With Obama's probable nomination, will come a 'generational' changing of the guard of the behind-the-scenes Democratic leadership. The people who've been there for a long time are like a cohort of singles bar aficionados, who pride themselves on being masters at sealing the deal. But their obsessive focus on the mechanics of seduction always ends up preventing the sex from being as satisfying as they imagine it will be.

An effective political party is not merely a vehicle for individual candidates who happen to share some policy goals. The party must be an instrument of a movement that brings together people who share some values, then determines what policies will best represent those values in government, and recruits and elects candidates who will support (and ideally, further develop) those policies.

Like most voters in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, and like both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I'm an American Liberal. That is, I believe the rules by which our society's natural abundance is distributed must be crafted so that everyone can attain some minimum reasonable standard of living and so that power disparities, if not disparities in creature comforts, are minimized. I believe that worth is not measured simply in wealth, and also that the incentive of wealth should be made to better comport with other thing we value, such as our physical and ethical environments. I believe that while government rightly gets involved where we infringe on others, government must not infringe on our rights to shape our own lives when that does not directly infringe on others, even if most others think we are unwise or set bad examples. And I believe America's foreign policy should reflect all of Americans' values, not merely our desire for plundered bounty and ego gratification.

I believe John Edwards would have been the best nominee. But Like Senator Edwards, I realized it was not to be.

Had he stayed in the race, we faced the prospect of a nominee who lacked the support of a majority of the primary electorate. And even if it turned out that a majority of us found the nominee acceptable, there would be many on the losing side who would not believe that. By allowing Senators Obama (my choice) and Clinton to enter a two-person race, Senator Edwards has done the party a great service, increasing our likelihood of bringing sanity, legality, and compassion back to the Presidency, no matter who is our candidate in November.

I was explaining Daily Kos to someone not from here, and I think I stumbled upon the right explanation. It's not radically different from what's been said, but I don't think I've seen IMO the right analogy before.

Imagine a corporation where the board of directors and top management have not been serving the shareholders' interests. That's the Democratic Party and many big, issue-oriented advocacy groups on the left. Daily Kos is about organizing the shareholders.

Maybe Markos already used the analogy in Crashing the Gate and I'm having memory problems, but as far as I do remember, I haven't seen it put that way.

So what's your definition of Daily Kos?

Many enemy movements are intractable. But many of their members, and sometimes even their leaders, are not. and unless you're planning a shooting war, it helps not to have a huge number of individuals who foster multi-generational worldviews of being suppressed, waiting for redemption and revenge.

Case in point: As the Civil War was ending, Lincoln was the only politician who on the one hand saw the need for radical restructuring of the South, but on the other wanted to avoid as much suffering as he could, even on the part of the gentry, while the society was being revamped. With the finally popular Lincoln's death, the country was led (despite Andrew Johnson) by people who wanted to punish the South for punishment sake, and to steal whatever they could—and then by those who had had enough of the suffering and the expense of occupation, and let the status quo fester.

(also posted on Blue Jersey) The cars-only lanes on the New Jersey Turnpike and other highways exist, in large part, because many drivers of cars find the decreased visibility of driving with trucks to be less safe and comfortable. Yet drivers of vehicles that block vision of what's in front of them almost as effectively as semis do are allowed. I'm talking about those SUV, pickups, and in rarer case minvans that are so big they get emissions and/or tax breaks for being trucks.

I need to do more research before I'd absolutely commit to this position, but I think if you're big enough to get perks for being a truck, you don't belong in cars-only spaces.

That's not a position politicians can lead on. It might get majority support, but at least at first, those opposed would likely to care a lot more. So if a change is to happen, we need to push from the outside.

Ecuador wants the world to pay it not to develop oil fields in rain forset. They say they want half the revenue they are forgoing, which the President said might be $350,000,000 per year.

I don't think the model is necessarily bad, but the rest of the world had best be careful. The oil would stay in the ground, available to be mined when the price of oil goes even higher, in the future. The economic value that Ecuador is forgoing, as opposed to the revenue, has to be figured after discounting the saved immediate expenses in drilling and the retained value in the ground.

Presumably, the oil is cheap enough to get at that Ecuador really is giving something up by not taking the cash in hand. And maybe in the future, there will be less intrusive economically feasible methods of extraction than there are now. So it probably does make some sense for the world to pay something to keep the area intact. But Ecuador's offer to take half is much more favorable to them than it seems.

Continuing the series started yesterday, when I wrote:

The poll system at Daily Kos is too limited, because we can only choose one answer to one question. I think we'd benefit from knowing more about how we collectively feel about the presidential hopefuls.

So I'll start this off by asking about HRC. If other people add similar diaries with polls on other candidates, I'll edit and link to them. Ideally, we should have the same wording on question and answers for each candidate.

It's Richardson's turn. To express your opinions of other candidates, go to the other diaries to vote on Clinton, Edwards, Clark, Obama, Gore, Kucinich, and Vilsack. We still need polls on Kerry, Biden, Dodd, and Warner.

The poll system at Daily Kos is too limited, because we can only choose one answer to one question. I think we'd benefit from knowing more about how we collectively feel about the presidential hopefuls.

So I'll start this off by asking about HRC. If other people add similar diaries with polls on other candidates, I'll edit and link to them. Ideally, we should have the same wording on question and answers for each candidate.

EDIT:
You can vote on Edwards here.
You can vote on Clark here.
You can vote on Obama here.
You can vote on Gore here.
You can vote on Kucinich here.
You can vote on Vilsack here.
You can vote on Richardson here.

He's smart, funny, quick, and right about most of the things he talks about. But

1. he's not as good as people think he is, because his charisma causes folks to assume he agrees with them on things he doesn't talk about—and we don't all agree about those things, so we can't all be right about him
2. he's a long way from showing that he can withstand the flows and eddies of an nearly interminable campaign.

But before he has a chance to show that he can't withstand the ordeal, he may suck the wind out of the campaigns of everyone else who could beat Clinton for the nomination.

This is from correspondance with a long-term friend. A close friend of my brothers, less so of mine, but still someone I like and have known for over 20 years.

I don't think I did as well as could have. I'm looking for advice and a community discussion on how to approach people like this.

Am I correct in my assumption that you grew up in a family that either had someone in the military in harm's way while you were young or that had someone within the past few generations die in a war? I have never met anyone who actually saw combat be as irrationally protective of the holiness of every military adventure the US undertakes. But I have frequently seen in among families who feel that by doing so they are upholding the honor of fallen and/or imperiled relatives.

In the first Reagan Administration Congress, the House was nominally Democratic, but was effectively controlled by a coalition of Republicans and Boll Weevils, Democrats who consistently allied with the Republicans. One Boll Weevil, Phil Gramm, stuck his neck out further than the rest of the insects by leaking Democratic Caucus information to the Republicans.

Speaker of the House (and therefore head of the Democratic operation in the House) O'Neill was angry, but he also saw it as an opportunity to make an example of one of the Boll Weevils, without completely alienating all of them. He stripped Gramm of his Appropriations Committee assignment.

I know that school scheudes vary, but here in the Northeast, most schools end their years in the last third of June. I'm a math teacher in Newark, NJ's schoold. I'm sure I'm not the only teacher who couldn't got this year because of that. I'm giving finals this coming week, and was leading reviews last week. No way could I take personal days, and even the weekend was needed for end-of-year work.

I see a strong physical resembelence (as well as a common family name) between old-time New Jersey Republican U.S. Senator William Warren Barbour and current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. But I can't find any record of them being related. Does anyone know if they are? (pictures and poll below the fold)

We all know about Fred Phelps disrupting military funerals, claiming that the soldiers are being killed as God's just retribution against the US for condoning homosexuality, right?

Well suppose, instead, there was a group going around disrupting those funerals, claiming that the soldiers were being killed as God's just retribution for the oppression of gays, or Indians, or the environment, or whatever. How long do you think the protesters would remain out of jail? And if, by chance, they weren't locked up, what would the over/under be on how many funerals before they were assassinated while the authorities looked the other way?

We are engaged in two major conflicts; neither of which can rightly be called a war.

The conflict generating the most casualties and headlines is in Iraq. There we are an occupying colonial power. Yes, our government says (and probably really means) that it would like to relinquish this colony once a suitably compliant and self-sufficient client state can be set up. But in the mean time, we are a colonial power. And like most colonial empires, we must deal with ongoing restlessness on the part of the natives. That restlessness will keep on going for as long as our occupation keeps on going. It may get worse and better in turns, but it will not stop until we stop.

In 1989, at the age of 29, my life collapsed. My marriage, which I put all of my being (including parts of my psyche I discovered just for the purpose) into making work, failed. And my career as an activist was at what seemed like a dead end. I didn't want to be just a fundraiser forever, and I didn't have the energy to continue to find new ways of simultaneously being politically useful and being paid for it.

So I preserved what little ego I had left by finding something to be good at. At first, that was getting substantially better at correspondence chess and fantasy baseball. Then it was holding a job. Then, after an interruption, it was having a career. Then it was making a lot of money (none of which i still have). Then it was was holding a socially useful job. That's steady progress and takes me up to where I am now.

Well, I guess I didn't actually dis-gust, as I hadn't just eaten and my physical reaction wasn't strong enough to outwardly manifest, anyway. But it was an actual physical reaction.

The English teacher (where I teach math) was preparing a video of Julius Caesar for her classes, seeing exactly how long Act I was. I walked by and heard Brutus (Jason Robards), saying of himself

Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us.