Good thing Erick Erickson lives down in Georgia and not up in Washington State. Otherwise, we might have ourselves the "Cascade Revolution." At issue in the warped mind of Mr. Erickson is an environmental regulation passed in Washington State that bans dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. His response is to talk about an armed revolt against encroaching Federal regulations even though the law he's railing against happens to be a state law.

If the GOP plays its cards right, it will have a winning issue in 2010. But it is going to have to get back to "leave me the hell alone" style federalism where the national government recedes and the people themselves will have to fight to take their states back from special interests out of touch with body politic as a whole.

Were I in Washington State, I'd be cleaning my gun right about now waiting to protect my property from the coming riots or the government apparatchiks coming to enforce nonsensical legislation.

Up in Minnesota before she decided to lead the fight against China's attempt to impose a single world currency on the United States, the kook of kooks Michelle Bachmann was fighting to save incandescent light bulbs from extinction. Rep. Bachmann believes that the government has no business telling consumers what kind of light bulbs they can buy. She has also called any human connection to global warming "voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax."

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Rick Santelli's "Tea Parties" continue unabated. You can check Free Republic for the latest non-happenings. Apart from one this weekend in Fullerton, California  that had more to do with the situation here in the not so golden Golden State that drew 8,000 people according to the Orange County Register, these national reenactments of the Boston Tea Party, under false historical analogies at that (Bostonians were upset about taxation without representation, we have representative government), have been an epic fail.

I must admit, however, that the Grover Norquist and Michelle Malkin crowd irk me beyond belief for while they talk about 'personal responsibility,' the reality of their proposals would have the effect to allow the have to shirk their responsibility. Let's be clear, their view is that 'it's mine and I have a some god-given right to plunder and pillage'. Ayn Randism runs amok yet again. Where did American civic culture disappear to? What happen to the culture of the New England town hall and prairie populism?

While some of conservative neighbors are railing against higher taxes, I think it is time to take a page from a program in my native Colombia, Bogotá 110 Percent.

Antanas Mockus, who served as mayor from 1995 to 1997 and from 2001 to 2003, is widely credited with launching and sustaining this renewed sense of civic engagement and responsibility. As mayor,  Antanas Mockus did the politically unthinkable. He asked residents to voluntarily pay more taxes, 10 percent above their regular bill. The extra money would go toward social projects, he assured. That first year, over 60,000 bogotanos contributed. Now here's the real surprise:

"To my great pride, the highest percentage of participants came from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogota," Mockus said.

The 110 percent program is one reason that Bogotá has been transformed from one of the worst cities to one of the most progressive cities in the world in less than a generation. If you had asked me in back in 1994 when I last lived in Colombia if this was possible, I would have said "no mihijo" or no way Jose. To change Colombia, men like Antanas Mockus, the son of Lithuanian refugees and a mathematician and philosophers by profession, tackled civic culture. The approach was to upgrade the commons. Make the cities livable. Make them functional on human scale. Providing vehicles for citizen participation in the management of their communities.

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This diary was written expressly for Daily Kos, but I thought other progressive bloggers might find it interesting.

Yesterday I was devastated. A friend told me my favorite TV show Stargate, had been cancelled. This was actually announced last week, but I'm not involved in online fandom, so I had to get the 411 the old fashioned way. My friend is entrenched in online fandom, so I guess I'm in the second tier for info propagation from Stargate fandom ground zero. This is approximately where I would put myself in the progressive politics information stream, as well. Not in the room, but an interested party with my nose stuck to the window.

The word "devastated" might strike some as grotesque hyperbole in the context of a cheesy sci fi show. Wouldn't it be more appropriate for me to be devastated over Darfur or the warehousing of the poor in the U.S.? I've been pondering this for the last 24 hours, and I believe I've come up with some insights that may be of use to Kossacks and other people involved in political campaigns.

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I just read the NYT article about the stained glass ceiling for women in the church, and I was especially struck by this comment:

...in the marketplace of ideas and values, men matter most and...by definition, women have to take a back seat...

Why do men matter most in the marketplace of ideas?

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Over the last couple of weeks, if you listened through the sound of artillery bombardment and screams, you could hear one word being repeated over and over again: dignity. My ears first perked up when Link TV aired former President Carter's rebuke of the Bush Administration for insisting that Lebanon assume a posture of subservience. This morning (I believe it was on International Dateline), I heard an impassioned Dr. Amaal Saad-Ghorayeb demand dignity for the Lebonese people. A quick sprint through the blogosphere reveals dignity-based activism here and here and here and here.  

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