The Libertarians are blogging the convention for Reason Magazine with Tim Blair from the lib-right and Matt Welsh from the lib-left.  Blair's posts are more interesting than Welsh's in general -- here's his (warning: unfriendly) exploration of Kerry trade policy for instance from a right-libertarian's point of view, and here's his (warning: snide) exchange with Kos .

Maybe Libertarians are just naturally snide; maybe it's a cog in the big wheel of undermining and exposing the absurdity of big government.  And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of fun stuff being blogged here I haven't seen from the gang at TNR or TAPPED.  But Matt Welsh has always been a favourite political / cultural writer of mine for his work on the Iraqi Sanctions and on the left's reaction to 911.  He's a very talented guy, who sometimes really seems to have something genuine to say, which is why it's so frustrating to watch him descend straight into the sort of knee-jerk anti-Party More-Independent-than-Thou, celebrity hobnobbing, name-dropping cynicism he displays here.  It's a beef of mine with a lot of outsider/ alternative/ independent journalists: no matter how smart they are, no matter how good and unique their policy work, put them in a political medium and they quickly become Russerts-in-training.

This is sort of inconsequential for a diary entry, but it's such a great analysis, and so true, I thought it was worth pointing out.  Slate's Will Saleton has this take on the "wisdom" of Kerry's choosing Edwards:

More clearly than any Democratic presidential nominee in 20 years, Kerry was chosen not to represent himself but to represent his party. And what Democrats wanted, as polls and crowds made clear, was Edwards--because they like him, and because they want to win.

That's the most important thing Kerry revealed today: He understands that the election is about more than what he wants. Sometimes the biggest thing you can do is to accept what's bigger than you.

More at: http://slate.msn.com/id/2103432/

I'm a TNR-defender by and large.  But the current online addition of the magazine features an article so scary it shakes me.  Victor Davis Hanson -- I don't know who he is -- writes a piece called "Stop Talking" (byline: "Kill the insurgents".)

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040607&s=hanson060704

Here are a few of Hanson's claims:

I'm in the process of writing an essay on the failure of the Democratic Party and the moderate left to mount an effective "centrist" opposition to the War in Iraq -- a problem I think continues today.  I found these three linked pieces which I thought were interesting taken together because they span the antiwar movement from the centrist to the paleocon vies of the failures of the antiwar movement to stop the Bushie rush-to-war:

Disclaimer: the following is a lot of semi-informed political opinion from one of the centrists at Kos.  I just feel a need to vent so feel free to skip this.

Over the past few days, there's been a lot of good conservation here about Kerry's candidacy: specifically a lot of complaints and rebuttals about Kerry being a big wimp, a Gore-redux candidate and a lousy Bush-lite nominee who is not standing up for Democratic values, espeically on foreign policy.  In a recent thread comparing Dean to Kerry on Israel, somebody posed the (perfectly plausible) question of whether the fact that we're a 50-50 nation might be due to the fact that the Dems are too centrist, too cuddly with the Republicans.  Since I've got big opinions on these issues, I'm going to weigh in.  And it's going to be long.

I'm really like to know who everyone's "must read" liberal pundits are -- also, who people think is overrated and who are the biggest liberal media whores.  To kick things off, here are my favourite and less favourite liberal pundits ("liberal" means self-identified Democrat):

I was catching up on my must-read blogs today and found a few curious / interesting tidbits.  Any thoughts on the following?

1) Could the media really be turning on Bush?

From "Altercation", http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/, with links to "The Big Picture", http://bigpicture.typepad.com/writing/2004/04/war_coverage_sh.html, Barry Ritzholtz makes the case really well, tracing the sea change back to the Valerie Plame incident and predicting Bush is in for a shitstorm as journalist media-whores get ready for serious "revenge".  Let's hope.

2) What does Bob Somerby have against Ron Klain?

I love "The Howler" http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh041904.shtml but why is Somerby going off on Dem consultant Ron Klain over the op-ed he wrote Friday about Democrats and Bush's religosity?  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-klain16apr16,1,3592112.story?coll=la-news-comme nt-opinions

I thought the piece was a tad pedantic but TAPPED praised it as "thoughtful" on Friday.  It's certainly not "Fox-Democrat-like".  Out of curiosity, I looked up Klain on Nexis and Google to find the offending behaviour Somerby claims has been going on "for years".  In the past two years Klain has:

1. called Bush's constitutional amendment on gay marriage "a terrible idea" and Bush "too afraid to condemn intolerance on the right".
2. Condemned the Medicare bill
3. Praised Clark (for whom he worked this election cycle)
4. Defended Gore (for whom he used to work) on several occasions -- not much political captial in that these days either
5. praised Kerry for having a "unifying message" and described himself as a "big fan".

And for this he gets compared to Susan Estrich?  What is Somerby's problem?

3) TNR comes through!

Like most, I find The New Republic pretty objectionable on occasion (though I admit I couldn't live without it).  But today it rocks.  Noam Schieber of &c smartly praises Kerry's MTP interview as probably putting to rest any Bush criticism of Kerry's war-protest sitting-near-Jane-Fonda days:
http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml
and Adam B. Kushner makes a great case in defence of Jamie Gorlick while assailing her Republican foes, especially Ashcroft, as hypocritical demagogues: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=kushner041904

For those who aren't subscribers, here's a juicy bit:

Along these lines, Gorelick's tenure as deputy attorney general was no secret in Washington when she was named to the Commission. Going into the process, everyone knew the Commission would be considering matters related to the Justice Department. And yet, it is only now that Ashcroft has dragged Gorelick into the discussion of the wall--a matter in which her importance has been wildly overstated--that Republicans are calling on her to resign. If conservatives really thought Gorelick would be biased because of her work for the Clinton administration, there's no reason they should have waited until last week to say so. Unless, that is, this is merely a ploy to distract from the substance of the Commission's findings, which become increasingly embarrassing to the Bush administration with each passing week.

And while we're at it, can anybody tell me the nifty trick for getting links to show up as text so I don't have to paste them directly?  I can do it in MS Word, but it doesn't seem to work here.

Andrew Sullivan thinks Air America is a big flop:

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20040405

The funny thing about Sully's piece is how he spends the article ruminating about how liberal radio will flop because liberal elitism is too intellectual and hoity-toity arrogant to be condusive with the populism of talk radio.

This is a sham argument.  Not only is it ridiculous to contend that intellectualism and populism can never mix, in fact that mix is the defining principle and challenge of political discourse, for both liberals and conservatives.  Sully conveniently forgets that two recent Democratic campaigns were run on themes of "the people not the powerful" and "the two Americas" -- direct emotional-populist appeals to the electorate by intellectual politicians that also posed direct challenges to the think-tank wing of the party.

In fact, the elite-think-tank vs populist-emotional tradeoff is a fascinating and deep topic.  When is populism pandering?  When do politicians know more about what is good for the electorate than does the electorate itself?  Where do social conservatism and traditional liberalism meet and where do they depart?  Which is a political winner?  Of course, Sully has nothing much to say about any of this other than how (as he hopes) "Air America will flop".  He then concludes with this:

Let me be upfront: I'm probably the least knowledgable person around here about the 911 Commission and the ongoing saga...so I've got nothing very sage to say about things.  However, I've been nervous about what would happen when Clinton and Gore testified to the panel because the media coverage could easily turn toward a negative portrayal of of last Democratic Admin's role in fighting terror, thus letting Bush off the hook to some degree and helping him paint Kerry as a Clinton-loving terror-wuss.

Well...Clinton testified yesterday.  And Gore testified today...and the meetings have gone pretty much under the radar with the (deserved) brouhaha over Condi.  But the verdicts so far are pretty happy.

Here's a sampling of what I did find in the press:

According to CNN Inside Politics, the battle is on in the Senate:

Both sides say they want to move ahead, but Democrats are insisting on votes on amendments to raise the hourly minimum wage from $5.15 to $7, block changes to federal labor laws that stripped overtime pay from workers now eligible for the benefit and extend federal unemployment benefits.

This would be a huge development for poor people and progressives everywhere, possibly the most signficant welfare-enhancing policy we've seen since...I can't remember, certainly since Bush took over (at least I can't think of another).  It would literally erase the last 25 years in erosion in the real value of the minimum wage.

People, write to your senators.

I didn't see an entry on this before, but over at TAPPED, blogger Garence Franke-Ruta is being really unfair to Howard Dean:

DEAN IN THE DUMPS? If you haven't been a regular reader of Howard Dean's new blog at Democracy for America -- and, really, who is at this point? -- you'll want to take a look at this item posted today by the man himself:

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/

I love Limbaugh, but he's especially good tonight trying to spin the Unity Dinner:

Tomorrow is Kerry's big day; the AFSCME endorsement, the Dean endorsement and the transfer of the Dean Congressional people to Kerry.  Then the big fundraising party with all the major party players.  Perfect timing in the wake of the Clarke-Cohen-Albright testimony.  I predict that by next week, Kerry will be up by 10 points again.

Howard Dean was in fine form today, unveiling Democracy for America and promising to SEND BUSH BACK TO CRAWFORD, TEXAS.  That was the theme.  By the end, everytime he said it, the crowd would chant along "CRAWFORD TEXAS!".

...but does see fit to post this scintillating reader-email on his weblog:

More shilling for my favourite VP candidate:

Spitzer's new article for TNR on the government's role in fostering free markets is just so...vice presidential.  I can't post the whole thing since TNR makes me pay for it.  But I've printed some of my favourite bits.

Spitzer is a free trader (and I'm of the (minority?) opinion that any national Dem should be) but he's also a liberal who is concerned about the adverse effects of markets and thinks the federal government ought to take pressure off the states in doing so.  From a political point of view, the article is so idealistic-mixed-wonky that the man just screams to be put as number 2 on the national ticket.  Listening, John Kerry?

From a personal point of view, his section on preditory mortage lending hits home for me.  I wrote my honours thesis on preditory marketing of credit cards to lower-income households and students as a loan substitute on the premise that lower-income, higher-risk borrowers face a higher demand for credit and will therefore pay higher interest rates.  Witness the explosion of credit card debt in the last 80s and early 90s.

Today, Ms. Dowd proudly tells her Times readership all about about how she recently wasted fifteen minutes of John Kerry's time repeating Republican insults to him to see if she could get him to frown.  Yes, she is proud of having forced the next president of the United States to repeat -- again -- that he doesn't use Botox.  By the end of the article, it's clear that she doesn't believe his denial.  In her view, only Botox could possibly explain Kerry's superhuman forbearance in not "frowning" at her insipid baiting.

I just read the Gridiron speech for the first time, and the post-speech q&a.  Fantastic -- I don't know if I like it quite as much as his Dec 15 domestic policy speech, but it's up there among his very best.  THIS is the candidate I loved so much in the fall.  By the end of the campaign I was wondering where he'd gone.

I don't know if Dean could have won the election and in the end, that's the important thing to me.  Also, I think Kerry is a damn fine nominee.  But God Almighty, HD is the man.  And this quote just captures it all:

"I really - I get this serenity every time election day comes along, because I know I've done everything I can, and it's in the hands of the boss, and the boss is the voters, and as long as we have that system I have a fair amount of confidence in the country."

Beautiful.