful column, Maureen Dowd makes a relevant point:
There are deep schisms within the Democratic Party that were masked for a time, first by Bush and then by Obama’s election. Now that the Democrats have the presidency and the power and can enact legislation, it’s apparent that the word progressive is kind of […]

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I think primaries are really good, healthy things for both democracy broadly and the Democratic Party specifically. In my home state of Connecticut, there’s a heated primary going on between grassroots hero Ned Lamont and Stamford mayor Dan Malloy. It’s not that it’s a close race - Ned is well ahead of Malloy and is […]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4zwCMf8dsc

Greg Sargent is right:
All I’m saying is that raging against successful Republican efforts to block individual Dem initiatives isn’t enough. Raging about GOP obstructionism in general isn’t enough, either. The point is that Dems need to build an effective larger case that transcends individual issues and reckons more directly with the strategy underlying all the […]

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Last month I mentioned a brilliant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow that effectively lampooned how the American right as bizarrely warped perceptions of the positions held by President Obama. In it, Tom pointed out the irony of the right portraying Obama as a crazed liberal, when in fact most of his actions show he is a […]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAFb5p2qX8

Rest in peace, Senator Byrd.

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What Glenn Greenwald said:
What’s going on here couldn’t be clearer if the DNC produced neon signs explaining it. Blanche Lincoln and her corporatist/centrist Senate-friends aren’t some unfortunate outliers in the Democratic Party. They are the Democratic Party. The outliers are the progressives. The reason the Obama White House did nothing when […]

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