Nick Lewis: The Blog

I'm going to kickback and watch the best news show on TV, PBS's Frontline. You can watch the full show online here. Here's their blurb:

After surviving one of the roughest presidential elections in modern times, President George W. Bush singled out one member of his team in particular, calling Karl Rove the campaign's "architect." But Rove, a longtime Bush adviser and confidant, is much more than a political guru, he is also the single most powerful -- and ambitious -- policy adviser in the White House. [watch video]

From USNEWS:

Convinced that Internet weblogs, or blogs, helped defeat Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and out Dan Rather 's bad reporting on President Bush 's National Guard duty, House and Senate Republicans are scrambling to put them on their government Web pages. "Senators want them even though they don't know what they are," says a strategist helping several GOP senators develop the chat and news pages.

Lenin has put together a comprehensive analysis of the pentegon's post-Iraqi-election PR (read lie) campaign. It is a must read.

By Howard Zinn

As I write this, the day after the inauguration, the banner headline in The New York Times reads: "BUSH, AT 2ND INAUGURAL, SAYS SPREAD OF LIBERTY IS THE 'CALLING OF OUR TIME.' "Two days earlier, on an inside page of the Times, was a photo of a little girl, crouching, covered with blood, weeping. The caption read: "An Iraqi girl screamed yesterday after her parents were killed when American soldiers fired on their car when it failed to stop, despite warning shots, in Tal Afar, Iraq. The military is investigating the incident."Today, there is a large photo in the Times of young people cheering the President as his entourage moves down Pennsylvania Avenue. They do not look very different from the young people shown in another part of the paper, along another part of Pennsylvania Avenue, protesting the inauguration.I doubt that those young people cheering Bush saw the photo of the little girl. And even if they did, would it occur to them to juxtapose that photo to the words of George Bush about spreading liberty around the world?That question leads me to a larger one, which I suspect most of us have pondered: What does it take to bring a turnaround in social consciousness--from being a racist to being in favor of racial equality, from being in favor of Bush's tax program to being against it, from being in favor of the war in Iraq to being against it? We desperately want an answer, because we know that the future of the human race depends on a radical change in social consciousness.It seems to me that we need not engage in some fancy psychological experiment to learn the answer, but rather to look at ourselves and to talk to our friends. We then see, though it is unsettling, that we were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness--embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

Caught this editorial at TownHall.com:

Democrats, about to choose a new national chairman for their party, are on the verge of making a decision that is both fraught with potential consequences and interesting for the insight it offers on the current state of the party.

The front runner—indeed, increasingly the prohibitive favorite—is former Vermont Governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean.

Just think how scared we'd be had this editorial argued that Howard Dean was a good choice...

Progressives need to push for more federal funding of programs which make broadband more accessable to lower-income and rural residents. If you are wondering why, then take another look at these two maps.

Aldon Hynes shares some advice from a friend of his on how Progressives can communicate their message more effectively:

Get in touch with your own values; know them well. Engage in respectful discussions with people with different viewpoints. Do not argue. Do not be vitriolic. Express your values and find common ground with the person you’ve been talking with. Shake hands over your newfound friend; go buy him or her a beer. Participate in the local culture. Watch a Sitcom, go to a little league game, attend a PTA meeting, and chat at a beauty salon. Embrace and smile, knowing we are all Americans after all.

[read more]

The left end of the blogosphere was mostly quiet tonight. And why shouldn’t it have been? As Mark Twain once observed, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” And lately, I must say our messages have been foolishly self-centered, at best.

Let’s be honest. Our “progressive” movement has had an insignificant impact on public affairs at best. Our causes: human rights, social justice, equality, and peace are only talked about, never actually made into solid policy. And should this be a shock? After all, what is a "progressive"? I'd imagine the dozens of answers to that question would be as diverse as the multitude of factions that call themselves "progressive." In fact, I'd say that Progressivism is not a movement at all. Rather, it is a plurality of narrow interests and radical politics that needed a word to replace "liberal". And as Adele Stevenson once remarked, "a liberal is one who had both feet firmly planted in the air."

The various sects of Progressivism -- which include “the deaniacs”, the Kucinichers , the elderly “new deal liberals”, the Socialists, environmentalists, pacifists and anarchists – have historically kept their goals self-centered, static, and uncompromising. This is a shame; if these sects could cooperate and support each other, they might be able to revolutionize our government. However, these sects won’t have that. Our bickerings usually come down to something like, “my issue first -- we need to save the seals, than we can concentrate on racial equality". As a result of this selfishness, our goal --- the movement – is forever exiled to highbrow books, “alternative” publications, and the local coffee shop debating societies. Meanwhile, the conservatives, as always, continue to find total unity around the pursuit of dollars. See the difference? Ask yourself, how powerful of a motivation is greed? Now ask yourself, “will reframing our message be enough to fight the interests that own our government”? I hope you see where I’m going with this.

Howard Dean writes in his latest column:

Letting go of central control is what gives voters real power. When I used the phrase "you have the power" during the campaign, I meant that by working together, Americans could overcome the forces of the right wing and reassume their constitutional role in running the country. What I didn't understand was that "you have the power" was more than that. It didn't apply only to people's ability to change America, it also applied concretely to their ability to make everyday decisions about how they would cause that change.

...The idea of a decentralized campaign terrifies most politicians who have gotten used to putting out ideas and letting others respond. We discovered that the path to power, oddly enough, is to trust others with it.

Democracy Now! has released streaming video of William Rivers Pitt speaking at the Progressive Democrats of America Summit in Washington D.C.

"The alternative media, all of the people who are involved in this, need to engage the mainstream media on its own ground. And we have to do it in a number of different ways. First way, I think, the alternative media would do well to help promote in any way, shape or form, internet connections and easy access to internet and easy access to machines in poor and rural communities...."

[link to video and full transcript]