Green grows the presidency

Give President Barack Obama some green points. Having allowed the healthcare debate to get away from him, he apparently has decided to take the initiative on greenhouse gases and climate change. His administration, via the Environmental Protection Agency, said today that it "was moving forward on new rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and large industrial facilities," according to The New York Times.

“We are not going to continue with business as usual,” Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a conference call Wednesday with reporters. “We have the tools and the technology to move forward today, and we are using them.”

The proposed rules, which could take effect as early as 2011, would place the greatest burden on 400 new power plants and those undergoing substantial renovation, making them prove that they have applied the best available technology to reduce emissions — or face penalties.

Ms. Jackson described the proposal as a common-sense rule carefully tailored to apply to only the largest facilities — those that emit at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year — which are responsible for nearly 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

Dispatches: 'Reset' on Russian relations a rumor

Dispatches is up, based on an interview I did with Russia expert Stephen L. Cohen, who will be in Princeton on Monday to talk about his new book. Last week's can be found here.

Intellectual dishonesty

Max Baucus yesterday offered one of the more bizarre rationales for voting against including a public option -- publicly administered health insurance plan -- in healthcare reform:

Finance committee members rejected two amendments that would have created a public option. The votes were 15 to 8 and 13 to 10. Baucus, who has emerged as the central player in shaping the bill, was one of three Democrats who voted 'no' on both proposals. Baucus said he supports the principle of a public option as an alternative to private insurance. But he warned that including it could doom the bill to a Republican filibuster.

"No one has been able to show me how we can count up to 60 votes with a public option," Baucus said. "I want a bill that can become law."

So, to be clear: Baucus supports the public option but can't vote for it unless everyone else does. So much for intellectual consistency.

The Baucus contradiction, of course, is one that most progressives have been criticizing (Rachel Maddow last night, in a comment laden with derision and snarky sarcasm, described the Baucus position as "leadership").

Another intellectually suspect argument has been making the rounds, however, and it comes from the left, from the people seeking to get a public option into the bill. As anyone knows who has read this blog or my columns with the Packet Group or The Progressive Populist, I view the public option as a stop-gap but necessary measure. What I find disturbing is this argument, made last night by both Sen. Charles Schumer and Howard Dean on Maddow -- and made by other progressives at other times regarding this bill: That Democrats should vote with the leadership on cloture and with their conscience on the bill.

MADDOW: You just heard my interview with Senator Schumer. And he said something that I haven‘t heard him articulate before, which is that Democratic leadership should be able to expect that even Democrats who are going to vote against health reform should vote for cloture, should vote to end the Republican filibuster, thereby making the threshold 51 votes instead of 60. What‘s your reaction?

DEAN: That‘s true. Core procedure in almost every legislature I have ever had anything to do with, including the national legislature, is, you can vote however you want on a bill, that‘s a conscience matter, but you owe it to your leadership who gives you your chairmanship and to vote with the leadership on procedural votes. And a filibuster is a procedural vote.

So, I would expect all of the people caucusing with the Democrats to allow a vote to go forward.

MADDOW: And.

DEAN: And so, you know, the chairman‘s argument is auspicious. You don‘t need 60 votes for a public option, you need 51 -- under any circumstance, if the people who caucus with the Democratic Party and owe their chairs to the Democratic leadership are willing to do the right thing.

It's a specious argument that unfortunately echoes the ones made by Republicans when Democrats threatened (they always threatened but rarely followed through) to filibuster hard-right judicial nominees. Let the nominee get an up-or-down vote.

That's what Dean is arguing here, that whatever you believe you should allow a floor vote to occur. Sounds good in theory, but what if you know that allowing the floor vote will allow legislation you disagree with vehemently to pass. The cloture vote is the only power you have to stop the bill.

I'm not defending folks like Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln. Their stance on healthcare is indefensible. But they have a responsibility to use every tool they have in their arsenals to ensure that legislation they oppose does not become law.

The issue here is not that all good Democrats should fall in line. Rather, the issue is the filibuster itself and whether it really is anything more than an opportunity for a minority of senators to hold the rest of the Senate hostage.

I've written about this before (there was a point in time when I defended it, but shifted my view about four years ago$, when the Republicans threatened to jettison the filibuster to get their court nominees through. My reasoning was simple: It was an archaic technicality generally used to stop progress and thwart the democratic process. Rather than a simple majority of Senators (an unrepresentative body in and of itself), you potentially needed a supermajority of 60 -- something that can be difficult when controversial legislation is on the table (think about the civil rights filibusters of the '60s).

So, here we are, with a public healthcare option being incredibly popular (65 percent according to a recent CBS/NY Times poll) and offering the only real chance we'll get to keep the health insurance companies honest, but failing to get through a committee because a handful of small-state Senators with power disproportionate to the size of their constituency are unwilling to get behind it.

All of this is possible because we continue to hang on to an archaic procedural "safeguard."

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Help, the dogs are winning!

I'm still shaking. Two-plus hours after the dogs went at each other, after Rosie grabbed onto Sophie near the ear and locked in, two-plus hours after Annie and I stupidly attempted to break them up by grabbing their collars -- a horrifying couple of minutes -- and I'm still shaking.

The fight, probably just the fourth since we have them (though four is four too many), made us realize that we need to bring the trainer back, that their willfulness, their jumping on guests as they come in, is just not acceptible. We need help.

So we're bringing back our trainer, Pat, who knows her stuff. The problem has been us -- we just haven't followed through with the hard work.

If that doesn't work, we're going to have to call in Victoria Stillwell or Cesar Milan (he's going to be at Barnes and Noble next week) for an emergency session.

It is quite depressing to find that, after owning dogs for 25 years, these two have us where they want us and not where we need to be.

The long, silly season

The Connecticut U.S. Senate race has started early -- really early.

Sen. Chris Dodd, a longtime Democratic incumbent who holds the seat once held by his father, is under attack (with some cause) and facing a serious challenge.

This probably explains the TV ad I've seen several times over the last couple of days. It is from Linda McMahon, former CEO of the WWE -- the wrestling empire. She's not the frontrunner -- not even in the top four, acccording to all the major campaign sites and most polls -- but she's already opening her wallet.

And that means that Connecticut voters -- and those of us as far away as the northern half of New Jersey who share a television market -- are in for a long, drawn out campaign season.

The public knows better than the pols: Reform health care now

There is no doubt that the American healthcare system needs to be changed.

The problem is that the public -- the people who the reforms are supposed to help -- doesn't seem to understand how the amorphous change that has been placed on the table will fix things.

A mix of over-the-top and unhinged opposition from the far right and the GOP (are they the same thing at this point), a hands-off approach on the part of the president (until recently) and an overly technical and ridiculously complicated plan that may or may not include the one thing the public does understand (the public option) has created a level of confusion that is going to be difficult to overcome.

Consider this information from the poll released today by The New York Times:

Majorities of respondents said that they were confused about the health care argument and that Mr. Obama had not a good job in explaining what he was trying to accomplish.

“The Obama administration seems to have a plan, but I’m not understanding the exact details,” Paul Corkery, 59, a Democrat from Somerset, N.J., said in a follow-up interview.

However, and this is key, he continues to work in an environment in which the public is more likely to believe what he has to say than his opposition.

By a margin of 52 percent to 27 percent, Americans said Mr. Obama has better ideas about overhauling health care than Republicans. And the percentage of Americans who approve of how Mr. Obama has handled health care has gone from 40 percent in August to 47 percent now, about equal to where it was earlier in the year.

On one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate — whether to establish a government-run health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers — nearly two-thirds of the country continues to favor the proposal, which is backed by Mr. Obama but has drawn intense fire from most Republicans and some moderate Democrats. The poll suggested that Mr. Obama’s big effort to deal with concerns about the health care plan has enjoyed, at best, mixed success. In the poll, 55 percent of Americans said Mr. Obama has not clearly explained his plans for changing the health care system, and 69 percent said they thought the health care reforms under consideration in Congress was confusing.

What does all of this mean? First, the numbers make it clear that the public wants a change in the healthcare system and trust the president more than they trust the GOP. And, perhaps more importantly, the public is smarter than the politicians. It is the public, after all, that views the dance happening in Washington over health care as unnecessarily uncomplicated.

The public understands the benefits of a public option -- that competition from a government run program would keep the healthcare companies honest -- and that forcing people to carry insurance without giving them someplace to go aside from the insurance companies is nothing more than a huge government giveaway.

The danger right now is that the current parameters of the argument are focusing on the wrong things -- the deficit, for instance. We should be talking about what a lack of health insurance means for us and our neighbors, how it leaves too many vulnerable to illness and the economy, and how that vulnerability is bad for society as a whole. We should be focusing on how the system fails us every day and offering a clear plan to address it.

We should be talking about a single-payer system, which would remove profit from the system (health care companies boost profits by denying care) and place all of us on an equal plane. I know that is not going to happen at this moment in history, so we need to push hard for a public option and use the public option to prove to our neighbors and friends that a public plan is better for all of us.

Hammer time

Um....

I don't think America needed to see Tom DeLay shake his booty on national television. (I'm sitting with my wife, who watches the show religiously.)

Couldn't we have just let this guy fade into the sunset, to be remembered as a corrupt partisan who helped drive the conservative movement off a cliff?

A 16 for that dance? Are the judges hoping that DeLay will get his Congressional pals to name an airport after them? Or maybe some federal money for a TV dancing school?

Just too bizarre for words.

Helping the unemployed

Wall Street may think we're coming out of this recession, but there are millions of workers who may disagree. That's why Congress is considering another extension of unemployment benefits that "would provide 13 weeks of extended unemployment benefits for more than 300,000 jobless people who live in states with unemployment rates of at least 8.5 percent and who are scheduled to run out of benefits by the end of September." The extension "would supplement the 26 weeks of benefits most states offer and the federally funded extensions of up to 53 weeks that Congress approved in legislation last year and in the stimulus bill enacted last February."

This seems a no-brainer. This recession has been pretty hard on workers, leaving about 15 million out of work, and millions more working but facing pay cuts, furloughs or in part-time or temporary jobs.

Just as important is the number who are facing long-term unemployment.

Some 5 million people, about one-third of those on the unemployment list, have been without a job for six months or more, a record since data started being recorded in 1948, according to the research and advocacy group National Employment Law Project.

"It smashes any other figure we have ever seen. It is an unthinkable number," said Andrew Stettner, NELP's deputy director. He said there are currently about six jobless people for every job opening, so it's unlikely people are purposefully living off unemployment insurance while waiting for something better to come along.

And,

Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said at the Finance Committee hearing that, according to Labor Department figures, 51 percent of unemployment insurance claimants exhausted their regular benefits in July, the highest rate ever.

"It is likely the exhaustion rate will continue to increase in coming months" as the unemployment rate continues to rise, he said.

The reality is that, without the extension, many workers likely would need to use other social services or go without. Putting money in their hands is good policy -- workers are going to spend what they receive -- and the right thing to do.

You do it. No, you do it.

There appears to be consensus among international leaders that climate change must be reversed.

The consensus, however, is that it is up to the other guy to make the sacrifices needed to keep the Earth’s temperatures from continuing to rise – and causing the kind of havoc expected to be caused by the increase.

The leaders of about 100 nations are gathering in New York this week to discuss the issue at what The New York Times described as “highest level summit meeting on climate change ever convened.”

But it remains unclear whether the efforts expected to take place this week – they began Tuesday with round-tables on climate change – will shift talks out of neutral, where they have remained stalled for some time.

“The mood in the negotiations has been that I should do as little as possible as late as possible and let the other person go first,” said Kim Carstensen, the director of the Global Climate Initiative of the World Wildlife Fund.

There is some movement forward, but not a comprehensive, international plan. As The Times writes, "virtually all of the largest developed and developing nations have made domestic commitments toward creating more efficient, renewable sources of energy to cut emissions," but -- and this is key -- "none want to take the lead in fighting for significant international emissions reduction targets, lest they be accused at home of selling out future jobs and economic growth."

It is, as Jeffrey Sachs told the Times, a selfish nationalism that privileges parochial gains at the expense of humanity.

“The instinct is a kind of nationalist response that can get it exactly backwards,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We should be viewing this as global problem solving, not as global negotiation.”

Language police

I ran out of coffee yesterday so I stopped by Target this afternoon to grab a bag of beans from Starbucks (I had planned to get a pound at Small World yesterday, but ran into some friends and then realized the meter had run out -- which meant that I had to, as well). When I handed the coffee to the kid behind the counter -- and incredibly helpful and conscientious kid, by the way -- he let me know that I had a free cup of the coffee of the day coming.

"Would you like a free complimentary cup of coffee?"

Of course, but don't complimentary and free mean the same thing?

Conason offers voice of sanity on ACORN

You have to hand to the right wing. It certainly gets worked up over the most bizarre things.

Take its fascination with ACORN, with an organization of volunteers that works in the nation's poorest neighborhoods teaching its residents to help themselves and stand up for themselves. It certainly borders on the psychotic.

Does ACORN have problems? Yes. But as Joe Conason writes on Salon,

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator.

The uproar over the hidden-camera fiasco -- like the wing-nuttery of death panels and the tea-baggers -- does nothing more than divert our attention from what really matters. After all, if we're talking about ACORN, we're not talking about the nearly 50 million Americans without health coverage, the spiking unemployment rate, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture and all of the other things about which we should be talking.

The Eagle soars

I just wanted to post a quick note to offer kudos to John Parinello Jr., an SBHS graduate from Dayton, is looking to help children in Afghanistan by sending them sports equipment -- a worthy cause, for sure.

Look, I was never a Boy Scout and I sometimes find the Boy Scouts to be -- well, just leave it at that.

But I was taken by Parinello's mission -- and by the way it differs from some of the less necessary projects I've seen in other communities.

Parinello's efforts could have a real -- if small -- impact, contributing to the breaking down of cultural barriers and making the lives of children just a little bit better.

”It’s important to send goods to children in Kabul because, I hope, it will tighten the bonds between the U.S. and Afghanistan,” Mr. Parinello said.

Mr. Parinello decided on his project after an assistant Scoutmaster of Troop 10, who is also a commander in the Navy and is stationed in Kabul, told him of the need for sporting equipment for schoolchildren in the region. Mr. Parinello said he hopes the children will reap the benefits of having an escape from the world that surrounds them.

”I hope that this project will promote good team leadership skills while keeping children off the streets in a war-stricken area,” he said.

So, as I said, kudos.

It's about Corzine and Christie, not Obama

I'm getting tired of hearing that a Jon Corzine loss in the New Jersey governor's race would be an indication of a loss of faith in Barack Obama.

You hear it on cable, in the blogs (especially the right-wing ones) and it pops up from time to time in print: The gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia are bellwethers and can be used effectively as standins for a rerun of the 2008 presidential race or as a preview of the 2010 congressional mid-terms.

In a state where no Republican has won a statewide race in more than a decade, Mr. Christie could be a "bellwether" for a GOP revival in 2010, according to Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who stumped with the candidate in the state last month.

Mr. Christie "plays across the state unlike any Republican" in the past several election cycles, Mr. Steele told a gathering of Republican faithful in Pitman, N.J.

"You must be the next governor from this state," Mr. Steele said. "It is a bellwether in so many ways for the future of our party and the future of our nation."

The reality is far more complex, at least here in New Jersey, and has little to do with the president's popularity and everything to do with Jon Corzine's -- or his lack thereof.

Consider the poll numbers and the trends:


Notice anything? Chris Christie has maintained a rather consistent lead since at least April. And if you go back farther, you'll see that the governor has managed to lead in only two polls all year: a Jan. 12-14 Monmouth/Gannett poll that had him up by 2 percentage points and a Jan. 2-7 Fairleigh Dickinson poll that had him up by 7. Once we hit February, it's been all Christie.

At the same time, Obama continues to have approval ratings in the 50s (aside from a Rasmussen poll that puts him at 49 percent) nationally and much higher in New Jersey.

Corzine, on the other hand, has some pretty horrid approval numbers -- in his case, it might be better to call them disapproval numbers: 37 percent positive and 52 percent negative among registered voters 34-58 among likely voters) in a Monmouth University poll released Sunday.

The evidence, it would seem, just doesn't support the bellwether meme. But the bellwether meme has nothing to do with New Jersey; it is a national construct that makes good fodder for cable television, which has difficulty getting past their narrow focus on Washington.

The New Jersey governor's race has played out and will continue to play out on state issues. In the end, it will not be a referendum on Obama, but a referendum on Jon Corzine. The Washington media and the cable TV cranks are just too removed from the ground to understand that.

Wither change?

I don't want to use the word disappointment -- and not just because it is still early in his presidency. I don't want to use the word because it implies that the president somehow is letting down liberals. The reality is, of course, that he's only doing what he told us he'd do -- tack as much to the center as he could, while substituting bipartisanship for a principled commitment to a political philosophy.

So, as Ian Welsh says on Open Left, "no one" should have "expected anything else," and those who continue to expect Obama to be a liberal lion, a la Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone are "the living definition of denial."

He remains better than most of the alternatives, but he's still not a lot different than the leaders who have come before him.

Permanent nod -- elegy for Jim Carroll

There was always something regal and elegant about Jim Carroll, something that belied his drug-addicted youth, that seemed to set him apart from his time.

Carroll died Friday -- a shock, really, given that he was just 60 and had produced some great recent writing.

I met him once, briefly, after a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers. I got there at the end and he signed the flier -- a slip of paper I still have tucked away in a photo album with the other autographs I'd collected during my younger days.

I first read Carroll's work in 1980, when I was at Penn. State. I was at sea, so to speak, lacking real direction but developing what might be described as a bohemian bent. I was into rock -- mostly punk and what is now called classic rock -- and was just discovering that literature, and poetry in particular, was something worth reading outside of class.

I gobbled up books -- Kerouac and Ginsberg, Hemingway, a collection of postmodern Americans and Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries. The Diaries were an accidental find, a small pocket-sized book discovered in a bookstore as I rummaged the shelves. I'd been listening to Catholic Boy, Carroll's first album almost continuously after first hearing its single (if you can call it that), "People Who Died," on Vin Scelsa's show on WNEW. The album was a revelation for me -- poetic lyrics set atop those driving punk guitars -- that led me toward Television, Patti Smith and many of the other New York bands of the 1970s (I've always been more of a New York punk than a London banger).

The book was raw and yet also art, a contrivance in the best sort of way. It was a young teen describing the darker side of New York City in the 1960s in a stylized voice that helped define a particular strain of writing that would follow.

I was taken by the book, as I said, and have been reading his poetry since then. I remainin awe of a poetic sensibility that was so fully developed at such a young age and that managed to grow and the spread into other art forms (I mentioned rock, but there also were the spoken word discs, the prose explorations and the diaries).

In the end, it is that divine scream of an album -- Catholic Boy -- that stands as his best work, and as the piece of his muse that helped ingite my own poetic explorations.

Thanks, Jim. Rest in Peace.

Runner's diary, Friday

I tried something different today, to mix things up and try to jumpstart my running. I alternated between running and weight lifting -- a mile run, followed by heavy leg work, followed by another mile and upper body lifting and ending with another mile. It was brutal, so it must have been a good idea.

Unfortunately, it was only the second gym appearance of the week because of some changes here (I am no longer the online editor, or not just the online editor; I now have responsibility again for the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press), some freelance work and a new teaching gig at Middlesex County College (more on that to follow).

I'm hoping to develop a rhythm to the week that will allow me at least three weekday workouts on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and at least one other workout at some undetermined point.

Editorial: Expanding Afghan war will lead to quagmire

Is anyone surprised that the papers I edit -- and that I write editorials for -- came out against an Afghan troop expansion and called for an end to the war?

Dispatches: Movement needed to revive labor

Dispatches on the labor movement -- or the need for a new one -- is finally up.

First response: Obama makes his case and hits a long double into the gap

President Barack Obama laid down the ganlet tonight (drew his line in the sand, pick your cliche) on healthcare tonight, with an hour-long speech that finally made it clear that he is committed to "a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange" that "would only be an option for those who don't have insurance."

That's the good news. The bad news is that he's leaving it to Congress to craft the mechanism that gets us there, meaning we could be left with a weak "trigger" compromise on a weak reform compromise -- a public option, which falls far short of the single-payer system we need, that only kicks in if other reforms fail to extend coverage or reduce costs.

And just as worrying was his rhetorical nod to deficit reduction -- a problematic way of framing a debate that should be about a societal commitment, a moral commitment to those in need.

Ultimately, however, the speech's importance may lie in its role as personal marker. President Obama finally came out and explained why healthcare reform was necessary. (I was out and didn't get home until after the speech, so I'm relying on the text published by NYTimes.com.)

Our collective failure to meet this challenge – year after year, decade after decade – has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can't get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can't afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.

We are the only advanced democracy on Earth – the only wealthy nation – that allows such hardships for millions of its people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone.

But the problem that plagues the health care system is not just a problem of the uninsured. Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today. More and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you'll lose your health insurance too. More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won't pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.

He hit the crazies -- the people engaging in "demagoguery and distortion" -- hard:

But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.

So yes, a good speech, an effective speech, but it remains to be seen whether he's already given up too much.

Runner's diary, Tuesday

I stayed inside this morning, because it looked like it might rain and to save time so I could get in some lifting. I managed three miles then kicked my own butt with the weights. Tell me again whey we do this?

Where have all the union members gone?

Union members used to make up between 35 and 40 percent of the private-sector workforce; now, according to most estimates, fewer than one in 13 private-sector workers is in a union.

That sharp decline offers as good an explanation as any for what has happened to middle-class wages over the last four decades.

So, rebuilding the labor movement would seem to be key to rebuilding our economy, leveling wages and improving the lots of those who do the work.

How to do that? Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas but not a lot of unity among unions and even less of a favorable atmosphere among business or government.

Unions were hopeful that the Obama administration would bring with it a new union-friendly approach. But it has done relatively little to improve the ability of workers to organize. Card check -- the chief reform sought by the major unions -- appears dead, at least for now. And rather than using the government's new stake in the auto industry to bring unions to the table, to empower workers, the administration attacked them, forcing a renegotiation of contracts and making the United Auto Workers the poster child for what the Detroit carmakers had been doing wrong.

The failure to reignite the union movement has surprised some, given the explosion of union growth during the 1030s. Fear, according to one North Jersey labor attorney, is partly to blame:

Nancy Erika Smith, a prominent labor union attorney, says she is "disheartened" by the "go it alone" attitude of many workers.

"Everyone seems so afraid to join together and help each other," says Smith, whose office is in Montclair. "It's a time when people should want to stick together."

Contrast that with the Great Depression, for example, when hard times spawned labor aggressiveness -- the founding of the United Auto Workers (1935), American Newspaper Guild (1933), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (1937), the predecessor of the Communications Workers of America (1938).

"Hard times drove people together to offer mutual protection," she says.

Another North Jersey union leader, David McCann of the Service Employees International Union, points to a different kind of fear: Fear of change, especially as it revolves around race and the loss of privilege.

McCann sees the divisions over health care and other issues as surrogates for a much larger, if silent, fear. The fear of change represented by the election of a black man -- "a black man with a funny name," says McCann -- to the presidency.

"A lot of this is code -- this is racial. The election was easy, but now those with an interest in defeating this president are resorting to unsaid fears about change," he says.

This may be true, but any analysis of that earlier period of union growth has to reflect the aggressive organizing that took place over the first three to four decades of the 20th century, the apathy that came with success and the impact that the red-baiting of the 1950s had on the radical critique that had been a staple of the earlier labor movement.

Union growth in the 1930s was not just a product of the economic times, but a culmination of the efforts of hundreds and thousands of workers demanding their rights and working to alter the one-sided social contract under which they lived.

Their success altered the definition of what it meant to be working class, with factory workers suddenly finding themselves earning middle-class wages and moving into quiet suburbs. One result was a shift in the labor movement from improving the lives of the laboring classes to a business unionism in which individual unions focused only on the lives and wages of their members, ignoring the organizing side and creating a disconnect.

When middle-class labor jobs started to disappear in the 1960s -- at a time when minorities began to claim their own piece of the American dream -- the movement crashed and burned. It was a two-decade process, but one that has left labor wandering in the desert.

So, don't expect the bad times -- or even card check -- to reverse the losses. The labor movement has to begin to think of itself as a movement representing all workers again. It is going to be a painstaking process that will take the movement outside of its traditional industries to white-collar jobs and immigrant and minority communities.

Unfortunately, that means we're still several years away from a real rebirth of labor in America.

Do unto immigrants as you'd want them to do unto you

The subject of immigration tends to bring out the worst in the people who respond to our stories on line. The level of xenophobic vitriol is truly breathtaking -- and scary, revealing a dark undercurrent that seems ready to boil to the surface.

So when we ran an editorial this week supporting an immigration reform bill that would allow judges during deportation hearings to consider the impact on citizen children, I was ready for the worst.

After all, a story on a vigil scheduled for next week at St. Anthony of Padua R.C. Church generated quite a lot of hateful responses.

The editorial elicited its share of ugly comments, as well -- but this comment from someone identifying him/herself as Koleary sums up the more humane sentiments and gives me hope:

I think Catholics all need to ask ourselves. Who would we have been in the story of the nativity? Would we have been the innkeeper who turned Mary away?

I think this pretty succinctly sums up the question we all should be asking -- even those of us, like myself, who are not Catholic or even Christian. This is a question of humane treatment of our fellow human beings. Shouldn't we treat them as we'd wish ourselves to be treated?

Source material: classic rock

Channeling the Stones circa 1977.

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Jammin'

The Crowes work out their inner Allman Bros.

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Rock and roll is alive

"Under a Mountain"

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At The Stone Pony

Standing inside the Stone Pony -- first time in 26 years, I think, that I've been here. Tonight: The Black Crowes. Back then: Clarence Clemens -- with a surprise appearance from Mr. Bruce Springsteen. I hope tonight is as memorable.

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Grassroots: Health Fight is About Organizing

Progressive Populist column is on their site -- here. It's on the healthcare fight (what else?)

Runner's diary, Thursday

Well, I managed to get outside this morning for my only run of the week (three miles). Just call me a slug.

BHO = LBJ? In Afghanistan, he may

There was a lot of talk back in January when President Barack Obama took over that he was likely to follow in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's footsteps. The times, many argued, demaned bold vision and a rebirth of New Deal liberalism, and Obama's combination of smarts, charisma, eloquence and popularity would allow him to be aggressive in fixing our national problems.

Perhaps, we were foolish to expect so much. Not only do we live in different times, Obama is not FDR. And, perhaps more importantly, it is not FDR's presidency that Obama should study, but that of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I've written before about Johnson's style -- his willingness to twist arms and break skulls helped push through some of the more important, but unpopular initiatives (civil rights, fair housing and immigration legislation, Medicare and other parts of the Great Society) of the last century.

That stands in stark contrast to Obama, who fancies himself a bipartisan great conciliator. The problem with his approach, of course, is that bipartisanship cannot be an end unto itself. It is only useful when tied to a specific legislative target. Unfortunately, what we have seen so far from the Obama presidency has been a willingness to compromise away important pieces of the progressive agenda; on health care, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," climate change, the stimulus -- he's allowed a small number of Republicans and conservative Democrats to rein in his agenda.

It is not only on domestic policy that the president could learn from LBJ, however. Obama needs to reread his history of the era -- in particular, David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, which recounts the slow and deadly descent into quagmire in Vietnam. To Johnson, Vietnam was the line in the sand over which the communists could not be allowed to cross and he was willing to bet everything to keep them from crossing.

The result, of course, was more than 50,000 dead American soldiers, a badly damaged international reputation, division at home and-- most importantly, for the purposes of this argument -- the gutting of his own ambitious domestic agenda, especially his "war on poverty."

The war not only sapped the budget, but it angered a portion of what should have been his base -- the antiwar left -- at a time when working class whites were beginning their flight from the party, angry over accommodations being made to African Americans. It was the beginning of a long era of insignificance for the Democratic Party, which lost five of the next six presidential elections (the sixth, the Carter win, was in many ways an anamoly caused by the Watergate scandal).

Fastfoward to the Obama presidency, which is a little more than seven months old. Obama's commitment to the war in Afghanistan, as The Nation points out in an editorial in its Sept. 14 issue ($), will have a delitirious impact on the rest of what he wants to do. And Americans are starting to understand this.

(A) majority is increasingly aware that the more blood and treasure we pour down the Afghan drain, the less we'll have to spend on economic recovery, healthcare reform and building a green economy at home.

If we want to avoid this, if we want to "protect Obama's reform agenda," we have to "seek alternatives to a militarized strategy in Afghanistan" that must include a timeline for withdrawal (as proposed by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.) and a focus on diplomacy, targeted policing and an international commitment of money and other resources needed to rebuild the country.

Think about this: We are eight years into this war and we've just witnessed its bloodiest month. The national government is connected by a thread, with voter fraud being alleged and chaos outside the main cities. And al-Qaida has shown that it can get to high-level Afghan officials. And we've been relying to a disconterting degree on contractors and public support for the war is falling.

And yet, there are signals being sent that indicate we'll be increasing our troop presence, rather than cutting it back.

Parallels with other moments in history are difficult and generally specious. Afghanistan is not Vietnam and Obama is not LBJ. But the history of LBJ adminstration and the Vietnam war does have relevance to our current moment. President Obama ignores it at his -- and the nation's -- peril.

Another fast-food joint

A Sonic Drive-In is under construction on Route 27, near Vliet Avenue in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop. This is what can be called big news for the fast-food set.

I have to admit, however, that I don't get it. I've eaten twice at Sonic -- once in Iowa about 10 years ago when we went out to visit my sister and once in May in Maryland (Fruitland -- gotta love that name) on the way back from the Outerbanks. It was good, but not good enough to inspire the kind of mania you hear about; it was, after all, still fast food.

But it's still going to be a welcome addition to the area. There are only so many pizza places one area can support.

Dispatches: Planting seeds of good diets

Dispatches -- on the farm-to-school movement -- is up.