Progressive Issues for Progressive Democrats "Health care is a fundamental right." (Ted Kennedy, 8/26/08) * * * * * * * The Progressive Platform Project
"Once those intermodal trains can go through Stampede Pass, it will take some traffic off the main line and free up more room for additional passenger trains," said Uznanski.
By bringing the number of trains up to eight a day between Vancouver and Portland, ridership and ticket revenue will increase significantly. Currently ticket sales - what is known as farebox - cover 43% of the Amtrak Cascades' operating expenses; the state subsidizes the remainder. Run eight trains daily, however, the farebox recovery goes up to 70%.
It's all about frequency. When trains are frequency and convenient, ridership - particularly business travel - grows dramatically, said Uznanski.
It was a mantra I was to hear from experts all across the country - frequency builds ridership and only frequency significantly builds farebox recovery. Sure its great to have trains running more than 100mph in a corridor, but if there are only a couple of trains a day, they just aren't convenient enough to move people off the highway or away from the airport.
- John McCommons, Waiting on a Train, Chelsea Green Publishing: Vermont, p. 51
I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. Because there are so many enterprises that are succeeding, the competition for hard-working, educated and skilled employees is intense, and so wages and salaries rise.
One problem: he refuses to make it possible. The success of new business enterprise requires customers with the means and willingness to buy, and productive workers, equipment and natural resources. Romney's policies are:
To take even more of the means from those with the willingness to buy to those who place a higher priority on accumulating wealth
Offer his hypothetical entrepreneurs workers that are under-skilled and under-educated
Saddle prospective entrepreneurs that attended college with a burden of debt
Reduce the freedom of those workers with health benefits to take a job with that entrepreneur
And insist on leaving all of those entrepreneurs exposed to the risk of the next oil price shock recession throwing them into bankruptcy
He expresses a desire for a wonderfully desirable economy, but his policies promise that his administration will be too damn lazy to lift a finger to it possible.
Heck, that could be a bumper sticker: "Vote Romney for a Lazy, Do-Nothing Government."
I think there ought to be a rule. If a famous musician just a few years younger than you survives their twenties, they ought to make it until you can go as a retiree yourself see them singing golden oldies on a golden oldies tour. That's the way it ought to be.
This is not a political diary, as such, but just a log of my reaction to hearing the news. I heard the news on twitter, and after clicking through to listen to the linked YouTube clip ... and verifying the news, which at first I could not believe ... I set to browsing Youtube and sharing little reactions and memories, as one does when thinking about the passing of a pop culture star.
The tweet that sent me off on my journey was this one, which I retweeted with my visceral reaction:
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V @edgery / @TheTweetOfGod: This will always and forever be the definition of "nailing it". [...] || Wow. Shivers.
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My lord, it gave me chills again. Someone with the range to not merely belt out the high notes, but to sing them, and toss in a rising flourish on top of "Home of the Free" ... and the ability to sing the anthem as a song.
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NB. A lot of these clips are the VEVO music rights clearing house system, which inserts ads ~ but their ad servers may be running behind due to the load, so if there is more than normal buffering, that could be the problem.
It has finally come to this. The war of words and ideology just got serious-as-a-heart-attack! Now that the cartoonish Eric Bolling at Fox has called out the Indoctrination of "Merikan Children by Muppets as part of the Kenyan Socialist Agenda, nothing could be more important to our country than battling this weapons grade puppet menace, unless maybe it's a War on Christmas or something. Yet, that is SO last month.....
Let the battle royale begin! Okay. It's more of a tempest in a teabag, but still....
With the fight over a longer-term payroll tax cut fully underway, and the themes of economic security and tax fairness at the forefront, now is a good time to take a step back and look at just how much Republicans have been getting away with.
A new year is upon us after several disappointing years in trying to achieve progress for all Americans. For me this new year will be tempered with more than frustration for the failure we have faced in trying to achieve a just society for all Americans. It will be tempered by the sadness of being the first year I will face without my favorite American of all, my father George Dillon. A man that was much more than a father to me. He was my best friend, my mentor, my business partner and my greatest defender. In him I see all I wish my country could be and all that those I despise on the other side of the spectrum are not.
It seems everyone is writing about Ron Paul these days, and not in the usual way, as Paul's supporters inundate the inboxes and Twitter feeds of anyone who challenges Paul's agenda, the Campaign for Liberty, the "Ron Paul rEVOLution" or the case for why anyone who isn't a member in good standing of the John Birch Society should vote for him.
Contrary to Ron Paul Nation's belief in a well-coordinated smear campaign, the reason people are writing about Paul now is because he's in contention for a first place finish in both the Iowa Caucus and, perhaps on the strength of an Iowa upset, the New Hampshire primary. That Paul is in this position is no small feat. Paul's supporters are nothing if not determined. In their own way, they are a testament to the power of organizing.
But as Paul's campaign tries to bring progressive voters into their fold it's imperative to look at not just the parts of Paul's message that are appealing to people with progressive values, but the proffered progressive case for Paul in totality.
FYI: This was written before I read that PolitiFact had decided to label an accurate claim its "lie of the year." It seems Paul Ryan's "contact PolitiFact and tell them to give me an intellectual bailout" lobbying campaign paid off for him. For more on this, see Brian Beutler, Dean Baker, and Paul Krugman.
I won't be backing down on this one bit and I seriously doubt anyone else will be either. Truth doesn't change just because PolitFact, in all of its posturing glory, wishes it would.
Original post
The usual suspects, still pining for a Beltway "Grand Bargain" -- a bad solution that focuses on the wrong problem -- are reliant on a false equivalency. Their line goes something like this: Social Security and Medicare supporters like the NCPSSM (National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare) and the Strenghten Social Security coalition are no different than Grover Norquist.
To turn a popular phrase at the moment, this is a DC drone's idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like. Whether the person giving voice to this "analysis" actually believes it or they're repeating it as a testament to their own Seriousness, they're out of their depth in a kiddie pool.
Feb. 7, 2003 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
Or perhaps this not long after?
March 4, 2003 Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a breakfast with reporters: "What you'd like to do is have it be a short, short conflict. . . . Iraq is much weaker than they were back in the '90s," when its forces were routed from Kuwait.
Oh, and don't forget this!
March 11, 2003 Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars: "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator."
And then sadly but predictably, the walk back begins......
I got a weird little story about my friend Blitz Krieger to bring to you today.
He's had a crazy car problem, he has, and over the past few months he thought he had found a solution - in fact, he thought he had found the solution of his dreams - but in the end, he's discovered that the things you dream about often don't go according to plan.
The way it's worked out for him so far, it's been a lot of anticipation followed by a sudden wave of frustration, but I feel like he's a lot better off having his particular problem with his car...because if he'd had cancer instead, he'd surely be dead by now.
Despite the fact that planning for the L.A. streetcar goes back for more than a decade thanks to the work of a public-private local advocacy group, the city will have plenty of competition in its effort to win federal funds. Requests for the third round of TIGER funding outnumbered actual funding available by 27 to 1. With so many projects up for consideration, anything funded by Washington ought to be valuable. But L.A.'s project could benefit from significant improvement.
On Sunday night 60 Minutes went there. Prosecuting Wall Street asks why over three years after the Great Crash of 2008, no one on Wall Street has been prosecuted. Specifically, why haven't the Department of Justice or the SEC prosecuted Wall Street for violations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? CBS' Steve Kroft interviewed two high-level whistleblowers and Obama Administration Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
Good luck and congrats to Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks on their debut tonight on Current TV. Cenk really paid his dues during a lot of lean years to build a significant audience and he is rightly reaping the rewards now. Regardless of whether you love Cenk or not, we should all celebrate the fact that a non-conservative source of commentary and news has percolated up from the blogosphere into broadcast television and a mass audience.
It does beg the question though, in a media environment where liberals and progressives have created so many wonderful communities at places like Dailykos.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, firedoglake.com and drudgeretort.com to name just a few, why have there been so few successes at daily, live internet TV from a progressive perspective?
Partially, the answer is expense: it simply costs more to have a TV studio, cameras, technicians, lights, editing equipment, etc than it does to type on a keyboard, as is the principle requirement for text-based blogs and news sites.
At the risk of seeming offensively self-serving, I am planning on starting a daily internet-based hour long Internet TV show on hard news and politics beginning March 1, 2012. I already have a full-functioning TV studio in midtown Manhattan (for my training business) and I have plenty of interns and access to interesting guests (my studio is right down the street from the Today Show and Fox News Channel). For now, the format will be similar to Morning Joe and The Young Turks, but with a higher percentage of Skype TV interviews and telephone interviews with news makers and prominent liberal/progressive voices.
While I have tried a lot of different live and on-demand online TV ventures over the years, I'm the first to admit I've never figured out the ideal editorial mix or strategy. So I wondered if I might pick your brains on this:
1. Do liberals/progressives even like the medium of video/TV? (After all, the audience for Fox destroys the audience for MSNBC and Current combined)
2. Is there a need for another daily live Liberal/Progressive online TV show? (The Young Turks will still be doing an online show and they do a good job).
3. Is there some way of doing a New York City-based daily show that will compliment other liberal/progressive shows already in existence?
4. How can a new liberal/progressive online TV show integrate and unite the liberal/progressive blogosphere and help build a larger community?
5. Would you like to see a show that had a regular cast of, say, the top twenty liberal/progressive bloggers with regular or semi-regular on-camera appearances?
6. What would make the most prolific commenters on liberal/progressive blogs also want to participate/comment on a live daily TV show?
7. Would prolific liberal/progressive commentators want to call into a show regularly or merely text in comments?
8. What sort of guests on a show like this would make it stand out from already excellent segments seen on Rachel, Keith or Cenk?
9. Who would be great guests of interest to the Liberal/Progressive community you would want to hear from but who normally never get airtime?
10. Who would be good co-hosts for a show like this?
11. What else could a show like this do to build a large, mass audience?
12. Would you like to be involved as a host, co-host, pundit, producer, booker or armchair adviser for this new show? If so, please leave a comment here or email me directly at tj (at) dailynational (dot) com.
www.dailynational.com
A while back, I described how the peculiar institution of the US Senate Filibuster came into being:
The ability to Talk a Bill to Death was introduced by mistake when Aaron Burr in 1806 argued for removal of the motion to "move the previous question". This is a motion that can be used to postpone debate, when a measure does not yet have a majority, and can of course also be used to bring a measure to a vote, if it has a majority. Aaron Burr appealed to the fact that it had only passed once in the previous four years - but then again, the Senate did not at that time have a filibuster tradition.
But then we went for nearly two centuries with the filibuster being used to kill much progressive legislation, but not being used on a routine basis.
Eventually, as filibusters became more common, the Senate found that it had to re-introduce a version of "moving the previous question", which is the infamous, and confusing to non-insiders, "cloture" vote. This was originally set at a the same supermajority as required of Constitutional Amendments, 2/3 of Senators voting.
This held us through to the post-WWII era. After the experience of the decades long filibustering of civil rights legislation, the cloture threshold was lowered to 60% ~ but it was 60% of all Senators. At the same time, the "morning business" part of the Senate session was created, which allowed many routine operations to continue alongside a filibuster.
It was at this point that the foundations for the present abuse of the filibuster were in place. With far more ideological overlap then than now, there was an informal understanding of the kinds of things that would be subjected to filibuster and the kinds of things that would not be. But there was no longer strong support in the rules for restricting filibusters to major issues, which has led to the "60 Senators to get anything done" rule of thumb that now governs the Senate.
Ideally, we would just eliminate the filibuster. There are enough road blocks in our divided system of government as it is, and indeed if it ever stood in the way of a radical reactionary power grab ~ then the radical reactionaries would just sweep it away at that point in time.
However, getting Senators to give up something that gives the Majority something to hide behind and the Minority massive power is tricky. What I am going to sketch is a means for curbing the gross abuse of the filibuster.
Back in the 29 Nov 2009 Sunday Train, 
I think there ought to be a rule. If a famous musician just a few years younger than you survives their twenties, they ought to make it until you can go as a retiree yourself see them singing golden oldies on a golden oldies tour. That's the way it ought to be.
Nearly a month ago, Yonah Freemark had a post at 
A while back, 
