You have your marching order, <snark>and your check from George Soros</snark>. But seriously, progressives, turnout is our game. Let’s play it well. Don’t let this news lull you into complacency. Keep those tweets and blogposts coming.

So the bottom line is this: the Gallup poll indicates a pretty substantial shift in the partisan climate. But whether not it will be enough for Democrats to take over the House will depend on turnout. A turnout scenario like 2010 would not get the job done for Democrats, while 2008-type turnout very probably would. Some in-between scenario like 2004 (which is perhaps the most likely case) would make control of the House a coin flip.

Of course, we’ll want to see whether Gallup’s figure is confirmed by other pollsters — as well as how the numbers change over the course of time.

Still, this is a pretty encouraging sign for Democrats — coming, interestingly enough, at a time when President Obama is achieving his lowest-ever approval ratings in many polls. We’ll have another post up discussing the potential for this “double switch” next week — a Republican president plus a Democratic House — but it has become a tangible possibility (I would estimate the chances as being somewhere between 10 and 20 percent).

Republicans, meanwhile, will have to decide whether their hard bargaining strategy — which has produced some policy wins for the party while also making Mr. Obama’s job more difficult — is worth the price of potentially losing their majority in the House.

It was at roughly this point two years ago, in August 2009, that the generic Congressional ballot began to show a Republican lead. Republicans continued to expand upon it over the next year and a half as they campaigned against the unpopular Democratic Congress. If we’re on a parallel course this year, and voter sentiment continues to shift against Republicans in Congress, we’ll have yet another wave election.

read more

I’d be careful not to overstate how looney the Tihadists are. Every movement must mobilize resources, that is, correctly perceive political opportunities and seize them. These are rational acts. These are the acts that lead to the wielding of political power. These also, are interesting to social scientists, and those who would oppose the policies pursued by social movements.

Lastly, when we consider the long “moral arc of the universe,” the salient social movements are those that seek liberation, that is, social justice and freedom for historically suppressed groups. In this light periodically reactionary movements are properly seen as countermovements. Politically, they must be so seen, if progressives and not reactionaries are to set the terms of the debate. There is no guarantee of success, and that is why progressives must continue to mobilize, seek unity and set the terms of the debate by which elites must abide.

nationalpost:

John Moore: America is being held hostage by right-wing purists
Six years ago, I was shopping a book idea to publishers. The concept was a guide to how the Internet and radio and television gabbers were creating a self-contained parallel universe for American conservatism complete with its own system of economics, a fanciful version of U.S. history and even its own science. That this loopy world view required the rejection of matters established in fact and history posed no impediment to its adherents: They merely asserted that the record and the facts were wrong. My central thesis was that a portion of the American conservative movement had quite simply gone nuts.

The consensus of editors I met with was that the phenomenon was a cyclical historical blip explained in Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay The Paranoid Style, which documented the ebb and flow of hysteria in American politics. During one meeting, a publisher leaned forward and said, “We love the idea but really, how much crazier can things get?” She was afraid that the looniness had crested, and she didn’t want to buy into a declining stock. 

Flash forward six years and crazy still hasn’t found a floor. As their radical postures in the debt-ceiling fight shows, right-wing nutters have taken reason hostage and the American government along with it. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

wilwheaton:

This deal trades peoples’ livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, and I will not support it. Progressives have been organizing for months to oppose any scheme that cuts Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and it now seems clear that even these bedrock pillars of the American success story are on the chopping block. Even if this deal were not as bad as it is, this would be enough for me to fight against its passage.

This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance between more cuts for the working people of America and a fairer contribution from millionaires and corporations. The very wealthy will continue to receive taxpayer handouts, and corporations will keep their expensive federal giveaways. Meanwhile, millions of families unfairly lose more in this deal than they have already lost. I will not be a part of it.

[…]

The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican Party, is at a very serious crossroads at this moment. For decades Democrats have stood for a capable, meaningful government – a government that works for the people, not just the powerful, and that represents everyone fairly and equally. This deal weakens the Democratic Party as badly as it weakens the country. We have given much and received nothing in return. The lesson today is that Republicans can hold their breath long enough to get what they want. While I believe the country will not reward them for this in the long run, the damage has already been done.

THIS. It’s almost like the only people in America who aren’t listening to the people in America are the ones who are sitting on Capitol Hill.

Throwin’ down big knowledge, and proving right Kuttner (and similarly minded progressives).

With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here — from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.

Multimedia

Graphic

Budget Projections and Realities

GraphicDespite what

Policy Changes Under Two Presidents

 

antigovernment conservatives say, non-
defense discretionary spending on areas like foreign aid, education and food safety was not a driving factor in creating the deficits. In fact, such spending, accounting for only 15 percent of the budget, has been basically flat as a share of the economy for decades. Cutting it simply will not fill the deficit hole
.

read more

Yes, I remember well the begrudging assent to unity we progressives gave to the Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11.

[Snark on]

Aren’t you glad that conservatives are now responding in kind to Obama’s announcement?

[Snark off]

Contrast for a moment the styles of right-wing and left-wing activists. The latter have their facts in order, properly identify the sources of corruption in the body politic, and protest nonviolently. I bet their posters had words that were spelled properly. How’s that for afflicting the comfortable?

Sunday’s protest against the Koch brothers’ right-wing pow-wow in Rancho Mirage demonstrated a growing boldness by progressive causes and activists.January 31, 2011  |    
   Petitions by Change.org|Get Widget|Start a Petition� 

Note: The article below reprinted from FireDogLake by David Dayen recounts the events of Sunday’s protest against the Koch brothers in Rancho Mirage, CA. The demonstration signals a series of promising developments for progressive groups and activists. Notably, the event was marked by an impressive coalition effort by the participating organizations, positive energy and activism by the attendants, and the wide-held understanding that it is the Koch’s ill-gotten, obscene wealth that has made the Tea Party and hundreds of right-wing abuses of our democratic system possible. Author Jim Hightower said it well in the kick-off event  in a packed large movie theater before the protest; the problem the Kochs represent is what the 19th century populists used to call “the money power,” and our right to speak out against it is rooted in our “democratic authority” as citizens concerned with the general welfare of the country.

read more

This is the most lucid thing I’ve heard Nader say in a while.

To the Editor:

“The Repeal Amendment” (editorial, Dec. 27) asserts that many Americans who are economically struggling “have no progressive champion,” and that the left has “ceded the field to the Tea Party and, in doing so, allowed it to make history.”

Hello! There are plenty of distinguished progressive champions lobbying, rallying, exposing, suing and organizing at the national, state and local level. Yet they have been mostly left out of the mass media, on television and radio and in the news, feature, style, opinion and book review pages of major newspapers, including The Times.

Meanwhile, the Tea Partiers have seen their modest initiatives hugely magnified and therefore expanded by major media. This has mainstreamed the radical right, including Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Pamela Geller, as well as the most extreme neoconservatives who still receive media attention despite their deceptive, disastrous Iraq war-mongering.

Check your own pages and you will see the evidence. Or better yet, have your public editor look into why flagrant, often bigoted right-wingers are given so much time and space compared with fact-based progressive leaders committed to the “equality and welfare” that your editorial espouses.

After all, mass media coverage matters greatly for social and political movements.

Ralph Nader
Washington, Dec. 28, 2010