There's a temptation for progressives to entertain Ron Paul as a serious alternative to Obama, primarily because Ron Paul is very, very serious about getting rid of a couple of major federal programs that progressives tend to hate: namely, our War on Some People's Terror and our War on Some People Who Use Some Drugs.
The problem, as Ben Adler points out, is that Ron Paul's motivation for opposing these programs has nothing to do with the progressive motivation for opposing them. Most charitably, Paul just cares about limiting federal power. His administration would care little about the impact of federal policies on various populations; it would only care that the government pursued those programs at all. This means that the end of the War on Drugs would come alongside a push to end Medicare and Social Security, a push to end all forms of social welfare, a push to end everything designed to ameliorate the effects of systemic discrimination over past decades and centuries.
Ron Paul doesn't care about equality or social progress, he's just an adorable shrunken grump who has an ideological opposition to the government doing most anything. That opposition has certain incidental benefits, and it's hard not to think of him as a useful tool in achieving long-term political goals.
Less charitably (and, I think, more honestly), Ron Paul by and large only gives a shit about maximizing the freedom of white men. The War on Drugs is problematic not because it helps incarcerate truly ridiculous numbers of young black and Hispanic men, it's problematic because white guys deserve a doobie or some blow after work. The War on Terror is an outward extension of American resources and manpower, but the person whose freedom we care about isn't the little girl disfigured by a drone or the imam whose mosque was destroyed. It's the white guy who works long, hard hours to pay for that war, who would much rather be spending his money on other things, like gold bricks or gold boullion or ads trying to get people to buy his stock of gold.
What that ultimately means, though, is that the shining moments of a Paul presidency would be largely flash. Paul's libertarianism would mean an end to the War on Drugs, but it would also mean an end to enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, a push toward a future of rampant Tentherism where a state's discriminatory action would be met with a shrug and a casual bon mot about the Fed.
The appeal of Ron Paul is that he comes off as truly principled. Even when his policies may achieve a goal of racial equalization that he would seem to be otherwise opposed to, you're still assured that he'll advocate for those policies.
That allure, however, masks the dirty secret of his appeal to progressives: we're so sure that he'll pursue the policies that we like, we might be willing to compromise on the other stuff. The problem is, that other stuff is the very core of progressivism. The scant victories a Paul presidency promises are meaningless when they're the curtain hiding the abyss.
Unless, of course, you have a whole lot of gold. At that point, I can't really blame you.
This man, Rick Barber, is running for Congress, which is terribly funny, as he does not appear to believe Congress exists:
Besides the part where George Washington is sitting there stroking a gun as this nutjob is ranting, my two favorite parts:
1.) Businesses spy on themselves! That shit is crazy! I cannot believe that a tyrannical government with no more authority than the Constitution of the United States can literally make you tell them who you’ve hired and fired for the purposes of taxation! And employment protections! And anti-discrimination laws! And tax breaks for employers! In a system where this all-powerful bureaucracy can reach into the very bowels of your life and pull out the sweet intestinal goo of employment associations, the next thing they will do is…surely very, very bad. And tyrannical.
2.) You went to war over tea, bitches! This is, in many ways, the foundational stupidity of modern psuedo-revolutionary conservatism. If you ever wonder why every alleged excess of the government is grounds for impeachment or war or God’s Holy Moon Beam Vengeance, it’s this. To say that the colonists during the Revolutionary War committed a nation to war over taxes on tea is like saying that the reason Wizard of Oz is a classic movie is because it has a scarecrow in it. The American Revolution was the culmination of decades of strife between the American Colonies and Britain, with the latter frequently imposing broad and sweeping regulations on colonists who were explicitly barred from having any say in the British government.
Ways in which Rick Barber’s situation differs:
All of them.
If you think that America was founded because people were just pissed about paying more for their sweetened hot leaf water, you shouldn’t be running for fucking office, because you’re a risk to go postal every time you lose a close vote. If you’re so dumb that you’re motivated to change your nation by virtue of a narrative constructed for four year olds who can’t pay attention because it’s the middle of July and they really want into that box of sparklers, you should really take any money you raise in your political campaign and donate it to charity. Of course, the government would like you to report that as well, so maybe you’re better just using it to buy plastic Army men and reliving the fateful battle of John Adams versus the Martians on your dining table.
In the wake of yesteday’s Senate hearing on DADT repeal, there are two reactions out that drew my attention. One was the lunatic WSJ op-ed by foreign policy journal editor Mackubin Thomas Owens. He took umbrage at the thought that heterosexual soldiers were capable of serving openly with gays and lesbians. The old saw of unit cohesion came up again, with this infantile, *sshat statement by Owens:
[T]he military stresses such martial virtues as courage, both physical and moral, a sense of honor and duty, discipline, a professional code of conduct, and loyalty. It places a premium on such factors as unit cohesion and morale. The glue of the military ethos is what the Greeks called philia—friendship, comradeship or brotherly love. Philia, the bond among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together, is the source of the unit cohesion that most research has shown to be critical to battlefield success.
Philia depends on fairness and the absence of favoritism. Favoritism and double standards are deadly to philia and its associated phenomena—cohesion, morale and discipline—are absolutely critical to the success of a military organization.
The presence of open homosexuals in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros—which unlike philia is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive—will be unleashed into the environment. Eros manifests itself as sexual competition, protectiveness and favoritism, all of which undermine the nonsexual bonding essential to unit cohesion, good order, discipline and morale.
Wow. Owens’ eruption really needs deconstruction and discussion because it raisese several questions:
1. Then what about eros and women in the military? All of the above also true - and came up time and again when women were being integrated into the military. In fact the whole line in the sand barring combat service for women has been blurred as they are practically on the front lines anyway, subjected to the same levels of lethal force in Iraq, for example. Does Owens want women out of the military?
2. Owens renders our fighting men weak, ignorant and guided only by their “little brains.” (It’s clear women aren’t even considered in Owen’s op-ed, so let’s set that aside.) If our mlitary is so strong and powerful, how can its capabilities be undermined so easily by their pee-pees? From the POV of Owens, if gay service members come out of the closet, the barracks will instantly become a cruising bar, complete with a disco ball and rocket-propelled grenades and IEDs. In his mind the soldiers can’t tell the difference between comradeship and bonding under stress-filled, life-threatening conditions
and a pick up line
.
3. Apparently theUniform Code of Military Justice(UCMJ) is a useless document. Owens alternately views the military as an institution of rules and regulations and as a lawless outpost. It’s clear he’s afraid that all this potential aggressive man-on-man cruising will lead to sexual assault that will go unprosecuted. Hmmm. Well he may be on to something—women who serve are being assaulted and raped at record levels, with their male peers going unpunished or receiving a slap on the wrist. If Owens envisions that scenario, he should spare his wrath against those who want to repeal DADT and direct it to those in the Pentagon that don’t take sexual assault and harassment seriously. It doesn’t matter whether it’s same- or opposite-sex criminal conduct—both should be prosecuted under UCMJ, including fraternization.
The other piece to take a look at is David Mixner’s “DADT: They Are Killing Us Softly With Their Song.” His position is that while we finally have the President and his military leaders Defense Secretary of Defense Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen strongly on the record for repeal in a very public way,
it’s not time for a happy dance
by any stretch of the imagination.
The problem is that DADT isn’t going to end in the near future - not even this year. These new converts are asking for a year long study and then maybe at least another year before implementation. After all is said and done, the implication is that once they ‘study’ us one more time, they might slowly integrate us into the Armed Forces over the next few years.
What do they mean they have to ‘study’ for a year our impact on the military if we are allowed to serve openly? How offensive is that?
Along with the unnecessary study about the impact of DADT on the agenda, the focus needs to be on Congress and its foot-dragging. Flip-flopping John McCain, who said he “needed to hear from the generals first” before his final decision, looked positively feeble and fossilized up there at the hearing. He offerws up discredited Elaine “homo flow chart” Donnelly’s letter w/1,500 flag officers supporting DADT. A letter signed by officials mostly over 70 years old, four of whom passed away even before the letter was published. The side of discrimination has no credibility left—what is Congress waiting for?
[T]he fact still remains on a daily basis we must lie who we are to our family, friends and those who lives depend on us. We must never acknowledge a loved one at home nor admit that we have a life like anyone else. We must continue to dehumanize ourselves for the comfort of others for an antiquated policy that should have never been implemented in the first place. Our soldiers who die in combat have to think of their partners who will be denied full rights in their heroic deaths. Who will not be even allowed to accept the flag as their loved one is buried. What kind of change is this? Not much of a one!
...Congress should act immediately for the full repeal of DADT and we should refuse to support or give money to anyone who does not support such an effort. In less than a year, we will face a Congress that is less friendly than the one now. Do we really believe our chances will be much better next year than this year?
Repeal it now. Stop the crap and deal with us as full American citizens. The policy is offensive, obscene and immoral. There is no reason to study us; just embrace our talents, gifts and patriotism.
I made my case to readers why I should get to sail, but alas, I’m coming up short… With only one day left to vote, and it looks like there was a lot of movement for Mike Lux in the last couple of days; looks like he'll be packing his bags soon…
In a seemingly Herculean lift of support, Mike Lux from Open Left has superseded the strong lead that Joe Jervis nearly locked down earlier on in Round Two.
First place - Mike Lux (45%) Second place - Joe Jervis (26%) Third place - Karl Frisch (12%) Fourth place - Pam Spaulding (11%) Fifth place - Digby (6%)
It is starting to get cold outside. A vacation in sunny Mexico is certainly looking pretty good right about now for these bloggers eager to be named Air America's favorite progressive blogger and win the free seven-day trip.
With over 4000 votes so far and 24 hours left in the cruise competition, will there be yet another surprise before it is all said and done? You tell us. Vote now for your favorite progressive blogger.
In an NBC report less than 24 hours after the President declared his unwavering support for the LGBT community, the White House has decided to sh*t on citizen journalists on the left who are simply advocating for our civil rights. This is a real shot across the bow. Via Americablog:
NBC News’ John Harwood just reported that an Obama administration staffer advisor today called the gay community part of “the Internet left fringe,” and therefore the White House is not concerned about the gay community’s, and other Democrats’, concerns that the president isn’t keeping his promises. As part of its report on today’s gay march, NBC’s Harwood said the following:
Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.
Harwood then went on to say that the White House thinks that:
For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.
Wow. Nice to know that asking to pass federal legislation (ENDA) so my fellow North Carolinian LGBTs don’t get canned for being who they are is a “fringe” activity. I must remind the White House that North Carolina delivered for him in 2008, and LGBT support was key, and was leaned on for support in a big way.
Nice to know that asking to pass federal legislation related to national security (repeal of DADT) when our military forces are strained and the Obama administration is mulling an increase in troops in Afghanistan is a “fringe” activity.
I guess asking for any of the long list of issues to be addressed before 2012 (since re-election isn’t a given in the reality-based universe) is a “fringe” activity.
I guess all of that “support” he doled out last night at the HRC dinner and the fact Candidate Obama said to hold him accountable was conditional if you’re LGBT. Or maybe civil rights matters are don’t qualify for the “keep up the pressure” policy.
It doesn’t matter why this behavior is occurring, really. What one has to take away from this message, naturally not attributed to anyone at the WH—cowards—is that bloggers are messing up their playbooks. And the answer is to diminish what influence we have—it’s limited at best. You have to ask why is this paranoid, juvenile message getting tossed out there. All those big brains in the White House and the best they can do is to bring up the hoary pajama game?
Here is the transcript via FDL:
LESTER HOLT: John what we saw in that protest today, was it simply frustration or does it represent a serious problem the President is having with an important part of his base?
JOHN HARWOOD: As a practical matter Lester I don’t think it’s a serious problem. we’ve seen and certainly Bill Clinton learned that they Democratic President can get punished by the mainstream of the electorate for being too aggressive on social issues so for now I think the administration feels that if they take care of the big issues — health care, energy, the economy — he’s going to be just fine with this group.
HOLT: But in general when yo look at the left as a whole, have there been conversations about some things they thought would have been done but haven’t?
HARWOOD: Sure but If you look at the polling, Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the “internet left fringe” Lester. And for a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition one adviser told me today those bloggers need to take off their pajamas get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.
So which Barack Obama is it—the one who said to challenge him, or a fragile flower that panders to LGBTs then has a coward source backstab? To me the WH has just declared war on us after a wine and dine with the right kind of LGBTs that don’t make trouble for them. Someone has to answer to this.
Or do I just need to fold my hands in my pajama-clad, Cheetos-stained lap like a good homo?
UPDATE: You wouldn’t believe some of the excuses flying around on FB and Twitter saying “oh, you shouldn’t pay attention to anon sources” or “the WH wouldn’t say that” or that this statement somehow is NBC reporter John Harwood making the sh*t up, or that “he didn’t say LGBT bloggers” (ok, that one is just lame—I said in the headline “part of pajama-clad ‘Internet fringe’” - AND the reporter’s filing a report about NEM, for god’s sake, lolol).
Well, sitting in this chair, SOMEONE needs to take responsibility for the statement because it is someone’s POV, one believed to be widely held by insiders about progressive bloggers, but never articulated so boldly.
The remarks are an insult to people like me (and readers), who know how complicated governing and legislating are, and many of us do this from a perspective of 1) being in a state where waiting DOES matter and, in my case 2) I blog and work a full time job, at the expense of my own health, not to be a muckraker, but to make a difference. If someone has a different perspective and dismisses me outright, I do have a right to be angry and demand someone own their statement. When I say something it’s straight up, you mean to tell me no one has the stones to own their opinions up there? That’s pathetic. Anonymous or not, the statement’s out there now for all to see.
The bottom line is that it’s one of three things—1) Harwood is lying or 2) The White House is playing two-faced; or 3) they’ve got a lunatic loose high level advisor who is off message.
You’ll recall that yesterday, 77 members of Congress sent a letter to President Obama calling for him to suspend DADT discharges by changing the policy’s implementation at the Department of Defense (as opposed to executive order). The Advocate sought a response to this letter from the administration. It was, to be charitable, lacking.
“President Obama remains committed to a legislative repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which he believes will provide a durable and lasting solution to this issue. He welcomes the commitment of these members to seeing Congress take action,” read the statement.
As in, the White House isn’t lifting a finger to do anything unilaterally to stop the discharge of valuable, trained service members. No wonder SLDN is not only protesting at the LGBT DNC fundraiser, it will march on the White House on Saturday, June 27.
The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) and its allies will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by leading a march of 265 veterans, service members and supporters to the White House 2 p.m. Saturday, June 27, to urge President Obama to break his continued silence on repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The 265 marchers represent the number of service members discharged this week since the President and the new Congress were sworn in.
“‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ underscores that discrimination against gays and lesbians continues 40 years after the Stonewall riots, and reminds us that many challenges remain in the fight for full equality,” said Aubrey Sarvis, SLDN Executive Director. “Like those who stood up for freedom at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, we will stand up for the freedom to serve. We need to tell President Obama that 265 is enough.”
SLDN has been urging the President to speak up and send a bill (the Military Readiness Enhancement Act) to the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader that overturns DADT and replaces it with a policy of nondiscrimination.
Meanwhile, the LGBT fundraiser (it is on Thursday), is in complete meltdown, with a long list of drop outs. The Washington Blade.
Tension continued to build over an upcoming LGBT fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee with several gay invitees planning to boycott the event and others planning to attend to voice their frustrations to party leaders.
The latest invitee to withdraw Tuesday from the event was Chuck Wolfe, president of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund. An informed source confirmed that Wolfe would not attend.
Below the fold are people who still plan to go—and who spoke to the Blade
I don’t know how many of my readers surf around the general progressive blogosphere regularly, but you can get a taste of the blowback the LGBT community is receiving for deigning to ask why the Obama administration has been silent regarding his self-proclaimed “fierce advocate” role.
Check out this diary by Clarknt67 at the big progressive orange, Daily Kos, “Rachel Maddow examines Candidate Obama vs. President Obama on GBLT.” Clark features the video from Rachel’s show the other day (I blogged it here), where she took on the disingenous behavior by the White House regarding DADT and had on Rep. Rush Holt (D) to discuss how the country is ready for repeal and that there would be little political capital expended to stop the discrimination.
Clark issues this simple statement:
With seventy plus public approval on repealing don’t ask, don’t tell, I kinda don’t get why Obama doesn’t just rip that bandage off swiftly and make these complaints go away.
Oh sure, we’d still want ENDA, we’d still want DOMA gone, we’d still want Uniting American Families Act, we’d still want Matthew Shepard Act. But I think the perception that something, anything was moving forward for the GBLT community during this supposed great period change, would be a huge PR win with most people.
Well, you should see the litany of criticism in the comments, many lodged against Rachel Maddow and the LGBT community for calling President Obama on the DADT, and the alternate silence and evasion on the executive order issue.
My outline of the predictable reaction is below the fold.
Now, Jonah attacks several members of the left (and “the Left”, that mythical organization of baby-killing death machines who have molotov cocktails behind their “No Blood for Oil” signs). He calls out Naomi Wolf, I’m sure because she wrote a book on fascism rather than flip through a World Book encyclopedia from 1967 and figure out a way to call every Democrat in it a fascist. He compares Rosie O’Donnell - whose major ideological impact on leftism was The View, which would in turn make Elizabeth Hasselbeck the 21st century’s Barry Goldwater - to Michael Savage, despite Savage having had a mainstream political talk show, a handful of bulk-sold conservative bestsellers and, for a brief time, a prominent voice in actual conservative thought. Of course, it’s easy for Jonah to dismiss Michael Savage when his own magazine has theorized that Savage is a liberal agent provacateur.
Which is totally not paranoid.
He also delves down into a retracted claim by Randall Robinson and throws in Ward Churchill for good measure. The real problem that he has, though, is this:
The real problem is that the liberal establishment, starting with Hofstadter and Adorno, have perfected the art of proclaiming paranoia or populism they don’t like as “right-wing” when — often, but not always — there’s nothing right-wing about it.
There’s a very simple reason why there’s “nothing right-wing about it”: conservatives reserve the right at any time to declare that anything which embarrasses them is, in fact, not conservative but instead invariably liberal. Jonah’s actually the sterling example of this - Liberal Fascism is a few hundred interminably stupid pages of him declaring that conservatism is incapable of evil, which therefore makes all evil liberal in nature. Having such a reactionary, formless ideology makes you inherent paranoid, and drastically more so than the left. There’s little that conservatism believes which isn’t ultimately a response to something that someone else wants to change. There’s a reason that there’s a substantial conservative movement dedicated to the idea that the President of the United States is a Kenyan/Indonesian sleeper agent. There’s a reason that the major policy freakouts of the right over the past two months have been about the Fairness Doctrine and card check; that their modern-day heroes, from Joe the Plumber to Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh all share a common thread of victimization by their own stupidity (which is never their fault): conservatism thrives on paranoia in a decidedly mainstream fashion.
An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.
The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”
Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.
(I’m not sure why they tossed the honors student part in there. If she did poorly in English class, it wouldn’t have been any more okay.)
Praise be to Black Jesus, I actually agree with Ed Morrissey for the most part - it was a gross violation of her civil liberties, regardless of what kind of student she was. But reading through the comments, there’s a definite undertone that this is somehow the creeping hand of the liberal state acting in loco parentis, the unfettered power of teachers’ unions reaching in and giving little fiefdoms to overzealous employees. Except that this was a vice-principal, who’s not a member of the teacher’s union, not being a teacher and all.
What happened to this girl was totally illiberal, and I don’t mean that in the typical classical liberal/hierarchical superiority way, wherein you just say that Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have done it, so there and I smell like sunflowers. I mean it in the very real 21st-century liberal/progressive way, wherein the general way that liberals run things doesn’t involve assuming that 13-year-old girls are smuggling industrial-strength Advil in their panties.
Jonah Goldberg’s take is a good summation of much of Buchanan’s point: we already talk about race too much! We refuse to bow to the race gestapo! I’d eat chocolate Twinkies! The rest of Buchanan’s rant circled around the need for “personal responsibility” in the black community, which is exactly the sort of cowardice Holder was referencing, and what I’d like to discuss.
Buchanan pointed out the sad statistics that plague the black community, from crime to family structure. But he did the very thing that makes an honest conversation on race so terribly difficult to have - he treated the statistics as if they simply arose out of the ether, the product of a series of conscious decisions on the part of black people to sling drugs and live in ghettos. But the history of America, even to this day, revolves around how the white majority has chosen to shape our communities, and the steps to which they’ve gone to mask the nature of their decisions.
Suppose you were an upwardly mobile black family at any time in the 20th century, and you wanted to move somewhere. Chances are, you’d choose a neighborhood with affordable housing, good schools and the like. Chances are, you’d also be moving into a predominantly white neighborhood with neighbors who were convinced that you’d bring with you crime, disruption and a lowering of property values. Inevitably, after resistance, one of two things would happen: either the black presence would be repelled back to acceptable black neighborhoods, or the black presence would reach a tipping point and white people would move out, first to the old inner-ring suburbs and then out into the former boonies and now the places where the malls are at. White resistance and white flight created the very crime-ridden, poverty-stricken communities they feared, and now Pat Buchanan and his ilk get to sit back and lecture the black community on the plight they created.
Ever wonder why suburbs have nicer roads (in fact, roads to them at all)? Why they’re often so carefully tailored and drawn as to avoid any connection with areas that lack the same racial hegemony? The great welfare fight of the past 40 years has been (in the public mind) over black people getting public money to live in shitty urban housing and take the bus; the untold welfare story of the same time period has the great public subsidization and restructuring of society to allow white people the ability to avoid black people. The highway system, the placement and scope of public housing, the grading of neighborhoods for FHA loan approvals, the constant new incorporation of microtowns with their own tax bases, so on and so forth - black people didn’t choose the ghetto, the ghetto was chosen for them.
There is responsibility that needs to be taken, by everyone in American society. But we’re not going to be able to improve the black community until the great deprivation of resources that shaped it is admitted and rectified in way that doesn’t place shame on black people for needing help to get to even ground.
(Pandagon is on the ExpressionEngine CMS platform, btw, in case anyone was wondering…)
NOTE: I was interviewed about the Soapblox hack a couple of days ago by Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker for the January 19th Talk of the Town column, It hits newsstands Monday. You can read it here.
In the days since the hacking of the blogging platform Soapblox’s server on which Pam’s House Blend, OpenLeft and many state blogs reside (my reporting here), there have been a lot of discussions around the blogosphere about the fate of the content management software and its hosting service (Soapblox provided both).
One development has been the launch of a “Save Soapblox” fundraising campaign on Friday by Chris Bowers of OpenLeft (administered through BlogPAC). BlogPAC was alreadly deeply involved with Soapblox, paying the service fees for most of the state blogs on the platform each year, so that existing relationship was in place. Donating to “the cause,” as defined in the DKos diary, is to deal with the short-term issue of migrating the data and making it secure.
—Recharge ten servers —Perform a full security audit of the SoapBlox server/unix infrastructure to prevent hackers from gaining access —Ensure all backup processes are working and functional to guarantee that if hacking happens, data is preserved —Perform a security audit on the SoapBlox code itself so that hackers cannot exploit the SoapBlox code itself. —Migrate to new, secure servers
The good news is that, in addition to restoring full service for Soapblox, Paul has already found a system administrator who lives in his area and is able to help. All of the work listed above is currently underway. Here is what it will cost:
—Recharging ten servers at $100 apiece: $1,000 —Purchasing new, secure severs, and migrating the data: $8,000 —One month of full-time work at $50 / hour in order to complete all of the tasks listed above: $8,400
A big caveat here—nothing about the above is a long-term solution for a to-date closed-source, run-on-a-shoestring by one person effort, and they know it. Evolving a business based on the programming savvy (and the health and well-being) of Soapblox owner Paul Preston is not a business plan, particularly in crisis management mode, and without transparency.
The question needs to be asked—what is in the best long-term interest of supporting the progressive blogosphere? More below the fold, and it’s about more than just one content management system and hosting service.
Greg Mankiw alerts us to the progressiveness of taxation with a chart that is, presumably, meant to stand on its own:
The CBO has released a new report on effective tax rates (total taxes divided by total income). Compared with previous reports, it includes more information about thin slices at the top of the income distribution. Here are the total effective federal tax rates for 2005, the most recent year available:
Frederick Clarkson has a great piece up, “The Religious Right isn’t going anywhere,” that gives a roundup some of the more rancid fundnut activities in 2008, along with commentary that these creationism proponents and bedroom and womb peepers will continue the culture wars for years to come, focusing on throwing up roadblocks at the state level, since they aren’t going to get much accomplished at the federal level with the regime change. Here are his Snapshots from the Culture War in the States this year:
* Anti-marriage-equality initiatives prevailed in Arizona, Florida and California in 2008. Fueled with funding from politically animated Mormons, Catholics and Protestant evangelicals at the urging of religious leaders, the initiatives passed, and for the first time in American history, rolled back a court-ordered civil rights advance.
* While Rhode Island and New York recognize the validity of same-sex marriages from other states, the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act allows states to refuse to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages. The Supreme Court has so far declined to hear constitutional challenges to DOMA. So far, 30 states have passed anti-marriage-equality initiatives; and 10 states passed statutory DOMAs.
* New York and New Jersey: The conservative religious coalition that passed the stunning reversal on marriage equality in California plans to take the battle to these eastern states.
* Constitutional Convention initiative in Connecticut: Every 20 years, the state is required to have an initiative asking the voters if it is time for a state constitutional convention. Following the state’s Supreme Court legalization of same-sex marriage, the Religious Right and the Catholic Church seized on the initiative, purchasing a large, last-minute TV ad campaign. While this effort was unsuccessful, we can expect further battles in Connecticut.
* Failed efforts to get other anti-abortion or anti-gay initiatives on the ballot: Montana, Arkansas and Massachusetts. Even in losing, the Religious Right has considerable capacity to keep its issues on the front burner.
* Texas: The elected State Board of Education appointed three prominent “intelligent design” advocates to a six-member science-review panel. The chairman of the SBOE wrote in an op-ed, “Science education has become a culture war issue” and that the claims of scientists “will be challenged by creationists.”
The other piece to take a look at is David Mixner’s “
With only one day left to vote
I don’t know how many of my readers surf around the general progressive blogosphere regularly, but you can get a taste of the blowback the LGBT community is receiving for deigning to ask why the Obama administration has been silent regarding his self-proclaimed “fierce advocate” role. 
A guy who wrote a book declaring that liberals were the source of all evil in the world since 1915 
There’s a reason I’ve never believed that schools are hotbeds of liberalism, indoctrinating children in ungendered, hypersensitive hairshirt bubbles: 
Last night on Hardball, I watched Pat Buchanan take on Michael Eric Dyson on 
