So the media has finally gotten something it is competent to report

It's no surprise that the report of John Edward's affair was broken by the nonserious tabloid "The National Inquirer." With occasional very rare exceptions, that's all any of the media is any more - tabloids. Sex sells tabloids, especially if it is sex by a Democratic politician.

So it is no surprise that when the National Inquirer hassles John Edwards into confessing an affair, the media jumps all over it and distributes the story far and wide. Here, for example is ABC News carrying the story - broken by the National Inquirer, remember - as though it were real news.

What makes it real news, worthy of being carried by every mainstream "News" outlet in the U.S.? Sure, John Edwards ran for the Democratic nomination for President, but he never was a contender. So why has the news media jumped all over this story and pushed it as far as they could, delving into personal details that are of no concern to anyone outside the Edwards family?

Well, he's a prominent Democrat, that's why.

Think not? Do you remember this story? It was real news about a man who really does have a shot at becoming President - and it died with no follow-up. No delving into the reactions of the politician's family. No reportorial effort to see if it effected the candidate's policies in any way. A day or two, a fast denial by the politician's campaign, and then - (crickets.)

Why no follow up or repeated stories? Well simple. It was about a Republican politician. Another example is the stories of Arnold Schwarzenegger's history of sexual abuse of women. Not a big story because Arnold is a Republican politician. For some reason Arnold was not considered worthy of a full-court press by the National Inquirer.

The media has a narrative that stories about Democratic politician's sex lives are important and that the details matter, but stories about Republicans are one and two day stories that are never followed up on. This is not just the media narrative, though. It is also the actions of the Republican opposition researchers who dig these things up and then feed the stories into the right-wing Wurlitzer which plays the media and accentuates its reaction to the already existing media narrative.

The right-wing Wurlitzer is out in force during this Presidential election. It's not just the play of the news regarding John Edward's sexual indiscretion. It's also the stories about Obama's strange weaknesses. Really now, how can it be a weakness for Obama that he is popular and respected, very well-educated, quite physically fit (as, of course, are both George W. Bush and a potential future Republican Presidential nominee, General Petreaus) and gives great speeches that enthusiastic people WANT to attend?

In what kind of Bizarro world are those weaknesses for a Presidential candidate while the inability to remember the substance of a question long enough to answer it as McCain has repeatedly demonstrated is, together with McCain's great age and likely PTSD from his extended captivity and torture not a severe weakness?

Oh, sorry. I was thinking that the media was a potential watchdog on government as my civics teachers used to teach. But apparently the only remaining news watch dogs are the tabloids who cover Democratic political sexual peccadilloes. It is too much now to expect news judgment and competence from the media that is proud of Bill O'Reilly and the misogynist Chris Matthews and led by Matt Drudge. My bad.

What is Obama doing right?

In reading the interview with Rick Perlstein by the Chicago Review of Books this statement about how Rick conducts his history of conservatism jumped out at me.

...if you can’t feel what they feel, then you can’t take them seriously as political opponents. You see only the flimsy intellectual foundations and miss the motivating power of strategically harnessed resentment. From Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry, high-minded liberals have acted as if they were blind to the root feelings that feed the followers of politicians like Nixon and Bush. Instead, they alternate between expecting a fair fight on the issues (and getting swiftboated instead) and imagining that once people realize what a bad person Nixon or Bush is, the people will turn against him.

There is a lot in that statement.

Decision-making by resentment or logic

First, as is so often clear in many conservative policy decisions and their justifications, conservatives make the decision about what they want to happen first, then build a justification for it.

An example of this is the ideological concept that the free market solves all problems and is always better than government solutions. This is not an idea, it is an ideological presumed truth, never to be questioned. Whether real markets between independent buyers and sellers exist is never questioned, it is simply assumed that anytime a buyer pays a seller for something it is a free market. Also, the high cost of collecting data on other market transactions so that each transaction is embedded in the pattern of all other similar transactions taking place at the same time is ignored. These costs will exist anytime a real market transaction occurs, even if it is just like the dozen or so others just like it before and after. The fact that by sacrificing a little of the flexibility of a market decision in exchange for an administrative decision to follow routine could sharply lower the cost of the product or service to where market-based competitors cannot effectively compete is ignored intellectually (but not in business practice.) Similarly, government is dismissed because it operates with relatively rigid bureaucratic rules, and therefore can never be as good as a free market. The fact that human beings cannot mentally process large amounts of data without breaking it down and routing it to specialists who handle especially defined parts of the overall situation and therefore need an organizational structure that incorporates departments and specialized work roles in order to function is ignored. So is the fact that all large organizations, including all large business organizations, have the same human limitations of data processing and thus require bureaucracy in order to function.

Conservatives ignore the complications. They are interested in getting the job done the way their ideology directs, and the ideology is not to be questioned. This is emotional decision-making. The decision is made first, and then justified. But since the decision was actually made emotionally based on faith in the ideology, all discussion of the complexities and possible points of failure which the ideology excludes are ignored by conservatives.

A second example is religious Creationism or its Trojan horse, Intelligent Design. The Bible states that the earth was created by God in seven days. That is the decision. The justification is a sales pitch to attract believers to accept the previously made decision, and any facts that contradict that decision must be ignored or repressed. The key is that for conservatives, the decision is made first and the explanation for the decision is then built to sell the decision to other people. Facts to be used in that explanation are limited to the facts the "prove" the decision was correct, and facts either predicting failure or showing that the policy has failed are ignored or actively repressed.

This approach to decisions is difficult for liberals to understand. Liberals collect facts and then develop theories that both explain those facts and suggest where to look for additional explanatory facts. They also look for facts that show the theory has failed and when those are found, attempt to develop a new and better explanatory theory that includes the facts that contradicted the previous theory. Theories thus grow out of history and experience, and do not take on an aura of perfection the way ideologically justified programs do. The high degree of emotional involvement in the theory that justifies an emotionally made decision doesn't exist for liberals. In fact, they are always looking for facts that disprove an existing theory so that a better one can be built to replace it.

What is the difference between conservatives and liberals? Whatever it is, it appears to be something each is born with. Psychologists would say that liberals have a personality structure that includes a Tolerance for ambiguity. "Ambiguity tolerance is the ability to perceive ambiguity in information and behavior in a neutral and open way." A liberal who makes a decision recognizes that the decision is imperfect and may well be wrong, either in detail or overall, and so he will build in measures to help recognize both problems and failure.

Conservatives tend to be different. They have an ambiguity intolerance. This "... was defined in 1975 as a 'tendency to perceive or interpret information marked by vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable, unstructured, uncertain, inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or potential sources of psychological discomfort or threat.'" That discomfort or threat will drive many people to a degree of anxiety. Anxiety creates "... the feelings that we typically recognize as fear, apprehension, or worry."

If making a decision and being aware that it is certainly imperfect and maybe wrong leads to fear, apprehension, or worry, then a very effective solution is to find a leader who will make the decision and who declares that the decision is perfect. Then the conservative needs only to justify a decision which he already knows to be perfect because his authority has told him it is. Not only is that decision presumed perfect, any effort to analyze it in detail that might lead to finding flaws in ti will also lead to that same ambiguity and anxiety that assuming the decision was perfect relieved him from.

Liberals without empathy for conservative feelings are blind to the different approaches to decision-making

Liberals running for office tend to reduce policy and decisions to sets of non emotional facts and expect the fact to speak for them. Conservatives are making decisions based on ambiguity intolerance and resentment that their feelings are ignored. This is exactly what was being said when voters said that Bush was someone that they could be comfortable drinking a beer with, while both Gore and Kerry were considered out of touch elitists. This is what the poll question "Do you feel that the (named candidate) is like you?" gets at.

The campaign approaches of the Democratic candidates

Obama offers rhetoric that suggests he understands how the conservatives feel, while Clinton is offering in-depth logical policy positions and Edwards is appealing to those liberals who consider conservatives to be bad people and who reject everything that is conservative because it has proven itself to be so destructive to America.

I'd say that Obama is avoiding describing conservatives as bad people and instead is trying to show that he recognizes and respects their feelings. He is also avoiding presenting much policy. Clinton is offering herself as best able to deal with the swiftboating the Republicans will conduct and as having more real Senate experience so that she can better deal with Congress. Edwards is offering his progressive ideas to counter the failed policies of thirty years of the Reagan Revolution.

Will Obama's approach work?

It's a shame we can't get all the characteristics in one candidate. The polls suggest that Obama has an appeal to independents using this approach, while Edward's results suggest that since he is going after the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, he's just not getting enough traction to get the nomination. The constant refrain that Hillary is "too polarizing" suggests that she is touching a raw nerve by ignoring the emotional needs of the conservatives.

Since it looks like the decision is between Clinton and Obama now, with each beginning to adopt some of Edwards' ideas, I'm not sure which approach will work. I do think that recognizing and empathizing with the feelings that drive conservatives will make America a lot less polarized place politically. But will Obama's approach work to get him elected, and if elected, will it make him a successful President.

Those are two separate questions, and while I have some guesses, I really don't know the answer. But I do think that the quotation I started this piece with should be carefully considered by Democrats as we all move to elect a Democratic President.

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Addendum 2:55 PM CST
This is from a strong pro-Obama supporter, Mark Kleiman.

Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. If (probably when) Hillary is the nominee, I'm sending her the maximum contribution and working my butt off to get her elected.

I'm angry about the tactics the Clintons are using in this race largely because they make things harder in November, whoever is the nominee. But while it would be nice to elect an inspirational, potentially transformational President who knows how to make a speech and knows that waterboarding is torture without waiting for his Super-Duper Top Secret briefing, it's essential to prevent four more years of Republican misrule.

If Clinton is nominated, my advice to my fellow Obamites is: Think about the Supreme Court. Think about war with Iran. Think about global warming. Think about the abuse of science. Buy yourself a clothespin. And then do the right thing. This is not a year for sulking in your tent.

And I'm dead certain that Barack Obama is going to be leading the charge.

We Democrats need to keep our priorities straight. Right now we squabble among ourselves, but once a nominee is chosen, he or she is the Democratic nominee and the goal is to defeat the Republican. Whoever it is, they will need all of us to beat back the true forces of darkness who are even now working to destroy the American Republic.

The primaries as America's Rorsach test

The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.

This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.

The Democrats

dday at Hullabaloo poses this description of what the top three Democrats appear to stand for.

Hillary Clinton is running to change the President; Barack Obama is running to change our politics; John Edwards is running to change the country.

This is the image each has acquired, and as image goes, seems to carry some truth. It encapsulates the rhetoric each candidate has been running on, together with the public response to that rhetoric. At the same time, it seems accurate for any one of the candidates in part because of the contrast with the other two. Does it really describe how each would act as President? Or is it establishing artificial distinctions between the individuals in order to try to impose some clarity on the race? I think it is more of the latter, but it's the best we have.

dday's description suggests that Hillary is a old line politician who knows how to both get elected and how to work the levers of power, while Obama represents a unique breakthrough for America in our long battle to overcome the American disease of racism. That would imply that both Hillary and Obama offer excellent candidates who are at the top of our political class, but are still trapped by the existing political system. Hillary can do what good politicians can do and can hold the nation together, while Obama offers a great deal less in policy terms but also offers a great breakthrough in dealing with the American problem of Racism. He is vague on policy but implies that his very candidacy for the Presidency is America's solution.

Which leaves Edwards as the candidate who recognizes that America is in the middle of unparalleled changes. Edward's rhetoric is that he is the only candidate who really recognizes those changes and that he is prepared to deal with them. All of this is implied in that three sentence description of the images of the campaigns.

If Edwards is correct about the fact of the need for structural changes and that there is a great deal of strong resistance to those changed in powerful corners, then the next question is whether Edwards' proposed solutions will deal effectively with the problems America rather clearly has. Of those two issues, the first is the more important, because the government will be better able to deal with big changes if the public has been prepared in advance during the political campaign and shows they agree with and support the candidate they elect.

If America really is in a situation that requires significant changes and new initiatives, then the image that Edwards has developed will make it easier for him to actually accomplish anything. His specific solutions proposed now are less important than the fact that he is preparing the American public to accept the need for changes. That's going to undercut the defensive moves from Wall Street and the economic conservatives when the time comes to make changes.

This is the description of problems and solutions as seen through the Democratic candidates. This "compare and contrast" for the Democratic candidates appears to have clarified what the issues really are, so let's expand the analysis and compare the images of the Republicans to each other.

The Republicans

In contrast to the Democrats who are running on the need for changes, the Republicans are all running by offering proposals from the Republican past. The consensus they have is that America's problems cannot be rooted in the America's existing social or economic structures and that something general and unspecific called "conservatism" is the answer. It is when they try to get at the specifics of what conservatism demands that they have no consensus. The variety of solutions the various candidate offer show they to not agree on what the problems are. The varied positions of the candidates shows that.

McCain and Giuliani agree that all of America's current problems can be described as being attacked by enemies, and they both offer to fight those enemies. Both are offering militaristic solutions. The distinctions between the two is that McCain focuses on enemies outside the U.S. and he appears competent to apply those militaristic solutions and maybe with less corruption. Rudy sees enemies everywhere, and will apply military and police solutions to immigrants and minorities as rapidly as to terrorists. I expect to see a Rudy slogan of "America uber Alles!" at any time. Rudy appears to be the least ethical Republican running for the nomination, and he is certainly the most likely to be influenced by organized crime.

Fred Thompson is running on a campaign of "Elect me. I'm the REAL conservative." He doesn't describe America's problems, but suggests that whatever they are, conservative ideology is the solution and he will apply it. Other than that, he has no real policy. He simply offers himself, the new Reagan, as the solution. He is also, as Reagan did and Nixon before him, catering to the Republican Racists and Nativists. Fred is also more low key (lethargic even) than Rudy, or any other Republican candidate is.

Huckabee is offering the Bible as the solution to all our problems. He identifies America's problems as resulting from the rejection of Biblical Truth, and he proposes solving those problems by enforcing the prescriptions that he reads from the Bible.

Ron Paul is running on the platform that the very existence of government, including most use of the armed forces, is the source of America's problems, and he will solve America's problems by eliminating most government services. The idea is that every individual is so limited by the controls placed on him that he cannot be fully productive, so the problem is the controls. Remove those controls to achieve greater social and economic productivity and freedom. His literal, nonhistorical , and extremely limited view of the U.S. Constitution attracts a lot of people but would certainly do away with the Common Law and stare decisis in the Supreme Court.

Which brings me to Mitt Romney. Mitt recognizes that the modern Republican Party has been a coalition of the Wall Street Free marketers and Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the militarists and Nativists. That coalition has broken up, and the problem Mitt is trying to solve is reconstructing the Republican coalition. The evangelical Republicans have gotten very little back from the Republican Party, making Huckabee very attractive. The other problems Mitt doesn't face up to include growing economic disparity because the government has been redistributing American income from the middle class to the wealthy and failing to act on the export of middle class jobs or on the failure of the health care system to protect so many Americans, it is going to be hard to sell conservative free market solutions to the evangelicals. Then the failure of the militarist Republicans to resolve anything with the invasion of Iraq, leaving the American military stuck there while both Afghanistan and Pakistan fall apart, Mitt is going to find it difficult to sell a return to the failed Republican coalition. So Mitt's problem, the one he is trying to solve with his candidacy, is nothing more than the collapse of the Republican coalition. He offers nothing beyond possibly getting him elected President as a solution.

So having looked at the individual candidates, what can we tell about the two parties and their view of the problems and solutions?

The Party differences

The Republicans now face the collapse of the Republican Party consensus on both problems and solutions. The Reagan Revolution was based on a shared consensus (at least in the Republican Party) that if government planning, controls and limitations were removed, then private enterprise consisting of individual corporations and people, all led by "The Right People" using the social and economic institutions of free enterprise and wealth accumulation, could solve all the problems America faced. They sold this to America, and they have tried it for thirty years with disastrous results.

Yet the Republicans never saw or acknowledged the real problems (terrorism, globalism and its rejection, Peak oil, the hollowing out of the American productive economy and its replacement by a largely financial economy in which the middle class is of much less importance, and now Global Warming just for a start) of the 21st century coming, and when those problems became too obvious to overlook, the Republicans had no tools with which to solve those problems other than military invasion, replacing the court powers of warrants and habeas corpus with police power unified in the Department of Homeland Security and directed by intrusive spying on everyone, all linked together with a corrupt form of unplanned and uncontrolled free enterprise to hopefully solve them.

The result of the Reagan Revolution is an economy that is rapidly eliminating much of the middle class by remaking America socially and economically along the Latin American model (Mexico and Brazil especially) while miring America in the same boom-and-bust process that existed from the end of the American Civil War until the Great Depression. That's not the worst of it.

Since the Reagan/Libertarian/Free enterprise model allows government no power to act outside of the military and police, we have become enmeshed in a series of expanding wars in the middle east while at home we find expanded police powers, elimination of the protections provided by the courts and the Rule of Law, and the growth of secret government run by a society of spies and spy-lovers.

The only response the Republican Party offers to this set of conservative-caused or accentuated problems is to accuse the Bush administration of not being real conservatives, because if Bush had been a real conservative, America would not be having the problems that we all recognize we are having. The Republican mantra is that Conservatism never fails. Only people fail by being insufficiently conservative.

The Democrats, on the other hand, recognize that there are problems which are big and growing bigger. Barack Obama seems to have the least understanding of the general magnitude of those problems. He is a product of America's greatest and longest running problem, Racism, and sees that if America elects him President that action will signal that American is overcoming the Race problem. He is right.

But Obama's solution to the rest of the problems America faces today is to try to stop the bickering with the conservatives, listen to them and honor their input and work out a set of consensus solutions to those problems. It's not clear that he even understands the problems America faces. He clearly does not understand the health care crisis. He offers himself as someone with the abilities to make a problem solving process that removes the "bickering" that has paralyzed Washington and thus lets both Republicans and Democrats come together and solve the real problems. The recent racial flap between Obama and Hillary showed he is fully capable bickering with the best of them, but he and Hillary have worked to quickly tamp down that bickering. But was the solution an example of Obama's Kumbaya politics, or of Clintonian triangulation? And how does Obama's promise to eliminate bickering in Washington differ from Bush’s promise in 2000 to being a kinder and gentler tone to Washington? Obama is repackaging the same old promises and selling then as “New and Improved” as far as I can see.

Edwards has expanded the message that America's problems are structural and now Obama has expanded the message that bickering between adults can be resolved. I agree with Edwards, but I simply don't believe that the Republicans can afford to give up their obstructionism in the Senate. They have nothing positive to offer as solutions, but they still have the old guerrilla tactics of preventing the government from functioning and thus challenging its legitimacy, then offering themselves to the public as the solution to getting a government that works. I don[t see how Obama can get around that Republican dynamic. They HAVE to obstruct government if they have any hope of retaining power at all.

So that's Obama and Edwards. How about Hillary? Is Hillary too mired in the corporate-dominated past that she and Bill Clinton had to live in during the 90's? That’s a part of her image I’m sure she would get rid of. It’ll be hard to do while she is collecting corporate money to run on, though. I don't know if that really is the modern Hillary or just the image she is stuck with.

Conclusion

Personally I prefer Edwards among the three Democratic candidates. I suspect that the Press is ignoring him in large part because he does not have a machine that can compete with the machine Hillary has built over the last eight years and the one that Obama has been building. The difference that large sums of money have on the Press is obvious. Maybe he’ll break out in the next six or so weeks. UNfortunately, it's probably between Obama and Hillary, and I am moving to choose Hillary. Obama is too insubstantial as a candidate. He clearly has no clue on health care, and he has tried to run on positions that are the the right of the DLC even. Still, I'd sure rather have any of the Democrats over the pack of blind and ignorant men who are offered by the Republican Party.

It’s hard to avoid the fact that the Republicans are so heavily mired in the past and in conservative ideologies that they can't even recognize the seriousness of modern problems or accept that the solutions will require abandoning the failed Reagan Revolution. (Huckabee is really mired in the past - two thousand years ago.) America's current problems have grown out of the past, and the answers that supposedly worked before will not solve them, even if they are mixed with unrestrained militarism. The conservative ideology is a major barrier to even recognizing what has caused current problems, as well as a barrier to determining what the solutions need to be. To rephrase St. Ronnie, Government is not the Problem. The conservative movement is the Problem.

The Democrats do recognize that there are real and modern problems, with, I think, Obama being the least publicly aware of them. But Obama may also be the least tied to his own past. I don't know, because he has only come on the scene nationally in the last two or three years and I can't say that I know enough about him to trust his reactions or abilities. Unfortunately, all three Democrats come out of legislatures, so there is less clarity in their images. Legislators simply cannot be held accountable for government actions the way executives can. But all three Democrats are looking towards the future, not the past.

This next six weeks is going to be especially interesting as all these contrasts play out against each other.

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Caveats
The initial statement by dday appears to me to be framed in a pro-Edwards context. That doesn't bother me much because I had already come to much the same conclusion about Edwards and I do prefer him as a candidate.

I am describing my reactions to the carefully crafted public images of each of the above candidates. Such crafted images are designed to conceal more than they reveal. Only Giuliani and Thompson seem to have lost control of their public images so that we have a better view of the flaws of the individual behind the image. McCain, interestingly enough, appears to have minimized the constructed image and redefines the flaws thus exposed as an advantage he calls "Straight-talk." The rough edges exposed now have become a sort of image of no-publicly-crafted image for him. It is, of course, carefully crafted.

I am then comparing those carefully crafted images with the public descriptions of America and the world that have been presented by the Press and those descriptions that I can find on the Internet. Overall, most of the data is of doubtful reliability, but it is the best I can get. This is my attempt to pull those disparate sources of data together into some form of rational structure that I feel comfortable with. The structure should then show what data is good and what does not fit. To pull it all together, I have made a lot of judgments about what to accept and a lot more judgments about what to ignore. So be it.

This analysis applies to the current situation. I am not trying to predict the future.

Given those caveats, I do not offer this as "The Truth." Any reader should look at it, see if it contains anything that resonates with them positively or negatively, and then accept or reject part or all of what I have written. I'm betting that this is worthwhile. It's up to the reader to decide if they agree or disagree.

Why is the best Democratic candidate ignored by the media?

Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo Horsed Mouth documents the strange blackout of coverage of the Democrat's best possible candidate for President. There is no rational explanation even attempted to explain the problem.

When there is no rational systemic explanation for such a clear aberration in coverage, the logical explanation becomes some kind of powerful conspiracy. Who's afraid of him that also has the power to limit coverage of his race for the nomination? The answer is more likely to be a small group than any single individual, of course.

I suspect that public financing of political campaigns would eliminate this kind of apparent conspiracy.

[I DON'T LIKE CONSPIRACY THEORIES! What is an alternative that passes the laugh test?]

Americans face a consumption-driven Recession by pulling back on consumption

Americans, staring a consumption-driven Recession in the face right after the last piggy bank they had to maintain spending was taken away with the collapse of the housing bubble, are doing the only thing possible. From the New York Times:

Strong evidence is emerging that consumer spending, a bulwark against recession over the last year even as energy prices surged and the housing market sputtered, has begun to slow sharply at every level of the American economy, from the working class to the wealthy.

The abrupt pullback raises the possibility that the country may be experiencing a rare decline in personal consumption, not just a slower rate of growth. Such a decline would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.

There are mounting anecdotal signs that beginning in December Americans cut back significantly on personal consumption, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy.

The perpetual Republican solution, Tax cuts for the rich, won't work to restore consumption. All they will do is hand more money to invest to the wealthy, who will invest where the returns are highest - outside the U.S. (Krugman points out that Obama's only prescription for the Recession is a tax cut. At least both Edwards and Hillary are economically competent, unlike Obama and the Republicans.)

The fed has already announced informally that they will lower interest rates again, but the resulting inflation will shortly wipe out any gain because lenders will raise interest rates to counter anticipated inflation.

Paul Krugman points to both Edwards and Hillary for their fiscal stimulus plans. First from Edewards:

last month, before the economic consensus turned as negative as it now has, he proposed a stimulus package including aid to unemployed workers, aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, public investment in alternative energy, and other measures.

and then Hillary, in response to Edward's proposal came out with

a broadly similar but somewhat larger proposal. (It also includes aid to families having trouble paying heating bills, which seems like a clever way to put cash in the hands of people likely to spend it.) The Edwards and Clinton proposals both contain provisions for bigger stimulus if the economy worsens.

As the economy continues to get worse and the election gets closer, this is going to become a larger and larger issue for all the candidates, and who ever become President is going to have to deal with this Republican-created and worsened Recession for quite a while.

Right now it is enough just to recognize that the consumers, who have been the mainstay of the American economy since 2001, are now finally pulling back on their spending, there is nothing in place to replace them, and most of the politicians who are even slightly aware of the problem have no clue regarding what might work or why.

One really good campaign ad

Digby posted this at her site this morning.

Hillary, Obama, Edwards refuse to cross CBS writer's picket lines

The CBS writers have not had a contract with CBS for 2 1/2 years now, so they went on strike. CBS had planned to hold a debate for the Democratic nominees for President on December 10, 2007. It looks like the CBS negotiators better get it in gear and finally negotiate with the Writer's Guild in good faith. According to Sam Stein at Huffington Post the top four Democratic candidates have acted to support the writers and will not cross the picket lines.

Hillary Clinton:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, declared that: "The workers at CBS News have been without a contract for close to two and a half years. It is my hope that both sides will reach an agreement that results in a secure contract for the workers at CBS News but let me be clear: I will honor the picket line if the workers at CBS News decide to strike."

Barack Obama

Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, weighed in as well, issuing the following statement through his campaign: "If CBS News is unable to reach an agreement with its workers and they decide to strike, Barack Obama will not cross the picket line to attend the debate."

John Edwards

former Sen. John Edwards, D-NC, offered his support for the strikers, declaring that he and his wife Elizabeth "will also honor any picket lines at CBS News, up to and including the CBS presidential debate on December 10th... I hope that in these disputes, management and the union are able to agree on a just settlement. But until those settlements are reached, I will stand firmly with these workers in their fight for a better life."

Bill Richardson

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has offered his support for the strikers as well, saying in a statement, "Supporting workers' rights is more important than anything I will say at the debate."

I have to wonder what the CBS management is thinking when they fail to bargain in good faith with their writers. Without their writers they have no product to put on the air. No contract for 2 1/2 years is simply stupidity on the part of CBS.

The truth from John Edwards

America's government has failed a great people. We have let wealthy businessmen and greedy church leaders take over our government and work to convince Americans that government it their enemy rather than an expression of American greatness as it has been in the past. Of all the candidates currently running for Presidential nominations, only John Edwards is speaking out about this. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

It's time to tell the truth. And the truth is the system in Washington is corrupt. It is rigged by the powerful special interests to benefit they very few at the expense of the many. And as a result, the American people have lost faith in our broken system in Washington, and believe it no longer works for ordinary Americans. They're right.

As I look across the political landscape of both parties today -- what I see are politicians too afraid to tell the truth -- good people caught in a bad system that overwhelms their good intentions and requires them to chase millions of dollars in campaign contributions in order to perpetuate their careers and continue their climb to higher office.

This presidential campaign is a perfect example of how our politics is awash with money. I have raised more money up to this point than any Democratic candidate raised last time in the presidential campaign -- $30 million. And, I did it without taking a dime from any Washington lobbyist or any special interest PAC.

I saw the chase for campaign money at any cost by the front runner in this race -- and I did not join it -- because the cost to our nation and our children is not worth the hollow victory of any candidate. Being called president while powerful interests really run things is not the same as being free to lead this nation as president of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. If protecting the current established structure in Washington is in your interest, then I am not your candidate. I ran for president four years ago -- yes, in part out of personal ambition -- but also with a deep desire to stand for working people like my father and mother -- who no matter how hard things were for our family, always worked even harder to make things better for us.

But the more Elizabeth and I campaigned this year, the more we talked to the American people, the more we met people just like my father, and hard working people like James Lowe. James is a decent and honest man who had to live for 50 years with no voice in the richest country in the world because he didn't have health care. The more people like him that I met, the more I realized something much bigger was stirring in the American people. And it has stirred in each of us for far too long.

Last month Ken Burns -- who made the great Civil War documentary -- launched his newest epic on World War II on PBS -- and what a story it tells.

At the cost of great suffering, blood and enormous sacrifice, within four years after Pearl Harbor it is incredible what this nation achieved. America built the arsenal of democracy worthy of our great history. We launched the greatest invasion armada in the history of warfare against Hitler's fortress Europe, and, with our allies, we freed a continent of suffering humanity.

At the same time on the other side of the globe we crossed 10,000 miles of ocean and liberated another hemisphere of humanity -- islands and nations freed from the grip of Japanese militarists. While at the same time succeeding in the greatest scientific endeavor ever undertaken -- the Manhattan project -- and topped it off with building the Pentagon, one of the largest buildings in the world in a little over a year.

It is incredible what America has accomplished. Because no matter what extraordinary challenges we have been faced with, we did exactly what America has always done in our history -- we rose to the challenge.

And, now, as I travel across America and listen to people, I hear real concern about what's going on. For the first time in our nation's history, people are worried that we're going to be the first generation of Americans not to pass on a better life to our children.

And it's not the fault of the American people. The American people have not changed. The American people are still the strong, courageous people they have always been. The problem is what our government has become. And, it is up to us to do something about it.

Because Washington may not see it, but we are facing a moral crisis as great as any that has ever challenged us. And, it is this test -- this moral test -- that I have come to understand is at the heart of this campaign.

Just look at what has happened in Iraq. What was the response of the American people to the challenge at hand? Our men and women in uniform have been heroes. They've done everything that's been asked of them and more. But what about our government? Four years after invading Iraq, we cannot even keep the lights on in Baghdad.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the American people were at their best. They donated their time and their money in record numbers. There was an outpouring of support. I took 700 college kids down to help -- young people who gave up their spring break. But what about our government? Three years after hurricane Katrina thousands of our fellow Americans, our brothers and sisters, are still housed in trailers waiting to go home.

There's no better example of the bravery and goodness of the American people than the response to the attacks of 9/11: firefighters and first responders risking and too often giving their lives to save others, charging up the stairs while everyone else was coming down; record bloodbank donations; and the list goes on. But what about our government? Six years after 9/11, at Ground Zero there sits only a black hole that tortures our conscience and scars our hearts.

In every instance we see an American people who are good, decent, compassionate and undeterred. And, American people who are better than the government that is supposed to serve and represent them.

And what has happened to the American "can do" spirit? I will tell you what has happened: all of this is the result of the bitter poisoned fruit of corruption and the bankruptcy of our political leadership.

It is not an accident that the government of the United States cannot function on behalf of its people, because it is no longer our people's government -- and we the people know it.

This corruption did not begin yesterday -- and it did not even begin with George Bush -- it has been building for decades -- until it now threatens literally the life of our democracy.

While the American people personally rose to the occasion with an enormous outpouring of support and donations to both the victims of Katrina and 9/11 -- we all saw our government's neglect. And we saw greed and incompetence at work. Out of more than 700 contracts valued at $500,000 or greater, at least half were given without full competition or, according to news sources, with vague or open ended terms, and many of these contracts went to companies with deep political connections such as a subsidiary of Haliburton, Bechtel Corp., and AshBritt Inc.

And in Iraq -- while our nation's brave sons and daughters put their lives on the line for our country -- we now have mercenaries under their own law while their bosses sit at home raking in millions.

We have squandered millions on building Olympic size swimming pools and buildings that have never been used. We have weapons and ammunition unaccounted for that may now be being used against our own soldiers. We literally have billions wasted or misspent -- while our troops and their families continue to sacrifice. And the politically connected lobby for more. What's their great sacrifice -- higher profits.

It goes on every minute of every day.

Corporate executives at United Airlines and US Airways receive millions in compensation for taking their companies into bankruptcy, while their employees are forced to take cuts in pay.

Companies like Wal-Mart lobby against inspecting containers entering our nation's ports, even though expert after expert agrees that the likeliest way for a dirty bomb to enter the United States is through a container, because they believe their profits are more important than our safety. What has become of America when America's largest company lobbies against protecting America?

Trade deals cost of millions of jobs. What do we get in return? Millions of dangerous Chinese toys in our children's cribs laden with lead. This is the price we are made to pay when trade agreements are decided based on how much they pad the profits for multinational corporations instead of what is best for America's workers or the safety of America's consumers.

We have even gotten to the point where our children's safety is potentially at risk because nearly half of the apple juice consumed by our children comes from apples grown in China. And Americans are kept in the dark because the corporate lobbyists have pushed back country of origin labeling laws again and again.

This is not the America I believe in.

Nor is it the America I believe in. I grew up around WW II veterans and survivors of the Depression. They had seen hard times, and as I was growing up in the fifties, they were seeing good times. They knew that people faced good times and they faced bad time, and when times got bad they didn't didn't hunker down with what they had and ignore people who had it tough. They acted to help, either individually or as groups. And I grew up on the west side of my home town where the more wealthy families were.

Today the conservative mindset has taken over. When people have tough times, its their fault and up to them to dig out of it or die. Helping people in difficulty is welfare and government handouts. Such things are stealing from the rich. The rich should retreat to their gated communities, hire private security to protect the perimeter, ignore government and even refuse to pay taxes to make it go away, and ignore the suffering of others.

This isn't America. This is a bunch of rich people trying to turn their families into aristocrats over a dying society, then blaming the less fortunate for the death of the society.

It is time to stop the destruction of America and its basic ideals. It is time to eliminate the scourge of conservatism and return to the days when Americans looked out for other Americans and used government to protect us all from disease, fire, hurricanes, bandits and terrorists. The big corporations don't want America protected if it costs them anything. They don't want to pay taxes, decent pay rates or for employee health care. Like government, corporations are the servants of the American people, not our masters. They need to be brought to heel.

John Edwards understands this.

Edwards - through the fire before the race started

Name the candidate for the nomination for President who was Bill Clinton's lead attorney in Clinton's Senate impeachment trial, whose oldest son was killed in a freak car accident and whose wife is currently fighting breast cancer. The media don't like him, so they only story they have reported on him is that when he had a barber visit and cut his hair in advance of a major campaign function, he paid the man $400.

Yeah, John Edwards, the man who understands "All right we are two nations."

The Press doesn't like him, so they miss the real story of Edwards. But Charles P. Pierce gets him, and writes of the campaign by his fellow members of the Press who are working to destroy his candidacy in Equire Magazine:

the political culture seems to be determined to fag-bait John Edwards out of the race this time around. Channeling the conservative id from the swamps of its birth, as always, Ann Coulter flatly called him a "faggot" at a conference of conservative activists, and Rush Limbaugh regularly chaffs him as "the Breck Girl." From there, apparently, the affair of the haircuts has mainstreamed Coulter's position into more polite precincts. In April, Maureen Dowd wrote a column in The New York Times that speculated that the country was not ready for a "metrosexual in chief," comparing Edwards unfavorably with her dear departed Irish-cop daddy, who used to get his hair cut at the Senate barbershop for fifty cents. You could almost hear the gentle ringing of sputum in the spittoons. Thus are the issues. Thus are the watchdogs. Thus are the politics while people are dying.

But what can we expect from the American hack media who are still proud of the way they derailed Nixon's 1960 effort to become President when they focused on Nixon's heavy beard and poor makeup during his TV debate with John Kennedy? It has taken them a while, but the media has been able to shift all consideration in the election of the President way from the competence and demonstrated ability to the fantasy views of the candidates provided by his art directors and set designers.

What do we get now? Whatever it is, it is NOT an evaluation of competence and leadership ability. In a recent debate

John McCain pointed out that in his experience, which is considerable, torture doesn't work. On this, he was disputed by a former mayor of New York, who once was tortured by the thought that his second wife would not vacate the mayoral digs in favor of his second mistress, and the former governor of Massachusetts, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people were getting married. Toughness was now a performance skill in a cowardly country taught to fear the best things about itself.

A candidate's actual biography doesn't matter; George H. W. Bush flew fighter planes when he was a teenager, and he couldn't overcome the "wimp factor" against Ronald Reagan, whose primary combat experience was battling his way to the bar at the Brown Derby. In the three major national elections of his life, George W. Bush, who couldn't find Alabama while he was serving in the National Guard, defeated three men -- Al Gore, John McCain, and John Kerry -- who had volunteered to go to Vietnam, and he did so by out-butching them. Kerry's awkwardness in hunting clothes somehow trumped Bush's fear of horses.

Thanks to the American political media we get candidates who in real life would be considered more worthless than cardboard cutouts of candidates, but our media proudly puts these cutouts into office.

Then they take stenography of the lies the cardboard cutouts they set up on stage in front of them and give us things like a war in the Middle East built on fantasies of bloodless Republican Rambos and incompetence such as that demonstrated by Michael Brown and his destroyed FEMA which couldn't even find New Orleans right after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

But don't count Edwards out yet.

The numbers are good for him in Iowa, but the numbers are always good for him in Iowa. In 2004, it was his surprising second-place finish in Iowa that catapulted Edwards into the top tier of candidates and, eventually, made his selection as John Kerry's vice-presidential nominee possible.

Iowa is still the first place where real voters will tell us who they want. If the failed hack media can't totally hide him behind their fake cardboard cutouts and other media lies the voters have a real opportunity to bring sanity and a good man back to the White House for the first time since the Republicans bought and stole the office in 2000.

The Republicans have already demonstrated what they can do - not just nothing, but less than nothing. They destroy everything they touch, and they have spent nearly eight years now demonstrating how truly bad their sick, unrealistic and Un-American beliefs can be when put into practice. Someone has to come in, take over government and start to repair the damage done by Bush, the Republican Party and the failed American political media.

America needs John Edwards.

Why I support Edwards

I have liked Edwards better than any of the other Democrats in the race for a number or reasons, but I hadn't articulated them yet. Now Big Tent Democrat over at talkleft hits the nail on the head. Edwards is willing to stand up for what Democrats mean and is willing to go toe-to-toe with the Republicans without unnecessary compromise.

Go read the post and see if you don't agree - if you are a Democrat. What particularly connects with me is BTD's view of Obama. Check it out.

Elizabeth Edward's cancer recurs; John NOT withdrawing from race.

NPR announced that Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards, has learned that her cancer has recurred. The form is "treatable, but incurable."

However, in the announcement, they stated that John Edwards will continue to try to become the Democratic nominee for President.

Are the blogs really "Vulgar?"

Amanda Marcotte uses her recent experience of being attacked by Donohue taking soundbytes out of context in her extensive blogging to accuse her of "Anti-Catholic bigotry" after she went to work for the Edwards campaign to demonstrate the elitism and fatuousness of the mainstream media as it currently dominates American politics. That elitism is used to remove discussion and analysis from modern American politics, making it nothing more than a high-stakes duel contested with money and TV ads to keep the wealthy in control of the political process.

The elitists who currently dominate the mainstream media find the blogosphere "common" or "vulgar." (David Broder is a clear example. He seems panicked by the on-line competition he faces as a pundit.) Yet here is how Amanda describes the left blogosphere:

Blogging is a real counterpoint to the thoughtless, elitist, soundbyte-driven mainstream media, where we're supposed to absorb an endless stream of soundbytes and photo ops and our participation is limited mostly to a vote every couple of years. Blogs are bringing back the 19th century debate culture, where people would attend real debates and political rallies and listen to speeches for hours at a time. The irony about the vulgar people is that the vulgar people crave analysis, debate and participation, because these things validate our intelligence and our right to be citizens. The blogs are still appealing only to a small segment of society right now, but they're still relatively new and have the potential to reach a much larger audience over time.

To answer the question I posed in the tite - no. At this time, blogs are not an example of the common people at work. That's what the mainstream media means by "vulgar". Vulgar is common, crude and not something that the "better people" participate in.

But there are no major barriers of entry to blogging. As broadband access grows cheaper and more popular, we can really hope that the blogosphere or its improved progeny takes over from the current elitist-dominated TV, cable and newspapers. There is a real hunger for better news and improved analysis as a basis for our politics. Maybe blogging by the populace can get more than 50% of American eligible voters to participate in the voting process once they find they don't have to just listen to the wealthy elites bombard them with simplistic slogans and soundbytes taken out of context so that the real meaning is totally lost in games of "gotcha." Let's get Americans back to participating in the election process.

Possibly we can prevent the tragedy of the Cheney/Bush admininstration from ever being repeated!