Speaking of venting your frustration, I love the rant at FuckTheSouth.com :

Fuck the South. Fuck ‘em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they’d stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We’re the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about?. . .Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?
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All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for… The next dickwad who says, “It?s your money, not the government’s money” is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least… can you guess? Go on, guess. That?s right, motherfucker, they’re red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It?s too easy, asshole, they?re blue states. It?s not your money, assholes, it?s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

Let?s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It?s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that?s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that?s just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we’re-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.

I know it goes without saying, but you should really click on all the links as well. Another great link from the site, but not quoted here, is the fact that the nexus of “American values” just happens to have the highest murder rate in the country. Jeez, maybe they’d be able to lower it if those “activist judges” would let them post the ten commandments in more public spaces. That must be it, right?

They say time heals all wounds, but I’ve spent the last nine days feeling like I’ve been punched in the face. The President is using his new “mandate” to promote the torture memo guy, add a hateful amendment to the constitution, spend more money than he does on homeland security to rebuild a program that just needs a tune-up, etc. As Bob Harris says, it’s enough to make you wanna scream :

Like you, I’m pissed. I’m not sure what to do next. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna stand by silently while George W. Bush smugly takes another oath of office, rides in his smoked-window limousine through the capital of a nation he’s unfit to serve, and attends an inaugural ball with a gazillion self-congratulating fatcats who think they can push us around.

No. I want to scream that word right now. No. At the top of my lungs. No. No. No.

I have an idea. I don’t know if you’ll like it or think it’s funny or want to join in.

But I intend to scream my head off during the hour of Bush’s oath of office. When my voice gives out, I’ll make a ruckus with anything else I have. Musical instruments. Pots and pans. You name it.

And I’m starting to hope you’ll join in.

Maybe this is foolish, but so be it. But suddenly I’m smiling. Suddenly I have this hopeful picture in my head of people joining in, venting, laughing, grinning at the noise — pissed-off liberals all over the country announcing their presence, protesting Bush from wherever they are.

Needless to say, any time somebody echoes the movie Network, they’ve got my attention :

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be!

We all know things are bad — worse than bad — they’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living is getting smaller, and all we say is “Please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest; I don’t want you to riot; I don’t want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.

Once you’re mad and let off a little steam, it’s time to hit the ground running. It’s gonna be a long four years.

The other day, in a post about social security, I mentioned that Bush’s plan has a ” massive funding gap”. Turns out, it’s worse than I thought :

American workers currently pay 6.2 percent of their taxable income into Social Security, and employers match that amount. A starting point for an overhaul is a plan proposed by a presidential commission in 2001 that would divert 2 percent into private accounts. The remaining 4.2 percent ? and the taxes employers pay ? would go into the system, helping fund benefits for current retirees. That leaves an estimated shortfall of about $2 trillion to continue funding benefits for current retirees.

Bush said his commission, headed by the late senate Sen. Patrick Moynihan of New York, provided “a good blueprint.” The commission had been asked to propose a plan for establishing personal investment accounts.

For future retirees, base benefits would be cut by tying them to inflation instead of wage growth, with stock market gains assumed to make up any shortfall. The concept gained support in the stock market boom of the late 1990s.

Bush has not said how the $2 trillion transition costs would be funded, nor did his commission. Record deficits, Bush’s desire to make his five rounds of tax cuts permanent and the rising cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan are major obstacles.
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Republicans say doing nothing is worse. “There are a lot of things you could do, but none of them are without some sacrifice,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Graham’s plan would let workers divert into accounts 4 percent of their payroll taxes and spreads transition costs over 10-15 years. He said the yearly price tag of $80 billion to $100 billion could be funded by closing tax loopholes, cutting pork barrel spending, borrowing money or temporarily raising the payroll tax cap on earnings.

Why is it that every time a liberal suggests we raise taxes or cut pork barrel spending we get ridiculed? With the Republicans in charge of everything, excessive spending has increased and they’ve stuck to the mantra that cutting taxes will cure all that ails us. So with those ideas off the table, the choices are benefit cuts or adding to our nation’s debt, neither of which seem like great ideas if you’re serious about making sure future generations don’t get screwed.

As far as the persistent claim that Social Security will start paying out more than it brings in starting in 2018, I think the appropriate response is “Duh”. That’s why we have a social security trust fund, which will keep the system as it currently stands afloat until 2042. If we don’t change anything at all, we’re good for another 38 years. If we forgo the drastic changes for a combination of smaller changes that could include slightly raising the payroll tax cap, raising the retirement age by a year every decade or so, and, yes, letting the social security trust fund managers invest portions of the fund in higher-yield investments, we could probably extend the life of social security even longer. Then again, little changes aren’t as politically popular as a grand scheme like partial privatization.

As a fearful nation bids farewell to outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft, there’s a certain part of his legacy I’ll always remember fondly. No, it’s not the fact that thanks to the Patriot Act, my wife the librarian could theoretically be sent to federal prison for telling her boss what happened, if one day federal agents were to seize every computer in the library as “evidence.” It’s not the expanded freedom to wiretap enjoyed by every law enforcement officer in this great nation of ours. It’s not the way he and his administration have embraced wholeheartedly the idea of extended imprisonment without charges.

It’s not even the way, according to a dryly hilarious report by the Guardian, “Each time he has been sworn in to political office, he is anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs, ‘Lessons from a Father to His Son’).” (Did everybody else know about that story but me? I’d long considered myself an avid follower of Ashcroft’s fucked-up Pentecostal behavior, but man, if I didn’t know this …)

No, friends, what I’ll remember about the guy neocon moron commentators insist on referring to as “General Ashcroft” (I believe he was in the same branch of the military as Cap’n Crunch) is one simple, heartfelt song. (My favorite line from the afore-linked Guardian story is the one that describes Ashcroft as “a grittily determined singer.”)

Like any reasonable American, my faith in the mainstream media is at an all-time low these days. Thank heavens for Jon Stewart, who on last night’s “Daily Show” brought back this world-obliterating footage for one hurrah. And to give credit where credit’s due, I regained a little bit of faith in CNN when I discovered they’ve given the “Ashcroft Sings!” footage its very own dedicated page. Maybe the press isn’t dead; maybe it’s just sleeping.

Wow. The military has almost completely finished their assault on Falluja. Of course, this swift victory does come with some fine print :

Insurgent leaders in Falluja probably fled before the American-led offensive and may be coordinating attacks in Iraq that have left scores dead over the past few days, according to American military officials here. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is the most wanted man in Iraq, has almost certainly fled, military officials believe. Americans say his group is responsible for attacks, kidnappings and beheadings that have killed hundreds in more than a year. Before the offensive began, some military officials said Mr. Zarqawi could be operating out of Falluja, but his precise whereabouts have not been known. “I personally believe some of the senior leaders probably have fled,” Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, said in a video conference with reporters on Tuesday.
. . .
This spate of what appear to be coordinated attacks, as well as the dispersal of top insurgent leaders, suggests that the Falluja offensive alone will not crush an insurgency that has been gathering strength. And it raises the prospect that insurgents will try to regroup and infiltrate Falluja after the fighting is over, as they have done in Samarra.

How did these guys get away? Well, it could be related to the public warnings about the strike :

U.S. troops urged civilians to flee Falluja on Friday and launched air strikes on the rebel city ahead of an assault seen as critical to attempts to pacify Iraq before January elections.

U.S. forces sealed all roads to the city and used loudspeakers and leaflets in Arabic to tell residents they would detain any man under 45 trying to enter or leave the city.

“We are making last preparations. It will be soon. We are just awaiting orders from Prime Minister (Iyad) Allawi,” Marine Colonel Michael Shupp told Reuters near Falluja.

There’s been talk of a post-election Falluja assualt for weeks now. Anyone with an internet connection or a TV could see this thing coming a mile away. It’s foolish to think that a major attack would succed when it’s preceded by warnings to the civilian population. Of course the insurgents got away…they’re civilians.

Here’s an informative quote from a guy whose name you’ll be hearing a lot :

“In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

-Alberto Gonzales

In case you hadn’t heard, this is the guy they want to replace Ashcroft.

A quick reminder : 48% of us voted against this…

I strongly agree with Ezra that Howard Dean would make a terrific chairman of the DNC. This reason espeically struck me :

Currently, the Party is trying to figure out how to choose candidates able to speak to the Heartland. Since the voters in question are significantly more conservative than the average party activist, the message is going to, at the least, change. While we fumble around trying to strike the perfect note between middle and left, we’d be well served to have a Party chairman trusted by the base and able to speak to them throughout this process. ADDED BONUS: Dean’s record on gun rights and the primarily rural makeup of his state grant him the potential to build some bridges, if only mental ones, between his urban fans and the exurban/rural voters we want to reach.

To me that was one of the most appealing parts of Dean’s candidacy.

Going back to last year, when I wrote often about why I favored him in the primaries, I see a couple posts from my archives which highlight traits that would serve him even better as a party head than as a presidential candidate. When we’re faced with the crucial task of picking a leader who will reach out beyond our base and help strengthen our message, I’m reminded of what I wrote about Howard Dean’s controversial “confederate flags” remark….

Y’know, I really hate the confederate flag. I can’t think of anything more un-patriotic than flying the flag of a country that seceded from your own, but that’s just what many in the South do….As much as it sucks to admit it, the Democratic party does need to reach out to “people with confederate flags on their trucks”. This doesn’t mean campaigning in Georgia and saying things like “The South shall rise again!!”. It means convincing rural, poor white people that it’s not in their economic best interest to vote Republican.

What’s even more frustrating is that all the other candidates know what Howard Dean means. He’s been saying this for months. The way they’re freaking out, you’d think that Dean had supported flying the Stars n’ Bars over the Capitol or something.

Let’s not loose sight of the fact that there are people on the other side of the aisle that really do love the confederate flag. Although most of us see it as a symbol of racism, there are plenty of well-meaning, non-racist people who see it just as a symbol of southern pride. If you’re serious about making the senate platform appeal to as wide as base as possible, you’ve got to accept these people while sticking firm to your convictions that the Confederate Flag is a divisive and un-American symbol. From what I’ve seen, that’s exactly what Howard Dean has done.

…and this article from The Black Commentator his willingness to speak out about Republican race-baiting.

Howard Dean?s December 7 speech is the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years. Nothing remotely comparable has been said by anyone who might become or who has been President of the United States since Lyndon Johnson?s June 4, 1965 affirmative action address to the graduating class at Howard University.

For four decades, the primary political project of the Republican Party has been to transform itself into the White Man?s Party. Not only in the Deep South, but also nationally, the GOP seeks to secure a majority popular base for corporate governance through coded appeals to white racism. The success of this GOP project has been the central fact of American politics for two generations ? reaching its fullest expression in the Bush presidency. Yet a corporate covenant with both political parties has prohibited the mere mention of America?s core contemporary political reality: the constant, routine mobilization of white voters through the imagery and language of race.

Last Sunday, Howard Dean broke that covenant:

In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way ? by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people.

They called it the “Southern Strategy,” and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like “racial quotas” and “welfare queens” to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America’s problems.

The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few.

To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us.

Dean?s Columbia, South Carolina, statement is equal in political import to Lyndon Johnson?s framing of the need for affirmative action, in 1965.

What the Democratic party needs right now is not only someone who will never let the Republicans get away with dirty politics without calling them on it, but also turn around and use that criticism as a starting point to engage the people of the red states in a dialogue about what party best serves their interests. Howard Dean’s willingness to reach out to voters that most of the party would rather write-off or take for granted without comprimising senate principles says to me that he’d make a great DNC chairman.

Matt Welch has an important point about those on the right who insist on using Michael Moore as an example of senate extremism (via Kevin Drum) :

I heard more than 100 people during this election cycle say they intended, through their vote, to repudiate “the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party.” Here’s the deal: There is no such thing, at least of any significance.

Michael Moore did not even belong to the Democratic party in 2000; his candidate was Ralph Nader, and Ralph Nader got a meager 2.7% of the vote. For the sake of argument, if you assume (wrongly) that every single one of those Nader voters, plus the 1.3% or so that defected from him in the last minute, represent “the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party,” you are talking about 4% of the electorate, and maybe 8% of the Democratic party. The real figure is likely much lower.

What about this year? In the primary season, Moore endorsed Wesley Clark, who campaigned like a boob, won one primary, and bowed out. Howard Dean, who is assumed (wrongly) to have Moore-like values (despite being a fiscal hawk who supported the four previous U.S.-led wars), didn’t win a single primary. The senate candidate whose politics most closely mirrored Moore’s was Dennis Kucinich, who was beaten like a rented elf. The nomination went to the former prosecutor & War Hero, and he picked as VP the second-most hawkish candidate from the primaries. And the Democratic party Platform contained few if any of the provisions that the Moore/Nader/Kucinich 8% wing have been advocating for lo these many years.
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Anyway, the main point is not to compare competing fringes, but mostly to point out that the Republicans’ extremist fringe includes powerful senior elected politicians from their own party. Moore, for all his sitting-next-to-people action at the DNC, was not invited on the podium. Rick Santorum, the senator from Pennsylvania who has described outlawing gay marriage as “the ultimate Homeland security,” gave a rousing speech to the Republicans. Tom Coburn, the new Republican Senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for abortion doctors, and held up Fidel Castro’s forced AIDS camps as a model worth emulating. Jim DeMint, your new Senator from South Carolina, thinks that single pregnant women shouldn’t teach in public schools.

As someone on the left who really admires Michael Moore, but disagrees with him on a few issues, I’m getting really fucking tired of having to answer for the guy. Just because conservatives have a hard time thinking of a prominent liberal other than Moore doesn’t mean that he’s the epitome of liberal values. On any given day, the work of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, or Michael Savage make Michael Moore’s films look centrist in comparison. Yet I don’t see nearly as many people on the left demanding that prominent Republicans denounce the hateful rhetoric of the far (and overexposed) right.

Ashcroft resigned today, but apparently couldn’t leave without patting himself on the back :

Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans resigned today, the first members of President Bush’s Cabinet to leave as he headed from re-election into his second term.

The resignations were announced by White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who said Bush had accepted the decisions of both secretaries.

“The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved,” Ashcroft wrote in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush.

We all knew the Crisco Kid was a little nutty, but is he really quitting because he thinks his work is done?? If Ashcroft has finished the job of protecting us from crime and terrorism in less than four years, then it raises two important questions :

Can we have our civil liberties back now?

If you’re this good, could you help out Rumsfeld a bit? He’s gotten himself into a little trouble…

Ashcroft’s success in ridding the world of crime and terrorism is even more remarkable when you consider that he was still able to find time to throw cancer patients in jail. Great job, John! When I’m speaking in tongues tonight, I’ll be thinking of you.

Now I’m no fancy-pants economist or anything, but everytime I hear conservatives tout the benefits of their various privatization schemes, the one thing that keeps popping into my mind is that four years ago, many analysts would have advised investing in Enron. Granted, their recommendations would have likely been indirect (ie. investing in funds that include Enron rather than playing the market directly), the results would have been the same. Prior to its legendary implosion, Enron was seen as a sure thing investment-wise. Hell, even after it screwed its employees, gave its executives golden parachutes, and revealed itself to be the corporate equivalent of the Royal Flush Gang, it still moved up the list Forbes 500 companies. It was that big.

So, when Republicans try to convince everybody what a great idea it is to “allow” people to “invest” their money, I can’t help but wonder “How can we be sure we’re making a safe investment?” The answer here, of course, is “You can’t be sure, dummy.” The biggest difference between investing and gambling is that you don’t get free drinks for playing the stock market. If you make the wrong investment decision, then it’s no retirement for you.

That’s why we’ve got social security locked up in low-yield government bonds, because they’re low-risk too. While the prospect of “flexibility” and “choice” may be appealing to voters, the question Democrats should be posing is “Do you really want to put your future in a state in which a stock market ‘correction’ could decide whether you spend your golden years lounging at the beach or working the drive-thru at Taco Bell?” Don’t let a bunch of greedy politicians with dollar signs in their eyes convince you that your retirement is worth gambling away.