Prejudice does not stop being prejudice despite being popular or widely held. And constitutional rights do not loose their force even if they are applied to people, beliefs and behaviors that make many other people squeamish. That’s really the entire point of the bloody thing. Fundamental rights are not subject to popular opinion or the vote. That’s because they are fundamental rights.

Those who would say otherwise are just opportunistic jack-wagons. And I think the general reaction to their odious arguments is best summarized by the great orator, Sean Connery:

Naturally just like the gay marriage “strategy” the party’s elected leaders will pretend to be scandalized and run to distance themselves from these “outside the mainstream” initiatives. All the while while enjoying the benefits of the extra two or three percent on their bottom lines.

via Joshua Green at the Atlantic:

The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.

The legalization movement appears to be gaining steam. As many as a half dozen states could consider the issue this fall. If the correlation Merlino describes really exists, then Democrats will have an advantage in those states. Does it?

Political scientists disagree about whether gay marriage bans helped Republicans, though a growing body of scholarship suggests that they probably did. So far, nobody has measured marijuana’s effect at the polls. But Stephen Nicholson, a leading expert on ballot initiatives at the University of California at Merced, told me that he plans to. What’s more, he sees an intriguing precedent in the nuclear freeze initiatives of 28 years ago, which he has studied. “In the 1982 midterms, 10 states had ballot initiatives on the nuclear freeze,” Nicholson told me. “This had a significant positive effect on Democratic candidates.”

Green has a bit more on the phenomenon/possible strategy in a slightly longer article here. And there is a full cover story in the National Journal this month on the growing movement to revisit marijuana’s status as a controlled substance. But you’ll need to subscribe or run to your local library to read that one.

As a tactic would it be dirty and underhanded? Sure. But they called Karl Rove a genius for doing the same thing with gay marriage. This might actually do some social good. Win-Win I say.

In re: McCrystal. A couple of things that should pop right out as the nut graphs of this whole affair but that (typically) have been totally buried by the media in the whole scandaliciousness frenzy surrounding the Rolling Stone article by , Michael Hastings. One, Rolling Stone still does some awesome journalism. Two, mainstream media=total failure.

The sense of wonderment that pervaded on most of the TV puditocracy, e.g. “How is this guy ever going to get access again?”

Access isn’t the point because he’s now got the story of his life. Fuck access. See John Stewart.

And it was an outstanding bit of journalism. The “scandalous” stuff was really in the first 500 words. The rest of the article is a very illuminating piece on Gen. McCrystal — a soldier’s soldier if ever there was one — and our strategy in Afghanistan. For those of you who can’t be arsed to read 1,200 words of the most important journalism of 2010 here are the nut graphs of the Hasting’s piece:

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fucking losing this thing.”

Later on:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. “Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan,” he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. “It’s all very cynical, politically,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. “Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there’s nothing for us there.”

Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. “Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,” says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. “A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we’re picking winners and losers” – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

Of course, Stanley McChrystal is not in charge any more is he? And what we are not getting right now is any kind of rational debate on exactly what the fuck we are planning on with regards to an exit strategy for a war that has drug on for one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-NINE years and shows no sign of being over inside of a decade.

It seems to me that in our hate and fear of Al Quaida is holding hands with with a whole series of national neuroses that we can bundle up under the label, Vietnam Syndrome, e.g. support the troops at all costs, keep the faith, the illusion that winning only requires enough will power and the right strategy, etc. ( Read the article for why all of this is relevant in regard to Gen. McCrystal in particular but for the current generation of military upper brass in general.)

Looking at Vietn… sorry, Afghanistan through those lenses we have totally overlooked the really important thing about war in general; it is supposed to further the national interest.

A U.S. Marine, from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic)

Outside of finding and killing some murderous douchebags hiding out (mostly in Pakistan) in caves and mud huts — a job that can be done by a few handfuls of drones, spies and special operators — where is the national interest in spending hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of dollars and thousands of lives here?

Hundreds of billions of dollars. Do you have any idea what we could have done with that (borrowed) money? For the war in Afghanistan we could have built a coast-to-coast high speed railway. We could have sent every graduating senior in America to four years of college for the past nine years. We could have had free freakin’ healthcare for everyone.

Via Democracy in America, a recap:

I think popular deficit anxiety is related to a mistrust that what worked to end the Great Depression will still work today. The political will to achieve sufficient stimulus spending to kick-start the American economy out of its shortage of aggregate demand in the 1930s arrived in the form of an existential military threat: for four years, the government blew out all the stops on spending and printed money like there was no tomorrow. (Wars make it easy to get people to think that way.) At the end of the war, the national debt was over 100% of GDP, and the de-militarising economy faced a realignment that dwarfs anything today’s creative-destruction fans could imagine. But that late-1940s economy could count on two things: lots of young families who’d been starved of consumer goods for years and had built up a tremendous appetite, and a technological moment in which all sorts of fabulous new consumer goods were just being invented and advertised and pouring onto the shelves. In an industrial economy that was inventing amazing stuff people had never seen before—Whirlpools, Buicks, split-level ranch houses—demand was not hard to create. Today’s post-industrial economy is still creating a lot of amazing stuff people have never seen before, but a tremendous amount of it is downloadable and free. Much of the rest is fabulously expensive, and only useful if you have a rare genetic disease.

Paul Krugman has a famous essay in which he explains that our inability to imagine what people will spend money on as the economy changes is a failure of our imagination, not of the economy. But still, I’m having a hard time imagining what people will spend money on as the economy changes. We could certainly use a bunch of high-speed trains, a smart electric grid, highway and water-main upgrades and so forth, but only government can pay for those things, and to do that, you have to either tax or borrow. And those are the two things the public remains unwilling to do, because they don’t believe the spending will do the trick.

It seems to me that there is some room for splitting the difference here. I think a reasonable coalition could be assembled to cut spending by:

• raising the retirement age to 68 or or even 70, as the EU is preparing to do
• increase the social security contribution limit above $102,000 to say… oh, half a million sounds good

cutting several tens of billions from the Pentagon budget by killing programs aimed and fighting a Major Land/Air/Sea War (I’m looking at you DDG-1000, F-35and, and Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle) and refocusing on asymmetric war fighting (people).

One could then take about half of that and put it straight to bottom line deficit reduction — the retirement, SS moves alone would have long-term beneficial help for the deficit beyond the simple year-on-year revenue savings — and put the other half into big budget, big vision jobs projects like high speed rail and smart grid technology.

This is something that could probably get done in the House. In the Senate on the other hand, good luck getting it through without some Senator blocking the process because his/her sacred cow of a DoD project is on the chopping block.

If the political blogosphere covered basketball games, we’d not only be told about shots, makes, and misses, but every rotation of the ball on the way to the hoop. “He shoots, the ball appears to be on course, it’s getting closer and still seems like it’ll make it, I give it a 90 percent chance of going in, IT HITS THE BACK RIM, it didn’t make it, it definitely appears as though it may bounce out, it’s going to bounce on the rim a second time, now it’s perched on the lip and may go in or out — an instant poll of the crowd confirms that 75 percent of people think it’ll wind up a miss — my God it’s actually falling into the basket, this moment it is falling through the net, it’s a basket!”

So, yeah. Remember last July when Senator Jim DeMint declared that Republican’s would make health care “Obama’s Waterloo?” How’s your French, Jim? There were two great generals in that battle. I guess Obama gets to be Wellington.

But seriously, this blog has been saying for more than a year that the GOP was playing a dangerous game by betting the farm on absolute opposition to all Democratic initiatives. And now where are they?

Republican David Frum hits the nail on the head:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Funny how circumstances can change, innit? American’s are now going to have eight months to decide for themselves how they like the reality of health care reform as law, as opposed to the spectre of Obamacare socialist fantasy. They’ll find that the red flag does not fly above the United States and that freedom has not evaporated.

Instead they may just decide that they have an expanded view of freedom; freedom from needless pain and suffering; freedom from the hideous choice between food and medicine; freedom from the fear and shame of debt and bankruptcy.

Millions will come to grips with the fact that this is what change looks like. It looks pretty much like the day before except perhaps just a bit brighter.

The sun will rise on a November morning eight months from now and millions of Americans will then cast their votes based on the realities of what has been done this week, not the fears. They will have had time to reflect on what political courage means and what it’s worth both as a matter for the pocketbook and the history books.

And history will write, not one single Republican voted for it. And if yesterday was Waterloo, might November look like Cannae?

This was a strong speech. There were some real clunkers of course, the spending freeze most notably. No one, including Candidate Obama, believes that is a serious debt reducing measure. But overall, especially at the beginning and end it was very powerful, classic Obama. It will leave little doubt among anyone inclined to give the President any benefit of the doubt that he is sincere and dedicated to accomplishing the goals he sets out. But the larger question is, as one pundit put it, “Do you think speeches can change things?”

The answer is, they can help. They can give a boost of impetus. But that has to be followed up with some strong force if one is going to move the huge mass of cynicism and fecklessness that is the US Congress. So the question that I and many who want the President to succeed will be asking ourselves is: what is he willing to do to provide that necessary force? To date, Obama has been what many of us knew him to be all along: a smart, moderate politician. But now, with the forces of cynicism and self-interest so entrenched, we need him to be the idealistic master of political jujitsu that we saw in the campaign.

I fear that we are at a tipping point in our public lives in this country. That public trust in the ability of our elected officials has eroded to the point where the legitimacy of the government is increasingly called into question. If there is to be meaningful change, then the time is now. Comes the hour, comes the man. I just hope President Obama, can be the man Americans want him to be.

Aporopos of that last sentiment. Here is Andrew Sullivan yesterday:

“[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and Johnadams scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society,” – John Adams, as cited by Jim Sleeper.

My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance.

I’ve been working over recently the idea that our institutions inability to deal with our problems is the meta-problem of our day. (See here and here.) When people’s faith wanes so much in their government to govern responsibly and responsively to the nation’s needs then the entire legitimacy of the government begins to be called into question. And that gets us into some very dangerous territory.

Epic Fail

A year later we’re all echoing Casey Stengal’s famous lament about his 1962 Mets.

I could write up a long post analyzing the Democrat’s institutional deficiencies and misteps over the last year. But I have work to do. The problem boils down to this: Democratic elected officials do not have the courage of the movement’s convictions with regards to change and reform. Thus, meaningful policy legislation is a tough slog even with super-majorites. Repbulican officals on the other hand have lots of courage of conviction. Their problem is that their convictions are based on fantasy and failed policies.

But the Republicans know what they want and they know how to get it. Democrats know what they want and many know how to get it. But they are scared to be as heavy-handed as they need to be in the face of the know-nothing, never-say-die Republican opposition. I’m sick of it. Politics ain’t beanbag.

You know what’s worse than hopelessness? Hopes dashed. Expectations unfulfilled. Hopeless people are meek, and well, hopeless. People who have seen a glimmer of light that is then snuffed out… Those people are pissed off. That is the stuff revolutions are made of.

But that’s where we are right now because the Democrats in Congress and in the Iowa State House (and Governor’s mansion) have utterly squandered the massive electoral mandates they were handed on a silver platter two years ago for no other reason than lack of courage of their own convictions.

If you want to laugh and cry at the same time, Jon Stewart offered another master class in accurate political commentary thinly disguised and humor last night. Sadly for progressives and mainstream journalism, Stewart calls it as it is better than anyone else can, making the complex simple and highlighting the absurdity of it all.

Breaking down the Massachusetts special election and the potential consequences for health care reform and everything else the Democrats want to do in the next few years, he said in part:

Let me see if I have this straight. You need to replace perhaps the most beloved liberal in the history of the Senate with a candidate that believes Curt Schilling is a Yankee fan. Because if this lady loses, the health care reform bill that the beloved late senator considered his legacy will die. And the reason it will die is because if Coakley loses, Democrats will only have then an 18-vote majority in the Senate. Which is more than George W. Bush ever had in the Senate when he did whenever the fuck he wanted.

The Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurses office because, once again, they have glued their balls to their thighs.

Also, look for our takes on the State-of-the-State message tomorrow by Noon on the website and on Wednesday in the print edition of the Register.