Ken Brociner's article: The American Left:  Does a Nationwide ‘Progressive Movement’ Actually Exist?  in In These Times asks the question I have raised here in the past.  It is worth asking again.  The dynamics of the last months of campaign rhetoric and the reactions to diaries here makes it a more open question than ever.  Having written scores of diaries, many of high impact, I may even be free of "but you are new here" types of put downs, but anything can happen here as I have learned.  It is clear there is an "in group" and the rules are bent often for them.  So what does that have to do with the question about the movement's existence?  look below the break and you will see.

Stare into the center of the mandala, Steve

As I commented on Matt's post at New Mexico FBIHOP about the Steve Pearce hippie attack ad on Tom Udall, Grace Slick used to sing "One pill makes you larger. And one pill makes you small." GOP Senate candidate Steve Pearce must have gotten the one that makes you small -- and that causes flashbacks for 40 years. Steve isn't looking for somebody to love -- he's trying to get people to dredge up old grudges from decades past. He must still carry that baggage from all those years ago. Stuck in the past like an angrily buzzing fly in a time-warp web.

Today is Barack Obama's 47th birthday. He shares the same birthdate as Louis Armstrong, Helen Thomas, Billy Bob Thornton, Roger Clemens, and Percy Shelley.

Much has been made about Obama's youth, and I've joked about how much I love to hear that, being just nine days older than he is. In 1908, an American man could expect to live just 49.5 years. Had they lived a century ago, Barack Obama would likely have been nearing the end of his life and John McCain would've been dead for decades. It's only now, as average life expectancy nears 80, that Obama is considered to be barely middle aged. But as he closes in on the half-century mark, Obama has had plenty of time to gain wisdom and perspective.

Go below the flip to learn why someone born in 1961 is ideally suited to be president ...

Most folks have never heard of Yuri Kochiyama.  That is a damn shame.  Yuri Kochiyama has been one of the leading social justice advocates in the United States for more than 40 years...  

Hillary Rodham Clinton is one hip chick.

Tom Purcell bills himself as a humorist. Yet there is nothing funny about his brand of anti-tax extremism as he wraps himself around the American flag for the Thanksgiving holiday. What we have learned from the tragic years of the Bush administration is that anti-tax extremism destroys lives. Therefore, all of the Democratic candidates would rightly move away from that and enact a more progressive tax code that is fair for all.

Ted and I will be serializing the Introduction to our new book, Break Through, here at the DailyKos over the next week. This is the second of four parts. Enjoy!

Click here to find out more about the book.

Click here to find out about the writer/blogger hire at Breakthrough Institute, "the small think tank with big ideas."

And click here to buy Break Through on Amazon.

Dear Barack,

I was really excited when you said you were running for president.
Incredible! A black man, and a woman in the running for president for the first time in our country's history.

And you, so articulate, so passionate.  Your speach at the dem convention blew me away.  I felt like there was hope for my high-jacked country's future.

I was willing to throw my support behind you, even though, as a woman, I'd like to have a woman as president, before I die.

Robert Stone was close to ground zero all throughout the Sixties.  Kesey and the Merry Pranksters parked their bus, Furthur, outside his apartment when they finally made it to NYC.   Stone was there and, since he is a trained novelist, he remembers it well.  If you want to know where the Sixties came from and some of where they went, you can't do much better than reading Stone.  If you want to know how a writer keeps on writing throughout it all, you also can't do much better than Stone.

Prime Green:  Remembering the Sixties by Robert Stone
NY:  HarperCollins, 2007
ISBN:  978-0-06-019816-9

In the past I've liked some of the things this guy has had to say, but his Op-Ed for the Post today lost me entirely with this statement.

That's right, the Black Power movement was nothing more than the indulgence of Campus Radicals. Never mind that the U.S. government, the F.B.I, and Nixon focused their efforts almost entirely on derailing the black militants rather than the campus radicals with COINTELPRO.

Best radio on the internet! KBSG 97.3 from Seattle. Now online.

Remember....Blood, Sweat and Tears, Temptations, Deep Purple, Blind Faith, Genesis, Grand Funk, Doors, Steppenwolf, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Cheap Trick, Average White band, Eric Clapton, Doobie Brothers, Santana, Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan...

http://www.973kbsg.com/

Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.
They've been going in and out of style,
but they're guaranteed to raise a smile.
So may I introduce to you: the act you've known for all these years,
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

June 2, 1967 Sgt. Pepper's was release in the USA (6/1/67 in England - hence 40 years ago today).  How’s that for a mind blowing point in time  baby boomers?  Sgt. Pepper’s released right at the start of the Summer of Love.  

And what is its place in music history?  According to Rolling Stone:

This diary is of course a byproduct to the hot diary of the past two days Pot is not like tobacco. Please make a note of it. Thanks.

This seems to me to be a perfect example of the way these guys think...
And an even better example of something that younger people might not have picked up on...

The 1960's aren't over... GW Bush and the right have decided that a little reversal and revenge is in order... The Elephant never forgets...

But this is about something deeper than the Army or the right keeping and evening the score. It is about how we view the War and how we view the Warriors. The irony is in her reasoning and why she was motivated to do this in the first place.

As a younger contemporary and a child of the Sixties, I think she makes a valid point about confusing the War and the Warrior. My older cousin was one of those guys who came back from Khe Sanh through SFO, straight from 2 years of combat to North Beach, 1970... Skinheaded and in uniform he wasn't exactly welcomed by his peers... Maybe they didn't spit on him but we weren't exactly kind either. And I place myself in that category, I didn't speak to him about what he had been through for decades.

From the Washington Post:

Let's time travel: back to the late 1960's of Timothy Leary and the Magical Mystery Tour, back to the

There's a diary up talking about and extolling the far left.  And I think this is a topical subject, as so many of us (and by "us" I don't mean the far left in particular, I mean Kossaks in general) wish to convince mainstream Americans who are already against this Administration to join in opposition to it, up to supporting impeachment of both Cheney and Bush.

I did a little research on the far left's role in the 60s and found some interesting information.

Generation on Fire
An Oral History: Voices of Protest from the 1960s
By Jeff Kisseloff
University Press of Kentucky
Lexington, 2006

[Update: The author has emailed me with the news that there is a website for this book that has additional interviews that didn't make it into the book, photos and contemporary magazine accounts of events, for those who want to explore further.]

I swear I didn’t mean to write this book review now. I meant to dip in from day to day and read each of the featured activists’ memories of the turbulent 1960’s one at a time; alas, once started, this collaborative oral history proved impossible to put down. The parallels to today’s often fractious progressive movements are striking, but more than that, there is a vibrancy to the interviews with integrationists, anti-war activists, environmentalists, and women’s and gay rights advocates that brings to life a decade that most of us reading here are far too young too have experienced directly. For the course of this book, one gets subsumed in the hopes and dreams of a previous generation in a way few other histories of the decade convey.

It’s tempting to assume that the collage of memories from different factions active in the 1960’s serves as a pointer to the almost duplicative arguments we see on Daily Kos each day, as if there were a direct bloodline of specific resentments and arguments that were passed down to today’s progressive movements. But after a couple of years of participating at this blog, I’ve come to the conclusion that many here – myself included – are unaware of many of the undercurrents and cross-currents from the previous protest generation. Thus, it seems to me that we are less carrying on old grudge matches inherited from our progressive forebears than we are re-creating the same old tired ones anew, with each progressive generation.