Let's face it, if Barack Obama really wanted, as he said at Netroots nation, for progressives to hold him accountable, he would have called Josh and demanded that more resources be spent on more reader blogs and that TPM run fewer slideshows of White House life on its front page.  Also, he would have fired Timothy Geithner and would have pulled our troops out of Afghanistan by ordering Iraq to invade Kabul.

All of the above is just common sense.  That are supposedly Democratic President hasn't said a peep about this issue is proof enough of where his loyalties lie.  TPM, you'll notice, is a corporation.  So Obama's silence here is just proof that he's a tool of corporations.

That said, I'd like to poll all of you on a question Josh just asked on the left hand side: is migration of our old posts important to you should they set up a new read blogging site?  For me it isn't.  I hope the headline and first two paragraphs of this post amused you but I don't feel like I need them forever.

I'd be absolutely fine with starting a new blog from scratch.  What do you think?

Oddly enough I went on a blog break a little over a week ago.  I stopped writing and commenting on the TPM Sites, mostly because I was spending a lot of time doing it.  Of course I've continued to read what's going on here and I'm breaking my blog fast early because, hey... these blogs might not be available when I'm ready to take up the hobby again.

So, about Josh's decision: On one hand it's not great tragedy.  Any of us can get a free blog most anywhere and if what you crave is a blog plus community there are other progressive places to go, some created by TPMers, some not.  I'm sure some people here, to the extent they think about it at all, think I should take by firebagging butt over to firedoglake where it belongs. What we'll lose is a pretty unique little group that's formed around here and that'll be sad.  But if we're at a party in Josh's living room we can't expect him to put out new bowls of chips and cold beers forever.

Based on what Josh has said around here recently (not just in the last few days) he's only sort of happy with what he created here.  First there's the money issue.  Only he knows what he's spending on this and how resources could be better allocated. There's the issue of his staff's time which is much the same.  There seems to be some sense that he's not all that enamored with the content here, though.  He said we've written some good things.  But I wonder if we're not too snarky, too loud and too lefty for his personal tastes.  I like to think we've done a very good job debating with some very dangerous people around here -- people like Rachel Kleinfeld and Anne Marie Slaughter who might not otherwise have had to deal with us at all. And sheesh, remember that lunatic Larry Johnson?

But I think we have to look at this in the context of the rest of TPM and how it's changed.  During a decade where older established publications have slimmed down or shut down, Josh turned a one man operation into an actual media company.  The two greatest journalistic accomplishments, I think, have been Social Security, where he doggedly pinned down every member of congress on the issue of privatization -- a job the mainstream media shirked -- and the AG firings, also shirked by the main stream media until they saw Josh and his upstart outfit running away with the story.

Since Obama's election though, the coverage has changed.  We've started to see bizarre headlines on TPM stories along the lines of (these are paraphrases) "Progressives Angry Obama Over The Public Option" or "Progressives Worry That Democrats Won't Fight Social Security Cuts."  What struck me about this tone is that I'd been assuming that TPM considered itself a progressive company.  I'd been assuming that TPM would worry about Social Security cuts and that TPM would be angry over losing the public option.  I don't know what Josh personally thinks about either of those topics.  It doesn't seem to matter though because TPM has evolved away from being primarily an outlet for Josh's political views.  That is probably both good for business and good for the credibility of a news organization.  Whatever the merits and demerits I would argue that you find the most enthusiastic lefty voices here in the reader blogs and that elsewhere on the site progressives are covered as if they're any old group.

I notice that whether or not he keeps the reader blogs, Josh plans to keep comments.  Comments are great for pageviews.  You comment on a story and then you click on it all day and argue with people, adding more and more comments and letting Josh serve ads throughout the day while you watch a guy calling himself "Freerider" hurls insults at you multiple times an hour. 

Your mileage may vary on this but I don't think TPM's nonstop coverage of "The Crazy" is all that helpful.  I don't care what Glenn Beck teaches at his phony university or that Sarah Palin smacked down Scott Brown or that Pamela Geller, who I have never heard of, blames the liberal media for the cabbie slashing.  I certainly don't want to engage with other users in the comments sections of such articles.  What is there to say?  That Beck is an idiot? That Palin is a hypocrite? That Pamela Geller is not the actress from the Buffy TV series?

No matter what's decided about the reader blogs, I think that December is going to be a defining time for TPM.  The bipartisan deficit commission will probably recommend some form of Social Security benefit cuts, though dressed up with a lot of trade-offs that won't withstand scrutiny but will largely go unscrutinized.  Unless Obama fights his own commission, TPM will face an interesting conundrum. Does it marshall (ha ha) its resources to fight for Social Security Round II or do we get a bunch of stories about how "progressives are angry."  The answer will tell many of you whether or not you want to blog here anyway.

Little hiatus for me, but I'll be back almost certainly after the midterms if not before.  I've started to get a little concerned that my output here is taking away from more potentially serious writing such as the large and winding comic novel that will soon sit in my underwear drawer and in the hands of interns at literary agencies.  A guy with a pitchfork can dream, can't he?

I wasn't actually going to announce a goodbye because it's a little presumptuous and I'll look silly if I succumb the urge to Blahg again in four days.  So let's just say it's how I'm feeling right now and what I intend.

Gabbs vs. The Blahgs today made me decide to say "F it, I'll write a sign off."  Ultimately I think Robert Gibbs believes that we have the most progressive President that the country will tolerate and I somewhat believe that he thinks that's a good thing.  He says that some lefties wouldn't be satisfied even with Dennis Kucinich as president.  What he does say is probably closer to the truth: Robert Gibbs wouldn't be satified with Kucinich as president! He would not at all like for that to happen.  Canadian style health care?  Robert Gibbs doesn't want it!

Reasonable people can disagree, but only if they're honest.  It's not the "pace of change" that has some of the left angry at Obama.  It really comes down to actual policy differences.  I'll pick on something I kind of like which is financial reform.  I thought the pace of that was really good.  It was about as quick as you could expect for such a big issue with so many interests involved.  Nicely done on pace.  On substance I'm mostly happy but that's where I have my criticisms, too.  That's a substance disagreement not a pace disagreement.

Obama's so good at talking to people like adults that he probably just needs to come out and say things like, "I think breaking up the banks is too radical, so I didn't support it.  I don't support Medicare for all when there are other options.  You didn't get a bigger stimulus because I don't believe it's the government's place to replace every dime of lost demand when a recession hits."

I'd disagree with all of those statements but if he said them I think it'd serve us well in a few ways.  First, it would end speculation from the left about "What Obama believes."  Second, it'd prove in plain language that the people who call him a "Socialist" are too whacky to have a voice in the debate.  Third, it would give us an honest barometer by which to set our expectations.  The drawback would be that his administration would have to give up on the notion that it can or should be able to "count on support" from people who don't agree with the president's views.

But hey, that's not going to happen.  We're not going to have an honest airing of anything, especially in front of the midterms.  So I'm going to save my breath for a little while and come back when we have to take up Social Security, an issue that will test and define the character of our leaders in ways that will be difficult to dispute or obsfuscate.

I think I want to take a little time to see if I can make some statements that are a little less ephemeral than blog posts and that might change some hearts and minds without seeming to explicitly try so hard.  Also, I think I do need an intermission from arguing about how we should argue and what tones are appropriate and what are responsibilities are.  You're all great folks who believe passionately in what you believe.  Who am I to tell you how to behave?

I'm sure I'll be reading TPM but I'm going to try my best to spend a little more time with books, magazines and slower material and to let my brain ease away from this mode of thought and argument.  That said, if anyone wants to get in touch you can find destor23 at the free email system that is offered by the Google.  Feel free to drop a line.  Though I bet that even posting that here is going to flood my box with spam offers to purchase Ed Hardy bikinis.

A closing observation: in the comments section on other parts of TPM you can report spam by hitting a button that says "Flag Abuse."  Flag abuse.  Doesn't that just confirm what the conservatives think about us?

So Bob Inglis, a staunchly conservative South Carolina Republican congressional representative is now out there touting himself as some sort of victim of Tea Party extremists and the media, including TPM, seems to buy his act.

Cry me a river.

Inglis is an extremist and by any reasonable measure, was Tea Party before anyone had ever heard the term.  That his career spent nurturing the thoughtless, radical right has now bit him in the ass would reach the level of poetic justice only if this joker's character could ever reach the level of poetry.

It's just rich that Inglis, elected to congress in 1992 (he served there and dailed at a bid for the Senate in 1998) wants to pretend that Tea Part extremism is something new.  To me its very familiar.  Barack Obama is not American.  He's a Muslim.  He's a traitor.  This is a lot like: Bill Clinton is a draft dodger, he and his wife ran drugs from Cental America into Arkansas, they murdered Vince Foster.

Inglis was one of the House's loudest and most strident impeachment bosses.  Here, he describes it himself in a recent Wall Street Journal article about his supposed political and personal conversion: "I hated Bill Clinton. And I wanted to be on [the] Judiciary Committee to destroy him. I would confess that now as sin," he said. "At a spiritual point, there's something wrong with that, to hate somebody else. But it's also true that it just doesn't work politically."

The impulse that made the far right think that it was okay to try to throw a twice-elected and popular President out of office is at work in the Tea Party today.  Lost the election?  No problem!  There are other ways to get the White House.

Inglis is not the Tea Party's victim, he's one of its daddies.  He was happy to stoke the passions of the far right and to serve its anti-demcoratic aims, when it suited his interests.  Now he's just a sore loser, brought low by his own, ill-thought ideas.

To be formal about it: "Fuck you, Bob Inglis.  You dumb fuck."

Tim Geithner's New York Times op-ed this morning was infuriating.  To say that an economy with 9% unemployment is in recovery is a tough sell but Geithner seems to be blaming the wrong people for our financial circumstances and even when trying to write diplomatically he betrays a lack of empathy with working Americans.

As Atrios points out this morning, Geithner doesn't mention foreclosures once in his Times piece.  He's ignoring the government's failure to do anything about the problem of well-meaning (and reasponsible) people losing their homes.  He doesn't realize, as Atrios does, how this contributes to lasting unemployment by destroying the mobility of the work force (another concept I've never liked, actually -- "if you can't find work, move" is not exactly the kind of idea that leads to increased quality of life for people who may well pick where they want to live for reasons other than available jobs).  Foreclosures also choke off the construction industry by causing house values to fall and they hurt state and local budgets by blighting neighborhoods and killing the tax base.  A lot of ills could be cured by a successful foreclosure prevention program, but the government has so far done nothing and Geithner doesn't even think it's important enought to mention.

In his piece, Geithner bullets up some economic progress.  I, um... have comments.

• Exports are booming because American companies are very competitive and lead the world in many high-tech industries.

Yay.  Too bad so many of our high tech jobs are outsourced.  iPads aren't made in America, you know.  It's also true that a lot of our high tech capabilities that really are created here and exported are going towards creating jobs overseas and strengthening our economic competitors.  A lot of American tech firms are making money because they're wiring the emerging markets.  That's ultimately good for them and good for us but at the moment, realize that our high tech industry is probably creating more jobs elsewhere than here.

• Private job growth has returned -- not as fast as we would like, but at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries. Manufacturing has generated 136,000 new jobs in the past six months.

Call me when we're keeping pace with the population and when the unemployment rate isn't falling because people have gotten kicked off the rolls.  Yes, this is progress but are they really good jobs and how are the wages?  These jobs are not replacing what people have lost.

• Businesses have repaired their balance sheets and are now in a strong financial position to reinvest and grow.

Non-financial businesses entered the recession with some fo the strongest balance sheets in history.  Non-banks had tons of cash.  They hoarded it throughout the credit crisis and are hoarding it now.  What will they do with the money?  I bet they buy competitors.  That doesn't create jobs, it kills them. 

• American families are saving more, paying down their debt and borrowing more responsibly. This has been a necessary adjustment because the borrow-and-spend path we were on wasn't sustainable.

American families didn't borrow irresponsibly on a wide scale and Geithner owes the nation an apology for implying otherwise.  For the most part they borrowed what they had to borrow in order to keep up with the rising costs of necessities (like medical treatment) in the face of stagnant wages caused by outsourcing.

• The auto industry is coming back, and the Big Three -- Chrysler, Ford and General Motors -- are now leaner, generating profits despite lower annual sales.

As Robert Reich likes to say, "didn't we save these industries in order to save jobs?  Leaner, more profitable companies means fewer workers doing more for less.  The auto industry might be "coming back" according to the P&L but it is not creating jobs.

• Major banks, forced by the stress tests to raise capital and open their books, are stronger and more competitive. Now, as businesses expand again, our banks are better positioned to finance growth.

This is laughably dishonest.  Major banks are stronger and more competitive because we financed them through the roughest times, enabling the biggest of them to buy up competitors or take market share from smaller banks that failed, and because we've let them enjoy the easiest carry trade in history (borrow short-term from the Fed for nothing, buy long Treasuries with a yield, profit). 

• The government's investment in banks has already earned more than $20 billion in profits for taxpayers, and the TARP program will be out of business earlier than expected -- and costing nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars less than projected last year.

Conspicuous absence of AIG here.  I know it's not TARP proper but to separate these issues obscures the truth -- we lost money on the bailouts.  Can't stress this enough because you know the next time an industry needs bailing somebody's going to say "What could go wrong, we made money on TARP!"  Also, don't forget the opportunity costs of TARP.  How many foreclosures could we have stopped with that money?  How many jobs could we have created?

Later in the piece, Geithner blames the victims of unemployment for their circumstances.  He writes, "The share of workers who have been unemployed for six months or more is at its highest level since 1948, when the data was first recorded, and we must do more to ensure that they have the skills they need to re-enter the 21st-century economy."

People are not now unemployed because they lacked skill.  They are unemployed because companies shrunk to the sizes they thought appropriate for an era of lower demand and because our liberal policies on outsourcing and mergers have helped companies demand more output from smaller labor pools making less money per hour.  That's where out economy's mammoth productivity gains come from.  The hardworking America, logging more hours and taking fewer vacation days than most any worker in the world, has put itself out of a job with its own productivity.

Geithner's thesis is that it's a tough recovery but it's a recovery.  He's probably right that we've emerged from the recession and there might even be robust growth ahead (current projections are tempered by the sentiment of the moment) but where will the spoils of that growth wind up?  When banks are truly ready to lend again, what will they do with their money?  Probably give it to LBO funds so they can buy struggling companies.  When corporations loosen their purse strings where will they spend their money?  On factories here ot factories abroad?  Starting a new division or buying a competitor?

Near the end, Geithner includes a line about how we have to invest strategically but still take care of our deficits.  He's setting the stage for the end of 2010 debate over the recommendations of the administration's deficit reduction commission.  By declaring the recovery in the here and now, Geithner is introducing us to the next phase -- big cuts and sacrifices that will affect ordinary people unless the president ultimately says no.

It's really great to see that Obama was honest and competent enough to keep his promise of ending the combat phase of the Iraq war, leaving 50,000 soldiers on the ground in more of a security and peacekeeping role.  That's down from a peak of 144,000 soldiers.  Even if, like me, you think 50,000 soldiers are 50,000 too many, I think we can be happy that Obama did what he said he'd do.

We also have to take Obama at his word when he says: "The hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq."

As the force level is reduced and operations move from taking territory to security and advice, and as we ramp up operations in Afghanistan and as Iran continues to take over the news cycle, it's important for us not to forget the rather large garrison we're leaving in Iraq.  If we do, we risk leaving them there forever.  Is this like our having bases in Germany or in the Korean DMZ?  Unfortunately not.  Iraq is far more dangerous than either place and it's likely to remain that way for a long time.

I think our government needs to be honest with us about its plans for permanent military bases in Iraq.  This is what John McCain meant (but said badly) during the 2008 campaign with his "soldiers on the ground for 100 years" remark and it's certainly plausible to me that the original planners of the Iraq war envisioned that we would always have a base and substantial presence there in order to contain Iran and secure oil access for ourselves.  Is that the current thinking?  I think we deserve to know.

I also hope that Obama's winding down of the Iraq war on schedule is a harbinger of things to come in Afghanistan. As a society we desperately need to stand down from current hostilities and we need to create a financial peace dividend so that we can send money to other causes here at home.

I do think this is a major accomplishment for Obama.  It's not exactly what I'd like but it is what he promised and I think that's a good sign.  This is a "right direction" moment. 

Wear a mosque.

...says Time magazine, making use an an attrocity that even I won't make light of. 

As an opponent of the continued war in Afghanistan and an adovcate for the quick withdrawal of our troops, I do have to consider the fact that Time is correct in its assertion that the Taliban, unchecked by foreign troops, will commit terrible acts on Afghanistan's people, particularly those accused of cooperating with American troops, those who do not strictly abide by the Taliban's style of Islam and women.

Still, I have to ultimately reject Time's argument here.  The torture and abuse of a woman named Aisha that Time documented happened a year ago.  This means, unfortunately, that such crimes are taking place in spite of the occupation.  The practice of this form of Sharia law will unfortunately endure our presence the same way all criminal activity endures the presence of occupation and law enforcement all over the world.  Some people are sick and twisted.  We would do well to not design our policies around those people, what they do or what they might do.

I also have to point out that the Taliban's treatment of women and indeed anyone who doesn't share their philosophy and lifestyle is not new.  Prior to 9/11 one could find themselves called a dirty hippie for demanding that the U.S. government do something about the Taliban's treatment of women as well as ethnic and religious minorities in the region.  Some of you might not remember that the Taliban destroyed precious Buddhist shrines in the region some months before 9/11 and there was an international outcry about it.  They were also at the time harboring Osama bin Laden, already guilty of one attack on the World Trade Center and other attacks on U.S. interests around the world.  But back then we seemed more interested in building natural gas pipelines than in deposing the Taliban, changing Afghanistan or helping the cause of women there.

Some will say, "fine, but our pre-9/11 Taliban policy was obviously a mistake.  You dirty hippies were right, we should have done something about those fanatical religious extremsist fascists before they really got to us."  That's true.  But us dirty hippies never advocating invading the place.  Our thought was that maybe our government would end its material support for the Taliban, which was rendered both in terms of some development aid (seriously!) and in terms of our trade policies.  A liberal response to the excesses of the Taliban would have involved containing and isolating its regime and a generous policy of offering asylum to people fleeing its oppression as well as working with global partners to undermine the Taliban and to encourage its overhtrow.  If we'd had our way the prospects of the Taliban leadership coming to the U.S. on a diplomatic visit (as it did prior to 9/11) or even leaving Afghanistan's borders without being picked up and shipped to the Hague would have been unthinkable. But we never, ever would have supported a 10 year occupation.

After 9/11 I was convinced that we had to retaliate but I anticipated fast military action resulting in the overthrow of the Taliban and the rapid and rabid pursuit of the criminals that its government harbored.  A ten year occupation can be viewed as nothing but a failure.

It's not really fair to say that we'd be responsible for the Taliban's actions after our troops leave.  The Taliban are the lawbreakers and oppressors here.  They are responsible for their own crimes and if they are to be held accountable for them it's up to the world's police to snatch them and bring them to stand trial in an international court.

Time would have us believe that we have a choice between war and crimes against humanity.  It's not so.  What we have now is both.  Whether or not we're at war is up to us.  We can deal with the Taliban's crimes through the global criminal system and we can help its victims by helping them escape and offering them asylum here, in Western Europe or in friendlier Middle Eastern or Asian countries, should they so choose.

Josh highlights the outrageous case of Bell, California in which the citizens of a small municipality have apparently been taken for a ride by public servants who have been generous to themselves with the public till.  Josh reports high six figure salaries for a City Administrator and a Chief of Police.  I'm not going to defend the privileged few of Bell, naturally, though I will defend some civil service salaries in general later.  What really strikes me is that the leadership of Bell is merely following the advice that Republicans have been giving for ages.  They're running politics like a business.

Bell has 40,000 citizens who Josh describes as "working class."  So I set out in search of a public company with 40,000 employees (who would by definition be "working class") and I found technology conglomerate and defense contractor ITT, which has just that many employees worldwide.  You should see what their executives make.

CEO Steve Loranger gets a base salary of $1.13 million and total compensation of $13 million including stock grants, option grants, long-term incentive plan participation and a super-charged pension.  The company also pays some of his taxes, provides him with a financial advisor and gives him use of both a corporate jet and car and driver.  Wow!  Despite the recession, his compensation has climbed every year since 2007, when he only made a total of $10 million for the year.

Now, you can argue that Bell, California just seizes people's money and wastes it while ITT uses its money productively and profitably.  ITT is, indeed, profitable though its revenues and profits both fell between 2008 and 2009 even as its executive team got hefty raises so, go figure.  Some shareholders at ITT might want to look into that.

If you think $800,000 a year is out of line for the administrator of a 40,000 person town you have to at least wonder if $13 million might be out of line for somebody running a 40,000 person company.

Now, a word about real civil service salaries, by which I mean teachers, police officers, fire fighters and the like -- as public finances have worsened it seems we've decided to attack a pretty old deal we made with these people which went something like this: "You won't make a ton of money, all your friends in the private sector will make more than you and sometimes you'll find yourself short of cash when somebody who works as hard as you do shouldn't be.  In exchange you'll get a secure pension, the right to retire after a reasonable period of service instead of based on your age, a little more job security and maybe more time off."

When times are tough we tend to attack everything on the "in exchange" size of the ledger and we forget that these people and their unions mostly accepted lower salaries in exchange.  This is partly because the private sector has failed many workers and is no longer offering appreciably higher pay than civil servants are getting.  The lack of job security in the public sector has also gotten worse and pensions have been mostly phased out in favor of 401(k) plans, representing a transfer of retirement risk from employer to employee.  In the face of those private sector realities, some would like a do-over on the public sector deals of the past.

Another municipal story you see fairly frequently is the "can you believe this cop/firefighter/teacher" made six figures last year?  Generally this is because the person in question worked over time.  That fact alone should quell the outrage.  The teacher gave up more of their time for your children.  Evey extra hour a cop or firefighter is on the job is another hour where they risk death or injury.

And seriously, if I hear one more complaint about the gold plated health insurance that police and fire fighter unions negotiated for their members it better come from a miner or somebody else in a dangerous occupation.  Because until the Windows system crash can literally burn you alive, I don't want to hear about it.

The story of Bell, California teaches me just one thing: the people who seek political power and the people who seek corporate power are alike in that they will enrich themselves at the expense of others, so long as they aren't called out on it.  Also, they mostly aren't called out on it.

But I also hope that people don't lump stories like Bell into stories of "public employee excess."  Those narratives are highly misleading and public employees usually get short shrift.  I'd also hope that anyone who argued that AIG traders deserved their huge salaries no matter who was paying the bills because they had contracts will defend the sanctity of public employee union contracts with the same vehemence and enthusiasm.  I won't hold my breath though.

I have now personally read all of the 90,000 leaked documents and have had time to look up supporting material, calling on my own multilingual abilities and intelligence sources and I can say, after spending the better part of my late afternoon doing this, that there's nothing new in the Wikileaks documents and so we should just stop talking about them and move on to this exciting item about Lindsay Lohan's favorite tanning parlor.

Apparently that should pass for analysis based on what I saw in the major media today.  Fred Kaplan at Slate says "nothing new here."  Our old friend Rachel Kleinfeld says that there's nothing new.  Some person from the Hoover Institution, after claiming that the leaks somehow hurt the war effort then goes onto argue that they reveal no new information.

The counter-attack against Wikileaks has turned out to be "not very interesting."  I suppose this is supposed to accomplish two things for war supporting members of both parties.  First it says "don't pay attention to future Wikileaks releases, just because something is classified doesn't mean it's interesting."  They're arguing that most of what's classified wouldn't interest you anyway so let it go.  This is based on the "people are children" theory, akin to telling a grade schooler who wants to watch a horror movie that they won't like it because it's "boring."

The second and probably more important argument they're making is that the revelations of these documents: that we have wasted years and the better part of $1 trillion courting feckless and incompetent allies, killing innocents, dying needlessly and accomplishing next to nothing, shouldn't change your opinion about the war effort.  Ha ha.  We knew all that bad stuff.  If you were just reading the papers you'd have already developed your opinion about these things.  So don't pressure anyone for a withdrawal.  If you didn't want to bring the troops home on Friday, you shouldn't want to bring them home now!

None of these people have had time to thoroughly review these documents themselves and I doubt that they will (they're boring, after all).  I wish TPM had a muckraker site to do some independent reporting on this.  I kid, for all I know, that's in the works.  It should probably take weeks, if not months, to truly assess the importance of these releases.

But even if they tell us what our commentariat claims we already knew, doesn't it take on more meaning when it comes from primary sources?  By the way, Steve Clemons says that these documents support Seymour Hersh's claims that there have been battlefield executions.  As I recall, we discussed this here at the Cafe once and some people actually attacked Hersh's credibility, basically arguing that you can't listen to the guy unless he's fully vetted by The New Yorker.  So there you go, something we didn't know.  Hersh was right.

We could really use, after 10 years of war, some popular movement towards withdrawal.  I don't see it happening though.  The fix is in.  These leaks are boring and the next group of leaks will be boring too.  I'd be willing to bet that we get more coverage about the eventual prosecution of whoever leaked the materials than we did the documents themselves.

Your media and think tank communities at work!

In response to the President's request yesterday that he be "held accountable" by the Internet, the Internet has issued an official response:

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Bikini (Ed hardy,polo) $25
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To which Obama reportedly said, "I'm supposed to be held responsible by an Internet that can't collectively spell 'Armani?'"

This is not another call for more TPM spam control.  Some progress has been made on that front just as Obama has made some progress on health care, winding down the Iraq war and strengthening our financial regulations.  Progress has been slow, problems remain but the president is trying.

There's some debate about whether or not Obama's message to the netroots was patronizing, hollow or even dishonest.  Let's face it, some people like Rahm Emmanuel don't have much use for Democrats who don't fall in line.  People like him want and expect support and loyalty at all times.  Hey, it's a rough world out there and if you can't count on your friends, you can't count on anyone.

But if you're among those Obama supporters who believes that he is truly a progressive thinker, compromising to political reality, then I think you have to take his call for more and more vocal criticism at face value.  In a world where his opponents will call anything he proposes socialism, Obama will never be able to get anything done without a very vocal left.  By the way, what Obama should do is propose that the Republicans should take over congress.  The Republicans will reflexively label the proposal "socialist" and the resulting logical inconsistency of that should lead to a total system failure (see Kirk, James T. "How to Force An Out Of Control Super Computer To Reboot.")

If Obama's problem is that he has unrealized left wing political ambitions then his critics from the left haven't been too loud, shrill or disloyal.  Instead they've been too quiet and perhaps too willing to believe that whatever Obama accomplishes is the best he could have done under the circumstances.  Worse, the left has been drowned out of the national debate by a very loud, extreme right wing with a television friendly black and white message.

Does the left need its own Tea Party?  Would such an organization be practical?  Would it be moral?  Would it be as lunatic as the right's or a breath of common sense?  I know some people believe or hope that the Teap Party will ultimately destroy the Republican party by revealing it as too far outside of the mainstream and too far from the people's interests, to be a viable political organization.  That could happen, but not if we keep compromising with them.  In 2012 "they wanted to destroy Social Security" won't be a great argument if it comes from the mouths of Democrats who cut benefits.

The big fight over the next few years will be how we deal with our deficits.  One side will want to have working people pay the bill.  Our side should maintain that working people are not responsible for these deficits and that the bills need to be paid by those individuals and industries that reaped the greatest benefits of the last 30 years.

I think the left needs a radical message of its own.  I suggest this: your living standards are 10 times lower than they should be and you work too hard for what you get.  The moral debt that America as a society owes its citizens is more important than the bonds issued by the Treasury.  Americans First.

I promised LisB and Anna am I'd write something about my new parenthood adventure and, it really has been great.  My son's three months old now and is developing a happy and energetic personality.  He's also trying to stand, which seems to defy physics but I guess since he doesn't know the laws of physics yet he's free to break them.

A few weeks ago my wife and I took our son on his first train trip from New York to New Haven, Ct. where we met up with my wife's mother for her birthday.  It is scary to take such a young kid so far away from his home and to take him on a train full of people where he might scream and generally create a nuisance.  But he does travel well and if he's quickly fed, screaming is kept to a minimum.  Also, he really likes other people and delights in being gawked at and entertained by strangers so we're really fortunate.  So far he's come out with us to restaurants and bars and parties and has basically become part of our social lives rather than a hindrance to it.  I'm told this can change as toddler-hood approaches but we're enjoying this now.

On the way back from his birthday visit with grandma we encountered our first truly harrowing public parental experience.  The baby was fussier than usual and hungrier than usual.  He's bottle fed and we thought we had plenty of formula for the trip.  But it turned out, while we were waiting an extra hour for a delayed train that I had been feeding him the last of our stash.  It's close to a 2 hour train ride for us to get home from New Haven (the bulk on the Metro North train and then some on the subway) and we were loaded down with baby gear and bags.  This was a true panic moment as his formula started to run out and he seemed nowhere near done eating.

The New Haven train station is also in the middle of nowhere in terms of services.  My wife went out to find a place to buy formula and found only one bodega in walking distance (and that guy though she wanted to buy loose cigarettes) and there were no stores within walking distance that would have what our son needed.

Of course we felt like irresponsible morons for not checking this before we left civilization.  getting on the train without food was of course not an option.  The little guy, hungry already, couldn't be expected to last for 2 hours and leaving a baby's needs unintended for that long is... well, it's a betrayal of biology and psychology.  But I think it's the first time we realized that we might have stumbled into a situation where our son would be feeling pain and need that we would not be able to soothe.  We resigned ourselves to leave the station and get a cab to a store, probably missing the next train and not getting home until late at night.  But it really makes you think "what if I ever find myself unable to feed my child?" 

It's a scary, scary thought.  I admit that my first reaction to his being born was something like "How beautiful.  And my, how fucked up things could get now."  Some people have the attitude that they can handle any suffering and there only real fear is bringing a wife or child down with them.  I fear bringing my wife and child down into failure and I also know that I can't handle just anything.  I have too many needs!

But there we were, two educated and employed and by some standards well-off people with our rail tickets and all our baby gear and we had blown it and could not feed our child and we both felt afraid, ashamed and vulnerable.

Then I saw a family with another newborn, also bottle fed.  I suggested to my wife that we offer to buy a bottle of formula from them, if they had any spares.  My wife actually went and made the offer, insisting on sparing me the indignity.  "Hi, we're bad parents, will you please sell us some of your formula since you have figured out how to competently care for your child?"  They didn't make us genuflect, of course and they wouldn't take our money and our son had the food he needed for the ride home because we asked some strangers for help and they said yes and didn't even seem to judge us for it.

By the way, the family was from Sri Lanka and my wife and I are white Americans.  If I were Thomas Friedman I probably would have hung the whole story on that and turned it into an inaccurate lesson about globalization and the flatness of the New Haven Metro North train terminal.  Of course we learned to "check and double check" before we head out on trips.  But the whole event was more emotional than practical and taught us a lot about what it feels like to need help and to get it and so, yeah... especially after that don't look me in the eye and say we're not extending people's unemployment benefits or anything of the sort.  We all think we don't need each other until we do.

Once, when I was working at my college paper there was a car accident on the main drag by the university.  A pedestrian was killed.  I went to get the story.  I saw the police interviewing the driver and boldly asked about "the suspect."  I was young, inexperienced and still learning about responsibility.  There was no suspect, the police officer informed me, in a manner more polite than warranted.  Some one had died though and the police officer, a true professional, decided to keep the proper decorum and not tell off the nosy kid.

There was no suspect.  It was an accident.  The driver was appropriately scared and distraught, probably tugged between the terror of being on one end of a situation that took a life and of possibly being arrested or punished or sued over an accident.  There I was, blathering about "suspects."  I learned then and there and very quickly that it's not just what you write and produce as a journalist (or as an artist or commentator, for that matter) but how you conduct yourself.

I remember also in college how we would try to "get" members of the administration or the trustees or the head of the campus police.  A healthy skepticism of authority is important for a journalist or artist or writer as is the drive to get a good story.  But over those years we learned that being out to get a story and being out to get a person are two very different things.  We had good examples of that around us back then as David Brock set out to "get" Anita Hill personally and how the right wing media set out to "get" the Clintons and everyone associated with them.  Fortunately, we in college grew up before we harmed any innocents.  All the braggadocio about having people's jobs went away in the face of our responsibility to find the real stories worth telling.

When I went into the professional world I wrote stories that affected (and sometimes caused) lawsuits and one time I wrote a story that did result in the successful criminal prosecution of the story subject.  My article was even submitted as evidence in federal court.  I remember researching that article and fact checking it and the night before it went to press.  I was sick.  I was sure I uncovered wrongdoing but I knew the wrongdoer was a person with aspirations and a wife (did she know?) and maybe kids.  There I was, what... 28?  Taking somebody down.  No, telling the story.  But there was a somebody involved in that story.  After the story the FBI investigated him for more than a year.  Then the charges.  I was up sick again.  Everything I said had been vindicated, of course, by investigators with warrants and the law behind them.  But it's still a real man who had his freedom taken from him and I played a role.  It was not a triumph.  It was humbling.

Andrew Breitbart and his minions are children who are either trying to ruin people's lives or don't care if they ruin people's lives.  That's unforgivable.  I hope that the White House and all of the agencies and departments that serve this administration and the public have at the very least learned that they must not react to the child-journalism of these arrogant, uncaring manipulators.

A journalist or a writer or an artist or a commentator that doesn't serve the cause of helping people understand facts, stories, aesthetics or a point of view cannot be trusted.  I don't care what medium you operate in.  Those who use the tools of a journalist, artist or commentator in order to destroy (through either direct assault or willful negligence) must be left out of the conversation.

We have been through this before.  Ask David Brock.  Back then the child-journalists on the right went after lower level appointees and employees that you've never heard of because all they needed to do was create a situation where they would have to deal with Starr and then the legal bills would mount and the pressure would build.  In the 90s the right wing child journalists destroyed people's livelihoods and families and forced the diversion of college tuition money and mortgage payments to legal fees just to destroy, destroy, destroy, on the path to the president.

They're trying to do it again.  David Brock and the American Spectator led to Drudge.  Breitbart worked with Drudge and now he's the new monster, out there like a child, setting people up, one by one.  These people can be stopped though.  The White House can ignore them and the real media, the media of responsibility and maturity, can perhaps stop its own decline and become relevant again by debunking this crap to the extent that it's even worth discussing.

I think I'm getting tired of stories about the movement that Josh Marshall calls "The Crazy."  Sarah Palin doesn't want a mosque in your town.  Racist members of the Tea Party acted racistly and make the Tea Party look bad.  Sharron Angle, who I'd never heard of before 2010 is a bad Senate candidate.  Andrew Breitbart is following you with a flipcam, waiting for you to say something or do a hooker.  Recriminations and refudiations.  Oh look, Trent Lott is the rational one now.  Rand Paul wants you to be free... in 1927.  Glenn Beck uses fear of a financial collapse to sell gold coins to people who would have been flipping houses a few years ago if they'd had the cash.

Are these stories important?  Yes, in the sense that the Tea Party is enough of a movement that it has knocked some mainstream Republicans out of contention for jobs they thought they owned.  Yes in that it's enough of a movement to support Beck and Limbaugh and Palin and to make them millionaires.  That it's enough of a movement that the mainstream Republicans have to cater to them and they're doing do by trying to obstruct everything.  So yes, I concede these stories are somewhat important.

But imagine yourself as a traveler in a strange land.  What if, instead of coming here to TPM to read about all the inanities of The Crazy you went to Town Hall or Red State or Little Green Footballs and imagine that instead of a lefty you were a righty and you went to those sites  tales of hippies trying to levitate the pentagon, psychedelic drug users, communists, socialists and extreme pacifists.  All of those things exist on the left.  I am some of them.  Maybe you are too.  But it's also a little beside the point, isn't it?  I think you can say that the extreme left has less influence on the Democrats than the extreme right does on the Republicans.  But I don't think that disparity is so broad as to warrant all of this extensive and detailed coverage of everything the Tea Partiers do and say.  Indeed, I wonder is such coverage isn't in fact misleading at worst or misdirected at best.

I wonder if we're not paying too much attention to their loons and too little attention to our leaders.  I know these Tea Party cats are funny and all with their birth certificate conspiracies and misspelled signs but they are way less important to me than whether or not Obama decides to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Protection Agency or what Nancy Pelosi and the President decide to do with the Deficit Commission recommendations in December.

I think the discussion here on TPM of late has been way more focused on the fringe right than on the doings of the left, both in and out of government.  Andrew Breitbart pimps a phony story?  On it!  Tim Geithner wants to keep Elizabeth Warren out of the administration? Crickets.

I like to laugh at the Tea Party too.  That's good clean family fun.  But don't watch the tea party so closely that you don't notice your friends spitting in your latte.

Quite the row about Social Security today as TPM finally weighs in on what's in store for us after the midterms when a lame duck congress will likely try to cut Social Security benefits.  We don't need to have another actuarial discussion in this thread.  I think there's something else amiss.

I'm not sure why Obama ever allowed Social Security cuts to be on the table in the first place.  It is the most successful program ever created by the Democratic party and our leaders should be looking for ways to enhance it and to make its benefits more generous, not to cut it.

But what I saw from Democrats on these boards was not a lot of anger over this.  Some people were even defending it, as if they're resigned to the cuts already.  This has been going on since the formation of the "National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform" at the start of the year.

I wonder how people would have reacted if a Republican president had set up such a commission and so stacked the deck with Social Security haters as to pretty much guaranty the outcome?  If it were Republicans behind this, rather than Obama, I bet TPM would have covered in long before today.  If it were Republicans behind this than we would be trying to hammer home to the public what these rats intend for us before the midterms.

Our politicians don't want to have their 2010 fates decided by what they ultimately do with Social Security.  The cowards are doing everything possible to avoid such a reckoning.  if it were Republicans behind this, TPM would be doing what it did in 2005.  Josh's reporters and readers would be calling every Federal representative in the country to get them on record, before the election, about whether or not they support benefit cuts.

Oddly, TPM has given more coverage to Republican efforts to revive Bush's privatization plan -- something the public has already rejected and that would be impossible for them to enact from the minority in any event -- than the it has to the very real threat that Obama himself might support raising the retirement age or reducing cost of living adjustments for Social Security recipients.

It's a little surprising that we on the left would be all right with going into the elections without some clarity as to where our leaders stand.  Now I'm sure most Democrats asked will dodge the question because "the committee has yet to release it's report" or some nonsense.  This is exactly why the committee never should have been formed in the first place.  Let's face it, it's not exactly a group made up of expert economists or, frankly, experts on anything.  This is not a blue ribbon panel of scientists trying to figure out how to rescue an astronaut trapped on the moon because he missed the shuttle back.  As soon as the commission was even proposed we should have loudly opposed it as obvious political cover for doing something bad.

How would you react if the facts were exactly as they are now but with Bush or McCain in the White House?  Wouldn't we be hammering them with the third rail they seem so intent on grabbing?

Forgive the impertinent question but if you've been defending Obama on this, I'd really like to know why.  Here are a few reasons I can figure:

1) You just honestly believe that these cuts have to be made.  In that case we can have the same old budget argument we've been having. 

2)  You don't believe that Obama will allow cuts to Social Security and you think people like me are either Obama-haters or well-meaning alarmists. 

3) You don't believe that Nancy Pelosi, the House leadership or Senate Democrats will allow Social Security cuts and you think I just won't be satisfied with anyone to the political right of Trotsky or that I'm a well meaning alarmist. 

4)  You don't think the commission will call for Social Security cuts and think all my griping is just sour grapes because Obama didn't put me on it.

But tell me, please.  Why are we going to easy on our own side when it seems to me they're doing exactly what we elected them not to do?