The American Crisis Deepens

The Supreme Court decision that essentially gives corporations unlimited power through campaign spending is a danger to American democracy and a danger to every citizen. It is no joke.

I was tempted to title this post: The GOP Sells the United States to the Chinese Communist Party. The consequences of unlimited campaign spending by corporations means the person with the most money wins. Since anyone outside the United States can invest in our corporations, it will now be legal for the Chinese, Saudis and Russians to influence American elections. Even Osama bin Laden, if he uses enough corporate shells, can now influence American politics directly.

George W. Bush appointed two corporatist judges to the Supreme Court. If we're not careful, the legacy of the worst president in our nation's history will now be intact.

I expect many posts around the country to focus on today's judicial fiasco. Here's a post from Firedoglake:

If you had any doubt about the corruption that has infected the very bloodstream of American politics, look at today’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court said corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence the outcome of elections.

(snip)

Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.

I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.

Here's a post from Kevin Drum who almost always has some of the most thoughtful posts:

I confess that I've become more sensitive to First Amendment concerns about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law over the years. But treating corporations as mere "associations of citizens"? Color me skeptical. That's just not what they are, and this is a decision that we're probably going to live to regret. After all, it's not as if lack of ability for corporations to influence the political process has historically been a major problem in the United States.

I've been saying it for some time now and I'll say it again: something has to change.

Revisiting John Edwards 2008 Announcement

There were two articles by Dan Balz of The Washington Post last week on the announcement by John Edwards that he's running for president. Both articles got me thinking. For one thing, Balz did a sort of whoa, wait a moment here, Edwards is not following the usual script for announcing. But before I get to that, let's look at the more conventional article that Balz wrote:

Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina launched his second campaign for the White House from this flood-ravaged city Thursday with a call for the United States to reduce its troop presence in Iraq and a plea for citizen action to combat poverty, global warming and America's reliance on foreign oil.

Edwards was sharply critical of the administration for its conduct of the war in Iraq... ...

"The biggest responsibility of the next president of the United States is to reestablish America's leadership role in the world, starting with Iraq," Edwards told reporters during his morning announcement. "We need to make it clear that we intend to leave Iraq and turn over the responsibility of Iraq to the Iraqi people."

(snip)

From his choice of setting to his message, Edwards used the opening day of his 2008 bid to signal that he intends to run a populist, insurgent campaign designed to show that he is not a candidate of Washington, in contrast to his likely Democratic rivals -- including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

The article does a fine job of laying out Edwards' announcement. Dan Balz also wrote an article analyzing some of the 'nontraditional' things that Edwards did the day of his announcement and in general terms of his candidacy:

John Edwards violated all the old rules when he announced his candidacy for the White House on Thursday. No theme music, no balloons, no adoring family at his side, no stage filled with enthusiastic supporters. No stage at all.

He looked anything but "presidential," wearing blue jeans and an open-collar shirt, rather than suit and tie. He had no prepared text, speaking instead from a practiced set of talking points but with no guaranteed applause lines and few perfect sound-bites.

(snip)

Edwards spoke to reporters, one after another after another, from the devastated 9th Ward in New Orleans. He started in the pre-dawn darkness with interviews on five morning television shows, declaring his intentions to seek the presidency even before what once would have been called his formal announcement. Later, he conducted a series of interviews with newspaper reporters, wire service reporters, local television reporters, cable television reporters, seemingly to every reporter or blogger who had traveled to New Orleans to witness the event first-hand.

(snip)

Nor did Edwards hope to spread his message by putting himself at the mercy of others. Like all candidates now, Edwards has his own Web site and his own videographer. As he did some volunteer work in the 9th Ward on Wednesday afternoon, he taped a message that his campaign posted later that night on his campaign Web site and on YouTube.com. What he said in that video was nearly identical to what he said to a bank of network and local television station cameras on Thursday.

Smart candidates know the old command-and-control structures of politics don't work anymore. Instead, campaigns are all about building communities and speaking directly to supporters, whether through email or podcasts or what the Edwards team calls "webisodes." As part of his announcement day, he spent a few minutes answering questions on the Daily Kos site, an influential liberal blog.

Candidates are looking for ways to get people more directly involved, by challenging them to give money not just to their campaign but to worthy causes; or by asking them to volunteer their time in New Orleans (as Edwards has done) or in their own communities, or by challenging them to take direct action politically to stop a war or a dam or to enact a piece of legislation.

One thing is clear: whether Edwards wins the nomination or not, he is changing the political landscape and it sounds like it's for the good.

Balz did an excellent job with both his stories, but the climate of the last number of years makes it clear that the media sometimes does Americans a disservice by doing stories on what ought to be expected by politicians when things change from time to time anyway. Think of it for a moment. Major newspapers changed things a long time ago. Then telegraph made it possible not only for most people in the country to know within a few hours that a candidate was running but, at convention time, it was used sometimes by smart candidates to swing delegations. There was a time when candidates were expected to stay home but trains made it possible to swing through the whole country over a period of weeks. Radio made it possible for millions of Americans to hear someone like Franklin Roosevelt, one of the better political speakers of his era. John Kennedy in the televised debate with Nixon in 1960 introduced the modern media age for presidents.

If we go back to Reagan, we have allowed our campaigns over the last twenty-seven years to become driven by media presentation rather than substance or a real discussion of the issues. One could argue that every candidate is a media candidate these days no matter how they make their case but one could also argue that the fiasco in Iraq is a direct result of not honestly discussing important issues in Washington and around the country before bad decisions are made.

I'm looking forward to the day when candidates can regularly bypass the talking heads on CNN and Fox News and can ignore the fake shock of the general media when candidates don't do exactly what's expected of them and instead talk like real human beings and not only talk directly to the voters but engage the voters in dialogue. Democrats, and not Republicans, have been the leaders in this change and I look forward to more of it. The great changes in our country over the last 230 years came when people were engaged in real debate about where our country should be going. Today, protecting wealthy interests with deep pockets and tired ideas is not much of a future for most Americans. I'm glad to see the change and I hope to see more from all the candidates, and particularly John Edwards.

Political Blog Survey

Note: Myspace users see update at the end.

One of the largest listings of political blogs (if not the largest) is found at Technorati. In late December, the number of political blogs listed at Technorati was over 6,800; most blogs I regularly read usually list ten to fifty blogs in their links section.

I was curious to know who all these other bloggers were (and I felt the need to publicize my own site as well) so I took a deep breath and started surveying all the political blogs listed on Technorati. I used the alphabetical listing category under politics and sometimes it took several evenings to do a single letter (the letter 't' took the longest since Technorati doesn't drop 'the' from the title).

This was by no means a formal survey. For one thing, blogs were being deleted and added during the period I was doing the survey. Also, my main purpose was to locate active, frequently updated political blogs that would interest me enough to bookmark. Now I was very generous in what I bookmarked and yet I was pleasantly surprised at the number of quality blogs I found that are not listed in the links sections of the many blogs I already read.

I didn't click on every one of the more than 6,800 blogs listed. First, it became obvious that the number 6,800 is somewhat misleading. Many blogs are listed more than once and many blogs have been dormant for more than a 120 days; it became apparent that roughly 2,000 blogs fall in this category. It also became obvious that Technorati doesn't do much in the way of screening blogs that list themselves under politics. I surveyed many blogs that were really about other things and only occassionally was there a post about politics. I arbitrarily decided many of these did not qualify as political blogs. I really don't mind a variety of subjects on a political blog and in cases like Kevin Drum's blog on The Washington Monthly, I actually look forward to good non-political posts. But on many of the blogs I surveyed, there were far too many weddding pictures, baby pictures, music reviews, bad days at school or the office, technical discussions of electronics, travelogues, etc. and far too little to qualify them as political blogs. Roughly 3,100 so-called political blogs fell into the category of not-much-politics. Another 400 blogs or so fell into the category of too specialized because they were about a narrowly defined topic or they were an English-language blog about places like Malaysia; and I had to eliminate the 20 or 30 blogs in a foreign language. Some blogs were Canadian, Australian or British and I bookmarked some of the better ones (particularly if they wrote about international issues) but I considered most of them too specialized for my needs though a number of them are the equal of any American blog.

That left over 1,300 blogs that are actively about politics. I had no stomach to read every right wing screed after the first dozen or so but as far as I can guess, the blogs were reasonably divided between conservatives on one side, and moderates and liberals on the other. I should add that there were one or two dozen blogs on the left that were so over the top with conspiracy theories or so full of vitriol that I considered bookmarking them a waste of time (I can handle vigorous debate, and some good honest sarcasm and cynicism but when credibility falls completely by the wayside, there isn't much point in staying around). By the time I was done, I had bookmarked 624 political blogs that I didn't know about before. I would say that about 585 of these blogs are moderate to liberal (and a handful clearly way over to the left). The remaining 40 or so were a variety of conservative blogs that I bookmarked for reference. Some 'conservative' sites I bookmarked were the type difficult to read because of their hate-mongering, general dishonesty or outright silliness when defending Bush, but a number of conservative sites were reasonably straight forward in their posts and were readable. Some fell in the category of the thoughtful and rational conservative; whether I agree with them or not, I wish there were more in the category (see RealCurrents as an example).

So Technorati led me to 585 new moderate to liberal blogs (I'll call them progressive blogs). But I already had about 70 progressive blogs that I had bookmarked for a total of around 655 blogs listed on Technorati. I should add that I have about 35 progressive blogs bookmarked that don't appear on Technorati (or didn't appear at the time I did the survey). So let me summarize my survey of Technorati political blogs (all numbers are approximate):

Claimed Political Blogs on Technorati as of Dec, 2005: over 6,800
Duplicates or dormant blogs: 2,000
Blogs that aren't much about politics: 3,100
Political Blogs that are too specialized: 400
Active Political Blogs (my definition): 1,300
Political Blogs I bookmarked during survey: 624
Progressive Blogs I bookmarked: 585
Conservative blogs I bookmarked: 39
Technorati Blogs I had previously bookmarked: 70
Total Technorati progressive blogs bookmarked: 655
Non-Technorati progressive blogs bookmarked: 35

In the last year, I heard from different people that there are thousands of progressive blogs on the Internet. One person suggested tens of thousands of progressive blogs. Neither appear to be the case. Before I started the survey, one-third of the progressive blogs I had bookmarked were not listed on Technorati. So we have to ask how many people don't have their progressive blog listed on Technorati. If my arbitrary list of blogs just happened to be about the right ratio, the total list of progressive blogs that are active and of interest to American readers would be under a thousand. As far as I can tell, Technorati does a good job of representing most of the top 100 political blogs as measured by different surveys. So even if Technorati happens to miss many of the smaller progressive blogs that are active, it's not likely that there are more than let's say about 2,000 progressive blogs.

But I think it's safe to say there are thousands of people who comment on blogs and thousands more who leave comments on message boards. But I'll leave that survey to someone else.

One final word. The number of political blogs listed under Technorati has now climbed to over 7,800 blogs. That's an increase of 1,000 blogs in two months but I'm fairly certain that only about a hundred of those blogs would qualify for my aribitrary definition of an active progressive blog. Still, I wonder what's leading to the increased numbers?

Update: Myspace users interested in political blogs on Myspace should try IceRocket myspace search which hosts a search engine for Myspace. If you find something better, I hope you come back and let me know.