Where is the national Democratic Party when it is needed to battle national Republican overreach?

Those of us who feel that the national Democratic Party seems unled and unmanaged in the face of the massive Republican attacks on the government and on unions probably have good reason to feel that way. We may have felt that with a Democratic President there should be some Democratic (if not progressive) push-back to the current Republican overreach at a national level. The New York Time has a good article today on the new management process in the White House since Rham Emmanuel and David Alexrod have been replaced by William M. Daley and Jay Carney. There's a lot interesting in the article about the different type of management style the White House feels in currently required, but the following provides a reason for me to feel the national Democratic Party is unled.

Frustrated Democratic lawmakers and interest groups have been railing to White House aides that Mr. Obama is forfeiting opportunities to draw the public’s attention to what the Republicans’ cuts would mean for programs popular with most voters, including the coveted independents. The aides respond that the time will come for Mr. Obama to join the attack, should Republicans press their agenda and refuse to compromise.

“One of the lessons of the last two years is that if the president weighs in all the time, it’s less impactful,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who remains as the communications director. “But if he weighs in at a moment of his choosing when the public is paying attention, it will be more influential.”

Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

It is clear that the Obama White House sees its job as reelecting Obama in 2012, not leading the national democratic party -- and definitely not leading a progressive counterrevolution against the massive Republican overreach that is currently going on. The may be right to believe that.

The problem is that the White House squashed efforts by the DNC to join the fray. The White House sees the DNC as an institution that belongs to them to be used for Obama's reelection. The problem is, this leaves the Democratic Party with NO institutions that have the job of coordinating the national party in the clearly needed national response to the present current attacks on America and its workers.

This is a big problem. The Republicans seem to have national party coordinating institutions, the Democrats do not. An organized and led organization will almost always defeat a larger but unled force. I see no immediate solution to it.

what will it take to reach out to the Republicans on health care reform?

What kinds of proposals can Democrats accept that will allow the Republicans to compromise and work seriously on a reform of the American health care mess? Digby thinks history has the answer:

Adam Green notes Mark Warner's tiresome comments over the week-end about the need for bipartisanship and reminds us that this isn't the first time the Democratic Charlie Brown's have fallen for this:

Newt Gingrich on the House floor during the health care debate -- March 16, 1994:

Mr. GINGRICH.

I agree with my friend, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt]. I want to reach out in a bipartisan way to pass the bill. I praise the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Bilirakis] and the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Rowland] for a bipartisan bill. I praise the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Grandy] and the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Cooper] for a bipartisan bill. They are starting in the right direction to reach out.

How did that work out?

[Digby responds with another quote] I can answer that:

Then minority whip Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led a politically opportunistic and stubborn conservative charge against health care reform. He argued internally that any successful bill would set back Republican electoral prospects in November 1994. At a March 1994 strategy retreat, Gingrich warned GOP senators that “any Republican concessions will be met with more Democratic demands,” and that the GOP should concede nothing.

[Again from Digby}I doubt the game plan has changed.

I agree with Digby. I doubt that the Republican game plan has changed.

The Republicans simply don't believe that the American people should be provided with universal health care or anything like it from the government. Period. They also are certain that they are right, and that the majority of Americans who disagree with them are wrong. Besides not believing in government benefits for anyone except the rich, they don't especially believe in democracy either.

They strongly believe these thins. But if they admitted it in public, they also know the media would pillory them with the admissions and they would lose the next election. So they act on their core beliefs, but do not publicly admit to them. [I suspect that this knowledge of how the media would expose their true beliefs to the public is the reason why they also strongly believe that the major media is liberal and opposed to them.]

That's a rather schizophrenic form of thinking, of course. The have their personal goals [personal power and personal wealth], and they have their strong personal beliefs. But to achieve those goals, they have to show a very different mask, one that does not display those beliefs, to the media for exposure to the public. They will do so as long as it remains rewarding. But it must be difficult.

There will be no bipartisan health care bill, no matter how badly America desperately needs massive reform in the health care lack-of-system. The Republicans will continue to talk a seemingly somewhat conciliatory game until the very end. But at the end, they will pull out all the stops to kill health care reform.

If the Democrats are fooled by this "Lucy's Football" again and do not succeed in passing the health care legislation in spite of the Republican obstructionism, then the next election is going to be a bad one for the Democrats.

If that's the case then the Blue Dogs who ultimately defeat the bill should be taken out in the primaries. Only the Democrats can make government work again, and if the Blue Dogs obstruct that, then they go or the Democratic Party itself goes.

To answer the question this essay started with, nothing will reach the Republicans. They cannot and will not act in a bipartisan manner on health care. It's that simple.And the Democratic Party will once again severely regret it if it ignores this truth

Nate Silver and Steve Benen argue that Democrats should use primary challenges to enforce Democratic Party discipline

The Republicans have long been able to enforce party discipline in the House and Senate by threatening and sometimes even carrying out primary challenges against incumbent politicians in their own party. That tactic has been a key element in causing the Republicans to consistently move towards a more extremist right-wing agenda over the last three decades. For reasons I do not clearly understand, the Democrats loath to conduct such exercises on their members, instead defending incumbents who could better by dispensed with. Sen. Joe Lieberman is one example of that.

Now Steve Benen together with Nate Silver makes the case that selected primary challenges are needed to make the Democratic Party in Congress more effective and more useful to the nation.

I'm inclined to agree. Diane Feinstein gets off the reservation too often, and California is a quite Democratic state now. She needs a primary challenge badly to either replace her or at least force her to represent her constituents.

There are no unbribed "Clinton Supporters for McCain"

It's been my opinion that the whole thing about disaffected Clinton supporters who are now supporting McCain is a media-made fiction. Supporting my opinion, here's an unscientific report from Hilzoy at the convention:

I've been wandering around having random conversations, and by pure chance, all the delegates I've talked to have been Clinton delegates. I have asked all of them whether they will have any problem voting for Obama, or are in any way aware of any of the disunity I see so much about on CNN. In every case the answer is not just 'no', but something closer to 'are you crazy?' The first Clinton delegate I talked to said: "For heaven's sakes, we're Democrats." The second said: "I'm sure some Clinton supporters, somewhere, won't support Obama, but everyone who thinks will." I cannot pretend that the delegates I've talked to are in any way representative, but for what it's worth, they have all reacted to the idea of not supporting Obama by looking at me as though I had come from Mars.

What they are concerned about, more than anything else, is the economy. I would have thought that a convention full of people who can somehow afford to take a week off and get to Denver might be somewhat insulated from that, but I would have been wrong. One of them was telling me, at some length, about the economic problems in her town: the way everyone is cutting back, the fact that she and her husband used to go out to eat every so often, but have cut that out along with the rest of their luxuries, the effects this is all having on local restaurants and other merchants, her fear that it will only get worse, and that politicians do not really get how bad it is. She was sure that the Republicans don't get it; she has her doubts about some people in the upper reaches of the Democratic party. She had none about Obama.

Why would the media create a fake controversy like this? Three reasons:

1. The media exists to attract viewers so that they can sell advertisements for revenue. Controversy attracts viewers. The media has been creating controversy for a century and a half.


2. The conservatives have built up a massive propaganda machine to inject their issues and subjects into the media and then pump up the coverage of those subjects. David Brock, the ex-right-wing propaganda expert described the process in his book Blinded by the Right. Propaganda experts in the the CIA call it "The Wurlitzer." FOX "News", the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard (also a Murdoch publication) and a number of other fake news organizations are part of the Wurlitzer.


3. The news media, especially the TV news media, have been hiring conservative activists in order to attract more viewers. Ron Fournier, the Washington Bureau Chief for Associate Press is only one current example. This process got into high gear during the Reagan Revolution when government regulation of how TV used the airwaves was removed and the TV news departments ceased to be public service departments to became profit centers. Profit centers have to sell advertisements for more money. The price of advertisements is based on how many viewers are likely to view them (measured by ratings.) Activist conservatives are an obvious potential market. Since print media readership has been declining since the 60's, they are desperately doing the same thing as TV news. What the conservatives learned after Goldwater was that the free media did them no services. They've had to buy their own media outlets. Democrats are going to have to do the same thing. Free media is now useless for political news. Its purpose is to make money, not provide news, so it is either highly biased or easily manipulated. Professionalism has failed as a method of protecting "objective" news, so the public media now has no protection against either flaw.

So that's why all this fake controversy over Hillary supporters for McCain. The McCain campaign loves is and encourages it, and it fills the media coffers with more revenue.

It only has the slight flaw - the "controversy" is a fantasy.

The Democratic leadership has failed America.

If you want to know how the Democatic leadership (Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller) has failed American, go look at this cartoon.

For the details, go read Glenn Greenwald. But only if you have a strong stomach.

Why is this the case? I agree with Glenn when he says

...the Democratic Party as a whole (with many individual exceptions) supports those policies and/or believes in nothing other than the perpetuation of their own power, which they perceive is advanced by supporting those policies.

This has got to change, and strongly so.

What's wrong with the Democratic Party?

We know what's wrong with the national Republican Party. They can't govern. As Fred Kaplan has just described in his new book Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, the Republicans live in a fantasy world and when given the power to lead government they act as though their fantasies were reality, with the devastating results that such insane behavior would normally be anticipated to deliver. (See How conservative fantasies have worked to destroy American power.) Republicans can get elected because getting elected is all about making promises. Fantasies help a politician make bigger, better and more grandiose promises. But once in office, the American Republican Party has shown itself to be consistently unable to deliver.

If the Democratic Party is to defeat the Republicans nationally they have to take advantage of the failures the Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated and offer a better political product. Voters aren't going to switch unless they think the Democrats can do better. That turns out to be a lot harder than it looks from the outside. When Democrats took the Congress back in 2006 there was a momentary hope that the grown ups had returned to government. The Democrats haven't delivered on the promise of the 2006 election, and their polls have dropped as a result.

Essentially the Republicans view the 2008 elections as lost before they start. Their problem is to pull the Democrats down so that the Democrats can't make big gains this year and build for another election when the problems the Republicans have created are forgotten by the voters. The Republican solution is to be total obstructionists, something the structure of the Constitution makes very easy.

The result is that the Democrats have a real image problem. They came in with great promise, raising hopes for change, and now they are shown that they aren't especially more efficient than the Republicans were. The Democrats appear to have compromised too much, and having compromised with the Republicans, the Democratic leadership in Washington have bought into much of the Republican disaster. Why has this image developed? Look at the way the politics look.

The American people have two choices for a national party, the Republicans and the Democrats. It seems reasonable that if the Republicans show the electorate that they are consistent incompetents and blowhards, then the American people are going to choose the alternate party - the Democrats - to run government. And they have in the past. They chose Bill Clinton because Bush 41 failed to deliver what the voters wanted. They chose Bush 43 because they were disgusted by the conflict between the Republicans and Bill Clinton, Gore was out of Clinton's regime, and Bush - from outside Washington D.C. - promised a new, quieter and more effective government. Remember Bush as the uniter who would work across party lines? Pure rhetoric, of course, but after the disaster of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, it was what the voters were looking for.

Bush's failure to live up to his promises, together with the failure of his War in Iraq and his ill-fated effort to destroy the well-like Social Security Program, caused the American people to rather resoundingly give the Congress to the Democrats in 2006. Glenn Greenwald (day pass required) carries the story on from there. The Democrats took office in January 2007 with great approval from the public.

Early on, ratings for Congressional Democrats were consistently near 50% as Americans had high hopes for their willingness to change the course of the country and place real limits on the deeply unpopular Republican policies. But as Congressional Democrats became more and more characterized by capitulation and an unwillingness to stand up to Republicans, their approval numbers steadily dropped to its current mark, just one point away from their lowest approval rating of the last 14 months.

The more willing Democrats are to stand up to Republicans and oppose their defining policies, the more popular they become. The less willing they are to do so, the more eager they are to erase distinctions and accommodate this deeply unpopular party, the more unpopular Democrats become. The empirical evidence for those propositions is close to indisputable. The profound rejection by the country of the Republican Party permits only one lesson: the country wants a party that opposes them, not resembles or fears them.

It is very clear to the non-Republicans who watch the political arena closely that the Republicans have failed. Fred Kaplan of Slate magazine points out why the Republicans have failed so completely at governing. The Republican incompetence is based on two major fantasies, "... that the world changed after Sept. 11, when it didn't, and that the United States emerged from the Cold War stronger than before, when in fact it was weaker."

The image of the Democratic Party leadership in Washington is that they all came to power by compromising with (1) those who based their actions on those fantasies and (2) those who were pushing the Christian evangelist agenda. Look at the key Democratic Congressional leaders.

• Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader - Senate Democratic Whip, first as minority whip from 1999 to 2001 and again from 2003 to 2005, and as majority whip from 2001 to 2003. He was minority leader in 2005 and then became majority leader when the Democrats took the Senate in 2007. While he has at times been confrontational against the Republicans, he apparently sees his job as seeing that the Senate actually appears to be functioning, not simply in paralysis. That and the Senate tradition of the filibuster gives the Republicans a great deal of leverage over him. Reid is also a conservative Mormon who is likely to believe the same fantasies as the Republicans.
• Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House - She was first elected to Congress in 1987 in a safe Democratic district and became House minority Whip in 2001. When Dick Gebhard ran for President in 2002 she was elected House Minority Leader to replace him, and when the Democrats retook control of the House in 2006 she was elevated to the position of Speaker. She rejected running on the idea of impeaching President Bush, apparently fearing that the voters would see it as nothing more than political payback for the 1998 Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton. She apparently saw any effort to impeach Bush as a net political negative for the Democratic Party, and has successfully blocked all efforts in 2007 to impeach him.
  
  I guess it's a fine line. An effort to impeach Bush could be viewed by voters as the Democrats being just like the Republicans, but refusing to entertain impeachment is clearly viewed by many voters as refusing to stand up to the clear Republican political atrocities and even criminal wrong-doing. Does the electorate really consider an effort to impeach Bush and Cheney to be the same level of destructive and otherwise purposeless politics as the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton?
• Steny Hoyer, House Majority Leader - Hoyer is a long-time close associate of Nancy Pelosi. They by both interned together for Senator Daniel Brewster (D-Maryland) in 1962. Hoyer was first elected to Congress in 1981, and was elected Minority Whip in 2002, replacing Pelosi when she was elevated to House Minority Leader. When Pelosi became Speaker of the House in 2006 Hoyer became Democratic Party Majority leader.

Have the clearly extremist actions and positions taken by the Republican Party in both Congress and in the White House made it impossible for the Democrats to respond for fear of looking equally extremist?

Clearly a lot of Democrats believe that what Bush and the Republicans have done since 1994 call for correction, but many of the correcting actions can be painted as politically extreme by those who see only what is happening today and ignore the history that brought those actions on.

Those of us who are Democratic political junkies get really frustrated when The Democratic Congressional leaders so clearly ignore the history of criminality, corruption and incompetence of the Republican Party. The refusal of the Democratic leaders to stand up to the Republicans is immensely frustrating. But most voters do not follow politics closely. They do not decide who to vote for until shortly before the election, and they have little historical knowledge of the candidates or the issues. They are easily swayed by emotional issues, political negative attacks and rhetoric from people they don't know well enough to know they should not trust them. Unfortunately, winning the elections depends more on the last minute deciders than it does on the issues and candidates' effectiveness in office that the political junkies consider so important.

The Democratic leadership clearly feels that they have to cater to both groups, and more to the late deciders than to the political junkies if they are to win elections. It is not enough that a politician be correct. First he or she has to get elected. The result is that the Democratic leadership is not doing anything to rock the boat. Rocking the boat makes it more likely that the politician will lose the election. Unfortunately, more and more of the American public wants change, and change means rocking the boat.

What's wrong with the Democrats? 2008 is very likely to be a pivotal election. The Democrats don't dare do anything to lose it, so they are doing nothing controversial that might be viewed as rocking the boat. The Democrats need every swing election to succeed in removing the Republicans. The Republicans, particularly in the Senate, have nothing to lose by being pure obstructionists, since this is an election they are unlikely to win anyway. They can do whatever they need to to keep the Democrats from appearing to successfully run Congress, and the Democrats will get the blame unless some things are passed. Since they are unlikely to regain the Congress, they don't need the swing districts and states. Having written off the close elections, the Republicans can be as obstructionist as they want. The Republicans taking the action are in secure districts and states, and if they can bring the image of the Democrats down to the same level of incompetence the Republicans already enjoy, then they can survive as a party and perhaps regain the Congress in a later election.

The facts that large segments of the Washington Media prefer the Republicans, defunding troops in Iraq can easily be spun as failure to support the troops at war and as abandoning the fight before it is lost, that a coalition of "blue dog" Democrats still cross over to support Republicans, the ability to threaten a filibuster can require a minimum of 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate and that Bush can veto with impunity (since he isn't running for reelection) and demand a 67 vote majority to pass anything, all together make responsible governance by the Democrats almost impossible.

Worse, the Republicans are quite good at stopping any progress and then placing the blame on the Democrats. The only thing left for Democrats to do is publicize the Republican obstructionism and face down George Bush. Bush's pool ratings would seem to make this easy, but can the Democrats hold their coalition together as the attempt it? Joe Lieberman and the Blue dog Democrats are happy to cross over and make life more difficult for good governance.

Hell, I don't know the answer. It's going to be interesting to see how this works out this year.

What are the Democrats going to do with the Presidency?

The race for the Democratic nomination for President has rather clearly been narrowing down to a two person race between Obama and Hillary that leave John Edwards out of contention.

Damn. Edwards is still my preferred candidate. His vision of what America needs to be doing and becoming is, in my opinion, the best vision being offered. But the Democrats this year have an abundance of talent.

Hillary, in my opinion, is too trapped by the corporate-dominated past, but she clearly has the capability to get things done in Congress. Of course, once she gets out of the "window" of the election campaign in which every statement she makes will be carefully parsed and might lose her votes, she is very intelligent and quite educable. (This assumes that her aging 90's left-over advisers can be sidelined - not an assured process.) She is also probably the best "vetted" Democratic candidate and of the three remaining candidates for the nomination, she is the most likely to be able to deal with the expected Republican nasty and illegal politics which everyone knows will start as soon as the Democrats settle on a nominee.

Obama has clearly demonstrated an ability to draw enthusiastic voters who have not generally participated in the political process in the past, and at the same time his very candidacy promises to be another major step for America away from the curse of Racism that has bent our American politics and society in some very sick directions. Obama has shown the ability to organize the get-out-the-vote extremely effectively in both Iowa and South Carolina. I'll be looking to see if his ability extends to Super Tuesday. I have some (strong) doubts that Obama really understands what the Republican conservative movement means and what methods is is willing to use to get its way, and I don't think he is sufficiently Progressive to build the kind of effective America for the future that remains true to the dream of 1776 and which is embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Can he really repair the damage the conservative movement has done to America if he becomes President? I still have my doubts, but he certainly has convinced a lot of voters that he is the best person running for the nomination and may well get it. If he does, then all my quibbles go to the side and I support him 110% in the general election because there is no competent Republican running. Like Hillary, I suspect that he is very educable and is reality-oriented.

The real issue for November is not which of the three Democratic contenders gets the nomination. What really matters is that Democrats are appointed to fill the roughly over 7,000 Federal civil service leadership and support positions listed in the Plum Book. Those are the jobs that Dick Cheney was responsible for filling in the legislative
and executive branches of the Federal Government. They are generally subject to noncompetitive appointment (e.g., positions such as agency heads and their immediate subordinates, policy executives and advisers, and aides who report to these officials), and the people who fill those jobs are the ones who dominate the Federal government for the President's term of office.

It was Cheney's ability to fill those positions with his personal loyalists that has made Dick Cheney more powerful in many ways than George W. Bush himself. The result has been a federal government that is not only dominated by movement conservatives and religious nuts who ignore reality, but also one that reflects Dick Cheney's personal paranoia.

Whoever the Democrats elect as President (and they must elect the next President if any form of Constitutional American democratic government can hope to survive) needs to quickly strip out the authoritarian movement conservatives and Republicans from the "Plum book" positions and replace them with pro-American Democrats. That's what the election in November is really about.

To get there, it currently looks like Barack Obama is going to become the Democratic nominee. This is, of course, subject to the results of the primaries and caucuses held on super Tuesday, but the good bet today is that Obama will get more delegates than Hillary will. If the concept of political "momentum" has any real meaning, that will effectively give Obama the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

So what happens to Hillary and Edwards is Obama gets the nomination? Matthew Mosk in today's Washington Post suggests that a President Obama appoint John Edwards as Attorney General. Not a bad move, but what if Obama takes Edwards on as Vice President? That would combine the ability of Obama to bring in younger voters, African American voters, and those of us who think he represents the best social vision of a great future America, with the Progressive policies championed by John Edwards. I think that combination would be a real win-win proposition.

But I don't want to leave Hillary out. She has shown that she is an effective Senator who is well-respected on both sides of the Senate aisle. I also understand that Harry Reid would like to leave the job as Majority Leader. That would be a perfect position for Hillary Clinton.

A real problem in the Democratic nomination race has been the abundance of talent. It's been hard to decide which single person to choose as the Presidential nominee. well, it looks like that problem is being resolved and will be resolved in the near future. Now, just imagine a President Barack Obama, Vice President John Edwards, Senate Majority Leader Hillary Clinton, and a Secretary of State Bill Richardson. Then I am sure that retired Gen. Wesley Clark would be a strong contender for the job of Secretary of Defense.

I'm not sure it could get much better than that.

Eggs. Yet to hatch. Counting Chickens. It's going to be a long, rough election this year. Still, a man can dream ....

Democratic Party superdelegates

In the 1970's the Democratic Party established a system of primaries and caucuses to select the delegates to the Presidential Democratic Nominating Convention. This removed the selection of delegates from the control of elected Democrats and party officials and made it a more open and democratic process. While this removed the party power brokers from total control of who the nominee for President would be, those power brokers wanted to retain some power, so the concept of the "superdelegate" was adopted. [The Republican Party does not have superdelegates to their convention but do have 123 delegates who are representatives of the Republican National Committee.] So who are superdelegates?

Superdelegates are party officials and elected Democrats who are permitted to attend the Presidential convention and vote on the nominee even though they have not gone through the primary/caucus selection system. They are not bound to any particular candidate, although they can endorse whoever they please. Here is the official description of who superdelegates are, as found on the Democratic Party website:

1. The individuals recognized as members of the DNC (as set forth in Article Three, Sections 2 and 3 of the Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States); and,
2. The Democratic President and the Democratic Vice President of the United States, if applicable; and,
3. All Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives and all Democratic members of the United States Senate; and,
4. The Democratic Governor, if applicable; and,
5. All former Democratic Presidents, all former Democratic Vice Presidents, all former Democratic Leaders of the U.S. Senate, all former Democratic Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic Minority Leaders, as applicable, and all former Chairs of the Democratic National Committee.

At present the total number of delegates to the Democratic Presidential Convention will be 4,049. That includes 3,253 delegates selected by either primary or caucus from the states along with 796 superdelegates. Superdelegates thus make up 19.66% of the total number of delegates at the convention. [These numbers exclude all delegates from both Michigan and Florida because the Democratic Parties in those states scheduled their primaries earlier than permitted by the Democratic National Committee. The convention will have the power to reinstate those delegates should it be considered desirable.]

The website 2008 Democratic Convention Watch is keeping track of which superdelegates have endorsed which candidate for the Democratic nomination. CNN Politics.com is performing a similar function. The two differ slightly but not significantly in the number of superdelegates each candidate has.

At the moment, Hillary Clinton has about 210 delegates to Obama's 123 and Edward's 52, with the magic number of 2,025 as the number of votes that will determine the Democratic nominee.

It's time to condemn all of Congress for unamerican activity

As you might notice in my previous post I find the utterly despicable behavior of Congress in condemning MoveOn.Org for its advertisement against the White House ventriloquists Dummy David Petreaus to have been a total failure of our government.

I'm not the only one. Rick Perlstein does a better job than I have of condemning Congress. So does Digby as she also quotes the recently freed (no more Times Select) New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman.

Is there really no solution left except to bring an army of bulldozers to the west side of Washington, D.C. and push the entire city into Chesapeake Bay? When we do, we need to finish by salting the ground it the city sat on.

Republican State Legislator Kirk England switches to Democrats

According to this morning's Fort Worth Star-Telegram Texas State Representative Kirk England of Grand Prairie has announced his switch from Republican to the Democratic Party. The district leans Democratic, as was shown when Kirk England, as the incumbent, only defeated the Democratic challenger in 2006 by 250 votes.

The 150 member Texas House of Representatives will thus be 79 Republicans and 70 Democrats, with one normally Republican district not represented at the moment. This is Kirk England's reaction to the dictatorial behavior of the Republican Speaker of the House Tom Craddick in the most recent house session. Craddick has been Speaker of the House since the Tom DeLay-financed Republican take-over of the Texas House in 2002, which led to the well-known runaway Democratic legislators as the Republicans used three month-long special sessions to redistrict the Texas Congress persons.

There may be hope for Texas yet, particularly with the national Republican Party dissing the Hispanics and all immigrants, Republicans everywhere dissing the African-American vote, and with Congressman Peter King (R-NY) who is an advisor to the Rudy Giuliani campaign announcing "Unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country." The Republicans seem to be getting frustrated or something and are letting their authoritarian, anti-Liberty and anti-minority opinions surface in the media.

GOP Congressmen giving up on retaking House

Greg Giroux at CQ Politics has posted an article that Democrats will find enjoyable. The recent announcements by Dennis Hastert (R-Ill), Debra Pryce (R-OH), and Chip Pickering Jr. (R-MS) along with two earlier retirement announcements (Ray LaHood (R-IL) and Duncan Hunnter (R-CA))makes it five Republicans leaving the House. Speculation is that more Republicans, looking at their continued minority role in the House in the future, can be expected to join those five.

Hastert and LaHood had to announce their retirements this early because the Illinois Primary was moved to February 5, 2008, the earliest Congressional Primary in the U.S. ever. The very early filing deadline requires them to have already begun distributing filing petitions which are due November 5. If the party is going to nominate someone else of those two seats, LaHood and Hastert are forced to get out of the race now. Other states have filing deadlines as late as January, so we may well be seeing additional Republican retirements.

On the Democratic side of the Aisle, only two congressmen have announced that they are not running for reelection. Mark Udall (D-CO) and Tom Allen (D-ME) both are leaving the House to run for Senate. The Colorado Senate seat is open and the Maine seat is held by Republican Susan Collins who is facing an increasingly Democratic electorate, so both Senate campaigns have realistic possibilities. The only Republican who has announced that he is not running for reelection so that he can run for higher office is Duncan Hunter. Rep. Hunter's run for the Presidency has never been anything more than a tremendous long shot.

In the Senate, only Wayne Allard (R-CO) has announced his retirement. No Democrats have made an announcement. This might be because the Senate is so close to parity right now that Republicans think they might have a chance to return to the majority, so they aren't ready to give up before the 2008 election. However, of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2008, 22 are held by Republicans and only 11 by Democrats. That makes the Republicans more vulnerable to a net loss of Senate seats.

2008 is already shaping up to be an interesting election year. As of right now, it certainly looks like it will be more fun for Democrats than the recent decade has been.