So now ethanol prices are collapsing, because there's no way to get the ethanol distributed to lots of cars quickly and as a result demand isn't materializing.

The economy isn't going to go green (let's not debate just now how green is corn) unless supply, distribution, and demand are all addressed.

Ethanol has a distribution problem. But solar, for instance, has a pricing problem. What is the long run outlook for solar pricing?

We can't swear off oil unless pricing is reasonably dependable for alternative energy sources. No one is going to invest really big money in alternatives unless they can predict prices with some certainty.

None of these problems is too hard to solve, but merely saying we need a carbon tax doesn't produce distribution for ethanol. Merely saying we want to tax carbon doesn't suppress the market demand for oil even at a 25% increase in price (what is now being predicted and prepared for.

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Though the presidential election is still more than a year away, political engagement around the country is exploding. As many people have already noted, potential voters are already turning out en mass to support their candidates. It's comforting to see so many domestic policy issues taking center stage (see here and here for instance).

And Hillary Clinton's latest proposal (although her staffers are quick to say it is just an idea being floated around) is both daring and out of left field. She contemplates a $5,000 grant for every child born, which is redeemable upon their completion of high school. Its viability is, at best, questionable, but it does show two things which I feared might not be present in the upcoming election…

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From the Wall St Journal:

PAGE ONE
How Economy
Could Survive Oil
At $100 a Barrel
Compared to 1980, U.S.
Is More Able to Handle
Once-Unthinkable Rise
***********************************

So if the economy can "handle" $100 a barrel oil, then what level of carbon tax would be required to shift demand from oil to green energy? A $100 barrel price would be roughly a 25% increase over today's level.

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The UAW strike shows why America needs universal healthcare: our system bankrupts industry and leaves the middle and working classes vulnerable. The President’s (and major Republican candidates’) commitment to ideology over problem-solving---not just in healthcare but across the board---opens space for a progressive coalition to emerge as the practical, empirically-minded, responsible choice. Progressives will have to take the right's ideology head-on and own the fact that government is indispensable for a competitive economy and for middle-class security.

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The Gazette newspaper chain in Maryland published an op-ed I wrote today advocating an increase in the state's gas tax:  http://www.gazette.net/stories/092807/policol43706_32364.shtml.

The gas tax represents an interesting middle class issue, especially for progressives.  On one hand, critics of this type of "Pigovian" tax emphasize its regressive nature and prefer forms of taxation that put more of a burden on the wealthy.  On the other, middle class families -- and everyone else -- would benefit from a policy that forces consumers to incorporate all costs of a product's use into their purchasing decisions.  And certainly gasoline has lots of costs when it comes to our environment and national security.

What do you think?  Can we just offset the regressive nature of the tax through other tax policy, or is that too problematic in today's political climate?

This article illustrates one reason I love Israel.

No, I obviously do not love Israel because of the murders of children the article describes. I love Israel because an article like this can appear in a newspaper that is the New York Times of Israel -- when it could not appear in the real New York Times or any major media outlet here.

In fact, in Israel even the mass circulation right-wing papers -- Ma'ariv and Yediot Achronoth -- run articles like this, particularly in their Friday papers (the equivalent of Sunday papers here).

Not here in the land of the free. Not only is our media afraid to write in terms like these about the killing of Palestinian kids, they barely mention the slaughter of Iraqi kids in America's war.

Read this article and see what it is like in a place where the far right does not intimidate the press into silence.

Note: not one of our major Democratic candidates would even consider expressing regret for these kids' death without coupling it in terms that would not offend the few crazies among their donor base. You don't believe me. Ask one of our candidates and listen to the double talk.

It seems to me that most of the argument over “The Argument” this week has been about policy and ideas, which is great, this being one of the most idea-driven blogs around. But since the week is almost up, I do wonder if I might redirect things to address a huge chunk of the book that we haven’t discussed. Several of the commenters have made reference, in a complimentary way, to my reporting on the Democracy Alliance and its influence on progressive politics. And yet, while Joan and Ed and others have spent a fair amount of time talking about the bloggers in the subtitle, the billionaires have gone largely unexamined.

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With the partial exception of Joan McCarter's excellent post, it appears the discussion over Matt Bai's book has drifted away from the internal party "argument" I first posted about, and towards the external "argument" Matt urges Democrats to take more seriously. I will probably have my Centrist Wonk credentials revoked for saying this, but I pretty much agree with Mark and Garance that Democrats have a perfectly adequate "take on the world" (give or take some important foreign policy details) to offer in 2008 unless Republicans begin to offer something different. But I'd also suggest that it makes a lot of sense to defer some parts of the internal argument over the external argument until we've run Republicans out of power.

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So now we come to the crux of where Mark and I disagree in the premise of “The Argument,” I think, and it is in fact a pretty narrow disagreement. Because I completely concur with his suggestion that all of those ideas to update Social Security for a new era (to change or replace it or however you want to frame it) are part of a long-term solution and perhaps of a new argument, too. He mentions Maya MacGuineas’s proposal, and I think the folks at New America Foundation have done an extraordinary job of trying to push government and the political debate forward.

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I'd like to echo Mark Schmitt's strong recommendation of the book, to start with. I'd been hearing about the book for months from various D.C. insiders before I finally sat down with it. Some of them disliked it intensely, and were just thrilled to predict to me how unfavorable the reception for this book would be. (I love this town -- total snakepit.) In retrospect, that prediction looks about as accurate as the predictions of Howard Dean's invincibility Beltway insiders made in Fall 2003.

The Argument is a great read, pure and simple. It carries you along with all the momentum of a thriller, even though you know going in the outcome of its suspenseful narrative. It is filled with so many acute, illuminating observations about the insurgent progressive movement's key players that I'm quite sure some will never again feel comfortable in Bai's presence, for fear of what is going on behind those dark green eyes of his. Indeed, there is so much in the book that I didn't know about various actors, such as the Democracy Alliance's Rob Stein, that I felt at times while reading it like someone had accidentally given me the secret psychiatrist's files on people I've spent years seeing around town.

The book, however, left me with one big question.

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I don’t know Nathan Newman, but here he does the classic old-school partisan thing (you see it on both the left and the right) of recasting my argument in classic conservative terms, and then assailing it as any good liberal would. He lists the tenets of CAP’s poverty plan and then proceeds to point out that none of these proposals constitutes a “handout.” Well, no. Who said they did? Did I call them handouts? When did I become Rush Limbaugh? In fact, I specifically noted that all of these ideas require their beneficiaries to work—which is a central platform of both CAP’s plan and John Edwards’s plan and a widely accepted approach across the political spectrum, but which Nathan apparently equates with cruel and unusual punishment.

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I appreciate Matt Bai's quick and comprehensive response to my comments. Our points of disagreement are narrowing (in one case centering on a single paragraph in the book), but worth another round, if readers have the patience, because the underlying question is huge, and is also what Nathan Newman and Joan McCarter focused on.

In contrast to the biting declarative sentences that make up most of the book, Bai approaches his claim that there are no ideas with delphic detachment:

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Arbitration clauses are buried in the fine print everywhere--credit card agreement, cell phone contracts, employee handbooks, health insurance plans, and franchise agreements.  No one cares--until they have a dispute.  Once they get over-billed, or discriminated against, or cheated, they discover that they have waived their legal remedies.  Instead, they have to pay high fees and they may have to travel to a distant forum only to appear in front of an arbitrator who is far more likely to rule for the company than for the individual.  That's the news from a comprehensive new report on arbitration issued today by Public Citizen.

The big push from Public Citizen raises a central political question:  In a business-versus-consumer choice, will Congress pass any consumer measure?  Does industry still own the legislative process? 

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You’ve certainly raised interesting arguments for and again the ID requirements that the Court will be addressing. One point, though. One is striking about the whole voter fraud issue is that there is so little evidence that voter fraud is really much of a problem – that is, that people are voting who are not allowed to do so. The absence of this evidence suggests that the people pushing voter IDs are doing something other than trying to solve a real problem (which, apparently, barely exists). It suggests they are trying to stop legitimate voters from voting, and that is a very sinister thing to do.

As for Clarence Thomas, I think one aspect of his record receives less attention that it deserves. He is the most conservative justice on the Court since the 1930s. He has made clear, in United States v. Lopez and elsewhere, that he believes much of the New Deal is unconstitutional. And he has a different attitude toward precedent than all of his colleagues. He thinks if a past decision is wrong, it should just be overturned, without regard for the value of stability.

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I'll probably eventually read Matt Bai's book for the story of bloggers and billionaires interacting, but his core view of the "lack of ideas" among liberals as driving the American reality is just an excuse not to deal with the REAL DC establishment, the core of moneyed corporate power that blocks most real reforms.   Europe doesn't have a better welfare state because the French had better intellectuals on the left; they built a stronger welfare state because, unlike in the US, the corporate class in Europe was devastated by World War II, so democratic votes were not thrawted and the labor movement was stronger.

There are lots of good ideas on the progressive side, but most policies proposed are modest not because people have small minds, but because even limited reforms face filibusters and corporate lobbying. 

Yet Bai dismisses even the Center for American Progress's anti-poverty program as being just about giving poor people a money handout when it is all about supporting working families to help themselves.   

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Thanks to the folks at TPMCafe for giving all of us this chance to spend some time in self-reflection through the lens of Matt Bai's The Argument. And thank you, Matt, fellow moderator, for the topic.

The Argument is an entertaining, often insightful, and in some instances highly illuminating examination of the state of the outsider in Democratic politics today. Particularly interesting for me, since this was all new to my eyes, is his examination of the Democracy Alliance, and where all that money is, and isn't going. But this blogger is going to focus on the part she knows best. And, regarding the blogs, I found Matt's book frustratingly incomplete in two critical areas regarding the blogosphere: its narrow focus on the activist component of the blogs, leaving out the wonkosphere, and that most critical element that gave rise to the blogosphere and drove its massive and meteoric success--the failure of traditional media in our political discourse.

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As a rule, I don’t take part in discussions about what I write, and the reason for that is, while I love to hear from readers and almost always write back (unless a letter leads me to fear it will end in my taking out a restraining order), I don’t love the fight. I’m not a provacateur by nature, and I don’t wake up every morning with an agenda or an ideology to which I want to convert everyone else. I spend time with people who interest me; I tell the best, most honest story I can; and then I put it out there and let other people debate its validity or idiocy it if they feel like it. That said, this is a great forum, and I want to thank the commenters who’ve engaged me on the book; I’ve spent hours these last few nights, staying up late after watching the Yankees (who are in the playoffs, I might add), trying to answer as many of you as I can. I’ve also found a lot to think about, predictably, in Mike and Ted’s and Ed’s posts. You all may not appreciate everything they have to say, but these are some smart guys who care a lot about their party and their country, and I admire that.

The post I want to address, though, as succinctly as I can, is Mark Schmitt’s very thoughtful critique.

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The Ted Nordhaus/Michael Schellenberger post casts a different, and interesting light on Matt Bai's excellent book, and his exposition on the various elements of the Democratic insurgency that's gained steam over the last few years.

The Reapers (as they are affectionately known in environmental circles) seize on Matt's concerns about the inability of insurgents to develop a coherent external "argument" for Democrats, and implicitly characterize said insurgents as reflecting the let's-all-link-arms-and-protect-our-programs interest-group liberalism that has dominated the party in the past.

I don't really agree with that characterization if we're talking about the netroots, but it does raise some important questions about the netroots' own characterization of the "D.C. Democratic Establishment."

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An article in today's New York Times notes that Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign is "holding a fundraiser today in Kazakhstan, despite concerns about its human rights record." "Concerns" is putting it mildly. The Human Rights Watch 2007 World Report notes that Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev has not only effectively shut down the main opposition party, but has also passed a new media law giving him "unlimited power to close independent and opposition media outlets." Democracy promotion, anyone?  

Hypocrisy and bad judgment are not new tools in the Giuliani repertoire, as evidenced by his long and checkered association with Bernard R. Kerik.

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I've participated in a few TPM Cafe book clubs now, and here's something I don't recall saying before: Buy the book. Read it. Enjoy it. We have talked about plenty of books that are basically policy or political strategy arguments, and the 2,000 word version of the 80,000 word argument is often sufficient. But The Argument is mostly not an argument, but a real narrative. I missed my stop on the subway yesterday while reading it. I know some bloggers and I know some billionaires, and Bai's portraits of their large personalities and the dance of misunderstanding that characterized their interactions, is by turns hilarious, acid and tragic. Bai's profile of Howard Dean is the first I've seen that catches just how ordinary, mainstream and adaptable he is, and his sketch of SEIU president Andy Stern, probably the most appealing figure to Bai, catches the dilemma of the progressive pulled in a million directions – toward running an organizing-based union, toward developing an alternative political structure on behalf of working people, toward developing a blue-sky new idea structure – and pushing forward despite the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and some of these objectives don't fit well with one another.

I don't know if Bai intended to perform a public service to the progressive movement, but he did so by shining some light into the operations of the Democracy Alliance, the collaborative of donors whose secrecy did far more to insulate those donors from creative ideas and common sense than to protect their deliberations.

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As many of these comments illustrate, the passion on Bush v. Gore doesn’t fade. People will never stop being angry – especially because the George W. Bush presidency turned out to be so consequential (unlike, say, his father’s). What if Gore had won? The world would be different.

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For the first time since 1976 a nationwide strike has been called by the United Auto Workers (UAW) after failing to reach an agreement with GM.  The UAW has ordered the 73,000 GM workers that it represents at 82 U.S. facilities not to report to work.  This promises to be an interesting test of the effectiveness of the strike in ensuring that these workers can avoid pay cuts and stay in the middle class.

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John Edwards released an aggressive education plan in Iowa on Sunday. It focuses on three themes- creating universal preschool, building teacher quality, and reforming No Child Left Behind. He adds this to a series of comprehensive plans for upgrading the social safety net.

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I never understood why Columbia invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak in the first place. I am all for the free exchange of ideas and all that but come on. There was never going to be an exchange of anything with Ahmadinejad. Of course, he wanted to speak to Columbia (a prestigious university in the heart of the beast, NYC) but Columbia had nothing to gain from having him. And much to lose.

And thanks to President Lee Bollinger, Columbia managed to lose about as much as it possibly could.

And more than that Bollinger made this country look fearful, paranoid, ill-mannered and weak.

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With his astute and often hilarious new book, Matt Bai has waved some much-needed smelling salts under the noses of delusional Democrats. What Bai has done is put the intellectual emptiness at the heart of the Democratic Party on public display — and set the Party's vacuity in historical terms.

From the Great Depression until the mid-1970s, Democrats and liberals achieved amazing things. Rights-based liberalism ended school segregation, dramatically reduced employment discrimination, and gave women the right to abortions. And environmental laws cleaned up our air and water and protected wilderness lands. But as the economy and society changed, and attitudes toward government evolved, liberal interest groups, grassroots activists, and Democratic insiders clung for dear life to old government programs, regulations, and court victories. Indeed, they still do.

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Several of these comments reflect a sentiment that I hear all the time:: that Bush v. Gore is the wound that won’t heal. It’s interesting that the response from supporters of the decision tends not to address the decision itself. It is more in the nature of, as Justice Scalia likes to say, “Get over it!” Or, as Justice O’Connor likes to say, “Bush would have won anyway.” O’Connor’s point is based on the so-called media recount, which is widely – and wildly – misinterpreted as leading to the definite conclusion that Bush would have won anyway. The media recount says no such thing. By the way, O’Connor is not in the habit of regretting anything, including her vote on Bush v. Gore. But she was sure disappointed by the Bush presidency.

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This September 20^th, thousands of Americans drove to Jena, Louisiana to protest the unjust prosecution of six black youth. The protest was so large—drawing somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people—that the multitude couldn’t even fit within the city limits of Jena. Are we seeing the birth of a 21^st century civil rights movement?

It all started last September, when white students at Jena High School hung three nooses in a tree in the school courtyard, to warn black students not to sit there. The school authorities dismissed this hate crime as a harmless prank. When black students staged an impromptu protest, the school called an emergency assembly to deal with the underlying causes of this unrest: troublemaking black youth. Flanked by police officers, Jena’s District Attorney looked directly at the high school’s black students and told them, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.” Yes, that’s right. In the minds of Jena’s authorities, the nooses weren’t the problem—black students protesting nooses were the problem.

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Ummm... Jeffrey--

You write:

Bush v. Gore may be an exception to this pattern. This may be the case where there was subterfuge. The opinion of the majority was so different from their customary views on important subjects – like Federalism and equal protection – that it is reasonable to conclude that the decision was little more than an attempt to seal the election for the Republican.

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Thanks to TPM Café for hosting this conversation. I enjoy reading these virtual exchanges. I’m sure I’ll enjoying taking part.

One of the most difficult things in writing about the Supreme Court is knowing what degree of cynicism to apply. In theory, of course, the justices are supposed to apply “the law,” which is, again in theory, a distinct entity from “politics.” Several of the justices (by no means all of them) still assert that a clear line can be drawn between the two, and the Court does its best to stick to law. As long ago as the 1930s, the Legal Realism movement began to break down these categories, but even all these years later, there’s no reliable measure for determining the true motives of the justices. My own effort to untangle the roots of Supreme Court decision-making is The Nine.

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Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by New Yorker staff writer and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who comes to discuss his book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Surveying justices and cases from the Reagan era onward, Toobin has analyzed the Court we know to determine what its justices rule and how they decide.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.

Perhaps you thought "The Argument" was a feature at TPMCafe's Book Club every week. That may be so, but this week we are striving for a treat of convergence with Matt Bai's new book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.

In his book, Bai examines another special convergence. Many signs point to the apparent inevitability of further political gains by the Democratic party in 2008, but Bai contends that the party still struggles with the same structural deficiencies it has always been blamed for.

Joining Bai in the discussion will be Michael Schellenberger, Kenneth Baer, Joan McCarter, Mark Schmitt, Todd Gitlin, and Ed Kilgore. (If you remember, TPMtv interviewed Bai and McCarter as part of our coverage of YearlyKos in August).

Previous Book Club discussions have covered the work of Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, Josh Kurlantzick, Glenn Greenwald, Todd Gitlin, Jonathan Chait, and Greg Anrig, Jr.

Alan Greenspan was appointed to positions of high power by Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. While this may say something about the narrow range of views in national politics in the last thirty years, it also says a great deal about Alan Greenspan.

Alan Greenspan can boast some great successes in his public career. The most notable success was recognizing that the unemployment rate could fall below the 6.0 percent floor widely accepted by economists, without leading to accelerating inflation. This allowed for the boom of the late nineties, and forced economists to re-cook their theories.

But Greenspan’s greatest skill has been to carefully position himself on key issues so that he could cover his backside, regardless of what happened.

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Hello everyone, and thank you for reading and thinking about “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics”, which just came out. It’s my first book, and it took me about three years of reporting and writing to complete, so I’m very gratified that the reviews have been great and that people are talking about it. I’m grateful to the guys at TPM Café for hosting this discussion and to all of you who are giving up your valuable hours doing whatever else you might be doing so you can weigh in on it. (A special shout-out to McJoan, my co-moderator at the YearlyKos debate. We meet again, albeit virtually.)

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CGI is one of the greatest shows on earth, but what is particularly admirable is former President Clinton's focus on addressing global warming. He's plainly a convert to former Vice President Gore's mission. He's implying that his wife's administration would undertake major transformation in the global economy: that's bold and exciting.

Email and web-based technology have served as critical tools for advocates and activists to grow petitions, advertise rallies, and disseminate information etc. for a myriad of causes. And most people in the advocacy community have memories of both forwarding to friends particularly inspiring emails and trashing the particularly rote description of suffering half-a-world away. Yet what happens when web video, global online communities and advocacy meet? Welcome to the world of Web 2.0 Advocacy. Many online advocacy efforts for Darfur exist. Yet a few have stood out for me for their ingenuity, impact and their consistent efforts to engage global citizenry in weighing in on decision making at national and supranational levels. These tools allow us to bear witness, to be seen and be heard en masse and to provide what the Economist referred to as a deafening wake-up call to world leaders.

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