With the handing down of the Hamdan decision last week there was a spate of stories planted by unnamed Republican operatives about how forcing a congressional debate on the status of detainees in the "War on Terror". This spin was incredibly powerful and we saw front page stories in newspapers, offline and online, pushing this meme. Some on the progressive side, or rather those of us on the side of liberty and freedom, have pushed back against this outrageously divisive story line, but we have largely focused on the story line itself, not the underlying childishness of the storytellers themselves.

Fortunately John Yoo, the architect of many of the memos that were totally and utterly destroyed by the Supremes spoke publicly this weekend in the NY Times:

What the court is doing is attempting to suppress creative thinking.

This is not the logic of a serious person, this is the logic of a 6-year-old who has been brought to the Principals office for coloring all over some other student's notebook. And that is how we need to make sure we talk about these people. They are childish, petty and despise the fact that there are actually structures for authority here in the United States.

There's more...

As we collectively and rightly hammer the Washington Post for their ridiculous decision to give Repulican Party hack Ben Domenech a paid blogging gig on their site, lowering the bar of 'journalist' to levels that Nadia Comaneci couldn't even limbo, there is another Republican hack working away on the printed pages of the LA Times who we cannot forget... Now while many have called Jonah Goldberg the stupidest man alive, he has at least been working for an organization whose funding doesn't come directly from US taxpayers and isn't directly connected to the current administration... That being said, his column today is such an exercise in hackery that I can't believe I'm even writing this. But the reality based community must march on...

So today's column is designed as a call to our President to defend his decision to invade Iraq based on Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of WMD. Jonah then goes on to muddle around the issue of Al Qaeda and Saddam with words like "smoking gun" and other issues surrounding classified documents (as if there were classified documents that showed an actual working relationship, but the Bush Administration doesn't want to show them to us!). Now while this section was stupid, he further descended into levels that can only be described by more articulate snarkers like Brad Delong, so I will let Jonah's words define him:

The fact that Hussein turned out to be bluffing about WMD isn't a mark against Bush's decision. If you're a cop and a man pulls out a gun and points it at you, you're within your rights to shoot him, particularly if the man in question is a known criminal who's shot people before. If it turns out afterward that the gun wasn't loaded, that's not the cop's fault.

HUH? Are you kidding me? Is this really the right analogy? Did Saddam pull out a gun and point it at us? I certainly don't remember that? Do you? Here is what I think the more realistic analogy would be:

If you're a cop and you run into a guy who fired a gun against an enemy 15 years ago, but has spent the last 15 years being frequently searched for guns (and occasionally some 'guns' were found that were confiscated), and then you ask the guy if he has a gun and he says he doesn't, but since you know he shot someone before you search him anyway and don't find any guns and then you shoot him... Is this the cop's fault?

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While we knew within days of Hurrican Katrina that FEMA's response to this National disaster was totally unacceptable, it has taken DHS chair Michael Chertoff over five months to come to that realization, and this happened only upon the release of a report by the House of Representatives blasting his response, FEMA's response and the WH response. The changes he is proposing, while probably worthwhile on face value, are merely being used by a governing party that isn't interested in governing to cover-up the broader issues at stake and culpability that rises to the highest levels of the White House.

Last September I think we missed a great opportunity to clearly delineate Democrats and Liberals as the party of effective government in the aftermath of Katrina. We talked about it for a few weeks here and there, but were unable to build a consistent drumbeat and narrative that framed this tragedy as a parable for the Republican Party. Of course it is not George Bush's fault that a hurricane hit New Orleans, but it is his fault and his party's fault that the emergency response was so pathetic and disorganized.

Just as George Bush reminds us at every turn that we must not forget the lessons of September 11th, so must we remind everyone that we must not forget the lessons of Hurricane Katrina...

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This is a pretty cool model. I've been wrestling a lot with online governance issues, and Marc's a great thinker in this realm. Matt

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is we do here at MyDD, and how our efforts help put more Progressive Democrats in power. In general I think we entertain ourselves by speculating, debating and hypothesizing about what is going to happen in politics, what the implications are of what has happened  and of course constant discussion of what Democrats should do to win elections.

But I fear something is missing, particularly in this last component. Now, I've never run or won an election before, so I think it is a little crazy for me to make suggestions on how we should win, but I don't think it is crazy for me to suggest how candidates can better connect to their grassroots activists and clearly this is one component of winning elections. The challenge is for candidates is figuring out what the hordes of MoveOn members, Kossacks, DFAers, etc... collectively believe - what issues and messages are we looking for from our candidates? Sure there are plenty of blog posts, diaries and comments on lots of different topics in many different forums, but does what someone writes on DailyKos mean that we all support it? Do Chris/Kos/Stoller/Scott/etc... define us? Even if they did, where is this 'definition' located?

So what to do?

I am involved in a project that is designed to deal with this problem. The project is called the Online Progressive Congress and the basic idea is...

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While many of us focused on facing our deep-seated human-animal hybrid fears during the SOTU I was stuck with visions of wood chips and switchgrass dancing through my head...

The question I have for the MyDD community is presuming we actually do make a push to use wood chips and switchgrass to make ethanol, how does this impact the already wierd Senatorial US based energy coalitions. We know how ethanol makes life complicated for Senators in midwestern corn states, but what about wood and grass? I found a Dec. 2005 paper titled A Geographic Perspective on the Current Biomass Resource Availability in the United States(PDF) which has some data on where there is potential for sawgrass farming and where there is underutilized wood chip production. So, MyDDers, what can you tell me? Which Senator(s) will be selling us out to the sawgrass lobby? how about the wood chip lobby?

There's more...

In our daily efforts to push back against right-wing talkingpoints propogated by a media more than happy to parrot them without fear of retribution or retaliation, we have had occasional victories more than balanced out by multiple setbacks. The current effort to drive Chris Matthews to apologize for his outrageous statements is a more than worthy endeavor, is probably going to be victorious and is as well organized and fought as any battle we have yet to fight.

That being said, we can and must do better. We must get to the root of the problem, dig it up, expose it to the light and burn it down. This is no easy process and one which I am no expert in how to execute. However, this week an opportunity has arisen for us to begin the process...

As many of you may know, this week CBS and Time-Warner announced that they are going to merge UPN and the WB into a new network called The CW. Aside from our deep concerns as to the fate of Smallville and Everybody Hates Chris, this merger puts one of the truly despicable right-wing media operations in some serious trouble. Sinclair Broadcasting (responsible for among other things, pre-empting Nightline's show reading the names of the dead in Iraq, attempting to air an hour-long anti-Kerry documentary two weeks before the election and producing 'the point', a one-minute right-wing diatribe/commentary which all Sinclair stations are forced to air) owns 24 UPN and WB stations and it is unclear at this moment which UPN and WB stations will sign new affiliate agreements with The CW.

Since the announcement this Tuesday, Sinclair's stock has dropped about 12% based on the uncertainty of their future programming on those stations. We have an opportunity to make their stock hurt even more and keep them off The CW... That's right, by marshalling our forces we can make CBS and Time-Warner understand that we don't want them to affiliate with Sinclair's hate and right-wing bias. We don't want them to sign affiliate agreements with them... And you know what? If we speak loudly enough, even if they DO sign an agreement with Sinclair, Sinclair will have to pay a premium for the right to carry The CW. Even better is that these affiliate agreements often are for 10-year periods, so if we keep them off The CW now, they are not likely to be able to get on for a long long time.

To help make this happen I built a site with some friends of mine through our c4 StartChange which took on Sinclair once before, we've relaunched our StopSinclair.org campaign and are asking The CW not to sign affiliate agreements with Sinclair Broadcasting stations. We'd appreciate your support, your help and your ideas.

For more background on Sinclair go here.

I'm sure you all remember when the Washington Monthly piece on Markos came out a few weeks ago and there was a large and aggressive pushback concerning some factual errors, one of which involved Markos' alleged tri-weekly calls with Rahm Emmanuel. We were quickly informed that no, this was not correct, and not only was it not correct, but that Markos has NEVER met or talked to Rahm Emmanuel.

I, like others, was frankly shocked that Markos had never talked to Rahm... Now I'm not one who believes that we should all have direct access into the DCCC, but Markos? Come on, the guy runs the most heavily trafficked political blog in the friggin' universe and the guy in charge of winning back the US House of Representatives for the Democrats has never talked to him... unreal, but wait, IT GETS WORSE.

This morning I was at a small event with Jim Dean of DFA and in the course of discussing the Cegelis situation he mentioned that even though he considers the DFA to be a part of a 'coalition' (whatever that is), he himself has never met or talked to Rahm Emmanuel.

My mind began to spin... I mean really, this was an amazing admission. Here is a guy who is at least the titular head of a relatively massive progressive/Democratic organization (500+ groups and 600,000+ email addresses that directed tons of money last cycle), who is the BROTHER of the DNC chairman and he's never met Rahm Emmanuel?

I thought to myself, what is going on? What in the world is our party doing?

I had no answer and the only plausible theory I could think of is that there is no "Rahm Emmanuel" and that he is merely a myth created by Verbal Kint to scare us.