Being a Liberal means you side, reflexively and all the time, with the little guy. Unions. Blue Collar people generally. The Poor. Minorities. The desperate. The doomed. The outcast. That little old lady you see pushing a shopping cart full of garbage outside Starbucks? She's your sister. What can you do to help her? The fact that she's talking to people who aren't there means she needs help. How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?

The soldier returning from war, unable to escape the terrible knowledge that what he has seen has shown him the damnable lies that our country tells itself in order to enable men to do things that will haunt them forever? The one who wakes up downstairs, halfway out the front door, because he heard an explosion in his dream and is now warning buddies who aren't there that they are about to die and his wife doesn't understand but tries to be there for him any way she can, but at the same time she's worried for the children? What can you do to help them? They are your brother and sister. How can we make America a place where they are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch them if they stumble?

I'm (obviously) supporting Obama in this cycle, from the beginning of the primaries til now; but thought I'd post this just for fun; I actually composed (and then deleted) a version of this diary a couple years ago. For what it's worth, my post-Obama candidate for 8 years from now...

[Beginning of make believe]

My dream candidate is a state governor who grew up working class and made himself prosperous by his own efforts. He knows his way around a union hall; while he's been both a union member and management, one of the things that made him want to start a business is he didn't have the stomach for the kind of screwing over of workers that is part and parcel of being a middle manager in many large companies.

There's a story circulated about him that he once missed an important vote in the state assembly because it was opening day of deer season, and he was nowhere to be found.

He is passionate about doing what he can to make sure that workers get a fair deal in America. Reliable rumor has it he once threw a Democratic Party official out of his office, with instructions never to return, because that Democrat had dared to make a crack about "the damned union chiselers."

I admit it: I was a Deaniac back in '04, and my respect for him has done nothing but grow since his flame-out that primary season. He's still popular with the netroots, and he's repaired virtually all of the (media-created) "damage" in the wake of the "scream" thing.

And - he would make a great VP for Obama. Why I think so, below the fold.

We've heard this stuff for years. Cheap Oil will "eventually" run out. Our deficits will "eventually" need to be dealt with. Foreigners will "eventually" get tired of buying our debt. Global warming will "eventually" cause real problems...

The US has been stumbling blindly into an absolutely epic train wreck the last few years. Hear that thwack sound just lately? That's the brown matter finally hitting the in-room air-mover. Gasoline is now over 4 dollars a gallon (in some places, well over). "Eventually" is now here. There are a number of urgent, and very expensive, things that are needed right away if the United States is to survive as a first-tier country in the world. A few of the more urgent items on the agenda:

Here's the unvarnished truth: Republicans took advantage of their time in office to massively enrich their friends, and as a bonus, they ran up such a colossal federal debt that repairing the damage will require at least 8 years to repair.

These will be 8 years of (hard to sell) austerity, during which it will be hard to both pay interest on the National Debt, pay down the principal on the National Debt, and also pay for social progress (such as National health care or poverty alleviation programs.)

This was deliberate, premeditated vandalism. Republicans hate it when the government has money, because that enables Democrats to make people's lives better with that money. The country's fiscal situation before Bush took office had the Republicans panicked: had Gore taken office and stuck to his "pay as you go" discipline, the entire national debt would have been paid off by mid-2006.

Had that happened, the government would today be running a surplus.

Digby had an interesting post over at Hullabaloo a couple weeks ago, in which she speculated about the dynamics of a possible (probable?) Democratic controlling majority in Washington in the aftermath of a likely Republican debacle this coming Fall, and it's ability to form a progressive majority.

Snippet:

   The Republicans kept their "moderates" on a very short chain and consciously governed with as few cross over votes as possible in order to keep the other side frustrated and the caucus "pure." They got things done for a while, and protected their president with the loyalty of feral pit bulls, but ended up destroying themselves.

My thoughts: Depends what you mean by "progressive" - if you mean politicians who champion, in a front-burner way, the sorts of things that are liable to get the Republican base riled up (Dean's "God, Guns and Gays"), I think you're likely to see problems and rancor - a squandered opportunity.

Obama's won the long, closely fought primary season. He's been made a better candidate, I think, by having to fight so hard to get to the top.

Hillary did some regrettable things during this season, and I was as angered as anyone by them. I am NOT minimizing them.

Thing is, that's now past. Hillary has bowed out, and endorsed Obama, in terms graceful enough that we can now focus our efforts on McCain, Mr. Third-Bush-Term, Mr. 100-Years-In-Iraq, etc.

No more criticizing ANY Democrat (Lieberman excepted: maybe I should say, any real Democrat) until after the 2008 butt-whuppin' we need (and the country needs) to give the Republicans this November.

...of which, $256.00 is overdraft fees.

What happened was, I have a debit card linked to my checking account. I checked my balance every day, but there were some transactions that weren't processed until my balance was about twenty bucks. So, for a variety of purchases in the 2-5 dollar range, I'm paying overdraft fees of $32 each, changing to $64 (each transaction) for the most recent.

Should I manage my checking account such that I never get overdrafts? Absolutely; no argument from me on that.

I was in DC a couple weeks ago, and decided to go across the Memorial Bridge from DC proper to Arlington National Cemetery, (among other things, I was looking for the grave of an Army buddy who'd been killed long ago by, of all things, a "dud" round: that's a story for another time) and was struck by something I saw: At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was a guy of about 40 or so in a Donald Duck tee shirt, sneakers and short pants, clicking away on a noisy camera during the Changing of the Guard. Looking at this clown, I had a series of thoughts:

I'm finding that a lot of R&B singing grates on my nerves the last, oh, 15 years or so. Some of that, I'll admit up front, is my middle-aged "these-kids-today..." sort of thing. But a lot has to do with the infuriating overuse of something that, properly used, can be a valuable part of a good singer's tool chest; melisma.

Melisma is singing more than one note during one syllable of a lyric. For example, the first word of the National Anthem ("Oh...") has two descending notes: that's Melisma. The use of melisma in much of American pop music is due to the forms of music from which it is derived, especially black Gospel music.

Reading this article in USA Today, my jaw just dropped:

More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.

43,000 disabled troops deployed to War Zones against medical advice. Awesome. The article doesn't say how many of those 43000 were subsequently killed or further injured; even one of these disabled troopers dying because he couldn't run fast enough to get to cover in time, is something so horrible I can't quite get myself to contemplate it.

Dana Goldstein muses on "helicopter" (i.e., overprotective) parents over at the Blog at The American Prospect. The particular "offense" a parent committed was to let her 9 year old ride the New York subway a few blocks from the Upper East Side to the Midtown West neighborhoods in Manhattan, for which she has received criticism for "neglecting" her child.

Firstly, I think not letting your child ride the subway between two safe neighborhoods in Manhattan could be argued to be "neglecting" to teach him to be autonomous and independent...but that argument would also be basically ridiculous, because it cheapens the meaning of "child neglect." What's lost is any sense of perspective - if whether or not your child rides the subway alone constitutes "child neglect," what would describe, say, selling your child into prostitution? Or less drastically, what would describe my own experience of going to my sixth grade class with blood in my hair from being thrown across the room by my raging father?

About 10 years ago, I used to work with a woman named Callie, who was from New Zealand. She was about as apolitical as they come - I don’t think she’d ever voted in her life, in either New Zealand or the US.

We were sitting around the office one evening with a couple of beers, shooting the breeze one evening after a long, hectic day taking care of the last of the seasonal inventory, and I asked her, "What was the first thing you noticed about America when you arrived here?"

She sort of paused, as if to judge my possible reactions to what she was about to say, and then said, "Well...everywhere you go here, you’re swimming in propaganda."

I was surprised, and asked her what she meant.

What’s missing from a lot of discussions white people have about the problems that beset black America, is any sense of the concrete, complex humanity of the people being discussed.

There are spiritual treasures heaped in our ghettos among the poverty and violence, and one of the tragic facts of our culture is that the vast majority of whites have absolutely no clue about the riches to be found there.

"Blackpeopleintheghetto" is a glib abstraction, a sort of quick mental categorization, which does not bear virtually any relationship to the people who were my neighbors in Richmond, California. For those who know the area, I grew up almost exactly between the Kennedy Manor and Easter Hill housing projects, in a solidly working-class black neighborhood, in the 1960s and into the 1970s - we were the only white family in the neighborhood. (We moved in 1976, to a town called Benicia - kind of like Mayberry RFD, only with Californian rather than Southern accents.)

Some of the most noble and Godly people I have ever been blessed to know lived in that neighborhood. Most of the parents in the ‘hood had moved in the 1940s to Richmond to get War work in the shipyard (building liberty ships mostly).

Peak Oil is a particular concern of mine, but today it occurred to me that there is an upside: car dealers will, sooner or later, be a thing of the past. I cannot adequately describe the bitterness with which I hate car dealers.

I'm in the market for a used car - I'd really like a Toyota Corolla, '03 or newer (any Bay Area Kossacks want to sell me their car?) so I go into the local Toyota dealership, motivated to buy and ready to bargain.

A sales associate named Jimmy, maybe 20 years old, shows me a Corolla I'm interested in: 2003, LE model, previously owned by a non-smoker, good condition. I say, "let's go sit and talk." and we go sit at the table in the showroom where little old ladies get fleeced. "Looks interesting. What do you want for it?" I ask.

"$11,500, but we'll entertain any reasonable offer," sales associate tells me.

I look at him like, nice try, and tell him, "Go tell your boss I'll give him $8,500 for the car, cash."

So, Young Hungry Sales Associate goes and gets his boss, who turns out to be an extremely oily guy with silver hair dressed like he's just come off the golf links at the country club.

There was a difference between the constant replaying of the Wright videos on the major cable news outlets. On Fox, they were intended not only as fodder for sensationalism (as they mostly were on MSNBC and CNN), but also to advance the Movement Conservative agenda, which is Fox News’ purpose as a network. Tear down Obama to make him more beatable in November.

Fox (and wider, movement conservatism generally) almost always uses signifiers of the cultural and political conflicts of the 1960s when they are trying to discredit the political left in general, and Democrats in particular.

Here's the thing: Hillary seems to be trying to get the nomination by attempting, through scorched-earth tactics, to destroy the reputation of a fellow Democrat, or at least so severely damage his General Election chances that the super delegates overturn the pledged delegate results at the convention.

IF she succeeds in this (a big 'if' admittedly), I will be torn in November: Do I reward her Machiavellian destruction of Obama by voting for her, thus sending the message that it's OK to use Rovian tactics as long as you're a Democrat? Or, do I sit out the election (I won't vote for McCain) and risk 4 more years of disaster?

To think I once defended the Clintons. My Nose is getting really raw from holding it while I vote.

If oil gets anywhere near $200 per barrel as predicted by Goldman Sachs, our current oil-driven lifestyle will be impossible - not inconvenienced, not "more difficult," but as a matter of practical economics, impossible.

$200-a-barrel oil means gasoline will cost around 8 bucks a gallon. Suburb dwellers with 30-mile-each-way commutes will have 20 dollar-a-day gasoline bills, and that's assuming they drive an economy car. If they drive an SUV, more like 50 bucks a day.

"Well, they can take public transit," you counter?