The three choices in CNN’s “not a scientific, but we’re running it anyways” poll to measure reaction to the State of the Union :

Very Positive

Somewhat Positive

Negative

Way to front-load the poll results guys. I wonder if that middle “positive” reaction would include people who thought “who cares?”, “whatever”, and “eh”. Next year, maybe you can have people choose between “Awesome”, “Rad”, and “Shitty”.

Starting the SOTU with a nod to the death of Coretta Scott King…classy move, Dubya. It would be even classier if you didn’t make a habit of pandering to racists by waiting until MLK Day to appoint a judge who supports cross-burners or speak out against affirmative action, but y’know…

Okay, this is a little random, but the quote in the title of this Atrios post reminded me of something that drives me nuts. If you’re going to use the word “approximately”, you should follow it with a round number, not a precise one. You could say that “approximately 20 Democrats” voted against cloture on the Alito nomination since the number was actually 19, but saying “approximately 19 Democrats” would make you sound like an idiot who’s trying to spice up your writing with big words. If you know the right number, don’t pretend to be unsure about it. Either use the word “exactly” or avoid the use of a modifier completely.

Since my more optimistic friends in the blogosphere are taking the opportunity to thank the 25 Dems who supported the filibuster (at least, since late last week after getting harassed by their base), here’s the list of the Democrats who didn’t support the filibuster.

Akaka (D-HI)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carper (D-DE)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)

What’s the point of having a Democratic Senate when almost half of the caucus (like the 19 listed above) is too afraid of their constituents to do the right thing? Is there any issue these men and women are willing to ignore the polls and fight for? Based on what we’ve seen, we know they aren’t willing to fight to protect freedom of privacy, due process, or checks and balances. These men and women (most of whom voted against Alito, btw) care more about their job security than protecting your personal freedoms. This is the worst form of pandering and the Democratic leadership should keep this list handy if the Democrats accidentally regain the Senate any time soon. Don’t support the party? No committee chairmanship for you.

Speaking of pandering, as much as I love Digby, I’m gonna have to disagree with him on this one :

I keep hearing that it’s bad that these Senators “pandered” to the blogosphere and I don’t understand it. We want them to pander to the blogosphere. In their book Politicians Don’t Pander; Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro argue:

Politicians respond to public opinion, then, but in two quite different ways. In one, politicians assemble information on public opinion to design government policy. This is usually equated with “pandering,” and this is most evident during the relatively short period when presidential elections are imminent. The use of public opinion research here, however, raises a troubling question: why has the derogatory term “pander” been pinned on politicians who respond to public opinion? The answer is revealing: the term is deliberately deployed by politicians, pundits, and other elites to belittle government responsiveness to public opinion and reflects a long-standing fear, uneasiness, and hostility among elites toward popular consent and influence over the affairs of government

Bingo. It isn’t actually pandering. It’s responsiveness.

The difference between pandering and responsiveness is that legitimate responsiveness isn’t patronizing. If Kerry was legitimately moved by the extremity of Alito’s views, he wouldn’t have announced his plan to filibuster at the last minute while he was in Europe. He would have stayed home and tried to gain the support of his fellow Democrats. At the very least, he would have given Harry Reid a phone call. If the red state Dems who voted against cloture really didn’t think Alito was extreme enough to filibuster, they wouldn’t have voted “No” on his confirmation. These weren’t decisions based on conviction, they were attempts to kiss the asses of various segments of the electorate. It’s the sincerity, stupid.

Now I know this next part is going to sound hopelessly naive, but I don’t want a party that’s only able to act in reaction to events on the ground. I want a proactive Democratic party that doesn’t need to be harassed in order to see that Justice Alito is a wingnut. While other bloggers find it refreshing that netroots activists were able to convince 25 Senators to support a filibuster, I’m saddened that trying to block Alito’s confirmation didn’t come as second nature. I thought we had similar values, but if it still takes a massive effort on our part to get this far, then we’re probably just better off pretending to be evangelicals and calling the Republicans. If we’re going to have to get on our knees and beg our Representatives to do the right thing, we might as well beg the people who have the power.

For years now, the Democrats have been promising us that their flip-flopping and brown-nosing was no big deal because they wouldn’t buckle when it came to the big fights. Yet we’ve been tricked into excusing this sort of behavior time and again. You guys supported the Patriot Act, the Iraq War resolution, the Medicare Drug Bill, the President’s tax cuts, the promotion of torture advocate Alberto Gonzales, and now the appointment of two conservative ideologues to the Supreme Court. Sure, a plurality of Dems are usually in the opposition, but when you’ve got Obama supporting “tort reform”, Feinstein supporting the prescription drug debacle, Kerry and Clinton supporting the Iraq war resolution, Feingold voting to confirm John Roberts and almost everybody supporting the Patriot Act, this isn’t something that can just be laid at the feet of the usual suspects like Joe Lieberman. Over and over again we see Democrats support the President’s agenda and we’re supposed to believe everything will magically get better once you guys get into power? If the Democratic-controlled the Senate from mid-2001 to the end of 2002 is any indication, the Dem weakness on the Alito confirmation, the President’s unconstitutional spying program, and the Republican bribery scandal is just business as usual.

Well Alito’s a sure thing and the Senate Dems should hang their heads in shame. There have been a number of great things written about the filibuster over the last few days that sum of my disgust with the Democratic establishment right now. This scenario from LiberalOasis perfectly sums up the beltway cowardice :

Senate Dems are perhaps heading into a worst-case scenario with the Alito nomination, at least, worst-case for the party’s reputation.

Achieving 41 “No” votes, yet not filibustering the nomination.
. . .
The Dem approach has the appearance of going through the motions — to give the allusion that a fight was waged, that principle was stood upon – in hopes that the base won’t be livid.
. . .
So if 41 or more Dems speechify as to all the damage Alito will wreak, yet choose not to do what they can to stop that damage, they will look like spineless idiots.

Walter Shapiro writing at Salon hits on the previous point with a look at how every side benefits from pretending to fight.

[A]s idealistic anti-Alito liberals rush off to sign petitions and phone their senators, I feel compelled to point out that some of the end-game moves in Washington have been motivated by (ssshhh!) self-interest. In hindsight, the battle was effectively over after the first day of the Senate hearings when the criminally verbose Judiciary Committee Democrats failed to sustain a clear and consistent anti-Alito argument with all those cable networks broadcasting live. When politicians and interest-group leaders know that they are going to lose, they automatically retreat to a can-I-get-anything-out-of-the-wreckage calculus. So moderate senators from red states like South Dakota’s Tim Johnson decide that they can buttress their independent credentials with home-state conservatives by supporting Alito, since the outcome would be the same no matter how he voted. Groups like People for the American Way realize that shrill calls for a filibuster might preserve their fundraising base even if their years of urgent appeals to prevent a right-wing Supreme Court takeover failed to change a single Senate vote. And Kerry — whose late entry into the anti-Alito fray can be partly excused by his not serving on the Judiciary Committee — is also aware that such dramatic gestures help him maintain an up-to-date, ready-for-’08 e-mail list of Democratic activists.

Matt Stoller writing at MyDD sums it all up pretty well and points out just how much we’ve been played :

Democratic insiders have failed at the art of politics. It’s that simple. Doing politics is not about saying the right thing at the wrong time, it’s about lining up a coalition to push the levers of social change. This they just don’t do. For instance, at no point has any insider pol or group leader laid out a strategy for victory. No one defined victory. No one laid out a path to get there. And no one communicated with various groups, including the netroots, on helping us be part of a coalition to win. The communications operation here is just atrocious. The insider groups have young communications staffers dealing with bloggers who collectively talk to 1 million people a day. These are talented people, but they aren’t setting strategy and they don’t have the juice to help us with this fight.

And don’t delude yourself, this is intentional. The attitude that the insiders have towards us is that we are a stupid ATM set up to feed their ineffectiveness. Witness uberinsider telling us the truth about where we fit in:

“The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left.”

They are telling us, broadcasting to us, that they think we’re stupid. They think that having no campaign on Alito can easily be fixed by posting a diary on Daily Kos urging us to ‘fight’ a month after the fight has already been lost. It’s craven, it’s crass, it’s ridiculous.

As far as I’m concerned, my little ATM is closed. I’m throwing away every Democratic press release, no longer attending the blogger conference calls, ignoring the speeches, and no longer accepting any ads from any candidates or organizations directly affiliated to the Democratic party. This goes beyond the cowardly red state Dems or the craven panderers like John Kerry. The failure to work together is everyone’s problem and I can’t in good conscience support a party this party until there are some big, noticeable changes.

Their pathetic performance throughout this entire process has at times been enough to make me wonder if a Democratic majority would really be that much better than the status quo. Seriously Dems, why should people vote for you in November?? Because you’re willing to fight for…just kidding. Because you’ll kiss our asses instead of the religious right? No thanks. I don’t want my ass kissed, I don’t want a seat at the table, I just want to fight for progressive change. After today’s defeat, it’s hard to believe that the Democratic party has the ability or inclination seek that change.

Want a good example of how out-of-touch the President is? Well, here’s a preview of his State of the Union address :

President Bush is expected to promote a series of health care initiatives in his State of the Union address tonight, including new incentives for workers to choose coverage that gives them more control over their medical spending.

Bush’s proposals will center on health savings accounts, which allow people to set aside tax-free dollars to cover medical expenses. These accounts, which were established under the Medicare Modernization Act passed in late 2003, are tied to high-deductible health insurance policies.

This concept is designed to make people more prudent health care consumers because they spend more of their own money. The accounts reflect Bush’s philosophy of an “ownership society” in which individuals take greater control over their personal health and wealth.

Only a rich kid like the King George would ever think up something like health savings accounts. In his world, it makes perfect sense for Americans to save up for something they can’t afford. Hell, he’s never had to worry about money, why should we? Well, here’s a good reason to worry :

Americans spent $42bn (£24bn) more than they earned last year, turning the annual US savings ratio negative for the first time since the Great Depression.
. . .
The savings ratio fell to minus 0.5 per cent last year, meaning Americans not only spent all of their after-tax income but also had to increase their borrowings or plunder their savings. This is the first time theratio has gone negative for an entire year since 1932 and 1933, when the US was struggling to cope with the Great Depression.

The savings ratio is seen as a key economic indicator as it shows how vulnerable households are to a sudden shock such as a surge in interest rates or unexpected redundancy.

Since our trust fund baby-in-chief is fond of recycling the same crappy proposals over and over again, I hope you’ll forgive me for doing the same by reposting part of what I wrote the last time he tried to sell this utopian garbage :

I wonder if Bush has ever had to lay all his bills out on the kitchen table and figure out which ones he can pay immediately and which ones can wait until the next paycheck? Or if he’s ever lived in an overcrowded apartment with hand-me-down furniture, eating the same thing six days a week because it’s cheaper? Or if he’s ever had to settle for a job slightly less shitty than the one he had in high school because there weren’t any jobs in the field he majored in? Of if he’s gone through the process of figuring out which generic brand products at the grocery store are as good as the name brands and which ones aren’t?

As most of you know, I’m not just describing poverty here. This is normal life for many Americans. Some live paycheck to paycheck, while others are able to pinch enough pennies to save a few bucks. Either way, most people don’t have thousands of dollars to spare.

Practically speaking, savings accounts for retirement and heath care a huge mistake, but for entirely separate reasons. With the latter, the rub is that health care is expensive. Let’s say you have an medical emergency with costs in the $20-30K range. How long would it take you to save that much? A few years? Even with the vague incentives, we’re still looking at a plan that’s the equivalent of asking every American to buy a new car that he/she may never drive.

That same principle holds true with Republican proposals for education and retirement savings. Do they honestly believe we’ve all got extra income sitting around that we can throw in the bank? It must be nice to grow up in the GOP world of disposable income and “personal responsibility”…

It’s been amazing to watch Administration shills move the goalposts in order to find new ways to justify the President’s lawbreaking. When the “Six Degrees of Osama Bin Laden” game didn’t adequately explain why the President deserves to subvert the constitution and avoid any judicial oversight, suddenly the number of people getting spied on got smaller and smaller. In an interview with CNN last week, that trend hit rock bottom when Sen. Saxby Chambliss tried to minimize the footprint of this program so much that it started to sound like a parody :

KAGAN: Senator, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that you are, I would like to ask you a couple questions. First of all, the NSA domestic wiretap scandal and controversy. Do you support the president and his take that this program is needed in order to keep Americans safe?

CHAMBLISS: Well, I do, Daryn. You know, the folks in opposition to this program would try to make you believe that they are intercepting — that we are intercepting conversations between two people who are carrying on legitimate conversations. That’s simply not the fact.

First of all, these monitoring are extremely limited in number. And as to who they are — and they’re initiated by calls from outside the United States from an individual that we don’t suspect, Daryn, is a terrorist, we know the person is a terrorist and gets up every day thinking what harm they can do to Americans.

When that individual make as phone call, which is usually to Germany, France or some part — some other part of the world, we monitor those calls occasionally. That call comes to the United States — and that call that comes to the United States is not coming for a legitimate purpose. It’s coming for the purpose of potentially planning and scheming to carry out an act of terrorism inside the United States by somebody who is here for the wrong reason.

This isn’t a friend of a friend we’re monitoring here, these are actual terrorist who are in the middle of planning an attack. We know that every phone call was made with the explicit purpose of planning an attack on Americans. So, NSA mind-reading aside, why was this “extremely limited” program conducted behind the backs of the FISA court?

KAGAN: But what would you say to people who say that they want to be safe here in the U.S.? Their big concern is those limitations and without a warrant, there’s no checks and balances. And they’re concerned about where the line would be drawn in terms of who would be allowed to be listened into?

CHAMBLISS: Well, we have a process called the FISA process, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that does allow us to get warrants to monitor conversations inside the United States. And we use that from time to time.

But unfortunately, if we are monitoring somebody in Pakistan who make as call to the United States and asks the question of the person inside the United States — listen, I know we’ve been talking about carrying out this act of terrorism, tell me when and where it’s going to take place, obviously, we don’t have time to go get a warrant before that person inside the United States answers that question.

And let me assure you, and assure the viewers that are watching this, that we have used this process with success to interrupt and disrupt potential activity by terrorists inside the United States. It’s worked, even though we used it on a very, very limited scale.

And that’s the trump card right there. We never, ever use this program, but the times we have used it, we prevented terrorists from blowing up the whole world. Nice Dodge there, Senator. Of course it would have been nice for Rush’s favorite feminazi to point out that the FISA court allows a 72 hour grace period before applying for a retroactive warrant, but that might undo the delicate “balance” that CNN has worked so hard to achieve.

Is it just me or is the E! Network the most consistently horrible channel on television? It’s bad enough that they have those creepy stalkerazzi shows, but if I see one more of those pseudo-documentaries about how wonderful rich people are I’m gonna scream. Yesterday while I was flipping through channels, I saw part of the E! True Hollywood Story on “Trust Fund Babies”. These aren’t actors or musicians or entertainers of any kind, they’re just the spoiled children of really, really rich people. So not only did this mean that the subject of this program do absolutely nothing to gain the attention they were receiving, but that I’d have to endure the overuse of the words “diva” and “socialite”. Ugh. The most maddening part of this program was that the few decent Republican tax cut recipients who had “devoted” their lives (or at least a few hours a week) to charity were treated as if having ambitions greater than getting high and screwing celebrities all the time is something worth celebrating. I know this may shock the people over at E!, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of us would do something like that if we didn’t have to spend so much time worrying about making enough cash to buy food and pay the rent. At least it wasn’t one of those 30-minute chunks of bling porn about how celebrities throw away millions of dollars on jewel-encrusted bullshit.

In other news, I was driving through downtown Los Angeles last weekend and the sidewalks of some streets were filled with homeless people trying to escape the cold. While many were stuck in cardboard boxes, the “lucky” ones had tents. I wonder how much better their lives would be if they were treated as well as, say, Paris Hilton’s dog. Oh well, as long as she doesn’t have to pay the “death tax” I’m sure everything will work out. Pass the gravy.

David Sirota wrote this great piece about the beltway babies who are are responsible for the Democrats near-permanent minority status :

Just look at yesterday’s piece in Roll Call where you had this same Democratic cabal saying the party shouldn’t mount an aggressive lobbying/ethics crackdown, or look back at the Iraq War where you had the Democratic strategic class saying it was good politics to just blindly follow the Bush administration’s lies (incredibly, they are still preaching this kind of acquiescence on Iraq even today). These “strategists” are the Washington, D.C. parasites who are far more concerned about protecting their own tiny rackets of DCCC contracts and candidate consulting gigs than actually helping the party take back the majority.

Today, these “strategists” are publicly worrying that Democrats challenging the President’s illegal behavior “could threaten the party in this year’s elections.” The first quote in the piece goes to an unnamed Democratic “strategist” who says “If Democrats want to be the party of people who think [the government] is too tough and the Republicans are the party of people who are tough, I don’t see how that helps us.”

This supposed “strategist,” of course, is dishonestly spinning the situation to benefit his opponents - not exactly “strategic.” The debate over the domestic surveillance is not a debate over spying on terrorists vs. not spying on terrorists, as this “strategist” - and then Brownstein - assert. Oh sure, as I documented earlier, the media has done everything it can to try to force the scandal into that frame - reporters behavior in this has been nothing short of disgusting. But that’s not what this is about. This is about whether this president - or any president - can ignore the Constitution and federal laws to order any kind of spying he wants without a court order. And the fact that these “strategists” aren’t even mentioning the fact that the President broke the law - even with Republican Senators admitting he did break the law - should indicate exactly why the Democratic Party today seems so rudderless and poorly run: because the “strategists” running it are morons.

I agree with everything Sirota wrote, but I’ve got to take issue with that last bit. Democratic strategists aren’t morons, they’re geniuses.

After all, these guys have found a way to make a killing on the Democratic “woe is me” mentality without ever having to accomplish the task they claim to be good at : winning elections. It’s a pretty damn good racket they’ve got going. Mix equal parts harsh reality (”Republicans are unbeatable”) and flattery (”Americans agree with Democrats”) which naturally lead your mark to the solutions that you’re about to sell (”I can help you craft the perfect message”). Like any good con, the last thing you want is for your victim to get the self-confidence they need to see they’re getting played, so every time there’s some good news, you’ve gotta make sure to use it to beat down your “client’s” self-esteem even more. (”We shouldn’t politicize this issue”) And as long as you can safely straddle that line between “We’re doomed” and “We’re doing great”, you can lose all the elections you want and still get hired again.

The point here, of course, isn’t that Democrats shouldn’t get advice from strategists but that they shouldn’t keep hiring the same losers over and over again. For those of us on the outside looking in, it’s heartbreaking to see that the incestuous circles of politicos in D.C. exist more to keep friends and relatives employed than advancing some meaningful public policy. I know you guys vacation in Martha’s Vineyard together and your kids attend the same private school, but being cool isn’t enough to undo the fact that a lot of these guys really suck at their jobs. What’s worse though is that even the wannabe Dems who aren’t invited to all the cool parties are often so starstruck that they’ll hire anybody with some big names on their resume. (”Wow, you worked for Tom Daschle and Wes Clark? You’re hired!”) It’s bad enough to see this shit go on in the business world, where a CEO can hop from bankrupt company to bankrupt company without ever taking pay cut, but the lack of accountability in Washington is enough to make you wonder if we’ll ever get something like universal healthcare or a minimum wage that doesn’t keep people in poverty.

This article that Atrios linked to reminds me of the post I did about the photos from the (first) killed miner tragedy. Remember this guy?

Well, it turns out that this moment of battle-scarred weariness was just the tip of the iceberg :

The man in the photograph is James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined.

He’s quieter now — easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can’t look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on invisible triggers.

The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.
. . .
None of the Marines talked much about the strain that war puts on one’s emotions, Miller said. The “wizards” — military psychologists — gave the returning troops a briefing on the subject, but nobody paid much attention. Even guys who were taking antidepressants to help them sleep didn’t think much about the long-term consequences.

“What the hell are those people going to do once they get out? They ride it out until they get an honorable discharge, and then they’re never diagnosed with anything,” Miller said. “How the hell are you going to do anything for them after that? And that’s how so many of these guys are ending up on the damn streets.”
. . .
Mildred Childers…sees Miller’s difficulties as a crisis of faith. She still remembers Miller’s call just before the assault on Fallujah, and his terrible question: “How can people go to church and be a Christian and kill people in Iraq?”

“He was raised where that’s one of the Ten Commandments, do not kill,” she said. “I think it’s hard for a soldier to go to war and have that embedded in them from small children up, and you go over there and you’ve got to do it to stay alive.”

Recently, some of his Marine buddies have been calling Miller up, crying drunk, and remembering their war experiences.

Miller’s shell shock doesn’t make him any less heroic, but you can bet that he won’t be getting half as much attention from the chickenhawk elites that he did before. As the family of Pat Tillman learned, the men and women stuck in Iraq tend to get praise only when it’s politically convenient for the President.