The demographics of Texas are changing. Last November every major city in Texas except Fort Worth voted Democratic. Unfortunately, that was largely a result of the get-out-the-vote operation that resulted from the Democratic primary between Clinton and Obama. Most of those Democratic votes are pretty damned fickle, and Perry is depending on them sitting at home in 2010.

A combination of money, organization and national encouragement will change that. Perry will probably win the Republican primary. That's why Hutchinson hasn't resigned her Senate seat - little hope in the party primary. But the Democrats?

Given a decent Democratic candidate for Governor (a big question mark right now) next November will be a horse race for the first time since Ann Richards. Perry is generally not much liked except by the fringe, and he has made an ass of himself in the media by chasing the right-wing Republicans and the tea baggers.

The uninformed, uneducated voters may well go for Perry, but the potentially Democratic majority could stop him if given a decent alternative candidate and a reason to vote for the Democrat. They just have to be convinced to vote.

That's my opinion, anyway.

Perry is a lot more polarizing than Hutchinson is because he is going hard after the tea baggers and the evangelical Republicans. His base is the "crazy" vote, which should make him easier to beat. He's also a rural politician in a state that is rapidly becoming more urbanized politically.

It won't hurt that Perry has already been governor for ten years. That would be too long even if he had been a decent governor.

Now if the Texas Dems can just get organized and get out the vote ....

This begins to suggest the end of the Washington Times. Will this be a harbinger of the collapse of the right-wing media? Will there remain nothing beyond the Murdoch media?

"W" was and remains very oriented towards getting "the best" people into office to control the nation. He is highly class-oriented. "The best" people are his close friends.

His Christianity is clearly important to him. It was his lifeline out of his drug and alcohol lifestyle. The political implications of that are, in my opinion, secondary to "W." But not to Karl Rove. Rove is responsible for using it politically I think.

A competent oral historian will ask questions that don't directly confront him. He'll keep trying to explain, giving us all much better information about his thinking.

And don't give me the collapse of the USSR. That didn't really effect the U.S. until 9/11/2001. Between 1989 and 2001 there was just a lack of American national focus and confusion, but no real changes. The government and politics simply continued in the interim much as before, but with a lack of real focus. There had to be a new American political focus to really change things.

Unfortunately the Bush/conservative response was the totally incompetent and global business-oriented invasion of Iraq. It was a typical conservative response to massive social and political change. Afghanistan made a lot more sense than Iraq, but the Bush administration was forced into that by public opinion. They didn't want to do it and quickly abandoned it. Remember?

TR? Nothing really major happened. What mattered after that in American politics was the Great War, and the big changes from that were under FDR when the passivity of Hoover had to be countered. Harding, Coolidge and Hoover took no significant actions. Everything drifted until FDR. The conservatives had again failed to deal with the changes.

I'd suggest Andrew Jackson before Lincoln, TR or Reagan. He pushed democracy down below the level of national control by the moneyed elite and represented true middle class democracy, even if he didn't himself cause it.

We can hope that it will provide the information needed to demonstrate that Bush's legacy is to set the new, lowest level of Presidential competence. Something every future President needs to avoid.

Now that Bush is out of office that's probably the worst we can do to him. Destroy any hope that posterity will consider him anything above the level of truly tasteless joke.

Let him talk. He will destroy the reputation of the Bush family forever. Even more than his incompetent behavior already has.

It'll be better if UVA gets a competent historian to ask the questions, but even if they don't get a real historian who is objective the interviews will provide the data needed to expose him in a way the daily media simply cannot do. Why?

Either Bush lies, in which case the truth will come out from comparing what he says to other evidence and expose him, or he'll tell the truth and expose himself. Either way he will head for history crap. Or take his words and he exposes himself as the worst President ever. Bush can't defend himself if he answers questions.

He's not smart enough to lie his way out of the need for a historian to publish a dissertation that tears him a new one. Take his words, compare it to recorded fact and "W" is in crap city. No matter what he says,no matter who the questioner is, we are better getting his defense on record.

Cheney might be smart enough to avoid some of the truth. He'll have planted the evidence that somewhat exonerates him. Bush hasn't.

Was "W" knowledgeable about "The Family?" Dominionism? Pat Robert's desire to make the Constitution subordinate to the bible as interpreted by the Evangelicals? There's a lot more to ask, and much of it will clarify the authoritarianism that was so clear in the Bush/Cheney administration.

As for the fracturing of the Democratic Party, it seems to me to be almost inevitable. The Democratic Senators are mostly not dependent on the party for election/reelection, so they are not as subject to party discipline as the Republicans are. There is also no outside political force like the conservative talk show people who can be dangerous to a politicians continued occupation of office, and those talk show conservatives are controlled by the big money people in America (who buy their ads.) They also have a built-in controlled voting block in the social conservatives.

What unifies the Democrats? What power of the party protects them? Whatever there is, it seems to me to be a lot less powerful than what the Republicans have on their side. Look at Snowe, for example.

That's my best guess about the difference in party unity between the two parties. The ideology, in my opinion, follows these structural pressures. Ideology might be a measure of party unity, but I don't think it causes it. And I think that most of the conservative ideology is what the paymasters want it to be.

I just find the difference in party discipline between the Democrats and the Republicans to be puzzling.

Such a blow will empower the conservatives, which will itself be a major destructive action for America.

America can be a nation for the people and especially for the middle class. Or it can be a nation that belongs to the wealthy and to the top executives of big often monopolistic businesses, the major Wall Street Banks, and to their paid politicians.

Is there anything I just wrote that is not a given?

But the Democrats can now only fail on HCR in the Senate, and if they do it will be devastating to the Democratic party. It will be because some damned Democratic Senator cannot see past his own f***ing career to the needs of America. (Hello, Joe. Ben. Blanch.) The American people will see that next year and in 2012. Count on it. Democratic weakness and failure at this point is unacceptable and will be punished. And I'll help if that is what it takes.

What have I missed?

That's the best explanation I have to why there is no unity in the Democratic Caucus. It would explain the old joke about being a Democrat so not belonging to any political party.

Anyone have a better explanation for the lack of party discipline in the Democratic Party? I'm still looking for it if you have one. In any case, I wouldn't touch Harry Reid's or Nancy Pelosi's jobs for anything. And what Nancy did to get the House to pass a health care bill is absolutely amazing.

And if some Democratic Senator puts their own reelection above the election futures of the entire Democratic Caucus in the Senate - he or she is going to have very few friends going forward, even if it gets that individual through the next election.

...for a recognition that human rights always trump property rights. No one should ever be injured or allowed to die just so someone else can say they have absolute control over something that they define as Property.

Property is a fiction of government (like all law) and does not exist unless it is enforced by society and especially by government. It is a human mental construct intended to simplify decision-making, and should never outweigh the right to life or health.

The question of what is and is not property, and who has which rights to make decisions regarding any given piece of property has been extremely flexible over human history. The current economic system is based on property rights, but the issue is always what is property, who can decide how it is used and traded, and how that impacts the rest of society. The key is that all those definitions be properly established and changed when necessary, but that they be predictable. That's what the Uniform Commercial Code is, but even the UCC is established state-by-state in America and is often very different across societies.

Property rights have to be exercised within the framework of the Rule of Law so that society has predictable forms of decision-making, but property rights themselves cannot be given priority over essential human rights or exercised outside the properly established written law.

Look. I happen to think that getting the cap and trade legislation and getting the once-in-a-lifetime health care reform through the House, both in the first 10 months in office when the Republicans are blocking every possible effort and as many political appointees to office as is possible is doing a lot more than just "attempting" to do stuff. He is succeeding.

The Garbage the Republicans have thrown up since last Summer to block health care is the political equivalent of the anti-aircraft barrage that was thrown up at the final flight path over Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Our Constitution and the Senate in particular are designed to give the rural elites a minority veto over the political efforts of the urban masses. The MSM is slanted against Obama and the Democrats. Even when the Democrats win it is spun as good for the Republicans and bad for the Democrats. And Obama is battering down the roadblocks.

I really don't know what you expect, but it sure doesn't consider the realities of the political situation. It looks to me as though you are demanding that Obama step up to the podium, present his program, snap his fingers, and everyone is supposed to fall in line. Or maybe he's supposed to hand the MSM the roadmap for his initiative so that every one of the myriad enemies out there can figure out how to block him.

You are demanding the impossible.

Yes, they do. And I fail to recognize how they can set their priorities the way they do unless it is pure ego and objection because no one is giving them the appreciation they think they deserve.

I do suspect that Nancy Pelosi had at least one or two Representatives who needed to vote against the bill but would have accepted a good arm-twisting if Nancy had to have them to pass it. Was Dennis one of them? We'll never know how many actually went off the reservation and how many were permitted by the leadership to vote against the bill.

As for Nadar, I think he has passed his "Use By" date and doesn't recognize it. I blame his actions on Robert Michels Iron Law of Oligarchy. From the Wikipedia article "Any large organization, Michels pointed out, is faced with problems of coordination that can be solved only by creating a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy, by design, is hierarchically organized to achieve efficiency—many decisions have to be made daily that cannot efficiently be made by large numbers of people. The effective functioning of an organization therefore requires the concentration of much power in the hands of a few. Those few, in turn—the oligarchy—will use all means necessary to preserve and further increase their power." Nadar has been at the top of more than one bureaucracy and feels entitled. He knows he is right, and all those who oppose him have to be wrong. So anything he does to get his view accepted is fair, and since he is the guy at the top of his organization, no one can tell him otherwise.

I think, in fact, that that same pattern effects most top executives and wealthy owners. They become laws unto themselves.

Nadar doesn't want to accept responsibility for permitting the Bush administration, so he has to blame the Democrats for running a poor campaign. That's the best excuse he can offer for being an egotistic asshole.

I also suspect that the same dynamic applies to most Senators. It's a form of Narcissism.

I wonder if there is some way we could put Joe Lieberman and Ralph Nadar in the same cage and let them have at each other?

OGD, if we set up an organization do you think you could summarize this stuff for handouts?

Committee on Health Reform or some such name?

Or can we find an existing organization that would like to do that kind of thing? TPM itself, maybe?

Maybe use the TPM audience reporting process to get people to analyze the material. How exactly do they operate?

Just brainstorming. Probably quite impractical, but maybe not.