Your historiography is approximately 40 years out of date.  Lincoln's "10 Percent Plan" allowed the (white) voters in the ex-Confederate states to re-elect the same people who had led the secession, and Johnson later hamstrung the execution of congressional (the so-called "Radical" Republicans) mandates for using the army to enforce the law, allowing the KKK, in effect, to carry on a guerrilla war against the freedmen.  And as for engendering "ill will," I suggest you read (carefully) what Lincoln himself had to say in his second Inaugural Address about "the bondsman's 350 years of unrequited toil."        

"Famously, Grant allowed the confederate army to leave with their weapons and their horses--it helped smooth the post-war period greatly. We should learn that lesson."

Yeah--and what did that get us?  The KKK, 100 years of Jim Crow, and neo-Confederate apologists into the 21st century.  We should learn the lesson, indeed.

People are often rude (please don't shout).  As I previously observed, however, "religious believers in this country are not beseiged by an aggressive movement of militant atheists claiming that "belief" is inherently intolerant, but there is in this country a large and influential political-religious movement aggressively asserting that "non-belief' is inherently immoral."  

With all due respect, both to Ms. Chart and to the junior senator from Illinois, I maintain that this sort of thing:

"The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant."

concedes far too much ground.  There is a false equivalency here that renders the whole passage both intellectually dishonest and morally--yes, morally--suspect. The "paranoid style" of American conservatism to the contrary notwithstanding, religious believers in this country are not beseiged by an aggressive movement of militant atheists claiming that "belief" is inherently intolerant, but there is in this country a large and influential political-religious movement aggressively asserting that "non-belief' is inherently immoral.    

"I've long stated that a Clinton/Clark ticket would be the strongest were Clinton to become the nominee."

I've always thought he'd be HRC's best choice for a running mate, but oddly (or not?) when I suggest this it gets a lot of blowback, not least from the few liberals among military poeple I known. Clark is really, really unpopular with the officer corps.

"do the bloggers that pile on Biden really believe that he is racist, or are you just playing piling on for fun?"

Can't speak for others, but for myself the answer is: just for fun.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson I (1835-1914) was vice president of the United States under Grover Cleveland.  In 1900, he was again nominated for vice president by the Democratic Party, as an elder statesman intended to "balance the ticket" with William Jennings Bryan.  He was generally regarded as a "Cleveland Democrat," i.e., a business conservative, and was not particularly close to Bryan, either personally or politically.  The fact that the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900-65) happens to have been his grandson is, in my opinion, a coincidence with no great significance for American political history.

If I may add a  note on FDR: CB's account of FDR's "Flip" (love that term) is, in my opinion, mostly wrong.  (No offense intended, Mr. Bowers--I appreciate your analyses of contemporary politics.)

To start with, FDR's ideological reorientation of the term "liberal" did not occur during the 1932 campaign; it came later: not before 1934, perhaps as late as 1935-36.  Certainly, during the `32 campaign FDR called himself a "liberal," and insisted that the Democratic party was the "liberal" party, but he was using the term in a reasonably conventional sense, and that's not what outraged Hoover.  What sent Hoover up the wall was that FDR was getting away with running both to the "left" of him and to the "right" of him, simultaneously--for example, by calling for both increased federal expenditure on unemployment relief, and a balanced budget, at the same time (sound familiar?).  Hoover considered FDR a political and intellectual lightweight, who was too stupid to understand the contradictions (sound familiar?).

FDR "flipped" the meaning of liberalism in American political discourse during the so-called Second New Deal (1934-35, or 1935-36, depending on which historian is grading your essay exam).  This was a deliberate move in the run-up to the 1936 presidential election, designed to do two things: (1) identify the allegedly "radical" policy departures of the New Deal with the nation's political past (by appropriating the term "liberal" for his own movement, FDR reassured the nervous middle that he was not some kind of European-style dictator); and (2) send a tacit message (dog-whistle?) to the actual "left" that the New Deal in fact represented a break with what the "left" perceived as the hopelessly compromised politics of the (by then) "old" progressives.  FDR's success in doing (1) and (2) simultaneously (they don't call him "The Juggler" for nothing!) fractured the opposition into mutually antipathetic fragments: old progressives, southern conservatives, and business conservatives (to say nothing of the "hard" left, communists and the real socialists, for example).  It took two full generations, and a considerable assist from liberal self-destruction, before Goldwater/Reagan were able to pull together the old-fashioned, 19th-century style liberals (now known as "libertarian conservatives"), the business conservatives, and the southern conservatives into a more-or-less coherent political force.

"Until FDR, "progressive" was actually the most common term used to describe the mainstream of American leftism."

There is some truth to this, but stated this way it's highly misleading.  As "eugene" remarks above, "in those years ...'the left'...[consisted of] Socialists, radical labor unionists like Eugene V. Debs, perhaps folks like Edward Bellamy and Ignatius Donnelly."  Socialism, for example, was a serious force in American politics.

Two critically-important points about 19th-century progressivism are: (1) it was a broad climate of opinion, encompassing many diverse and differing streams of political, social and economic thought; it was not a political ideology, as such. (2) In terms of its political content, first and second generation "progressivism" included important elements of both "liberalism" and "conservatism."

In that sense (although without endorsing their definitions  of "liberal," "conservative," "moderate") I would suggest that "Chicago Jeff" and "Peter from WI" are onto a key point: historically, 19th-century progressivism was about breaking public policy free from the liberal-conservative continuum of political ideology; indeed, the outstanding political progessives of the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, can only be properly understood in terms of their effective fusion (in different ways) of "liberal" and "conservative" political values.  

I know you're kidding, but this is spot-on.  Perhaps this trend will provide a future Democratic president with an opportunity to replace some of the Wingnuts appointed to the federal judiciary in recent years with decent jurists.

No one gets appointed to the federal bench out of law school.  Candidates for federal judgeships have had many years, if not decades, to pay off their student loans and build up their personal wealth.  Moreover, no one is "drafted" into a judgeship.  Lawyers who'd rather maximize their income are free to do so.  I rather doubt that, even amongst lawyers, the most talented are motivated exclusively by pecuniary interests.

"He is no democrat, and the sooner people start calling him a Republican, the better."

Amen and A-men.  

Kaus is not self-loathing, though. It's liberals and liberalism he loathes.  His agenda is identical to the original domestic agenda of the neo-conservatives, a la Irving Kristol.  

"In 2005, the Democratic Caucus adopted a provision requiring a member of the Democratic leadership of the House to step aside temporarily when they have been indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years imprisonment may be imposed.
So - according to the rule - a bribery indictment against Jefferson would mean he would step aside from Budget."

Is it a fact that the rules define the "leadership of the house" to include seats on the Budget Committee?

"if Jefferson continues on the Budget Committee in the 110th, that would suggest ...continuing appeasement of the CBC"

Interesting choice of words.

"The CBC are bound - that's their established MO - to play the race card."

An even more interesting choice of words.

Why are you so determined to turn a problem into an issue, and incite intra-party hostility over it?

I suppose it's possible to take a principled position that any member of congress who comes under criminal investigation should recuse him/herself--or be recused by his/her caucus--although no such rule exists at present.  And certainly, many people--myself included--are uncomfortable with the CBC's apparent failure to address the "appearance of wrongdoing" problem presented by Rep Jefferson.  There is, however,  plenty of room to make the--highly debatable--case for moving against Rep Jefferson in advance of an indictment (to say nothing of a conviction) and/or to criticize the CBC's political judgment, without employing inflammatory and counterproductive rhetoric.

"He will need work from the progressive community"

Tactfully put. Good luck with that.  

"FDR was governor of New York for just over a year when he got the nomination"

FDR had been governor of New York for three and a half years when he won his first presidential nomination.  In addition to a solid record as a "reform" governor of the (then) most populous state in the nation, and an all-time landslide reelection as governor, he had made a good impression as the party's candidate for vice president 12 years earlier, after seven years as #2 at the Navy Department (including World War One).  At the time President Wilson appointed him to the Navy Department, he had served two terms in the New York state senate, and before that, had (briefly) practiced law in New York City.