Despite decades on Eastern Daylight Time (sorry, couldn’t resist), our neighbors to the North seem to be having some trouble. Michigan lawmakers are at an impasse that might result in a government shut down. The issue seems to be this. The Democratic Governor Granholm is fighting red-ink Republicanism, unwilling to spend money the government doesn’t have. The Republican Senate is unwilling to raise taxes. Neither side is apparently willing to specify cuts necessary to balance the budget.

Granholm said that if an agreement cannot be reached today, she will provide details today about what services will be maintained and what will be suspended. On Wednesday she said that the three Detroit casinos will close at midnight Sunday and Lottery sales will be suspended. Additionally, she said liquor distribution to bars and stores would cease, state parks and welcome centers and Secretary of State branch offices would close.

Bob Moser, writing for the Nation, has an article entitled Purple America. The article takes a look at some of the effects of Howard Dean’s “50 State Strategy” as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the past, as I recall, this has put him at odds with other members of the Democratic Party, notably Democratic Leadership Council members.

In just two years, the belated catch-up effort has paid off in at least two tangible ways: It has exponentially multiplied grassroots party involvement and–in a short-term benefit not even envisioned by its architects–has helped win an impressive number of state, local and Congressional elections in majority-Republican regions. That’s not to mention the intangible benefits of fanning out 180 Democratic organizers, fundraisers and communications specialists across the map, many of them working in places like western North Carolina, where, as one local activist puts it, “a lot of Democrats think of the national party as the devil itself.” As the chair of the most overwhelmingly Republican of states, Utah’s Wayne Holland, wrote last year, “Democrats have become outsiders who do things to us, not insiders who do things for us. The fifty-state strategy is one way to turn it around.”

. . .

Dean’s analysis ran contrary to the entrenched interests of those who had long run the DNC, Matt Bai wrote last year in The New York Times Magazine, as “essentially a service organization for a few hundred wealthy donors, who treated it like their private political club.” Also being served at this “club” were Congressional leaders who had risen with help from the old DNC. And then there were the big-ticket consultants, the James Carvilles and Paul Begalas, who had shot to fortune and fame with their image-driven, big-media Bill Clinton campaigns, their pricey polling data and “strategic targeting.”
. . .
“If you make your living buying and making TV ads, then you’re not really very wild about a change in technology that says, Let’s hire organizers,” says Kamarck. “The whole political-consultant industry has been built on ads. But with cable TV and the diffusion of media, what the hell good is an ad? The fifty-state strategy takes a generation of consultants and kind of says, Let’s put you out to pasture.”

. . .

Clearly, this state of affairs cried out for some well-placed media smears and strong-arm tactics. In March 2006 House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader-to-be Harry Reid met with the miscreant from Vermont and, according to the Washington Post, “complained about Dean’s priorities.” To little avail. In May DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel and DSCC honcho Chuck Schumer had a similar contretemps with Dean, ending with Emanuel reportedly storming out with “a trail of expletives.” And on CNN, Clinton consultant and longtime Democratic strategist Paul Begala tartly mouthed the insiders’ consensus. “He says it’s a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”

Shai Sachs at MyDD has interesting commentary on the report by Media Matters demonstrating the conservative bias of newspaper op-ed pages.

The report confirmed what media critics like Eric Alterman have charged for a long time: that there is a pronounced right-wing bias in newspaper op-ed pages, in particular, in the ranks of nationally-syndicated opinion columnists. The bias is wide and deep: there are more conservative than progressive columnists in almost every region and state in the nation; three times as many newspapers have a conservative bias as those that have a progressive bias; and conservatives dominate in total readership as well.

. . .

My guess is that the heart of the explanation is a complex combination of subtle or overt bias handed down from the newspaper owners; the conservative makeup of newspaper subscribers or advertisers; and the way the syndicated works are marketed and organized as a business.

The Indiana Barrister asks an appropriate question for today, September 11, 2007; six years after al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center towers:

We all know what today is and what it means so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about it. What I will ask is what is your assessment of the war on terror?

My opinion is that it’s ridiculous to purport to have a War on an emotion (terror) or on a tactic (terrorism). It’s like having a war on hate or a war on flanking maneuvers. This isn’t just hairsplitting. The metaphors we use influence the decisions we make. I think it was Marconi who had so much trouble figuring out a good way to use radio because he thought of it as a wireless telegraph. It’s a good thing we abandoned the “Information Superhighway” metaphor. We should have given up on the “War on Terror(ism/ists)” metaphor long ago. If your war isn’t against a concrete object, you won’t win. I think the Jews recognized this when they put the “no graven images” requirement into the commandments — with no physical manifestation, their God could never be destroyed. Similarly, terror is an abstraction and can never be destroyed — hence, such a war can’t be “won.”

A War on al-Qaeda could be won. A War on the nation-states from whence the terrorists came (Saudi Arabia & Egypt, primarily) could be won. A War on those who finance al-Qaeda could be won. But, to purport to have a “war” on terror or terrorism is as foolish as having a “war” on poverty.

That’s my assessment.

Not that I’m complaining, but John Cole at Balloon Juice quotes a severe critique by Andrew Cohen of former Attorney General Alberto “Abu” Gonzales.

By any reasonable standard, the Gonzales Era at the Justice Department is void of almost all redemptive qualities. He brought shame and disgrace to the Department because of his lack of independent judgment on some of the most vital legal issues of our time. And he brought chaos and confusion to the department because of his lack of respectable leadership over a cabinet-level department among the most important in the nation.

He neither served the longstanding role as “the people’s attorney” nor fully met and tamed his duties and responsibilities to the Constitution. He was a man who got the job not because he was supremely qualified or notably well-respected among the leading legal lights of our time, but because he had faithfully and with blind obedience served President George W. Bush for years in Texas (where he botched clemency memos in death penalty cases) and then as White House counsel (where he botched the nation’s legal policy on torture).

For an administration known for its cronyism, and alas for an alarmingly incompetent group of cronies, Gonzales was the granddaddy of them all. He lacked the integrity, the intellect and the independence to perform his duties in a manner befitting the job for which he was chosen.

Cole also takes a look at an entry at Red State that suggests the solution for President Bush to take this opportunity to appoint an Attorney General who will clear out career staffers and install more yes-men and cronies.

I think George Bush is rhetorically shooting himself in the foot with his recent speech about how we shouldn’t leave Iraq because al Qaeda is there.

“The facts are that Al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they’re fighting us in Iraq and across the world and they are plotting to kill Americans here at home again,” Mr. Bush told a contingent of military personnel here. “Those who justify withdrawing our troops from Iraq by denying the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its ties to Osama bin Laden ignore the clear consequences of such a retreat.”

Very good, genius. The folks who attacked us on 9/11 didn’t have any influence in Iraq before we invaded. Now they do. Since you and your brain trust gave al Qaeda this little Iraqi gift basket in the first place, why in the world should we trust you to make any decent decisions going forward? Maybe we should take the Zippo away from the guy who insists on pouring gas everywhere.

At the very least, instead of “sharp criticism” for those who oppose him, perhaps Mr. Bush could at least apologize for messing things up so badly.

For some reason this morning, I found my attention drawn to Washington D.C. more than to Indiana. So, here are a few things:

Not so much with the strict construction: The Bush administration claims that it can prevent an ex-employee from testifying to Congress on grounds of “executive privilege.” They say that the U.S. Attorney in charge of prosecuting contempt citations for the Congress cannot do so when executive privilege has been asserted by the President.

Senator Robert Byrd doesn’t think too much of those who would engage in dog fighting as Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick is alleged to have done:

“I am confident that the hottest places in hell are reserved for the souls of sick and brutal people who hold God’s creatures in such brutal and cruel contempt,” he said.

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said of Vick something like, “I think we should cover him in liver and set those dogs loose. Then we’ll see if he is really as ‘fast’ and ‘elusive’ as everybody says.”

FEMA housed Hurricane Katrina victims in trailers with high levels of formaldehyde then tried to covered its ass by remaining willfully ignorant — deliberately refusing to test conditions, reasoning that if they had proof of the formaldehyde levels, they would be forced to do something about it. Senator Byrd’s hottest places in hell might be getting a little crowded. Maybe we should just follow Jon Stewart’s advice and just stock up on more liver.

Valerie Plame’s civil suit against Dick Cheney gets thrown out on a technicality. By “technicality,” I mean it the way law & order types always seem to mean it when a criminal case doesn’t get tried on its merits. I haven’t reviewed the text of the order dismissing the Cheney suit, but from the news reports it looks like Cheney enjoys immunity for actions taken in the course of his public employment. So, this isn’t any kind of vindication for Cheney, et al., but it does put a stop to claims for civil damages in the federal courts. (And, just for what it’s worth, I have no objection to lawyers getting suits dismissed on “technicalities”. I make the attempt all the time when, for example, prisoners and former prisoners sue the Sheriff because they weren’t real happy with their jail experience.)

Looks like Greg Sargent has himself a meme going, having dubbed Senator Lugar and like minded Senators WINOs which is short for Waverers in Name Only. This, of course, plays on the acronym RINO, an epithet I first saw over at Free Republic for those Republicans who were not pure of heart: Republicans in Name Only. In the case at hand, the WINO caucus includes Senators Susan Collins, Jack Warner, John Sununu, Norm Coleman, Dick Lugar, Pete Domenici and George Voinovich. These are Republicans who more or less acknowledge that the Bush administration’s plan for Iraq has failed but who will not cast a vote or take concrete action to alter the Bush administration’s course.

I’m not going to claim that the Democratic plan is the perfect one. But, in politics, the perfect is the enemy of the good. In any event, to me the main solution is for the Congress to do what it can to wrest control of this debacle from the President. We know that Bush is an incompetent, yet stubborn, failure who will not change course through any amount of persuasion. He has to be compelled. Normally, I’d say that waging war by committee is a recipe for disaster, but it seems worth a shot given how bad President Bush is at the job. Maybe Congress can do better.