He's Baaaaaack

In defiance of increasingly unhinged threats from the US government Nicaraguans gave Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas a decisive first round election win in Nicaragua today. The Americans pulled out all the stops including threatening trade, aid and even individual remittances to the tiny Central American country.

America punished Nicaraguans throughout the 80's for daring to vote for leftists with a terrorist campaign that ended up costing 30,000 lives. Nicaraguans gave in and let successive American supported conservative governments run the country in line with the Washington consensus of unrestricted trade, selling off the public sector and 'free trade zones', sweat shop camps where even limited labour laws were non-existent and no taxes went to the state. Result? An economy competing with Haiti for the poverty stricken bottom of the hemisphere. The people of Nicaragua finally signalled today that they'd had enough.

The Leftward tilt continues in Latin America.

America Votes 2006

Suppression, intimidation and malfunctioning voting machines, oh my.

"As voters are coming out of their cars and walking up towards their polls, one person is videotaping the voter as he walks towards the polling place," she said. Then another person, wearing an American flag bandana and a shirt with the image of a badge ironed or embroidered on it, approaches with a clipboard to talk to the voter. "While the clipboard person is. . .talking to [the voter], the cameraperson comes up and starts videotaping their face," Perales said.

As this happens, the third man -- with a gun visible in a sideholster -- stands next to the voter. According to Perales, he is wearing a shirt with an American flag on it, and camouflage shorts.

The men only approach Latino voters, she said, and noted they have been doing so since early this morning.

With all these highlights as the voting day continues the most telling point may be senior Republicans quietly avoiding the electronic voting machines:

It's an epidemic. RNC Chair Ken Mehlman prefers paper ballots... and so does Bob Novak.

From TPM Reader TO:

I voted directly behind Bob Novak this morning in a small polling place on Capitol Hill. Novak immediately picked the paper ballot too. There was no line.

As with Mehlman, Novak had a choice between paper and an electronic machine.

Rock And Roll

The Velvet Undergound

Sunday Link Blast - Nov 5

• Iraq for Sale - An interview with film maker Robert Greenwald and a link collection to his full movie library.
  
• Saddam sentenced to hang - Nervous Iraqi and American officials prepare for the worst.
  
• Interrogation methods should be State Secret Argues White House - How we torture you is classified.
  
• Canadian Government won't appeal section of Anti-Terrorism Act being struck down - Juliet O'’Neill and The Ottawa Citizen v. the Attorney General of Canada has officially changed law.
  
• Army Times calls for Rumsfeld's Resignation -Influential military newspaper chain takes unprecedented step over sitting Defense Secretary.
  
• David Frum for the Closet - It's better to sneak around and hide your 'shame' then live free and open.
  
• Electronic Voting Machine Slays Nine - Carnage started when Democrat picked.
  
• Cook's Last Forecast - The GOP will lose Congress big, possibly massively, they're edging back to safety in the Senate
  

Unspinning the Neo-Con spin-cycle

All the neo-cons are spinning the desperate line that it was the execution not the plan, that it was the bureaucracy or the military, or Rumsfeld or in some advanced cases going all the way to acknowledging the deficiencies of the Commander in Chief.

Of course an essential point to their ferocious promotion of their cause was their full throated defense of Bush, of the team he had assembled and yea, did bosoms heave manfully and jowls quiver aggressively in the brisk wind of the hot air blown about the resolute genius of George W. Bush, the cold yet heroic cunning of Dick Cheney, and of the steadfast, experienced mastermind Donald Rumsfeld, the ideal Secretary of Defense to bring America into the 2st century.

It's as if they think we are too dumb to remember their own words of just a few years ago.

Better the elderly should DIE than vote Democrat

Really almost beyond belief.

The Republicans have sued to keep elderly voters in poor and minority areas from getting flu shots at early voting - a program that's been going for ten years.

This is what desperation looks like.

Venus in Furs

John Cale

Saddam verdict could set Iraq on fire

Tomorrow Saddam Hussein will almost certainly be found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Republicans hoping for a timely boost in the polls from the former dictator's conviction may want to consider the likely outcome:

The trial, which started a year ago, aimed to heal Iraq's wounds after Saddam and his Baath party's 35-year regime. Instead, it has become a symbol of Iraq's divisions, between the long-oppressed Shia majority, who now rule the country, and Saddam'’s Sunnis. Clashes between them tomorrow could push Iraq over the edge....

In Baghdad yesterday, Sunnis were resentful and Shia gleeful at Saddam’s possible fate.

Evangelicals About to Turn on GOP?

As a major Evangelical leader claims that although he did buy the crystal meth from the gay prostitute and had hotel room massages from him but didn't do the drugs or have sex with him, a New York Times/CBS poll puts evangelicals as evenly split on whether they will vote Republican or Democrat.

Note these are just those who admit to planning to vote. I've said for months that the story on November 8th will be all the Right Wingers who end up not voting at all.

The wave threatening the GOP begins to look like a Tsunami...

The Rothenberg Political Report predicts the GOP losing the Congress and the Senate and 7 to 9 Governorships:

The Senate: "While Senate control is in doubt, with Democrats most likely to win from 5 to 7 seats, we do not think the two sides have an equal chance of winning a majority in the Senate. Instead, we believe that state and national dynamics favor Democrats netting six seats and winning control of the United States Senate."

The House: "Going into the final days before the 2006 midterm elections, we believe the most likely outcome in the House of Representatives is a Democratic gain of 34 to 40 seats, with slightly larger gains not impossible. This would put Democrats at between 237 and 243 seats, if not a handful more, giving them a majority in the next House that is slightly larger than the one the Republicans currently hold. If these numbers are generally correct, we would expect a period of GOP finger-pointing and self-flagellation after the elections, followed by a considerable number of Republican House retirements over the next two years."

Governors: "With Republican seats like Idaho, Alaska, and Nevada in play for state-specific reasons, and Minnesota vulnerable to a Democratic wave, the ceiling for possible Democratic gains is high. We have narrowed our earlier projection from Democratic gains of 6-10 to 7-9."

Hark! Is that the sound of Darren Entwistle and Michael Sabia explosively prolapsing I hear?

Of course I feel nothing but love and concern...snk... for the Canadian Telco Executive class...hmf...so of course I feel deeply sad for how their plans to offload their tax bill forever....snort... have been so sadly crushed...snicker...

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!... sorry... couldn't. keep. straight. face...heeheehee...

Ok. I'm better now. Really.

Credit where credit is due: I'm impressed that Joe Flaherty and the Conservatives were capable of the hitherto unseen abillity to accept stark reality when it was rubbed in their face long enough, and enough intestinal fortitude to do what was necessary. And enough basic humanity, or at least political savvy, to reduce the impact of the neccesary steps on Canadian senior investors.

One last relevant thought from the Globe's Eric Reguly to consider as Corporate Canada's outraged stuffed suits bawl like branded calves:

Tax balance -- the relative proportion paid by corporations and individuals -- was already in trouble in Canada. The rising trust market threatened to kill it. The impression given by corporations, with their lobbyists and PR men and speechwriters, is they pay the lion's share of the taxes in this country, and that the tax burden is making them uncompetitive in the global market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that corporations paid the equivalent of 60 per cent of all individual taxes collected in the early 1960s, according to national accounts. Since then, the figure has dropped to about 30 per cent. In other words, the relative tax burden on the individual has doubled, while on corporations it has been halved.

Who Was in My Room Last Night?

You may have blotted out the memories of a bacchanalian Halloween celebration, but The Butthole Surfers saw it all and they remember. Oh Yes.

Well Played

Jack Layton just forced Harper to choose between an election he can't win over an issue he tanks in the polls on and screwing his buddies in the oil patch with a real Greenhouse plan.

Simultaneously, with all eyes on the Liberal Leadership contenders and weeks to go to convention, they will now have to explain to the extremely pro-environment Canadian people, and even more pro environment Quebec delegates whether saving the world is worth it or not.

Jack Layton just picked the next Liberal Party leader and the election date.

Fiscal Responsibility is What Progressives Do - Deficit Spending is What Conservatives Do.

Bruce Reed in Slate today with hopefully the last nail in the coffin of the grotesquely obsequious Third Way Movement:

In 1994, Republicans took over the Congress with one goal foremost in mind; —to turn Americans against government. Twelve years later, they've succeeded, although not the way they intended. A new CNN poll finds that 54 percent of Americans think government tries to do too much, while only 37 percent think government should do more. And to put government in its place, they're going to vote… Democrat.

The pernicious myths of the free spending irresponsible tax and spend liberals and the hard money steely-eyed conservatives has dominated the discourse for too many years. Even so-called progressives from Clinton to Blair scrambled madly to show how Reaganesqe or Thatcherite they could be.

While in Canada we've seen the vaguely progressive Liberals maintaining more than a decade of government by - which even their foes were forced to admit - being extremely pro business, tax-cutting deficit slaying good government types. They only lost power because they were also stinting on the progressiveness and simultaneously and blatantly sucking back all the loot they could throat.

Which is basically what happened to the Democrats when they were caught filling their pockets too many times leading up to '94, so they missed most of the benefit from the begining of the big progressive era economic upswing.

Then the Republicans came in, borrowed and spent like drunken sailors to protect carefully gerrymandered vote margins, poured out oceans of blood and tanker fleets of treasure in a mind-numbingly stupid utopian Middle Eastern fantasy, committed assault and battery on liberty, democracy and the constitution and filled their pockets at the same time.

The coming GOP apocalypse will be an explicit swing to the left and will herald a return to progressive politics within the Democratic Party. A renawal largely driven by an activist grass-roots and the canniness of the much reviled Howard Dean's 50 state strategy and also largely reflecting a wider and growing American consensus, illuminated rigorously by Stirling Newberry:

Many progressives, burned by kick the base tactics and outright betrayals, are going to have to stop and blink to realize that the frame of the debate has changed - this is no longer a debate about how far right we are to go, how fast, but how far left we are to go, and how best to proceed. It is going to take time for conservative Democrats to stop running to Reaganisms, and it is going to take time for progressives to realize that while there are many battles ahead, one of the most fundamental battles has been won.

Part of this is because the top down media still wants, for its own economic reasons, a restoration of the "to the right, ever to the right, never to the left" dialog of the past. And therefore they have been doing their best not to report on what has happened in the country. But the polls tell the story - independents now poll like Democrats, the country is now 60-40 against the reactionary movement.

The rising sea change in American political life will also be the outrider for a similar shift, or rather an affirmation, of the Canadian progressive consensus.

Jack Layton just backed Stephen Harper and all the contenders in the Liberal leadership race blinking and stammering into the same spotlit corner. It will be a chilly day on the Hustings but by the end of the night we'll most likely have a government that views the combination of responsible stewardship and a progressive approach to public policy as the baseline for political survival and Stephen Harper can go back to his former job of professional whiner for the National Citizens Coalition.

Thankfully, before the Conservatives can screw over Canada as much as the Republicans did the USA.

Trick or Treat?

Here's hoping American progressives get a treat on the 7th.

The Ghost of Stephen Foster

For Halloween, once again the Squirrel Nut Zippers

Deserting the Sinking Ship

George Bush's popularity now stagnates at permanent Nixonian numbers and the public's distaste for him seems likely to crush the GOP in the mid-terms. In response the conservative punditry class in America scrambles to pretend they knew he was no good all along - as Greenwald reveals here.

Nothing sadder than the sight of a bunch of grotesque suckbutts pretending they always had a jaundiced view of Bush and never implied his critics were traitors when he was riding high in the polls.

Lame Ducks

It seemed so simple a year ago; the Conservatives had won a minority - or more accurately the Liberals had lost one. The Tories had their 5 principles - down to what now - Two? Three? - They figured a careful low expectations performance of about a year, some vague promises to fix the fiscal imbalance in Quebec's favour and a divided opposition while the more radical rightwingers in caucus spent a year gagged and bound in Harper's basement and they could coast to an easy majority.

But they overestimated their appeal and underestimated how carefully the Canadian people would be watching how they used their newfound power. Last years election created one of the most deliberate minority governments in history. Remember, with a week to go before the election when the polls started suggesting the Tories were in majority territory? Remember how the Conservative numbers immediately crashed back to minority range as soon as the prospect of a Conservative majority raised its ugly head?

Canadians wanted the Liberals out, but they weren't taking a flier on the Conservatives either.

With a fractured opposition, a rigidly controlled - even muzzled -caucus and a disciplined minimalist agenda the Tories should be head and shoulders over the thrashing, many-headed monstrosity that the Liberals currently present to the public. Instead Tory numbers have stagnated, even without an opposition. They've flatlined in Quebec and hovered or cratered everywhere else. Their hopes for a majority are over and their hopes of even maintaining their minority are on life support.

What little is left of their agenda is at the mercy of the opposition - the Tories are now dependent on desperate stalling measures just to keep the opposition from controlling parliament altogether.

"The behavior of the Liberal party is arrogant and anti-democratic," fumed Harper. "That's really the problem. They haven't accepted the decision of the electorate."

Of course, more than half of the electorate voted center left to socialist - in a minority government, respecting the decision of the electorate means compromise and respect for the opposition and an agenda hewing to the political center, not the extremist edges. Instead the Conservatives chose arrogance, and catering to their base. It's cost them.

I've heard the grimly spoken words 'If this is how they behave with a minority...' uncountable times lately - and I live in Calgary.

Many factors will determine the immediate political future, from who wins the American mid-terms to who wins the Liberal leadership. Right now the most likely result of the next Canadian election is a minority Liberal government and a Conservative return to the political wilderness.

In the News

Kris Kristofferson

The Real Legacy of Conservatism

I've expressed here before a certain admiration for the more rational strains of reality based pragmatic conservatism. Garth Turner represents the fading strain of realist Progressive Conservatives, so of course the current triumphalist extremists in the Conservative Party had to purge him - and yes he would make a good fit with the center right thing the Canadian Green Party has become.

Andrew Sullivan made the same jump Scott Brison made, to realize that incompetence and willingness to pander to extremists trumps ideological affinity. Even the free market high church the Cato Institute, observing the smoking ruin of the deregulated electricity markets has reluctantly advocated returning to some kind of regulated environment.

However finding the more moderate elements of the Conservative movement less bat-shit insane then those currently infesting the corridors of power in both Ottawa and Washington is hardly a tough curve to be graded on.

Stirling Newberry writes that the misty eyed nostalgia among the ostensibly clear-eyed reality based conservatives ignores the real legacy of the Reagan/Thatcher years when the resurgent right looted the wealth created over decades by worn out progressives:

Reagan and Thatcher brought in hard people. People willing to inflict misery on other people. People willing to lay the lumber down on the working class, and even more so on the day laboring class.

They were willing to warehouse urban criminals in jail forever, they were willing to impose a stagnation tax on wages, and they were willing to let people slip into a permanent state of semi-poverty, floating between jobs on one hand, and lotteries and alcohol on the other. This hardness was projected in foreign affairs, in domestic affairs. It brought with it a wave of people who had been waiting to lay into the "softness" of all kinds - in education, in criminal justice, in economics, in society.

The right might want to run and hide from the reality that they are, in fact, a bunch of conservative inflationists who have a wide streak of political sadism in them, but it does not take long wandering in the wilderness of right wing ranting to realize that what unifies the right wing is not a love of small government, nor a love of rights, nor any particular economic theory, but a personal belief that other people's right to a face stops at your fist, and that problems are best solved by beating the guts out of whoever crosses you - whether in the foreign or domestic environment.

And of course as he points out, the conditions that allowed Reagan and Thatcher to keep the party going as long as they did no longer obtain:

The retreat of the conservatives to the happy haven of Reagan is also doomed as policy. Virtually every circumstance which allowed Thatcherism and Reaganomics to work is gone. Far from being over-taxes, holders of rent are under taxed dramatically, and the resulting lack of research has created a pervasive lack of investment supply. The United States is no longer a creditor nation that makes more from its investments than it pays out, but one that pays out more in investment service than it takes in. The Baby Boom is not about to enter its peak earning years, but its peak "burning years". The rest of the world is not half enslaved, but competing for a diminishing flow of the very same oil that Carter had no chance of weaning us from. Developing nations now know that allowing Western finance to come in too soon, is to be stripped bare of assets - and China and India are both taking steps to prevent this, as the oilarchies long ago did. They can buy our companies, but we cannot buy theirs on equal terms. Worker's wages are now not high relative to the size of the economy, but after a generation of standing still, are not even enough to pay the debt service they have taken on. There isn't a generation of pension funds to pillage, but instead a middle class with a negative savings rate.

In short, the Conservative Troll, not Soul, wants to go back to the idyllic moment when Liberalism was both rich in savings to loot, and poor of energy and ideas to prevent it. When the world was, indeed, ready for a generation long spending binge, when there was a fat bank account to tap. All of this is gone, as gone as the polluted rivers and monolithic network news broadcasts. It is a waning memory, like the sound of Walter Cronkite's sign off of "and that's the way it is." We look back on it through an increasingly smokey lense, as E.L. Doctrow looked back on the turn of the century in Ragtime.