A New Season of War

Saurabh Das/AP

Remember Afghanistan? Think hard. I know other, more important stories have taken over our attention lately: the gushing geyser of oil threatening the eco chain in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond, the pseudo civil war in Thailand, the European economy in the toilet, Rachel dating Jesse St. James of Vocal Adrenaline...

But guess what tovarich? Spring in Afghanistan doesn't just mean a fresh, new field of fiery red poppies to refine into opium and heroin. No suh, you crazy trainspotters. May means we're back in the business of war, wa-hoo! Unlike most Americans who have so moved on with this story, yours truly is obsessed with the "Central Asian Roundabout." Maybe it's because, as the namesake of You Know Who The Great who failed to annex Afghanistan to his collection of real estate, I feel the need to vindicate my brother-from-across-the-centuries and pick up the slack--pen, not sword, you understand. Hey baby what can I say... I'm a lover, not a fighter.

Or maybe it's because somwhereabouts the winter of '79 your not so humble opinion writer was hanging around a disgusting pensione in Rome, waiting for his entry visa into the United States, and befriended an old Soviet emigré who proceeded to school yours truly on the catastrophic mistake the CCCP had just made, invading Afghanistan. And ever since, this always-curious writer has been shaking his head at just how idiotically analogous to the Reds, America's meddling into افغانستان has been. Maybe not.

In any case, Spring has sprung, the roads have defrosted, and it's back to the front we go. If you haven't yet heard, Taliban insurgents launched a brazen assault on the American base at Bagram Wednesday morning, sparking a "large and confusing gun battle that left at least five American soldiers wounded and seven guerrillas dead." (NY Times)

Taliban leaders claimed that seven suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the gates of the base, clearing the way for more than 20 other fighters to get inside. The Taliban reports appeared a bit conflagrative, as they often are. But American officials confirmed that the base, one of the largest in Afghanistan, had come under an "ambitious and unusual assault." (NY Times)

An American official confirmed that the base was bumrushed by as many as 30 insurgents, but that no one had actually breached the defenses.

The assault on Bagram comes on the heels of an attack Tuesday by a suicide bomber in Kabul, who rammed an explosives-laden bus into an American convoy, killing 18 people, including five American soldiers and a Canadian officer.

That attack — and the one on Bagram on Wednesday — appeared to be part of a larger campaign directed at the capital and its environs. In recent days, the Taliban have smuggled five suicide bombers into the area, an American military official said.

A last check still has the White House muttering something about packing up and getting out only after establishing a strong, local governance. Historically speaking...good luck with that. If the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Indian Maurya Empire, the Muslim Arab Empire, the Sasanid Empire, and the Great Soviet Empire couldn't tame the baby, chances look a bit thin for our broke-ass selves. But hey, have you heard? Fox is putting on Glee after the Super Bowl next year.

In a move to head off questions about its long-simmering tensions with Hamid Karzai, last week the Obama administration rolled out the red carpet for Our Man in Afghanistan, granting him unprecedented access to Washington's top brass and royal treatment denied to even the closest of US allies.

But don't be fooled by appearances. Tensions are still boiling just below the surface. For all the pomp and circumstance of the four-day visit by the Afghan president and his posse of cabinet ministers and senior advisors, the Obama administration is working hard behind the scenes to weaken his authority by reinforcing local governance to boost elusive stability of the war-torn country.

Stay tuned. This series is slated to develop very slowly. And more than likely, never end. But you know, in the wise words of Eric Arthur Blair (aka Georgie Porgie Orwell): "War is Peace."

A salam alaikum brothers, and pass the AK-47s.

BookFaced

 
I'd like to humbly offer my reasons for deleting my profile on Facebook, at the risk (and reality) of losing touch with many good friends--some of whom write opinion here.

The answer that I've heard time and time again to my recent move has been: it's online, it's the Internet...you should assume everything is public. If you don't want your information or data made public, you should not have made a profile on the service to begin with.

Yet therein lies the issue. When I first signed up with Facebook, back in 2006-ish, I was promised complete control over information I wished to keep private. Over the last four years, Facebook has continually changed its parameters and has constantly worked to un-cover information that would then be sold to third parties for the sole purpose of marketing. Or...for, perhaps, something else.

As Facebook has relentlessly changed its functionality, privacy controls have become opt-in, rather than in place by default. As users, we have been asked to constantly maneuver through the labyrinthine field of permissions to keep whichever pieces of data we want, private.

My second issue with the philosophy that "everything is public on the web" is: if that is true (or the norm) then what is to be done about the majority of us consumers doing, for example, online banking--moving money between accounts, or transferring into other accounts held with different banks, paying off credit cards, or entering our social security numbers into seemingly secure sites/fields etc.? It is quite un-nerving when you apply that open-web thinking.

And to the people who have told me: "I have nothing to hide, they can watch me, they can have whatever they want" I say: keeping information private does not always mean one is doing something illegal. One should have the option of storing information that will not be made public (think: private, IM conversations regarding one's sexual orientation).

But more than the annoyance of having my time line clogged with incessant Farmville or Mafia Wars updates from my high school buddies, or the inundation of requests for social causes and groups working to rid the world of evil, my departure from Facebook was fueled by the culture that is being nurtured by Facebook CEO, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. It scares me. These are inroads for invasion of privacy that are rapidly transformed into slippery slopes to totalitarian domination. Closed societies, if you've studied history, don't start off with a bang. They slowly and systematically take away rights and freedom. I know. I come from a country which modeled itself after Stalin's Soviet Union.

Already Facebook has partnered with certain sites whose functionality one cannot fully enjoy, unless he/she has a Facebook profile. That is not an adherence to the philosophy of a free web; that is the beginning of "world domination" so to speak. When I log into Pandora and it offers me choices based on my Thumbs-Up preferences on Facebook, I get freaky-deaky about the shared information.

Since the deletion of my Facebook profile last week, I am sad to announce that I've lost touch with a handful of good people. I have sent emails, yes, but the interaction is gone. I wonder if it's for good. We'll see.

I'm not confident enough people on Facebook really care about what's happening. The service has become beyond addictive, especially to people in my age range (late 30s-early 40s)--a fact that to this day has me baffled. Maybe, at the core, we're insufferably narcissistic. Maybe we think the most mundane details of our lives are exciting. Maybe we've been tweaked by our parents, or not given enough proper attention, to believe that we are now, suddenly, the center of the universe.

For whatever reason, I'm out.

I Hear The Train A Comin'

OK, so I'm still mulling over a diatribe about Obama's presidency so far and how I'm at this point going to have a hard time voting for his reelection in 2-1/2 years, but I haven't had any real time to think it through properly.

For now I'd like to talk about the recent distribution of money for rail projects all over the country that Obama just handed out. I'll do my best to not put you to sleep with this post, but I make no promises.

This will be a really long post it seems, so I put regions/states in bold so you could skip ahead to read what it happening by you, I know not everyone is all geeked out about the entire train network like me.

The national media has done a horrible job of describing what the projects are where this money is going. About the only thing most people know is that Obama just handed out $8 billion for "high-speed rail projects" that will come to fruition some time way down the road (and with how train travel has gone in this country for 40 years you couldn't be blamed for thinking this will all probably happen about the same time we colonize Mars).

Well, yes and no. I'm here to let you know some details that maybe you haven't heard. The first is that most of this money is not going to true high-speed rail lines and the second is that a lot of these projects will have real results a lot sooner than you think.

Now of course Obama's plan doesn't yet do anything close to what I would like to see invested in our rail network. To do that he would have had to announce a plan to convert our interstate highways to eight-track high-speed trunk lines (two tracks dedicated to freight, two local passenger tracks, two express tracks and two super-express tracks for going non-stop between large cities like Chicago to L.A. or San Francisco) and I know that's just a dream of mine that won't be happening anytime soon. But it does do some good things, even if they are not all high-speed rail systems, though the politicians love to refer to them as high-speed. Europeans must laugh heartily at us calling a train going 110 mph "high-speed."

Some of these plans that are being touted as high-speed lines will only be returning us to speeds (90 to 110 mph) that trains in America achieved on a regular basis as long ago as the 1940s. But let's not dwell on that.

Here are some of the details to some of the projects that just got funding. Note: almost all of my info comes from a news wire that is only accessible to Trains Magazine subscribers (yes, I'm that big of a nerd) so that's why there are no links to sources. At the end of the post you'll see a map of the projects.

And while I will be writing about the transportation benefits of these projects, Let's not forget that these projects, while helping rebuild our national infrastructure that is in such terrible decay that it might as well be made of sugar, will mean thousand and thousands of construction jobs as well as thousands and thousands of permanent jobs.

All aboard!

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True High-Speed Rail Lines. Two states did very well, mostly because they both had true high-speed rail (155 mph and higher) plans in the works that had voter approval (Florida's story is complicated as the state GOP killed it several times even after voters passed it) and other financing in place.

Florida, (web site) with a huge population of senior citizens and the largest tourist attraction in the country has a major need for better public transportation, and this will be a big step forward. The $1.25 billion they got from the federal government will allow them to get to work immediately in building the first segment of their HSR system. Construction will begin in 2011 or 2012 for a dedicated passenger line between Tampa and Orlando that will have trains traveling at 168 mph, doing 16 round trips a day initially. Plans call for this segment to open in early 2015, five short years from now.

California (web site) got the largest chunk of the rail project money and for good reason. California has a plan in place for an HSR system that even the Japanese and the French would call "high-speed." Long term plans call for an 800 mile system stretching from Sacramento and San Francisco to San Diego with 300 daily trains traveling at 220 mph (!!!!!) by 2026. They will first build the Anaheim-L.A.-San Jose-San Francisco segment with completion targeted for 2020.

Once up and running, trains will make the trip from L.A. to downtown San Francisco in less than 2 hours and 40 minutes. Which kicks the shit out of the six hour drive. It also competes very well with the flying time of 1:15 considering the extra amount of time you have to spend getting to and from the airports, security screening, the longer amount of time required to board planes and other hassles. Downtown L.A. to downtown S.F. in 2:40? Try doing that on a plane and let me know how that works out for you.

Which is exactly the goal of high-speed rail. Build a nationwide network like what California is planning on building and you can accomplish a major goal of rail and transportation advocates - eliminating flights of 600 miles or less.

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Midwest. (web site) I really though there would be more for the planned Midwest HSR. Obama is from Illinois and James Oberstar, the head of the House Transportation Committee and a big train booster, is from Minnesota. But I suppose Florida and California are much more important to keep happy with their larger number of electoral votes in presidential elections. But the Upper Midwest states didn't come up empty handed.

Wisconsin will be the one of the first places (along with Ohio, see below) that the public sees what is being accomplished with the rail funds. The fact that there is currently no train running between Chicago or Milwaukee to Madison, a major college town, is insane. That will soon end, with $810 million going to help with a planned Milwaukee to Madison extension of the current Chicago-Milwaukee route. Now this will not be a high-speed train like Florida or California, but there are plans to upgrade tracks along the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor (where there are already seven round trips a day) and from Milwaukee to Madison to give trains the capability to run up to 110 mph.

Not only will this train be great for those of us that live in Chicago and want to go spend a weekend in a great town like Madison, but gives a great transportation option for those UW students from the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, as well as giving them a direct "train to plane" transfer with a stop at the Milwaukee airport. It will also serve a large group of people in Wisconsin, with 76% of the state's population living within 30 minutes of a station on the route, giving towns without a lot of transportation options access to the national train network.

And best of all, thanks to some foresight by the state to have already ordered two 14-car trainsets from Talgo in anticipation (and to help their chances) of getting the federal grant, the Madison train will be up and running in 2013. That means in three years we will have train service where there wasn't any before.

The future of this line looks even better, as Minnesota was given $1 million to begin a study of extending it all the way to Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Over $1 billion went to a combination of Illinois and Missouri for improvements to the Chicago-St. Louis-Kansas City corridors. This will go for track improvements to bump up train speeds to 110 mph in several sections and add more trains to the now five round trips between Chicago and St. Louis and two to Kansas City.

Other funds went to a combo of Illinois, Michigan and Indiana for lots of track improvements to reduce congestion along routes between Chicago and Detroit/Port Huron/Grand Rapids. While this may be less sexy than a new high-speed line, it is no less important. Congestion on the lines kills on-time performance which in turn kills ridership levels. People will choose to take the train, even if it takes a little longer, as long as they know it will get there when it is supposed to get there. Amtrak's record ridership increases the last five years or so have quite a bit to do with their better on-time performance system-wide over that time.

Two projects that I'd hoped would receive funding but didn't are planned lines from Chicago to Iowa, one to Dubuque via Rockford and another to the Quad Cities that has future plans to also extend to Iowa City (serving a huge number of college students who live in the Chicago region) and Des Moines, and even to Omaha, Nebraska. Iowa right now has only one train going through it, the California Zephyr to the Bay Area from Chicago, and it goes through nothing but rural areas and hits none of the state's population centers. Yes, Iowa has population centers. Surprising I know. The only thing Iowa got was a little bit of money for some track improvements along their one passenger route, which will end up being a bigger benefit to freight than passengers.

But the Illinois government has committed to funding both lines, so they will happen, just not as soon as if they got the fed money.

No state with such a sizable population has been treated as crappy as Ohio by Amtrak. Four trains run through the state daily - the Lake Shore Limited eastbound to New York/Boston, the Capitol Limited eastbound to D.C. and each of those trains westbound to Chicago - and looking at the schedule you would think that Ohio had a population the size of Wyoming's instead of being the seventh largest state.

All of those trains call at their Ohio stops after 11:30pm and before 7:30am. It is even worse for Cleveland, the second largest city in the state (and the biggest metropolitan area), with all four of those trains making their stops there between 1:45 and 5:20 in the morning.

Two more trains - the eastbound and westbound Cardinal trains between Chicago and New York through a southerly route - go through Ohio. The only stop in the state is Cincinnati; they run three days a week each and also call only in the middle of the night between 1:15 and 3:30 in the morning.

So Ohio has a grand total of seven Amtrak stations, six see daily service, one sees thrice weekly service and all trains call in the middle of the night and predawn hours. That will change in just a couple of years.

Ohio Received $400 million to start rail service between Cleveland and Cincinnati, which last saw trains in 1971. It is the first line of a planned Ohio regional network called Ohio Hub, which calls for 1,244 miles of new passenger service on seven corridors centered on the hubs of Cleveland and Columbus connecting all the large towns in the state (and the small ones in-between) and reaching out to Pittsburgh, Toronto, Detroit and Ft. Wayne.

This initial line will go up quickly - a plan that has a lot to do with why they got the money, no doubt - with only six stations at first (Cleveland, Southwest Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, North Cincinnati and Cincinnati) and three round trips a day with a target opening date in 2012. Which means Obama could be at a ribbon cutting ceremony in the middle of his reelection campaign.

Then, riders of the light rail in Cleveland will finally have a reason to use the Amtrak station stop, which has never made sense since they built it, seeing as how the light rail only runs during the day and Cleveland's Amtrak trains only stop there at night.

I wish they would get money to move the train station back to Tower City in the middle of downtown instead of way out on the waterfront. Baby steps.

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Southeast. (web site) This region, outside of Florida at least, didn't see a lot of major projects get funded. But there were a couple things done that could set the stage for future expansion.

North Carolina scored the best in this region, getting $520 million for upgrades on the state's successful Charlotte-Greensboro-Raleigh route, allowing them to bump up train speeds to 90 mph which will shave more than an hour off the travel time from Charlotte to Raleigh (competing nicely with travel time by car), and also to buy more locomotives and passenger cars to add more trains to the schedule, adding passenger flexibility which brings more riders.

There are long-term plans to get the line's speed up to 110 mph, which would get the travel time between Raleigh and Charlotte down to about an hour-and-a-half.

Virginia got $75 million to help add a third track to a section of the main passenger corridor through that state, which is huge when you consider that it is on the main corridor that connects New York and D.C. with just about the entire Southeast and sees lots of freight traffic. They also got another $25 million to add a crossover track to help ease congestion between Richmond and Raleigh, NC.

Again, not as sexy as some other projects, but more people take the train when they know it will get there as scheduled.

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Of course, the Southwest got almost nothing. Texas got less than $11 million to do some work on an existing line even though they had applied for $1.8 billion. That's what you get for giving the world George W. Bush, bitches.

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Pacific Northwest. Not as much as they hoped for, but money for the Eugene-Portland-Seattle-Bellingham-Vancouver Amtrak Cascades train will be a big help for capacity and on-time improvements.

Washington got $590 million for several track improvement and grade-separation projects to ease some bottlenecks and slightly increase travel times (the state DOT is saying by 5%) and they plan to add two more daily round trips between Portland and Seattle.

Oregon only got $8 million since there are only a few miles between the Washington border and Portland (the stretch to Eugene got no project funding this time around), which will go to some minor track improvements and upgrades to Portland's Union Station.

Washington and Oregon planners have high hopes to eventually get funding to build a dedicated right-of-way that handles 150 mph trains, allowing the trip between Portland and Seattle to take only a little over an hour.

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Northeast. This part of the country is already the best served by rail, with the Northeast Corridor trains that include the pseudo high-speed Acela service (going up to 150 mph for a mere 16 mile of the entire route between Boston and D.C., mostly running between 120 and 135 mph) as well as a ton of other routes serving the region. A total of $485 million was granted to this region, here's how it breaks down:

The Northeast Corridor service (Boston-D.C.) was given $112 million, though Amtrak also was given another $706 million from a different pot for work on this line. Most of the money will go to replace infrastructure that will probably fall apart in a few years if something is done now, including a 100-year-old bridge in New Jersey that hosts 100 Amtrak trains and 330 NJ Transit commuter trains every weekday. Some of the funds will also go to study replacing the tunnel under Baltimore and to the building of a new station at the Baltimore airport.

New York was given a big chunk of the money to increase performance on their NYC-Albany-Buffalo Empire service. Trains already run faster in a lot of sections on this corridor (110 mph) than in most of the country, but some improvements will include a second track in an area where there is only one, track crossovers, better signal systems and the like to increase reliability (do I have to repeat that thing about people taking trains if they run on time?) as well as station upgrades in Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, including work to make stations ADA compliant.

Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont were given a combined $160 million, all for improvements the Vermonter route, which runs from D.C. to St. Albans, VT. A beautiful train ride, it is also very slow. Major upgrades in tracks and routing - double tracking a segment in CT, new routing in MA (saving 25 minutes on the route) and lots of track work to increase speeds in Vermont - will make this train faster and more reliable, thus attracting more passengers.

Pennsylvania got $27 million to do some final small improvements on the NYC-Philly-Harrisburg Keystone service trains. They already run at 110mph on electric power, but three remaining grade crossings will be eliminated, taking away the last slower zones on the line. There is also money there for starting to plan the extension to Pittsburgh.

Finally, Maine got $35 million to extend their successful Boston-Portland Downeaster Amtrak train (one of the few trains in America to have free wireless internet) to Freeport and Brunswick. And in Brunswick there will be cross-platform connection to the spring through fall Maine Eastern tourist rain to Rockland. It has been a long time since people have been able to vacation in the beautiful state of Maine without a car, but that will be much more of an option in about two years when this extension opens. Someone will be able to jump on a train, well just about anywhere, get to Boston, jump on the Downeaster to Brunswick and take the Main Eastern to Rockland where they can grab a ferry to any of several beautiful islands.

A vacation to coastal Maine and you can read a book and have cocktails while getting there. Why the hell would anyone want to drive?

We've got a long ways to go to catch up with Europe and a few Asian countries, but this is a start. A very small one, but a start nonetheless.

(click to enlarge)

Today In Attack Ads

 
Folks, this is epic, seriously, this ad has it all: You've got farm animal imagery for unfathomable reasons (well, I guess the reason is a cheap visual gag); you've got Terry Gilliam animation; you've got rambling rhetoric; you've got dramatic music...Too bad the point gets muddled in all the excess, and who exactly this ad is aimed at isn't clear, beyond "true" fiscal conservatives...Still and all, it's a hell of a three and a half minute ride. Enjoy.

Enormous hat tip to former SEI member Anna.

More. Of. This.

 
It's being called Obama v. GOP. Doesn't matter what it's called, today Obama walked into the House of the Reps and went toe to toe with them during an Q&A session that lasted over an hour.

This is so good, I'll forgo my comment about this sort of thing being missing during the last 12 months.

Here's the Q&A session:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Answering the Beige One...

There was a quote in the beige one’s recent post that got my attention and I wanted to answer:

Mr. President, during the State of the Union address, you said that you didn’t choose to tackle the health care reform issue just to get a legislative victory under your belt. I believe you, but can you tell me how taking someone that is unemployed, or maybe is employed, but still can’t afford decent health insurance and making them buy some kind of policy from the very insurance companies that have screwed us in the past; how is this not capitulation? How do you go from the Public Option (and you did campaign on the Public Option) to trigger plans and not see that as dispiriting for the people who voted for you?

I must call up a post I made on Ft. McHenry earlier today:

Reforming Health Care is more complicated than what the beige one is making it out to be in his statement. This is why the Democratic solution doesn't fit on an effing bumper sticker. Short of ripping everything up and installing a Single Payer Plan (which is my preferred choice – but good luck getting the votes for that in either chamber), you’re going to be surprised at what choices you have to do reform the system.

And by the way, I’ll get to the beige one’s unemployed dude in a minute. But to debate his point, I have to go to the beginning.

First, you start off with the concept of Universal Coverage. At its core, this is what we all want. Of course, since you want everyone to have access to the system, you have start with ending the ban on pre-existing conditions. This is just basic. Everyone loves this. It polls great.

But, if you end the ban of pre-existing conditions, what happens? Well, sick people who couldn’t previously get insurance will jump into the system, and healthy people will leave figuring (at this point correctly) that they can just buy insurance when they need it (i.e. when they're sick). If that happens, Insurance rates don't just rise, they skyrocket. (I believe Paul Krugman referred to this as an Insurance Death Spiral). If everyone in the Insurance Pool is pulling money out of the system, the Industry can't cover all the costs.

Not won’t, can’t.

So, to keep the healthy people in the system, thus keeping costs low, you have to force the Healthy People to buy insurance (yes, force). This is called a mandate, which everyone hates, and polls terrible.

The mandate is not Insurance putting a gun to our heads, and demanding our healthy citizens. This is just how Insurance works (Auto, Home, what have you). It’s all about managing risk. You have multiple Healthy people putting money into the system covering the one Sick person who takes money out. Doing that keeps our rates lower (though not non-existent). One day, those Healthy People will get sick themselves, but there will be other Healthy people covering them, so the cycle goes on.

Now, if people are made to by insurance, well...some of those people aren't going to be able to afford it (like The beige one’s unemployed guy), so you need to have subsidies to help those who can't pay for this crap, or increased access to Medicaid to do the same. Once you've taken that step, you pretty much have the bills that are wandering their way through Congress.

The lack of a Public Option is a loss, but there are parts of Europe (I think the Netherlands, hardly a bastion of Conservative thought) that have similar systems but don't have Public Plans. It's not a disaster if Health Care Reform doesn't have one. It's just infinitely better with one. What should still pass isn't not pretty. It’s nowhere in the same good neighborhood of Single Payer (the best and truly cheapest way to fix Health Care), but given the fact that Health Care Costs will double in ten years, it’s our best shot.

And might I remind the beige one a little something about his unemployed guy. Sickness cannot tell, nor does not care when someone don’t have a paying job. If he or his family gets sick while he’s unemployed, he’s screwed, and the rest of us are going to have to cover him. At least with even the crappier Senate plan, he has options, like Medicaid.

This is also a basic sketch of the Massachusetts Plan, which also wasn’t popular when it passed, but try taking it away from them now.

All that mess...was just for one issue: Health Care Reform. Imagine that, multiplied a thousand times (given the thousand problems we have) where every Federal dollar spent has a lobby attached to it.

If I have a complaint about my fellow progressives, it is that they’re spending a lot of time with their heads up their arses, thinking everything is simple. “If he just did this, everything would work…”

No it won’t.

Leadership is never simple. Certainly not as simple as Liberals make it out to be.

And comparing everything to the New Deal?

My fellow Liberals may be many things, but experts on Roosevelt they ain’t (particularly at the Huffington Post where they quote the New Deal like it was the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. Too bad none of them seem to have...you know...read a book on the the New Deal.)

I’ve been working on a project set in the Depression so I’ve been reading nothing but Depression stuff for the last year and a half. And let me tell you, the New Deal was horribly, horribly compromised from jump. In fact Norman Thomas (Socialist Party leader and Dennis Kucinich of his day, once compared the New Deal “cough drop for a case of pneumonia.” African-Americans were suspiciously left out of a lot of New Deal Programs. Farm Workers were cut out of the National Labor Relations Act just as sharecroppers were going on strike. FDR had a more favorable Congress (with an even bigger majority), but even then they bickered and guffawed about every little damn thing. The Supreme Court struck down a lot of the initiatives from the 100 Days, being about as ethical as the current Roberts Court. There were fears of open armed rebellion, not in the south, but in fuckin’ Iowa. And oh yeah, unemployment was at 25%, almost triple what it is now.

Roosevelt got some things he wanted, some things he didn’t. (He was, it is often forgotten against the creation of the FDIC). You have to look at the whole picture, and not just your imagined corner of it. It is the overall metric of FDR's Presidency that we judge him on, and judge him rightly. It has to be the same standard for Obama, or otherwise the Progressive movement is more full of shit than I feared.


Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

GOP – The Party of “No!” The Party of “Gimme!” The Party of “Fuck the Rest of You!”

 
And nothing that took place after Obama’s State of the Union is going to change that impression (and before any potential conservative wags start their bellyaching about being painted in that light, let me ask you this: How would you fix this very real problem? Hint: Glib answers only prove my point).

In the meantime, have you read or listened to any of the Republicans’ replies to Obama? They all pretty much say the same thing, with tiny derivations of the following: “The President is not listening to the American people,” “job killing agenda” “same old liberal agenda” “they just wanna spend spend spend” ad infinitum.

In other words, after Obama’s call for bipartisanship, he was met with more non-bi-curious partisanship. Big surprise, and let’s just take as a given that this sort of behavior won’t change anytime soon.

While political points can and likely will be gained from continued conservative obstreperousness, there’s the matter of helping the left/progressive/Democrats find its spine; for if the Republicans are the party of “LALALALALALAICAN’THEARYOU!”, then Democrats are the party of “Why’d he hit me even after I gave him my milk money?” Current Democrats are the political equivalent of the simp at the beginning of that old Charles Atlas ad you used to see in the back of comic books, the one who got his girl taken away from him after some douche came along and kicked sand in their faces. (“It’s just fucking sand, you pathetic sack of flesh!” I’d think.)

This is an untenable situation, and if our elected representatives on the left are wondering why it is they can’t seem to get traction for their policies for longer than a couple of days, they would do well to remember that there’s a lot to be said for consistency, backbone and, ultimately, being able to deliver. I know a number of people who identify as Republican, whether they agree with the right’s policies or not, simply because they get things done.

Historically for the left, sticking to our guns has proven extremely effective. Roosevelt’s New Deal faced an unbelievable amount of opposition before its passage, and most of those programs are still standing to this day. Medicare has been so successful over the decades that the modern day base of conservatives believes its existence is their god-given right; the same is true with Social Security. Even right wing sops to progressives have proven necessary; whatever else could be said about Nixon (the last real conservative/Republican president in my estimation, nasty piece of business that he was), it was under his administration that the EPA was created.

This is why I appreciated Obama’s open admonishing of legislative Democrats during the State of the Union address, delivered just before he chastised their Republican counterparts.

However, admirable though it was, it’s surely not enough; at least not to satisfy my thirst for real progressive movement within our government, and, to be plain, the problem starts at the top.

Mr. President, beneath the fervent feelings the Left, the Progressives (oh, but not the Liberals, no; perish the thought) among us expressed for your candidacy during the 2008 campaign, was not just a desire for change or hope, but for leadership. It’s the sort of thing Jon Stewart expressed succinctly in this clip from the Daily Show.

Leadership is more than delivering uplifting, tough and compassionate oratory rhetoric. Leadership means sticking your neck out and providing ever important details, not just throwing out a blanket statement and then leaving the minions to figure out how to deliver that, and if they screw up, well, it’s their mess. “We still got some version of what we wanted, right?”

It means holding the hands of those doing the leg work, if necessary, in order to get them to deliver the desired policy you want. It means bolstering those who quake in their boots in the face of loud diversionary tactics as it is happening. It means browbeating those in your party who are visibly caving to the interests of lobbyists and industry.

It means not capitulating on goals and ideals in order to simply get things moving. It means remembering that bipartisanship is achieved by having a strong detailed plan and bartering over the small stuff. It means acknowledging that the other party isn’t being reasonable long before they just start saying no and acting appropriately at that moment, not weeks or months down the line.

Mr. President, during the State of the Union address, you said that you didn’t choose to tackle the health care reform issue just to get a legislative victory under your belt. I believe you, but can you tell me how taking someone that is unemployed, or maybe is employed, but still can’t afford decent health insurance and making them buy some kind of policy from the very insurance companies that have screwed us in the past; how is this not capitulation? How do you go from the Public Option (and you did campaign on the Public Option) to trigger plans and not see that as dispiriting for the people who voted for you?

Is it better than what we had before? I guess, but it isn’t Bold. Not as bold as the New Deal. It’s watered down Clinton progress and that is saying something.

That’s just health care reform; there are numerous areas where you’ve caved, Mr. President. I agree that some of that caving was probably necessary, but I don’t think that’s the case in every instance.

Lastly, I implore you not to take Progressives for granted. Please. One could say that it was moderate Republicans who put you in office, but beneath that, there was the massive Progressive support that provided the large bulk of your votes.

There is a school of thought that says that progressives will always turn out for the Democratic candidate, that they’d rather swallow a scumbag than face the alternative. You could argue that this has been true for quite some time.

But, increasingly, the more we get left out in the cold, the more potentially foolish notions get in our heads. Corrupt voting practices in Florida and the Supreme Court may have been responsible for handing George W. Bush the presidency in 2000, but let's remember that Ralph Nader was around to seduce valuable votes away from Al Gore.

It may be akin to cutting off our nose to spite our face, but not being heard, paid attention to, or appeased will drive anybody to extremes.

Consider this a friendly reminder.