As everyone has seen from the wonderful front pagers the senate is finally acting to correct one of the most horrible and ridiculous actions of the last congress.  But there is much more to be done.  On June 26th the ACLU, Amnesty international and host of other affiliated groups are rallying in Washington and also coordinating a lobbying day for the congress critters to meet their constituents.  The ACLU is providing transportation for some states and hotel rooms.  But it is on a first come first serve basis and those spots are disappearing fast.  Go to www.juneaction.org and sign up for the march and sign the petition.  For South Carolinians the ACLU is providing a bus in Florence at the civic center.  Now, the current bus is full but I have been told that if we can get another thirty or so people to sign up to go they will generate a new bus.

Over at TPM Cafe Chris Robertson has an interesting Idea about indexing property taxes to income.  If you make more then you pay more.  This is not a bad idea but I wonder if there isn't a simpler way making it so that Property taxes don't adversly effect those who own their own homes but have trouble paying the tax.

Let’s cut Congress’s salary.

In the normal world when someone is so egregiously bad at their job that they, for example, let debt pile up to the point that bankruptcy looks like the only sane option, they would probably be fired.  Well actually they would defiantly be fired.  As long as they weren’t the CEO since I don’t know what it means when someone says you don’t have to work anymore but that their going to give you a ton of money.

Billman wrote a pretty good post over at his blog that one unfortunate tendency of thought that that I find over represented, at least implicitly, in this community and among many liberals.

He states, "Wilkerson strikes me as reasonably representative of the technicians who actually run the empire -- and his assumptions largely appear to reflect those of his class."

Now is the time finally that Democrats can finally come out as the party of the working and middle class.  As another diary noted the poverty is getting a lot of attention now as people are realizing that everything in this country is not sunshine and cupcakes all the time.  People are finally realizing that the next step they take on the stair case of wealth may well be to the bottom and not the top.  One reason the Democrats have lost is because we have lost what was our core competence, managing the effects of the economy for the benefit of all.  Penny ante stuff like a prescription drug bill is meaningless.  We need to go full bore with a whole set of wholesale changes and we need rhetoric that makes it clear that our changes are not little but will change everything.

Details after the flip.

I'm curious to see how others answer this question that has been rolling around in my head for a while.  If you had to choose between something like government mandated rules on minimum wage and other labor laws or a very strong labor movement in this country which would you choose?  I know that this is a false dichotomy and that it is possible to have both but it's a question that I think points to a dichotomy in my own thinking which is whether it is better for society to have strong civil institutions outside of government produce results or to have the government itself produce results.

This diary has to do with a common attribute self attributed to our side.  That were smarter than the other guys.  That conservatives are too willing to believe bald faced lies but we're smart enough to look at "reality".  In some instance's that may be true.  But I think that calling a group, any group, smarter than another group is wrong.  Not only is it wrong calling your own group smart is stupid.

I have read at least of a couple of the recent diaries on the pie wars and have been trying to figure out why this is such a hard issue.  A comment was made in mcjoan's diary that an ad depicting two black women in a fried chicken fight would never have been put up and it was right.  Racism is thought of differently than sexism, and for some or many that is a horrible thing.  I tend to think that the two are different beasts.  

Dissent Magazine has an article by Andrei S. Markovits ( Dissent Magazine ) about the history of the left from 1945 to now.  It looks at the gains and the defeats that the left has encountered and the change in both structure and ideology that has occured in that time.

His basic thesis is that the left, while formerly, motivated by a concern for workers has fragmented itself into mostly issue based activism without a coherent center.  

His article is mostly on European leftism but I think that it can be applied to us here.

More below the flip

 I apologize in advance for how dry this treatment is but came after a debate with someone who used what seemed to be a very logical argument and so I had to dig into the logic as much as possible to treat it fairly and also refute it.

    The argument of many Christians for why Homosexuality means the destruction of marriage seems to run thus; If A is to B as A is to A then A must necessarily equal B, which is false, therefore A cannot be to A as A is to B.  

A Washington Post "In the Loop" article says that there is a rumour running around Washinton that Bush may ask Lieberman to be the new secratary of defense.

The crazies, not having been able to take down Arlen Specter in november are screaming again.  About what you might ask?  

The fact that Specter has hired liberals (oh god) to his staff.  But were not actually talking about socialists or anything were just talking about people who have connections to the democratic party and the NAACP.  Both obvious bastions of America hating commies.

I know that there have been many, many diaries on Iraq but I'd like this one to be sort of clearing house of idea's about what to do, if in some hypothetical universe you were president.

In my mind I would love it if we could just declare victory and pull out.  But the consequences of pulling out both from the perspective of the utter mess we'd leave behind and the possible greater devastation that that would create, even more than we are are creating now, makes me worry.  

We have to only look at Afghanistan to see what twenty years of war will do to a country.  That was the reason Rumsfeld said that there was nothing to bomb there.  Even our boneheaded policies are not as destructive as civil war.  Hobbes belief in the absolute power of the government was predicated on his belief, after seeing the English civil war, that life was so bad with out an effective government that the only way to ensure that there was never one again was to have government that held all power.