I understand what they were saying.  Is MyDD a blog to support and build the Democratic Party, or is it a blog to tear down the Democratic Party with internicene warfare based on "progressive" litmus tests?  Sometimes I wonder.

Or better, Virginia.  Maryland is already blue, Virginia needs a little nudge in that direction.

Yeah, that's real productive.  They vote with us 80% of the time and are better than the progressive caucus on at least one issue - the Second Amendment.  So let's just oppose every bill they sponsor.  If you aren't for us, you're against us and all that.  How mature.

Since the Blue Dog Caucus has 44 members but I only see 17 people on this list, what was the purpose of your including "Blue Dog" in the title?  Is it to attack the Blue Dog "brand" and if so, why?

In a nutshell, neoliberal ideology.

The belief that expanding the marketplace is the key to spreading prosperity.  Globalization is seen as inevitable and good; impediments to expanding markets should be removed; growth for the sake of growth is seen as good; increasing "productivity" (meaning more output for less capital expenditure) is seen as good.

It's a form of trickle-down economics.  They believe prosperity will spread if markets grow, but the irony here is increasing productivity and removing impediments to market growth destroy the gains that were hard-won in the past for working families.

Unions are seen as an impediment to market growth by this ideology.

Neoconservatives share neoliberal market ideology with an added emphasis on using belligerent foreign policy to "spread democracy" (read: open up more markets).  But there is also a "liberal" version of this ideology which justifies it with rationalizations that neoliberalism and globalization go hand in hand with "diversity" and other buzzwords.  A significant segment of the Democratic Party became infected with this ideology during the 1990s.

Thankfully this trend seems on the wane in the Democratic Party.

Thanks - will do!  I wasn't aware of Progressive Historians but now that I've had a look I'm impressed.  It looks like it might be right up my alley.

What you said about politics not happening in a vacuum.  The biggest problem I see with assuming the 2000 electoral college results represent a baseline is the electorate is known to shift drastically given different circumstances.

In many ways 9/11 solidified the 2000 electoral college results as a baseline for several years to come, but that effect is bound to wear off, possibly soon as it fades further into memory.

Barring major events, the electorate has been known to shift wildly from election to election - look at the Clinton era when states like Georgia and Montana went for Clinton in some elections, or back to 1988 when states like Illinois, New Jersey, and Vermont were still voting Republican.

I would argue that the blue state/red state divide as we see it right now is a temporary thing, and largely driven by media hype.

Um, on the list of Top 100 Reasons Why Romney Should Not Be Elected President, this ranks at about #275.  Harry Reid and most of the Udall family are Mormons too...

Also worth noting is people with past felony convictions are still barred from voting in a handful of states, including Florida and Virginia.  The number of states affected is small, down around 10 or less, but there is also still a widespread misconception that this is the case in all 50 states.  

See here: http://www.hrw.org/reports98/vote/ keeping in mind this report is almost a decade old and out of date as several states mentioned have since modified their laws or their Democratic governors (in Iowa and Tennessee) have taken steps to make regaining voting rights a near-automatic process.  Florida is still the most egregious exception.

Wondering that myself...since he's the only Republican I would have even remotely considered voting for.

Also conspicuously missing include Tom Vilsack, Mike Gravel, and Dennis Kucinich.

It works, but they don't include all the candidates.  

Several issues come to mind here:

* the Fairness Doctrine - abandoned during the Reagan Administration.

* Media deregulation during the 1990s, leading to media consolidation into the hands of a few large companies like Clear Channel.

* Format standardization - a corporate marketing, product positioning tool affecting not only talk radio but popular music formats as well.  

* A liberal preference toward the non-profit (which in radio means: NPR, Pacifica, nonprofit community radio), leading to liberal voices on radio becoming ghettoized on the lower end of the FM dial.  This essentially gave conservatives free reign all over the AM bands, especially after programming directors decided that music was no longer a viable format on AM.

I fondly remember when locally owned talk stations were quite eclectic in who they carried.  Some talk stations alternated liberal and conservative hosts, a possible holdover from the Fairness Doctrine days.  At some point the corporate marketing types decided that "talk radio" meant "conservative talk radio".  Mavericks don't fit the corporate formats anymore, except maybe for those who established their popularity prior to consolidation (e.g., Art Bell) and are too popular to drop.  Liberal talk radio as an AM radio format is still in the developing stages.

Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine and media re-regulation to limit the number of stations one company can own may be a pipe dream at this point, but I really wish Congress would consider it.

Thanks for replying..

Just to clarify - I don't think of Dobbs as a paleo-libertarian at all, but some paleo-libertarians share his antiglobalization views which is why I mentioned them in the same paragraph.

Regarding immigration I didn't mention it but also suspect Dobbs' "Broken Borders" series has a lot to do with the hostility toward him.  Yet it's an issue where progressives hold widely diverging views.  There does exist a segment of progressives trying to enforce an orthodoxy on this issue - including name calling of anyone critical of illegal immigration as "racist" or "anti-immigrant", which I don't see as being particularly constructive.  It's an issue where there is no one correct progressive view.  The issue is a big can of worms with no simple solutions.

Gravel isn't the only Dem to advocate a flat tax during a presidential run, Jerry Brown did too (flat income tax in his case) in 1992.  I believe Eugene McCarthy also eventually backed some kind of flat tax and certainly became an IRS critic in his later years.  The issue seems to be one with appeal to some older maverick Dems.  I'm not quite sure why except that maybe there is lingering libertarian influence among some progressives dating from the 1970s, because of the tendency of libertarians at the time to ally with the left - something they abandoned after Ed Clark's presidential run in 1980.

That said...a national sales tax is the one idea Gravel has that I really cannot get behind.  I looked into this issue myself many years ago and concluded that if we need to be considering replacing the progressive income tax with anything it should be a graduated asset tax, which is an even more progressive system of taxation.  Sales taxes are by nature very regressive.  Even if necessities such as food and medical care are excluded, they are still regressive in that the poor will pay a higher portion of their income as taxes than the rich.  A national sales tax would also by necessity have to be a rather high rate (over 20%, maybe higher) in order to maintain current levels of federal spending without running up the federal debt to astronomical levels, and once people consider just how much more things will cost, the idea loses any appeal it has rather quickly.

He lives in Virginia now and I believe he's running mostly to get his National Initiative idea some exposure.