Cross-posted from Open Left.

Polarization is the great evil, the great scourge of our times.  All our great authorities tell us so.

All our great authorities are wrong.

Polarization is not a great evil, so long as great evil lives in our land.  This was a primary message of one of Martin Luther King's most famous writings, his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" [PDF].

Indeed, King himself was one of the most polarizing figures of American history, and his entire career consisted of polarizing public opinion, breaking down apathy and comfortable indifference in the face of great evils-racism, poverty and war.  Those evils are still with us today, though in differing guises and proportions, and yet we not only hear repeated calls for unity, for rejecting polarization, we see King himself obscenely misrepresented as a harmless, Santa Claus-like figure of fuzzy-headed unity.  It is hard to conceive of a greater insult to his memory.

Frontpaged At OpenLeft

Of course Congressional Democrats realize that Bush's veto of SCHIP is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans politically. But do they really have any idea just how bad it is? I doubt it. And because they don't recognize how bad it is, it won't be. Failure to capitalize on the political opportunity will largely squander it.

For example, it's a little known fact, but Bush was opposed to fully funding SCHIP when he was Governor of Texas, and Democrats failed to make an issue of that in the 2000 campaign. If they failed to fully capitalize on it then, they will surely do so again.

But what is it, exactly, that they will fail to do? Simple: They will fail to show how deeply out of step movement conservatives are with the rest of the country. And more importantly, that gap is growing, as younger voters are even more supportive of social spenging than older voters.

(Cross-posted from OpenLeft)

Think of the Children!
(Global Warmining Is Scaring Them To Death!)

A network of anti-global warming activists is gearing up for yet another assault on the scientific consensus that global warming is real, and has a significant human-caused component.

Their chosen vehicle is a not-yet-published paper, by a British endocrinologist, Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte, claiming to "update" and essentially overturn historian of science Naomi Oreskes 2004 finding that there was no opposition to the consensus view in a representative sample of 928 peer-reviewed articles whose abtracts she surveyed.

This is the last of a four-part series: Part I. Part II. Part III. And Part IIV--taking another look back at Schulte's paper, and a closer look at Senator Inhofe's staffer who's pumping out this propaganda on Inhofe's blog--picks up just over the fold...

(Cross-posted from OpenLeft)

Senator Inhofe's Blog

A network of anti-global warming activists is gearing up for yet another assault on the scientific consensus that global warming is real, and has a significant human-caused component.

Their chosen vehicle is a not-yet-published paper claiming to "update" and essentially overturn historian of science Naomi Oreskes 2004 finding that there was no opposition to the consensus view in a representative sample of 928 peer-reviewed articles whose abtracts she surveyed.

This is the second of a three... sorry! four-part series.  Part I is here. Part II is here. And Part III--focusing on Senator Inhofe's blog--picks up just over the fold...

(Cross-posted from OpenLeft)

A network of anti-global warming activists is gearing up for yet another assault on the scientific consensus that global warming is real, and has a significant human-caused component.

Their chosen vehicle is a not-yet-published paper claiming to "update" and essentially overturn historian of science Naomi Oreskes 2004 finding that there was no opposition to the consensus view in a representative sample of 928 peer-reviewed articles whose abtracts she surveyed.

This is the second of a three-part series.  Part I is here.  And Part II picks up just over the fold...

(Cross-posted from OpenLeft)

British MD Makes Shocking Discovery: Climate Scientists Newly Doubtful About Holocaust!

A network of anti-global warming activists is gearing up for yet another assault on the scientific consensus that global warming is real, and has a significant human-caused component So far, the network has visible nodes in Senator James Inhofe's Environmental and Public Works (EPW) Committee Minority Staff, in the tech blogosphere, and in a fringe science journal devoted to pushing denialist views.

Their chosen vehicle is a not-yet-published paper claiming to "update" and essentially overturn historian of science Naomi Oreskes 2004 finding that there was no opposition to the consensus view in a representative sample of 928 peer-reviewed articles whose abtracts she surveyed.  Yet, despite the secrecy and overblown claims, enough of the contents have already spilled out to discredit the study.  One paper cited as rejecting the consensus was not even about climate science, but about public attitudes regarding climate science debates.

What’s This About The Holocaust???       JUMP!-->

The Bush Dog campiagn, started at Open Left with this analysis by Chris Bowers.  Its focus so far is merely criticizing representatives who supported Bush on FISA and the Iraq War, and suggesting that some of them should be subject to primary challenges.

With the example of Joe Liebarman apparently still fresh in people's mind, the p-word seems as hard to handle as the i-word, and over-reaction is the order of the day.  Above all, we are told that the members in question are not at fault, that they have to vote that way because of their districts.  But a simple, straighforward analysis shows that this just isn't true.... On the jump.

Glenn Greenwald's new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, is doing quite well, especially considering the virtual press blackout.  Here's an opportunity to help lift that blackout: A book review for alternative weeklies to pick up, direct from the website they use for syndication purposes.

The review (reprinted below the fold) was just published by the paper I work for, Random Lengths News, and is available on the Altweeklies.com website at this link.  You can find a listing of weeklies here.  It only has phone numbers—get emails from the papers' websites.

A brief email to the editor with the link to the review on the Altweeklies.com website is recommended.  Be sensible, polite and respectful.

So jump the fold, and read the review.

I was going to title this "Much Ado About Just A Little," but wanting at least one or two folks to take a look, I thought better of it.  But the title would be quite apt, I thought.  Until I finished writing it.  Turns out, there was a bit more here than I first thought, at least as a point of departure for further reflection.

I've looked at all the presidential electoral maps from 1896 to 2004, analyzed how many contiguous regions the states won by each party's candidates fall into, and come to the conclusion you'd expect, if you thought about it: the losers' states are more fragmented than the winners.

But I hope that putting so much work into it will at least yield a moment or two's reflection on the seemingly obvious to carry something of value away.  And if you'd like to see how that hope turns out, then join me over the flip.

We all know that the red-state/blue-state vision of American politics is too simplistic—and yet, due to the nature of our political culture, particularly our winner-take-all election system—there is a powerful logic behind the two-party system that finds its expression in the seemingly static red-state/blue-state configuration.  At the same time, we also recognize a sort of four-way logic, with two axes—social and economic.  In a recent article at Huffington Post, novelist Jane Smiley argued for another four-fold vision of American politics—one rooted in four distinct cultural traditions dating back to Colonial America.  This vision, elaborated in David Hacker Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed, has the advantage of being rooted in rich, concrete cultural traditions, rather than stripped-down theoretical ideals.  In this diary, I want to tease out some of its potential power.

In his PC screed against novelist Jane Smiley, diarist AaronBa accused her of unfairly stereotyping the Scots-Irish. In my last diary, I argued she was doing nothing more than talking about group characteristics, and doing so in an historical context that has the exact opposite thrust of stereotyping. By showing such characteristics to be a product of historical and sociological forces, Smiley’s approach—based on the book Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer—undermines the stereotypical belief that such characteristics represent an immutable essential nature.

Here, I’ll take a look at a 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Senator James Webb, himself a proud Scots-Irish who’s written a whole book on the subject, and compare his views with Smiley’s. Webb’s and Smiley’s views coincide to some extent, but differ in major ways.  Yet, we could not even begin to compare them, and learn from doing so, if we bought into AaronBa’s vitriolic PC attack on Smiley.

"Political correctness" (PC) is largely a meaningless catch-all term for demonizing liberals, which came into vogue in the early 1990s, just as the collapse of the Soviet Union finally took all the wind out of the "commie" slur.  But it actually originated among leftists, primarily on college campuses, to refer to the practice of humorlessly putting the minutia of form over the substance of justice—particularly by members of sectarian groups such as the American Communist Party or any of its various Trotskyite or Maoist rivals, often referred to as "the PC police."

Sometimes the politically correct had a point, but no sense of perspective.  Sometimes they didn’t even have a point—beyond, of course, their real point, which was to impose a uniformity of thought and expression among the groups’ followers, and to establish a presumed moral superiority.  Here at DKos, we recently had a really pernicious PC outbreak—pernicious because (1) it didn’t even have a point and (2) it served to suppress serious consideration of potentially very important, fruitful insights.  

Cross-posted from Patterns That Connect

On Dec 04, Chris Bowers post, "The Two Obamas and Me, Part One" contrasted the principle-driven Obama who first inspired tremendous netroots support with the compromise-driven Obama who now seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start. Chris cited this example:

In town-hall meetings, when those who opposed the war get shrill, Obama makes a point of noting that while he, too, opposed the war, he's "not one of those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil."

Chis followed up:

Did anyone with any power every say that? Did any leading Democrats ever say that? Did any progressive or liberal of any public stature ever say that? If they did, I'd love to see the quote.

Well, now it appears that someone has come quite close to saying that: The Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG).

Cross-posted from Patterns That Connect

Chris Bowers posted a very important frontpage story at MyDD last night, "The Two Obamas and Me, Part One".  In it, he drew a distinction between the Obama who first attracted widespread, enthusiastic netroots and grassroots progressive support, and post-Senate election Obama who has often reiterated rightwing stereotypes of the left, in order to position himself more favorably.

In the course of the comments, some counter-arguments were raise, many knee-jerk and fatuous, but some serious, and deserving of serious replies.  

Cross-posted from Patterns That Connect

Although somewhat complicated, and somewhat debated, I like to put the concept of hegemony in a nutshell as "a dominant ideology in drag as a common sense."  It’s a very stripped-down way of putting it, but I think it suits our times. The concept is important precisely because it covers so much, and points to a common functionality across a wide range of topics and issues—the whole range of dominant ideology, and the opposing views it seeks to render as more or less "unthinkable," as readily dismissable at the very least.

In this installment of my "Hegemony is the Enemy" series, I’ll delve a bit deeper into the concept to justify that description, while providing enough information to draw other conclusions as well.  

Republished from Random Lengths News

Is Bush’s nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld another scandal just waiting to happen? And why don’t the Democrats seem to care?

Over two decades before the Bush Administration first thought about politicizing intelligence to build a phony case for war against Iraq, Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, played a trailblazing role in politicizing intelligence within the CIA, vastly inflating the threat posed by the Soviet Union, and blaming it for a wide range of terrorism it had nothing to do with. His right hand man was Robert Gates, President Bush’s appointee to succeed Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

But Gates did more than politicize intelligence.  His involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, selling weapons to the terrorist-supporting Iranian government to illegally fund the terrorist Nicaraguan Contras—came close to getting him indicted.

Cross-posted from Patterns That Connect.

With the election behind us, the task before us is more enormous than most folks realize. Political scientists describe American political history in terms of a series of “party systems,” divided by decisive breaking points, known as “realigning elections.”  The last universally agreed upon realigning election happened in 1932.  While things have changed enormously since then, the Republicans were never able to dominate the political landscape with sweeping congressional majorities the way that Democrats were.  The New Deal Party System crumpled, but did not fold.

Yet, that system is disdained by the punditocracy.  America's ownershp elite has repudiated the New Deal—an accommodation with the working [and middle] class necessitated by collapse of capitalism—although the people still support it.

That repudiation can be understood in terms of the concept of hegemony....

Cross-posted From Patterns That Connect

With the election behind us, the task before us is enormous, more enormous than most folks realize. In a pre-election post, I raised the issue of realigning elections, wave elections that fundamentally alter the party system from one era to another. A single wave election will not do it, I argued.  Past history shows we need two in a row.

But even a party system realignment will not be enough to save us—not from such looming threats as global warming, for example.  In this series, I argue we must grapple with something deeper: the power of hegemony—a high-faluttin word that basically boils down to meaning a dominant ideology in drag as common sense. The recent death of economist Milton Friedman provides an opportunity for a glimpse at the workings of hegemony, as I’ll explain on the flip.