Stephen Bruton – Nothing But The Truth.   

On my mind tonight  is the Organic Blogging fundraiser to help Marcy be able to blog full time.  You can donate here  and you can set a reoccurring donation here.

What’s on your mind tonight?

I’m pumped. I’m excited. I. Am. Flying.

I click my Emptywheel bookmark, open a new tab in my browser, and I’m already mentally composing what I’ll put into the comment box: "I found it! It’s the key to the latest mystery . . ." Marcy’s homepage loads, and my head crashes into the keyboard.

She’s already on it.

Has been for hours, actually. Disappointment quickly gives way to delight, however, as I read what she’s already been able to do with the small nugget I thought I had found.

Admit it — this has happened to you, hasn’t it?

Or maybe it’s been worse. I find that nugget, I go to Emptywheel, and behold: she’s *not* talking about it already! A scoop! I’ve got a scoop to pass to Marcy!!! I post my comment, giddy with excitement, and then wait for it to get noticed. It’s tough to keep from reloading the page every fifteen seconds, but I can hold out for at least a minute because I know — I know! — just how much my news will make a difference. 

Then comes the comment — "I posted on that about six months ago" (with a link, of course).

Think about it. How many times have you read Marcy and said something to yourself like . . .

• "Why didn’t I see that?"
• "How in the world did she think of that?"
• "#^%*$!!! There goes my half-written post . . ." 
• "I was just about to say that myself."

Marcy reads. Then she thinks. Then she reads some more. Then she digs. All the while, she’s making her timelines and taking notes. She posts, and then she listens as readers chime in with theories and evidence and arguments of their own. She gets into the discussion in the comments, she sifts, she posts again (happily giving credit to her readers), she listens some more, and she goes back to the weeds and digs a little deeper. And the best part of this story is this: when people know Marcy is digging, her regular readers start to salivate and those with something to hide start to perspire.

This makes me smile. 

One of my favorite little games it to imagine the reactions of others to the posts that Marcy puts up — especially the ones that go deep in the weeds to unearth things that Teh Evil People want to remain buried. People like telecom lawyers, after reading what Marcy has parsed out from some footnote in a congressional report about their client’s warrantless wiretapping. People like Scooter Libby’s legal team, after Marcy dissects the foolish arguments they made in court — and doing it in real time, as she liveblogs the trial, for all the world to see! People like TradMed editors, after she takes apart a story they’ve published, making them look like idiots, stenographers, or accessories to the crimes they are allegedly covering. People like congressional investigators, stymied in their progress until they read Emptywheel.

• "Damn bloggers."
• "I’ve got an entire newsroom of reporters crawling all over DC, and not one of you came up with this story?"
• "$^%&@ — She’s on to us!"
• "Now that’s an interesting development. At tomorrow’s hearing, make sure the boss asks about . . ." 

Imagine if the CIA hired Marcy to do interrogations and analysis. If any of the various House and Senate committees were serious about digging into governmental misconduct — torture, warrantless wiretapping, outing inconvenient covert agents — they’d have hired Marcy long ago. But they haven’t.

Jane, however, is trying to do just that. A while back, she persuaded Marcy to set up shop here with her own little pad at FDL, and last Tuesday, Jane took things a step further:

I’ve been trying for months to get funding for Marcy so she can do what she does full time. I’ve been turned down by every major donor and donor representative I’ve asked. They’d rather create their own "astroturf" blogs. . .

It appears that the only way that Marcy and others are going to be supported to do investigative work past the minimal amount advertising can provide is if it comes directly from readers.

So we’re launching a campaign today. We want to raise $150,000 to support Marcy, another investigative blogger to work with her, and a researcher to help them.

You can make your contribution here, and as of 8:30 AM FDL time today, 818 people have given $49,788 — almost one third of that goal.

I can’t offer you a tote bag or a coffee mug. I’ve got no prestigious "spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom" to dangle out there as an enticement. All I’ve got is this:

If we can get the funds to support a full-time Marcy and give her a two-person staff, a lot of folks will sleep a lot less soundly at night — people like David Addington, Jay Bybee, Dick Cheney, lazy congresspeople (of both parties), TradMed stenographers, . . .

And isn’t that worth a lot more than a tote bag? 

Are we in the middle of an uprising? Best-selling author, journalist and indefatigable blogger, David Sirota says yes. In fact, there’s a primordial soup of a potential social movement out there. Yet it’s not a forgone conclusion that the uprising will be a progressive one. In this interview Sirota discusses his new book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, and why we find ourselves at a crossroads. Why has the anti-war movement failed to win over Democrats in Washington? Why has the economic justice movement had only limited success? Is the Barack Obama campaign a movement?

Sirota says this is just the beginning. Listen here to find out why the labor movement still matters, what the netroots can do, and why progressives need to seize the moment.

And what about the political establishment? It’s designed, Sirota says, to stop the uprising. The most effective leaders are the gadflies, the ones who are not well liked in Washington. So is Obama the darling of the political establishment? And if so what does that say about the progressive movement? Find out here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – What you see here is a slide from the audiovisual presentation about THE UPRISING that I unveiled yesterday at a Campaign for America’s Future event in Washington, D.C. It is a graph showing Gallup’s survey that documents Americans confidence in different institutions – and, as my new newspaper column today shows, it is an image that should give us hope that today’s populist uprising is, in fact, a progressive opportunity…if we seize it.

In my presentation (which you can come see at many of the events I am doing all over the country in the next month), I make the case that today’s political topography resembles that of the late 1970s – just like back then, we are facing a Mideast crisis, a financial crisis, a potential inflationary crisis and an energy crisis (incidentally, the Washington Post’s front-page this week actually noted some of the similarities).

As you can see from the Gallup polling graph above, Americans had little confidence in Congress in the late 1970s – and that helped the Right use an anti-government message to take the uprising of that age channel it into the full-fledged conservative movement that has now dominated our country for the last generation.

Today, Americans have lost further confidence in Congress, which would seem to bode well for conservatives and their anti-government ideology. Except other factors have also changed – namely, Americans’ confidence in Big Business and the financial system. While in the late 1970s Americans were relatively confident in those economic institutions, today we are not, meaning progressives critique of corporate power and economic inequality can compete against the Right’s anti-government rhetoric.

But that’s only the beginning of why today’s populist uprising – though occurring on both the Right and Left – favors progressives.

Republicans have spent the last three decades handing over the government to Big Business, while making the GOP synonymous with those economic interests that the public is outraged at. Put another way, the graph suggests that progressives’ argument against BOTH corruption and unfair economic policies is precisely where the public is at this populist moment.

As I say in THE UPRISING, it remains unclear whether progressives will seize this moment and transform it into a moment of historic change. Today, the Democratic Party still hasn’t fully decided whether to cast its lot with the Bob Rubins and Wall Streeters who ran the country into the ground, or with the mass public that wants an end to money politics. That goes for Barack Obama as well.

As I told the New York Sun today, Obama has one foot firmly planted inside the establishment and has presented himself as having one foot outside the establishment, and the question remains whether he is a candidate who used the pretense of insurgency to be another establishment stooge or whether he is the real deal? I think he’s the real deal – but we will need a full-fledged social movement to make sure of it.

You can read the whole column at Creators Syndicate, Denver Post, Ft. Collins Coloradoan, In These Times, TruthDig or Credo Action. The column relies on grassroots support, so if you’d like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn’t be what it is without your help.

The author at work in his study

I love footnotes.

Well-written footnotes do so many different things. Most provide the reader with directions to the evidence supporting a claim in the main text. Some give snark-filled asides – little tangents from the main topic, or perhaps humorous anecdotes. Some try to bat down the arguments put forth by other authors. Some suggest places to go for further reading on the topic at hand.

Face it: footnotes are fun. They might have felt like a drag when your English teacher was reminding you not to leave them out and browbeating you to put them in the right form – but in your heart, you know she was right. Footnotes are fun, and I miss them when they aren’t there.

And then I discovered links. Links are turbocharged footnotes. They don’t just tell you where to find the reference – they take you to it. Talk about service. Yum.

But twice a week, FDL goes one step further. . .

At the FDL Book Salons, we sit down with the authors themselves. Instead of one-way pointers to other writings, we get two way conversations. We get living breathing footnotes, with all the asides, all the snark, and all the background information that didn’t make it into the book.

FDL Book Salons have taken on subjects like the Iraq War, pushing to understand it from all kinds of perspectives, including Pentagon insider AJ Rossmiller, Valerie Plame from the CIA, and former Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) from Capitol Hill. We chatted with outsiders like Bob Drogin who followed the story of Curveball, and Linda Bilmes, who is watching the $3 trillion cost of the war. We visited with Mike Hoyt, editor of Reporting Iraq, un-embedded reporter Dahr Jamail, and looked at the failures of the media with Greg Mitchell.

And it’s not just Iraq. We’ve looked at the economy (Paul Krugman), religion and politics (Dan Gilgoff, Sarah Posner, John Gorenfeld), Republicans and neocons (John Anderson, John Dean, Paul Waldman, Jacob Heilbrunn, Naomi Klein), Democrats and progressives (Laura Flanders, Glenn Hurowitz, Eric Alterman), the Constitution (Lou Dubose and Molly Ivins), and the Worst People In The World (Keith Olbermann). We’ve checked out who hates whom (Bob Harris), how to change the world (Alex Steffen), life as a pro-choice doctor (Dr. Susan Wicklund), and we’ve peeked inside the minds of political operatives (Mark Penn, Allen Raymond.) [OK, some Book Salons have been better than others. But I digress.] We’ve had in major public figures, like 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, as well as other, less widely-known authors who nevertheless have something powerful to say.

While the guests are great, it’s the questions and comments that make the Book Salons work. Consider this exchange from last Saturday:

CTuttle: Senator, do you think there’s some traction in Congress to look into Yoo’s atrocious logic in discarding the Geneva Conventions and the 4th and 8th amendments…?

LChafee: Once again, Where’s the Democratic Party? They’re in the majority. What was the point of voting me out of office if the new Democratic majority isn’t willing to put on the brass knuckles and fight for our Constitution? John Ashcroft, of all people, on his sickbed, refused to sign off on the torture memo. Let’s give credit where credit’s due. Let’s hope Congressman Waxman goes after Yoo, he’s got the chairmanship of the committee.

Sometimes just pointing out the favorite part of the book is enlightening, like this from the chat with Bob Harris:

I particularly liked:

Tossing complex, violent agendas into giant bin called terrorism is both lazy and dangerous. Instead, let’s force ourselves to use specifics: “national rebels” or “drug-financed paramilitary death squads” or “sex-crazed vegetarian pacifists.” Speaking of which, not enough sex-crazed vegetarian pacifists are invading people. I checked.

No we’re just dhimmi who want to give away the farm and unconditionally surrender in the War Against Terrah. Not “real men” like Victor Davis Hanson, who wants to climb on the roof and “thin out the neighborhood” with a rifle and scope.

Not exactly what you see in either the book reviews or political stories reported elsewhere.

FDL Book Salon editor Bev Wright has a stunning list of authors coming up over the next couple of weeks:

• Philip Shenon — The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission
• Keli Goff — Party Crashing: How the Hip Hop Generation Declared its Personal Independence
• Glenn Greenwald — Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of American Politics
• Bernie Horn — Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People
• Eric Lichtblau — Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice
• Matthew Yglesias — Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws up Democrats

(Click through for times, details, and links to order the books.)

Just thinking about the news of the last couple of weeks makes me anxious to hear these conversations. "Philip, what do you make of Mukasey’s new story about FISA problems that kept us from stopping 9/11 — a story that never got to the ears of the 9/11 commission?" "Keli, who among both political parties’ leadership is most aware of the generational independence you describe?" . . .

Anything look interesting to you in that list? Who are you anxious to read and chat with? What have been your favorite Book Salons, and who had the best snark? Who would you like to see in upcoming chats (either authors or hosts)? What topics would you like to dig into, that you haven’t seen here before?

Some FDL readers check in only from work, Monday through Friday. That’s great, but there are some special threads that come up on the weekends, like these Book Salons (2PM Eastern/5PM Pacific) that you really, really don’t want to miss.

So Douglas Feith has a book out. The former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, famously described by Tommy Franks as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," has 688 pages in which to make the case that he made George Bush a war and Bush screwed it up.

Fortunately, the liberal blogosphere wrote the book on Feith years ago. And I do mean literally wrote the book.

A little background: In late 2004, I was asked by a publisher to begin gathering up the best blog posts on a given subject, to highlight the best of what the liberal blogs had to offer. It was a project called the Informed Citizen series, masterminded by Tom Sumner of William, James & Co, a small West Coast publishing house and early supporter of this strange new medium of ours.

I suggested Douglas Feith, whose machinations were just beginning to hit the press, and with whom I had, as I wrote to Tom, "a sick fascination, like a gaper at an accident." We weren’t sure at the time that there was enough out there for an entire book.

What we found, in the liberal blogosphere, was a staggering amount of information and research on Feith stretching back to the late 1990s.

A product of the Project for a New American Century, Feith made a name for himself writing about Middle Eastern affairs for conservative publications before moving into government work under the late President Reagan. He and his PNAC colleagues had long viewed ousting Saddam Hussein as a goal, and with the George W. Bush presidency and 9/11, they now had a vehicle through which to accomplish it.

The results of that work, as you can see, are all around us. More than 4,000 dead, tens of thousands wounded, and that’s just Americans. Iraq is once again edging toward chaos, and most people want to be gone from there. Yet Feith, one of the war’s chief architects, was introduced on 60 Minutes last night as an obscure figure; moreover, as an "insider," someone whose work was all but unknown.

Liberal blogs had been keeping tabs on Feith, including examinations of how he had his fingers all over every single bad decision made in the run-up to the war, and we exposed all of that in Special Plans, with posts from FDL’s very own Dave Neiwert, DailyKos diarist abw, Americablog, Wampum and Bad Attitudes. Those posts all examined Feith’s many misdeeds:

• Relying on Iraqi exiles and dissidents, including a crazy congenital liar (that’s how his friends describe him) known as "Curveball," to provide intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.
• Disbanding the Iraqi army, unemploying an entire population and leaving them pissed off and heavily armed.
• Dismissing any attempts to plan with actual troops for looting and post-war violence as pessimistic and "anti-war."
• And even as the rationale for war and its rosy aftermath was proving to be just one more big lie, former Feith aide Larry Franklin was found to be passing on classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

It was a record of incompetence and failure rivalling little else, even in the Bush administration. And while news stories here and there picked up pieces of Feith’s story, it was the liberal blogosphere that pulled it all together.

In his interview last night, Feith was utterly unrepentent about his actions. And really, why should he repent? Correspondent Steve Kroft gave him as hard a time as could be given, but Feith still walked away, to teach at Georgetown, to tour around talking about how he was right, and to say things like this, a quote he gave the Miami Herald back in 2003: "War, like life, always involves trade-offs." As if he’d know.

Feith may be right about one thing. It is, ultimately, the president who bears responsibility for this war. It is, ultimately, the president who presided over this disaster. Fill the government with anti-reality, anti-pragmatic, ideological fanatics willing to risk American power and might on their pretty plans on paper, and who treat any request for a backup plan as though it was a personal betrayal, and Feith is exactly what you get.

In Special Plans, we were able to point out what the blogs have become adept at pointing out over the past seven years: That whatever Feith and his PNAC colleagues may have done, for them to get away with it, Congress wasn’t doing its job. One of the blog posts in Special Plans is from Matt Yglesias, who wrote about oversight on pre-war intelligence during the Republican Congress:

It’s hard to think of a more important security issue facing the country than our capacity to gather reliable intelligence about who is, and who is not, collaborating with al-Qaeda. Feith’s operation has cut directly against this and, as the report documents, been used to mislead Congress about the state of American intelligence on the subject. Anyone with more than a passing regard for the national interest as opposed to partisan gain would want to get to the bottom of this. And yet, as an appendix to the report indicates, the administration time and again refused to provide key information to the SASC minority staff — putting politics above America’s national security. If a majority of the senators on the committee had gotten behind the inquiry it would have been possible to issue subpoenas and get this stuff out in the open.

I’m not giving Feith a pass, though. One of my very favorite posts in this book is by Jack K. of the Grumpy Forrester, who writes:

…so Doug Feith gets to saunter away to lucrative private life, after hammering together a poisonous mixture of misstatements, misrepresentations, half-truths, and fables to engineer Gee Dub’s Grand Iraqi Adventure, subsequent to which he did a major portion of the heavy lifting in post-conquest planning that stands as a stark icon to absolute perfection in incompetence.

The darkly grim irony in all of this is that, while Feith moseys off into this personal glimmering sunset, tens of thousands of common folk – butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, the guy down the street – found themselves federalized into full-time combat area duty as National Guard and Reserve members, jerked away from their jobs and families for far longer than they ever could have realistically imagined, while thousands of others were held in or called back to military service under stop-loss provisions when they thought their military commitment was about to be or had been completed.

They can’t look up one day from their MRE lunch and decide "for family and personal reasons" that they would like to leave this particular branch of government service.

That’s what truly enrages me about the information we all dug up: That despite all that work, despite all that information widely available discrediting this man on any number of levels, Feith remains someone worthy of paying a tidy sum to continue to spew his nonsense for the American people (a sum he claims, by the way, to be donating to the veterans of his war, which is the very least he could do). He should be giving his side of the story from a witness stand in the Hague, not from the comfy chair beside Tim Russert or Chris Matthews. He should be unemployed, not teaching at Georgetown.

The guy’s never gonna miss a meal. The Congressional report published last February said that what Feith had done was inappropriate but not illegal, something Feith’s defenders hailed at the time as a major exoneration, “not illegal” being the highest honor to which a Bush public servant can aspire these days. The war is going on and on, even as information continues to come out about how it was planned (or not, as the case may be).

As I wrote in the book’s conclusion, this many years in, we hardly even know what this is yet:

It may be years before we know the full extent of the machinations behind this war, the role Douglas Feith and his PNAC colleagues played in its beginnings, and the true cost in money and lives at the end.

But I have read enough of history to suspect the whole story, once told, will not be kind. And I take great comfort in the knowledge that for war crimes, there is no statute of limitations.

Special Plans made nary a dent in the mainstream discourse when it was published in 2005. America was just about to wake up to the idea that Bush and his war kind of suck, that spying on Americans isn’t cool, that it was OK to say so out loud because nobody’s bulldozing Dixie Chick records anymore. As annoyed as I am about that, I can’t say I’m sorry we were ahead of the curve, mostly because I don’t think you get some kind of cookie for speaking up after about a billion people beat you to it. The book provides an invaluable resource for understanding not just what Feith did and how he got away with doing it, but how he managed to be ignored for so long, by everybody but the liberal blogosphere, which was paying attention.

Lastly, I just have to say, when L. Paul Bremer III thinks you’re being a little dim, it may be time to hang it up:

Mr. Feith is an honorable public servant; possibly he was unaware of the many discussions my colleagues and I had with the president and his top advisers in the months after the establishment of the CPA.

The fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth, in other words, may be exactly that.

You’ll pardon me if, having read the book on Feith years ago, I’m not precisely shocked.

A.

Athenae blogs at First Draft, along with Holden, Scout and Jude. Her latest book is "It Doesn’t End With Us: The Story of the Daily Cardinal."

Reading Jane’s post on the morning of March 21, 2008  about the religious beliefs of candidates made me think about how my own Congressman, Keith Ellison, had to deal with religious controversy in his past and how he has been able to overcome it. (Religion and politics in general, and the religious beliefs of candidates running for president in 2008 in particular, seem to be standard fare in the political realm and the media these days.)

While a law student in 1989 and 1990, Ellison wrote several columns as Keith E. Hakim in the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. "The first article defended Louis Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism," defended Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and spoke in the voice of a Nation of Islam advocate." The second column "called affirmative action a ’sneaky’ form of compensation for slavery, suggesting instead that white Americans pay reparations to blacks."The third suggested the creation of a separate state for black residents.

In 1995, Ellison, writing an editorial as Keith X. Ellison, stated that Farrakhan is not an anti-Semite. The same year, Ellison was identified as a member of the Nation of Islam in the Star Tribune.

In 1997, when Joanne Jackson, executive director of the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism (MIAR), allegedly said that, "Jews are among the most racist white people", Ellison, using his religious name Mohammed, read a statement supporting her on behalf of the The Minneapolis-St. Paul Study Group of the Nations of Islam: "[We] stand by Ms. Jackson. We stand by the truth contained in the remarks attributed to her, and by her right to express her view without sanction. Here is why we support Ms. Jackson: She is correct about Minister Farrakhan. He is not a racist. He is also not an anti-Semite. This widespread and unfair practice of whites sanctioning blacks for not denouncing Minister Farrakhan represents a racist double standard, and is an impediment to any honest dialogue about race. If black people are to ever possess a collective sense of self-respect and self-determination, they must not genuflect whenever powerful whites make the unreasonable demand to denounce Minister Farrakhan. Minister Farrakhan said he did not like the tension between the black and Jewish communities, and that he was open to dialogue with any groups as long as they did not set any conditions." Ellison later claimed "While some at that meeting justified her comments, I spoke out in favor of increased dialogue between the Jewish and African-American communities."

Questions about Ellison’s involvement with the Nation of Islam arose during his 2006 campaign. After winning the Democratic party nomination in May, he wrote a letter to the local Jewish Community Relations Council where he reportedly "asserted that his involvement with the Nation of Islam had been limited to an 18-month period around the time of the Million Man March in 1995, that he had been unfamiliar with the Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitic views during his involvement with the group, and that he himself had never expressed such views." He also stated that he was never a member of the Nation of Islam, but only worked with it to organize the Minnesota contingent to the Million Man March.

But also in 2006, despite his work with the Nation of Islam, Ellison was backed by the publisher of The American Jewish World, a local Twin Cites newspaper.

“Keith has recognized his past mistakes and renounced his brief association with the Nation of Islam,” wrote Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, in a press statement released September 21. “It is only the GOP attack machine who seems intent on not moving on.”

The release — issued in response to recent criticism from Ellison’s opponent, Republican Alan Fine, as well as from state GOP party leaders — put the national Jewish group at the forefront of Ellison’s defense.

In spite of what his detractors threw at him, Ellison’s views on the Iraq War, his positions and work in favor of the environment, immigration reform, healthcare, children, and the poor seem to resonate with his ethnically diverse constituents in Minneapolis, many of whom rallied to vote for him. In 2006, he won the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) (DFL) primary with 41 percent of the vote, and then won in the general with 56 percent of the vote against Republican candidate Alan Fine and others, becoming the first Muslim–and also the first African-American from Minnesota–to be elected to US Congress. His term began in the midst of a great controversy over his religion. He was finger pointed and attacked by extreme right even before taking oath.

On November 14, 2006, Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News asked Ellison to, "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies," saying, "And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way." Ellison replied that his constituents, "know that I have a deep love and affection for my country. There’s no one who’s more patriotic than I am, and so you know, I don’t need to — need to prove my patriotic stripes."

And controversy over Ellison’s religion reached national news when conservative columnist Dennis Prager wrote a column criticizing him because Ellison stated an intent to use the Quran instead of a Bible at his photo-op reenactment of the swearing in ceremony (the official ceremony is done en masse without any books). Fifth-term Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA), responding to "scores and hundreds of emails"from his constituents after the Prager articles, has also stated his view that Ellison’s decision to use the Quran is a threat to "the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America".He also wrote, "…if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

CNN reported that on the opening day of Congress, Ellison met Goode on the House floor to shake hands and Goode accepted an offer to talk over coffee.

That same day, during his oath reenactment, Ellison used a two volume Quran published in London in 1764 that was once owned by Thomas Jefferson and loaned to Ellison by "the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress".

On January 11, 2008, La Prensa de Minnesota, the primary (and prominent) Hispanic newspaper in Minnesota, named Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District “La Prensa de Minnesota Person of the Year for 2007, an award aimed to highlight the accomplishments and the impact of one person in favor of the Twin Cities communities as a whole.The newspaper cited his work, during 2007, in favor of the environment, immigration reform, healthcare, the poor and the Liberian community for giving Keith Ellison this award.

Congressman Ellison is running for re-election to Congress from Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, which comprises all of Minneapolis, and which, since 1963, has easily been the bluest and most ethnically diverse district in the whole state of Minnesota, especially with the large number of US citizens who are Somali refugees—supposedly the largest outside Mogadishu. Given his accomplishments, my neighbors and fellow Fifth District constituents should be so lucky to re-elect him as their representative.

mushon

In my post last week, I talked about how, beginning in the mid-1970s, capitalism and technology, working for each other, produced a new regime that quietly dissolved the old pact between capital and labor. From then on, this new regime of capital started laying the foundation for the time of the Internet that was to emerge about two decades later in the mid-1990s. It helps to state the obvious here once again: Capitalism and technology produced the Internet, again working for each other as always, and also as always, both more or less contributing equally to the enterprise. The Internet in turn quite rapidly began to facilitate the free circulation of humans, products, and information. People whose profession involves producing, analyzing, and circulating money, words, codes, data, audio, video, and images (the so-called dot.com crowd); editors; writers; movie producers; media content-providers; designers; investment bankers; currency traders; and even salespeople (thanks to e-commerce, e-Bay, and others–and let’s not forget that sales used to depend on so-called "face-time") can live and work anywhere in the world as long as they’re wired, for institutions and entities not necessarily located where they live and work.

In order to render this post’s discursive narrative coherent and as understandable as possible, let’s distill here one sentence from my last post: Capitalism and technology together produced a teletopia where the duration of time and the extension of space have been erased. Now comes the alarming part: In the new full-blown regime of the Internet, time and space have long been superseded by the absolute speed of the time of capital: the speed of what Paul Virilio in "The Overexposed City" has called time-light: that is, the time it takes to transmit data–the speed of light. And now in the first decade of the Third Millennium, the condominium of capitalism-technology–that high-tech Janus–has liberated human life completely from the boundaries of space and even abolished all together the need for travel as we know it. From this point on, the task of capital is to ensure the optimal mobilization of information and, from sunrise to sunset and also overnight, to work against the viscosity of a complex social body that might obstruct this mobilization: as examples: civil-rights movements; radical intellectuals; community activists; and, in this age of the blogosphere, progressive netroots (there’s an irony in this latter that I will disclose later. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves).

In a seminal essay published in 1987 in the first issue of Zone, just about one decade before the Internet became widely available to consumers, Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, "The Luster of Capital," the authors seemed to have anticipated the human life online that the Internet would produce when they contrasted the brick-and-mortar world of the old system with the new one:

Before this new system of capital emerged, the traditional laborer moved everyday from the "space" of home to that of work, and vice-versa. These days home and work are fused in a fluid time-space. We’re all enslaved completely by time and capital, free to invest in ourselves, with various machines at our disposal, to produce valued time. We’ve all become new "human capitals," now producing valued time in order to consume time valued…Capital has provided the Time used to produce and save Time, the saved Time subject to the law of commodities. One is rich because one has saved time (that is, money), and one poor because one has less saved time (again, less money). The poor or the homeless, the unemployed or the unskilled have no valued or stored time, but only "naked, real, or actual" time that no employer wants to buy, not even at a discount. (The unemployed and unskilled have their own naked time(s) to waste. ) However, both employer and employee are also enslaved by the Time of Capital, since both are incorporated into the machine of global capital: The former simply has more money at his/her disposal to buy more machines to enable her/him to buy more machines to enable him/her to produce and to save more time in order to enjoy (to consume) more time, and so on and so on.

We get the picture. This human capital engages in the optimal maximization of time and is highly skilled at so-called multitasking. This human capital, jetting around the globe to network, is equipped with: laptop with wireless card or chip (this to tap into numerous "hot-spots" in cafes in world cities); cellphone with SIM cards (or a Blackberry) for voice connections across the globe; and various other gadgets too numerous to adumbrate here. Sometimes you see her/him in cafes working on his/her laptop while also talking on the cellphone and also drinking latte. In all of these "spaces," s/he works in an environment that has no relationship to real time as such. In other words, there is a distinction between "present time" (the time present to the viewer on the laptop monitor), and the "real time" most of us live in, in our brick-and-mortar, block-buildings, mostly visceral everyday life.,

This human capital lives in a "digital city," which is a contemporary world city (as examples: New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Hong Kong, and so on) that has become a fluid terrain of multiple lines of flight, as well as a shifting zone of intensities and forces. This cosmopolis is "overexposed" in the sense that Paul Virilio talked about in "The Overexposed City." At this point, the city no longer occupies a piece of space– nor is it even a geographical position. For some time now, these world cities have existed in electronic topologies: They are not determined by the spatial grid of streets and avenues but by electronic freeway systems where humans and machines interface. Before the emergence of digital cities, traditional cities had circadian alternations of night and day. In digital cities, however, with the glow of televisions and computer monitors, daylight itself has changed, replaced by an artificial electronic day whose calendar is based on the telecommuting of information that has no relation to real time as such.

This human capital is obviously a corporate exec who probably owns a private Lear jet, a huge yacht, a McMansion, and so on. But this human capital could also be…er, a member of progressive netroots working for social justice for the poor, fighting poverty, and in general advocating for the have-nots of all stripes. How could this be so, you might ask yourself. Who appointed this human capital as a "change agent" (to use the common parlance of the day) of the poor, who are often mistakenly and sometimes arrogantly believed to be inarticulate, therefore needing representation, as it were. Who gave this person the cultural authority to do all these things?

(Consider the following supreme irony: according to the paradigm of Time and value and storage spelled out above, in which Time (as prison) is the only factor in the production and consumption of Time, the leftist progressive blogger has to buy some time out on furlough [as it were] with some time that s/he has saved in order to think a post, type, cut and paste, rewrite, edit, and tweak it again and again with the prodding of a [blog)] editor, before s/he finally clicks Saved…although some lucky bloggers get paid and make a living from blogging…)

In a (to my eyes) brilliant article in 2006, Pachacutec argued that in this first decade of the 21st century, the US is operating defacto with a three-party system instead of the two we’ve been deadened with for most of the history of the country, and he identified these three parties as (1) DC/K Elites; (2) Grassroots Theocrats; and (3) Grassroots Progressives. I find what he said about the latter, which is none other than our own progressive netroots, quite interesting and fascinating:

Grassroots Progressives: This new, emerging power center in American politics is making its bid for ascendancy as an alternative to the ruling coalition of the previously described two parties. It seeks to forge an alliance of secularists, pro-pluralist religionists, information elites on the Internet, working people and anyone not among the super-rich (including poor and middle class urbanites, suburbanites and small farmers). It also seeks to include privacy advocates and members of the creative class, including creators of music, software and films. It has created its own media arm on the Internet, of which this blog is a part, and it also gets its message out virally through independent films like Iraq for Sale. It supports the traditional, pro-pluralist understanding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and therefore supports things like civil rights and due process. Members of this emerging coalition believe government should be a servant of the needs of innovative businesses and common people neglected or largely disenfranchised by the DC/K Street Elitists and the Theocrats.

(My bold except for the name of the party)

MSM pundits and talk-show hosts like to disparage netroots, especially progressive netroots, as rife with pampered, rich, trust-fund brats who can afford to work in their pajamas. This exhausted topos has been repeated ad nauseam, so much so that it is now part of quotidian MSM argot, that I will not even bother to link it. But then again we’re obliged to ask: Are they right? Do they have a point? Can many progressive netroots members come from the middle- and upper-middle class and still have legitimate "rights"–so to speak–to advocate for the poor and fight for social justice on behalf of the underprivileged? This phenomenon sort of skews the conventional discourse on class in the US, doesn’t it? Maybe the issue of class is no longer the simple polarity between rich and poor that dear old Marx formulated; maybe the issue is considerably more complicated in this first decade of the 21st century, when Internet access is available to the poor in public libraries, albeit for a limited amount of time per day (two hours in Minneapolis, where I have my own brick-and-mortar existence). Maybe. So many maybes…

And please by all means, let the debate(s) begin.

(Biodun Iginla)

But there’s still a chance it can be undone — if we act now:

The March 2007 decision by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to drastically increase postal rates for small and independent publications represents an abrupt departure from more than 200 years of postal policy encouraging a vibrant marketplace of ideas.

[...]

Other founders soon came to understand that the press as a political institution needed to be supported through favorable postal rates. George Washington advocated for free postage for newspapers through the mail. Even Alexander Hamilton — no proponent of government deficit — conceded that supportive policies were needed to sustain a viable press. The postal policies that resulted have lasted for more than 200 years, spurring a vibrant political culture in the United States. They have eased the entry of diverse political viewpoints into a national discourse often dominated by the largest media organizations.

Our free press did not happen magically; it was built on the foundation of postal policies that encouraged small publications and dissident ideas to spout and flourish. The postal system is based on policies of public service and democratic values.

The new postal rate hike reverses this history of policymaking in the public interest.

The hike threatens the financial viability of hundreds of small and independent magazines from across the political spectrum, including many of the best known journals of political opinion in the country. It will cost these publications hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional postage and force them to make drastic cuts to their operations in order to survive.

You can help protect our marketplace of ideas.

Click here to send a message to Congress.

You know what to do.

Your stepping up to the plate has emboldened people like Chris Dodd, encouraged the forces in Congress pushing to hold key Bush Juntaists Joshua Bolten and Harriet Miers in criminal contempt, and endangered the once slam-dunk nomination of Hans von Spakovsky. You have more power than you know. Go get ‘em, tigers!

Initially, I was a bit skeptical about diving headlong into another 300-page tome detailing the third act of the pitiful “Flowers for Algernon”-style psychodrama that’s currently playing out backstage in the Bush Administration. You and I already know that George W. Bush is a man of intractable stubbornness, hot and cold running religious fanaticism, and truly breathtaking ignorance, a combination that makes him singularly unsuited for his current employment status. Why get an upset stomach and a rage-induced headache learning about it in even greater detail?

And yet, I was dead wrong, and I knew it before the end of the first chapter. Tragic Legacy is, in fact, a highly entertaining read, if you, like me, enjoy the sensation of (in the words of Jane Austen) “reveling in angry pleasure” at seeing so insidious an enemy taken down point by point and left huddled in the smoking ruins of his own hubris by the end of the book.

An alternate title for Greenwald’s second book could be, How to Talk to a Rightard About President Bush (If You Must). The book is divided into three parts. Part One is a detailed study of President Bush’s jejune, Manichean view of the world, as expressed in his own speeches, writings, and in the voices of his peers.

It is not a kind portrait. To many of us, President Bush’s decisions over the last six years seem to emanate from no fixed set of values. We have wondered from time to time if he is losing his mind, hitting the bottle, or is merely adrift, making sweeping policy decisions on the spur of the moment, based on the sketchiest of details and an imperfect understanding of the issues at hand.

Greenwald provides us with an illuminating view of a President completely unencumbered by nuanced thought. His whole notion of history and America’s role in the world seems to have been cribbed entirely from 1950’s cowboy movies and “Sgt. Rock” comics. In George Bush’s world, his friends, admirers, and supporters are all on the side of “Good”, whereas anyone who disagrees or opposes him is on the side of “Evil”.

This binary view of the world permeates everything that the President says and does, and he is constantly surrounded by a troupe of Neoconservative toadies who know that they can convince him to sign on with even the most outrageous and ridiculous policy initiatives by presenting the issue to him drawn in huge bubble pictures that would be comprehensible to a child, and as long as they are sure to couch the question in terms of a struggle between Good and Evil.

Nowhere is the danger of this kind of reductive thinking more apparent than with regards to US policy toward Iran, which takes up the second, and longest, part of Tragic Legacy. In this section, Greenwald lays out in chilling detail how White House policy seems to be headed inexorably toward a war with Iran. No matter how foolhardy this course of action may be, the “Decider” has included the nation of Iran in his armies of “Evil” and seems bound and determined to strike at any time, regardless of the consequences. As has been documented by numerous sources, Bush has come unmoored from the considerations of the real world (i.e., public opinion, the Pentagon, and sticks-in-the-mud like the Iraq Study Group) and decided that only “History” can be the proper judge of his legacy.

An armed conflict with Iran is possibly the greatest danger we face from the Lame Duck Bush Presidency. As is illustrated in the book, as well as in today’s “We’re just starting the surge!” display of petulance, George Bush is at his most bellicose and defiant when his back is against the wall. No amount of empirical evidence will dissuade a man like President Bush who is completely convinced that he is on a personal “Mission from God”.

In reading the book over the weekend, I was lucky enough to have my reading punctuated by further updates about the defection of multiple members of the GOP away from Bush’s Iraq policy. Perhaps being disowned by his own party apparatchik will begin George Bush’s slow and painful re-integration into the real world. I don’t have quite enough faith in that prospect, however, to sit by and wait calmly until the end of his term and hope that somehow, everything is magically going to be alright.

It’s a shame that thus far not a single Dead Tree Media outfit has seen fit to review or feature Tragic Legacy. This book is an explicit elucidation of the madness driving this administration, and yet it never falls into the trap of being an extended rant. Greenwald calmly and methodically builds his case with exquisite care, proving that his writing on the printed page is every bit as pithy and trenchant as it is on the computer screen, then surprises you with dry, bitingly funny asides like this from p. 88:

Bush’s evangelical conversion seems beyond doubt, given the profound life changes it facilitated, most particularly the abrupt and total cessation of what was, by all accounts (including his own) a rather severe addiction to alcohol. But in another, equally significant sense, replacing an alcohol-fueled life of unbridled hedonism with a fervent evangelical certainty can be seen as a lateral, rather than a vertical, move.

Indeed. And heh.

If you don’t have a copy of Tragic Legacy yet, get one. If you have a copy and haven’t read it, what are you waiting for? It’s not like it’s some piece of Ann Coulter tripe to be purchased and displayed, unread, on a moron’s bookshelf. Greenwald has crafted for us and the world a moving, cathartic, and insightful book that hopefully will give the non-blogging public a new level of comprehension as to the dangers we face under an unbridled chief executive whose view of the world is not much more nuanced nor a great deal less fanatical than that of, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also just so happens to believe that he’s on a personal “Mission from God”.

Ignore this book at your peril.