From this morning's lead Wall Street Journal editorial:

"Opening arguments begin next week in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and, regardless of the verdict, it is our firm belief that this is a case that should never have been brought....the case is among the most egregious examples we can recall of criminalizing political differences."

Criminalizing political differences.

I have two words for Paul Gigot:

1. Whitewater.

2. Lewinsky.

Then words fail.

For over 50 years, the American tax code has declined to tax employer-provided health insurance. Employers can deduct the cost of providing the insurance, and employees' income is not taxed on this fringe benefit. Not only is this system unfair to the remainder of Americans who must buy their own insurance with after-tax money (or go without), it also distorts the health market in odd ways. Why should our system prefer that employers choose health plans, rather than consumers choosing for themselves? (These two groups likely have different priorities.) And given that workers often change employers (and therefore change insurers), this system encourages insurers to only manage short-term costs, without investing in long-term health.

According to the New York Times, in President Bush's upcoming state of the union address, he will propose that we change all that. And he thinks that doing so will bring health insurance to 47 million Americans. Aside from the merits of this proposal, Bush should be applauded by the Democratic Congress for using the bully pulpit to put the spotlight on this critical issue.

As my friend Ben Falit explained this summer in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Bush's proposal won't be entirely new. (See 34 JLMEDETH 632.) In last year's SOTU address, Bush set the goal of helping "people afford the insurance coverage they need." In the interim, he has not done much about that goal, except to quietly release a White Paper (pdf) a few days later. That paper included many different reform proposals, beyond the mere tax treatment which we are now hearing about.

Below the fold: Initial analysis suggests that the 2007 plan may be worse in some ways, and better in some ways, than the quiet 2006 proposal. ...

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Payday lenders offer a convenient product for consumers.  In exchange for immediate cash, a borrower gives a check dated a week or two in the future.  Usually, the cash advance comes to about 80% of the check -- the other 20% is the fee for the short-term loan.  The problem with payday lending is that if a check bounces for any number of innocent reasons -- like a health emergency or layoff in the family -- the borrower gets stuck in a debt trap that is almost impossible to climb out of.  This is because interest rates are often as high as 500% or 600%.  This is compared to the 30% most credit card companies charge for interest on cash advances.

Seventeen states have capped the interest rates on payday lending to eliminate enormous windfall profits for lenders and protect borrowers from financial ruin.  Legislators in Montana sought to do the same this year, but were rebuffed when the House Business and Labor Committee voted to table the bill this week.  The bill was blocked despite data that interest rates on Montana payday loans are the sixth highest in the nation and payday lenders drain $8 million a year from the state's economy, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.  Having the will to take on unscrupulous lending practices is not "anti-business."

Whoever came up with HRC's announcement strategy deserves real kudos. I like the way she downplays the whole thing. No drum rolls. No Bill. Nothing flashy.

Just her on a couch talking to the people. Her conversational style can't be beat. I've always been skeptical of her chances but things are changing.

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Some elements of our recent round-table on the netroots and the sixties came back to mind this morning as I was watching a Sundance screening of Chicago 10, an impressively vivid film by Brett Morgen which mixes actuality footage of the Chicago horrors of August 1968 with a cartoon recreation (fragments of the transcript read by actors) of the trial of the Chicago 7 that followed in 1969-70.

When the movie comes around, see it. It's a remarkable piece of work. It carries the weight of the spirit of the time. You can choke on the tear gas wafting off the screen. You can tear your hair over the craziness of Lyndon Johnson's war decisions. You can cheer for the craftiness and more brilliant craziness of Abbie Hoffman. You can watch a country eating itself alive.

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Warren Reports’ hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, runs this story about people losing their homes not because they cannot make the mortgage payments to stave off foreclosure, but because they cannot cover the fees due to attorneys hired by the mortgage companies. Granted, the reality is that some homeowners fail to cover their mortgage payments; foreclosure is an appropriate, if unfortunate, incident of securing a loan with one’s home. But as the article relates, there are plenty of people out there trying desperately to hang on to their homes. They find ways to cover the back payments they owe and the next payment due. But if they cannot cover the exorbitant and rapidly-rising fees, including the fees of the attorneys responsible for taking away their homes, they are out of luck.

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Remember the controversy about President Carter's proposed visit to Brandeis University?

Carter was invited to address the students about his controversial book about Israel and Palestine.

But then, due to pressure from various sectors, Brandeis insisted that Carter would have to share a platform with OJ Simpson's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

Carter rejected that plan. Whoever heard of a former President being forced to submit to simultaneous rebuttal? Carter negotiated the Camp David peace treaty. Dershowitz is a lawyer with no particular expertise on the Middle East -- but tons of opinions.

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This week was a promising week for education.  On Thursday, the House triumphantly passed a plan to cut interest rates by $6 billion over the next five years. Applause met the final vote of 356 to 71, and the Democrats checked off Number 5 on their list of 6 priority items for the first 100 hours. Said Representative Miller, this bill is a "downpayment." House Democrats agreed, suggesting this was just a first step towards making higher education more afforable.

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Thanks again to Matt for sparking this lively conversation. I agree with him, I think, that there is more similarity than difference among some of the positive and healthy dynamics created by the early New Left and the netroots phenomenon. And I also agree that the netroots phenomenon--bringing people to the process--is a positive one, similar to social movements like labor, feminism, etc. in that way (and differentiated from the DLC which brought money to the Dems, but not bodies, as Matt points out, even if their ideas did spark some useful debate and repositioning here and there). But I'd like to pose two questions to him in response to his initial post and to his newest post. First, Matt, could you define what you mean by 'social liberals' who are part of the netroots movement?

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Matt Stoller's latest piece, along with the netpolls, remind me of the importance of not allowing 2008 to become another 1968.

As in 1968, the differences among us (now the netroots, then the activist kids) are far less than those things we have in common.

Some of us are issue-driven. Others just want to win. But all of us want the conservative nightmare to be replaced with a progressive reality.

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Wow, that was quite a response to my initial post. I don't have a coherent way of describing the responses, and I can't really categorize the different themes without spending a few weeks thinking and researching, so rather than try, I'll just put out a couple of half-baked thoughts.

Mark Schmitt wrote a very thoughtful post about the arguments that the new progressive movement is making, and about the generational conflict inherent in the institutional shift away from top-down organizations and media politics. Despite Mark's implications, the evidence is pretty conclusive that this is not a youth movement. In fact, I would guess that the opinion leaders (not the readership) are in Nathan Newman's age bracket, mostly in their early thirties and forties. This group was largely apolitical before becoming involved over the last eight years, but we actually belong to the 'in-between' generation. For instance, Schmitt describes a fascinating 'Crashing the Gate' argument made by Heather Booth in 1980.

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Josh's last post nicely clarifies one of the points I was clumsily trying to make in my own essay in the Stoller Series: some folks in the "netroots," as broadly construed, are into movement-building, while others are practicing an unfettered form of journalism.

But it's not that easy to separate the two tribes.

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I participate in a clinical program in which I provide legal advice to people with housing-related questions. The most frequently-asked set of questions pertains to security deposits - a landlord refusing to return it, or failing to pay interest, or claiming too much for repairs, etc. The law is relatively clear, but landlords often take advantage of their inherently superior bargaining position (they hold the money and, hey, they're the landlords) to shortchange tenants on their way out.

That's why I was glad to see that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is reversing a series of amendments advocated by his predecessor (and likely presidential candidate) George Pataki and passed in the type of midnight legislative session that makes the New York legislature such a disgrace. One amendment would have permitted landlords to double security deposits. In my clinical experience, I have seen dozens of instances of landlords taking advantage of tenants. I have not yet seen a landlord without enough money on deposit. When a family is moving to a new apartment (which often entails paying more rent), the last thing they need is for the landlord to have even more of their money not to give back.

We, "the activists," probably could use more regular intellectual depth and historical context in our writing, while I think the "intellectuals" could use a lot more focus on the sort of action and meta self-awareness that you regularly see at places like MyDD and Dailykos. -- Chris Bowers, mydd.com.

Was it something I said? [Sigh.] So many people to annoy, so little time . . .

The nub of the question here is not very radical or ideological -- it's whether the public, netroots included, can be sold the next war. Democrats and any netroot backers who support more needless war will deserve all the raspberries we can pitch. Any day I can provoke anyone into swearing, at me and up and down, that they are likely to do no such thing, that's a good day.

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Over at MyDD Chris Bowers has a post in response to our discussion here about the 'netroots' as a political movement. And Chris keys in on the already observed bifurcation within the progressive political blogosphere. The thesis -- and there's some persuasive statistical evidence to back it up -- that there are really two progressive blogospheres -- one built around Kos, MyDD and other blogs that have grown out of them, and another with a less activist or more journalistic bent like TPM, Tapped, Kevin Drum, Yglesias, etc.

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Anyone who runs up credit card must be buying too many gameboys.  At least that's the view of lots of folks in DC who write the laws governing credit, bankruptcy and the like.  I wonder what they will make of a new report released today examines the "medically indebted"--the people who charged medical expenses to their credit cards and then couldn't pay off the bills.  

The report is a double indictment.  It focuses on the financial impact of an inadequate health care system and lack of health insurance, but just below the surface is a reminder that people are paying 29% interest and $39 late fees as they try to pay off medical debts that have morphed into credit card bills.  Nearly 2 out of 3 (62%) of the medically indebted had received calls from debt collectors.  That's a great get well call:  pay up or we'll make more trouble for you. 

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I had only minor quibbles with Matt Stoller’s essay. One of them was that I thought he was a little too defensive in denying that there was a generational difference or that the “new movement” is largely youth-driven. I was going to paraphrase former Senator Dale Bumpers in his defense of Bill Clinton: “When they tell you its not about generations, it’s about generations.”

I hardly have to say it, though, because the responses here so vividly prove it. Stoller has put a lot of effort into understanding and explaining the social movement he’s part of, and in return, he’s been met by a whithering blast of Boomer vanity.

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As Secretary Rice continues her swing through the Middle East, pointedly avoiding Damascus, Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar today revealed that two years of informal meetings have produced a draft text for an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement. The full text can be read here and the story here. While neither is as detailed nor dramatic as the Geneva Initiative model Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, the new text exposed in Haaretz goes another step in demystifying the parameters of a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace. Also this week, former officials and negotiators from Israel, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, the Gulf, the US and Europe met in Madrid to mark the 15th anniversary of the conference convened by Jim Baker and the grown-up Bush after the first Iraq war. So the vacuum created by the administration’s dogged insistence on military escalation combined with diplomatic docility continues to be filled by unofficial peace initiatives.

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As one who was in college during the height of the New Left era, I still don't have any more idea of what it was than I did then.

I recall the left-wing intellectuals who debated Marcuse and the others but these folks seemed pretty fringy to me, and way too cerebral.

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TPMCafe was buzzing last night with debate about Matt Stoller's case for the Netroots as a new political movement of the Left. After tracing its birth from Clinton's impeachment through the Iraq War and Howard Dean to the 2006 midterms, Stoller argues that, in contrast to the New Left of the 1960s, this new political movement is diverse in age, concerned with economics and willing to take over institutions to build power.

Nathan Newman takes exception to Stoller's history. Newman argues that what Stoller describes as a political drought between 1970 and 1997 for the Left was actually a time marked by tremendous progress for causes like environmentalism and feminism. He cautions against taking many of the post-60s institutions that do exist for granted.

Like Newman, Max Sawicky focuses his critique on Stoller's historical narrative.

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As we talk about whether the 'netroots' are a political 'movement' or not, I'm reminded of the constant counsel of one of my advisors back when I was in another line of work. A movement is a vague and often ephemeral thing. What do we even mean when we use the word? I think the acid test, the real question is this: what are the institutions that this new political movement has spawned? Dailykos.com seems to clearly fit as one answer. So do the various sites and mechanisms that pool small contributions for various candidates. What else?

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I typically write about consumer contract and credit lending issues, but an AP story in today's news grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go: Iran gets army gear in Pentagon sale. 

After describing at one point how undercover buyers with no social security numbers and no credit histories simply drove onto a military base and purchased rocket launchers, body armor, F-14 fighter technology and more, the article includes a "justification" that really offends sensibilities:

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Condominium sales in some pretty significant real estate markets are falling quickly. The question on people's minds is whether it signals a more general trend towards the bursting - or, at the very least, the substantial deflation - of the alleged housing bubble. Given the widespread of use of high-risk adjustable rate financing instruments and the rising prime rate, there is reason to be concerned. If there is a bubble and it does burst, how will the main stakeholders (borrowers, lenders, and policymakers) react?

A few months ago, I received the bill from the nonprofit hospital where my daugher was born this summer. The bill was over $20,000, and that was for a routine procedure with no complications!

Thanks to Harvard, we were fully insured, so our total expense out-of-pocket was only $100. What may not be obvious to everyone, however, is that the insurer didn't pay the difference. In this case, most of the charges were simply wiped away. The insurer only paid a special, negotiated rate of a few thousand dollars.

I call this a "funny money" game because almost nobody really pays what the hospitals charge. The private insurers negotiate a big cut for their patients' bills and the government gets an even larger cut for Medicare and Medicaid patients. (That's part of the game for the hospitals -- first inflate the charges, then give the illusions of discounts.)

And then there are the working poor who aren't destitute enough to get Medicaid but who do not have a job good enough to provide health insurance. They are the ones who get trapped in this absurd game. For them, the exorbitant charges are quite real -- real enough to ruin their credit and to prevent them from seeking additonal medical care in the future. Many eventually end up losing their homes to foreclosure or even resort to bankruptcy.

There are two noteworthy developments on this front...

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Matt Stoller is an exemplary figure in what is unmistakably a movement. A movement is a passion embodied in the many and varied works of vast, unruly numbers who come and go and, if the movement is any good, come again. Since the 'late 60s, movements of the left have been sectoral. The netroots' breakthrough is that they seriously aspire to transcend the sectors.

The so-called netroots are without doubt a movement, not because they have won every battle they've fought (cf. Dean, cf. Lamont), and not because they cut across race and class lines, and not because they are left-wing (what is left-wing about Howard Dean?) but because they are (a) in motion and (b) serious. What makes them serious is that they supply energy and its crystallization, money, to actual projects that seek power.

Because they are alive to their moment, in its cultural and technological particularity, they are a movement of this moment, not (thank God) a reverberation of Golden Oldies. Of course they are not "just a repeat of the 1960s, with a .com attached." And what a blessed thing--not because the '60s movements were flawed (which they were), but because they were movements of the '60s.

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Thanks to Matt Stoller for his post. But a few questions- I’m not sure about what he means by “identity liberals.” Without doubt, what I would call “ swing voters” are disillusioned by politics—and politicians—as usual. But swing voters are not necessarily liberals at all. If anything, the divide between social liberals and economic liberals—or progressives, even populists—is still something that must be negotiated among the Democrats. Whether they have mediating institutions or not, the politics need to be sorted out if the Dems are to win in 2008.

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[UPDATE: More here, if you can stand it.]  [Second UPDATE:  Responses to commenters appended to this post.]

All generalizations about "the 1960s left" are false, except for this one.

Matt Stoller is well-situated to talk about the intersection of contemporary internet-based protest and the Democratic Party. He does not seem very current on the boots-on-the-ground left that is responsible for the huge anti-war demonstrations we have seen since 2002, as well as for local organizing against Wal-Mart and for the "living wage." About the 60s left, he is all wet. Why does this matter? It speaks to the limits of the netroots when it comes to policy, program, ideology, and intellectual world-view.

The "Internet Left" is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.

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Matt Stoller's initial post on the origins, nature and future of the "netroots" as a progressive political movement is an excellent point of departure for a discussion that should go beyond his analysis.

I have two key questions for Matt and other commentators: To what extent is the "netroots" a movement rather than an expression of a new and ideologically inchoate medium? And is the resurgent Left adequately represented by the "netroots?"

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I'm glad Matt is engaging with what to make of the Netroots movement in the broader historical picture, since there's something new going on. But I think he creates too binary a story of a disappeared New Left divided from the new Netroots movement by an interim political wasteland-- where the story is more optimistic at the grassroots. For example, the following just doesn't seem right:

It's not a surprise that the left of the time saw little value in institutional takeover, and retreated to the private and academic spheres...

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[Matt Stoller of MyDD is visiting TPMCafe this week to discuss the Netroots and generational politics.]

Over the past nine years, a series of shocks to the country have radically changed the contours of our political debates. In the 2000 election, the Presidential debate involved sweater hues and snowmobiles, ‘lock boxes’ and ‘fuzzy math’. Virtually nothing in that election prepared any but the most cynical political observers for the massive security failures, electoral fraud, the creation of the beginnings of a police state, the loss of two wars one of which was sold under false pretenses, and the destruction of a major American city – all tragic events which have not only occurred on the watch of some very bad people without adverse consequence, but have all increased the power and wealth of those same people. America is a very different place in 2007 than it was in 1999.

This series of events has done something specific to a relatively apolitical white liberal class that had been somewhat absented from the public debate since the early 1970s. It made us angry, and has created a movement.

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On this day celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, let’s honor his memory by taking time to remember why so many people didn’t like him. Now that Dr. King is dead and gone, leaders of all stripes purr their respect. But back in the day many of these same people didn’t like what he said nor what he did, nor what he stood for.

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Barack Obama:

“When you watch Clinton vs. Gingrich or Gore vs. Bush or Kerry vs. Bush….you feel like these are fights that were taking place back in dorm rooms in the sixties.”

Matt Stoller:

But instead of coming up with new ideas, the New Left turned inward and the liberals were scared away from political combat. You can see this today in how the new and progressive movement is basically without institutional help, mentorship, or funding. Retreat to academia and the personal sphere happened because the 1960s left ignored economics and failed to defend the public as a meaningful concept.

The first post-boomer generation of political leaders is chomping at the bit. And with the possibility of a generation political realignment and power in the Democratic Party shifting significantly in just a few years, we here at TPM thought it would be interesting to bring Netroots activist and super-blogger Matt Stoller to the Coffee House to build on his past writing on the Netroots and the New Left.

Matt will post his first thoughts soon, and for the rest of the week he'll be spending some time engaging you and other Coffee House writers on how he understands this new progressive movement. If you would like to contribute a longer thought, please feel free to compose a blog post and send me the link to be included with my daily summaries.

Iraq serves as a template for America’s foreign policy in tough neighborhoods. Up to and including Somalia. Here’s how Iraq and Somalia are similar and different, and what they may tell us about future foreign adventures.

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David Brooks has a provocative column in today's New York Times about American exceptionalism. It's an homage to Seymour Martin Lipset, the monumental political sociologist who died on New Year's Eve, and who was the intellectual most responsible for the phrase "American exceptionalism" entering modern political discourse.

Lipset, who died in his eighties,was a democrat and Democrat was born of the era when defense of the social welfare state meant defending a commitment to a social democratic ethos of equality. He spent decades examining why the trade union movement was among the weakest in the industrial world, and why Americans believed in a non-class based system. Brooks posits the notion of equality against opportunity, and challenges the Democratic Party to listen to those centrists who promote "opportunity" against the leftward populists who "advocate an activist state." The question is, however, how can we become a nation of true opportunity without the state making certain interventions. This is not only where the Democrats and Republicans part ways, but where the Democrats and the Democrats part ways.

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