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Yearend notes

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I’ve been off-blog for a time here as I tend to family during the holidays — normal posting will resume next week.

In the meantime, best wishes for the new year to all of you who keep up with my small effort in the blogosphere here. We celebrated, as is often the case here at our home, with good beer and spicy Szechuan meat sauce noodles — noodles being, as I understand it, symbolic, in the Chinese culture, of long life. Also tasty.

And of course it’s not possible this year to celebrate without thinking of the thousands lost and the thousands still coping with the sorrows and privations of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Living here as we do on the Hayward and San Andreas faults, we can only acknowledge our collective vulnerability, and offer whatever help we’re able.

It’s good to see that our government is finally reacting to the enormity of this disaster with a more appropriate level of assistance than first announced.

But not everyone sees the humanitarian value in such decisions: Our friends at the Ayn Rand Institute argue that the U.S. government shouldn’t offer any humanitarian aid at all. After all, the government has no money of its own except what it raises by taxation — and taxation is, you know, like, theft. “Every dollar the government hands out as foreign aid has to be extorted from an American taxpayer first” — so let’s stand on that principle while thousands die!

This ludicrous argument has no virtue other than consistency with the rest of the rad-lib[ertarian] “starve the beast” mentality that, alas, has achieved more influence in the Beltway than anyone would have imagined possible a decade ago. It’s a perspective that’s not far removed from those of proponents of Social Security pseudo-reform, who are really eager to scuttle the program so that the government is no longer involved in securing a safety net for the elderly.

In the end, these people see no role for the government in taking care of anyone, ever. We’ve gone way beyond the days of complaining about welfare queens and the nanny state. We now face determined ideologues who honestly believe that government should let people die of starvation before taxing citizens a cent. Surely the best retort to their extremist idiocy is a simple demonstration of the effectiveness of both public and private aid in the face of nature’s implacable havoc. May such help be there, for them as for all of us, should it ever be needed.

Indefensible missile defense

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In the world of research and development, as in the world of entrepreneurial capitalism, there’s this notion of a “proof of concept.” A proof of concept is a small-scale test or prototype demonstration that takes some new idea and subjects it to some stress-testing by reality — not a full dose but enough to show that the idea might be worth pursuing. Prove the concept, and maybe you’ll risk fully funding the idea. Can’t prove the concept? Give up. Move on to something else.

For two decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan unveiled his “Star Wars” vision, a faction of the defense-industrial complex has been trying to produce a proof of concept for missile defense — to show that we can, with some level of reliability, defend the U.S. by shooting down hostile incoming missiles.

This week, they failed, again.

As proofs of concept go, this was not a cheap one — the single test cost $85 million. We’ve spent $80 billion to date on this program, and President Bush wants to spend another $50 billion in the next few years.

But the real issue is not cost but methodology: The whole point of the proof of concept approach is that, if you can’t prove the concept, you pull the plug while you’re still in the R&D phase. The Bush administration is instead ignoring the simple reality of the results of its experiments and barreling forward.

I guess it’s just being consistent: If you don’t accept simple budgetary arithmetic and you don’t accept the results of weapons inspections in Iraq and you don’t accept the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, why should you break the pattern and accept the data from your missile-defense experiments? After all, that might be inching uncomfortably close to the “reality-based community.” (See Fred Kaplan in Slate for a more detailed argument: “We can’t even count on the rocket getting out of its launch silo, much less the millions of minute operations that must follow. President Bush fielded a half-dozen antimissile missiles and called them ‘operational.’ But they’re a ruse.”)

What we have here, aside from a massive and repeated technical failure, is a proof of concept for our government’s new, proof-of-concept-free approach to spending our money. If we can get away with this reality-denial, the Bush administration’s logic goes, let’s keep doing it on a bigger and bigger scale! And indeed that’s what’s unfolding as the comic opera known as the Bush economic plan plays its overture to Act Two.

Let’s see, we had enough money to support Social Security until we cut taxes repeatedly and manufactured a crisis, which is now being used to justify a ridiculous privatization scheme. But we still have enough money to pour into the black hole of missile defense.

I hate to be cynical, and certainly a lot of this is being driven by stupid blind ideology, but there is a common thread here: There’s profit to be made by parking billions of Social Security money on Wall Street. And there’s money to be made in missile defense.

Hey, maybe some of that money will be kicked back in 2008, when it’s time to find and fund another Republican to keep this con game going!

Spitzer in bloggerland

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Eliot Spitzer, a guy I went to high school with, has been making headlines for a few years now. In a decade that has seen a retreat from progressive politics across the board, he’s picked up the tools available to him as New York State attorney general and used them creatively and effectively to represent the interests of ordinary citizens. His investigations and prosecutions in the securities, mutual funds and insurance industries have exposed longstanding practices by which insiders profit at the expense of the public they ostensibly serve.

In a better world, the bodies that are supposed to be the watchdogs in these areas would be doing their jobs. Since they haven’t been, Spitzer’s investigations have represented the public’s last line of defense.

I haven’t agreed with every position Eliot has taken in his career (for instance, I don’t support the death penalty), but there isn’t any other Democratic politician out there right now who has been more effective at fighting the self-dealing, cronyism and plundering of the public good that characterize Bush-era business.

Today, in what was a long-expected move, Spitzer announced that he’s running for governor of New York in 2006. And he announced it on a page labeled “Eliot’s Blog” — that appears to be a real, functional weblog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Eliot — I think you’ll like it.

Responsible parties

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There’s one situation that we’re all painfully aware of, in which a top official of the U.S. government oversaw a war that began in a flurry of now-disproven charges and then degenerated into disastrous and worsening chaos. During the course of this war incidents of shameful torture were perpetrated by the U.S. military and those hired by the U.S. military. Yet this official did not take responsibility and step down; indeed, when his boss cleaned house and fired a passel of his peers, the official was specifically asked to stay in place.

Then there’s this other situation, in which the top official of the U.N. oversaw a program that may well have been be marred by significant amounts of corruption. There’s even a charge of petty corruption on the part of the official’s son. An investigation led by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, an unimpeachable “wise man,” has yet to weigh in with a verdict. But voices from within the same administration and party that have accepted no responsibility or consequences for their botched war and their torture victims are the first in line to call for the U.N. official to take reponsibility and step down.

Secretary Rumsfeld, meet Secretary Annan. You two gentlemen have a certain amount in common these days. Isn’t it amazing, though, how differently the Republican powers-that-be view your two cases?

I swear my jaw dropped on Friday evening as I listened to the fulminations (on the PBS News Hour) of Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, who has publicly called for Kofi Annan’s resignation. Let’s look at Coleman’s argument in detail:

“Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. He must, therefore, be held accountable for the U.N.’s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam’s abuses. It’s in his interests and it’s in the interest of the U.N. to step down, and I say this without pointing the finger of accusation against the secretary-general. Clearly he knows that people who were under him, people that he put in place allowed this massive fraud and abuse to occur…. There’s no dispute that Saddam Hussein perpetrated a massive fraud on the Oil-for-Food Program, stole billions of dollars, used it to fund terrorism, rearm himself and to bribe high-ranking individuals connected to member states and Kofi Annan was the guy at the center. He was the boss at that point in time…. In any other organization in the country or in the world, a CIA [I assume this is a transcription error for “CEO”] who oversaw, who was in control when a multibillion dollar fraud took place under his nose and under people that he appointed to oversee the program would step down…. He should step back, get somebody fresh in there, then we can have the transparency and credibility we need to get to the bottom of this…. My criticism is that he was at the helm. We do not have evidence today that ties him and so this shouldn’t be about him.”

OK, Coleman’s point one: Annan was in charge when some really bad stuff went down, and though no “evidence” “ties him” directly to that bad stuff, we call for him to resign — “without pointing the finger of accusation against him” — because it’s the right thing to do.

This, of course, is precisely what Democrats and Americans everywhere who were disgusted by Abu Ghraib demanded of Secretary Rumsfeld. In fact, the secretary of defense’s responsibility at the top of a disciplined military chain of command was if anything much clearer than that held by the leader of a loose international organization that serves many masters.

Back to Coleman: “And I don’t believe there’s any way for us to credibly investigate all of this if the guy who was in charge of the organization, who had appointed Benon Sevan is the guy who’s going to receive these reports and have responsibility for ferreting out the fraud…. And if we’re going to get to the bottom of it — if he doesn’t have credibility — how do you have the guy who was in charge at the time of the fraud be responsible for ferreting it out?”

OK, Coleman’s second point: We can’t count on Volcker to report the truth because the Volcker investigation will deliver its conclusions to Annan himself. Well, let’s see, who did the investigators of Abu Ghraib deliver their reports to, again? I don’t recall an independent counsel being given years of time, massive budgets and free rein to pursue the matter.

Former Sen. Tim Wirth of the U.N. Foundation, set up by the News Hour as Coleman’s foil, invoked the Abu Ghraib comparison himself, but I’m afraid he fumbled it. Here’s what he said: “I think to suggest that because Kofi Annan was the secretary general at the time and because there was a problem that’s being looked at independently that he should go is a little bit like saying that Don Rumsfeld ought to leave because of the Abu Ghraib scandal or because of what went on with Halliburton or so on. I mean, that’s sort of an absurd jump to make.”

Well, no, the point is, it’s not an absurd jump. In any other administration Rumsfeld would have been out on his tuches ages ago. And if he didn’t have the integrity to tender his own resignation, any president with a a soul and a conscience would have fired him and his whole cadre of incompetent lieutenants as the first step in cleaning house after Abu Ghraib and trying to set the war against the al-Qaida terrorists back on track from the disastrous Iraq detour. (Well, a president with a big soul and conscience would have resigned himself, but that’s probably asking too much of any politician.)

We’re still waiting for the full record on Kofi Annan and the oil-for-food program. A reasonable person could argue that Annan ought to quit simply for being the man in charge at the time the program went awry. But you can’t make that argument with a straight face unless you accept that the same logic condemns Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and probably George W. Bush himself.

In my book — pardon me, I should say “according to my moral values” — corruption is bad, but torturing people and launching unnecessary wars under false pretenses is worse. (Of course, there’s a theory that the Republicans are just getting Annan back for his criticisms of the Iraq war. But they’re above that. Er, right?)

Coleman closes with this: “Why are we arguing over Kofi Annan? Why doesn’t he step back, bring someone in there who is not tainted by the allegations, the concerns, the fraud that took place…?”

Indeed. With a little tweak you could inscribe his words over the Pentagon doors: “Why are we arguing over Donald Rumsfeld? Why doesn’t he step back, bring someone in there who is not tainted by the torture, the lies, the intelligence failures that took place…?”

Random links

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In this winter of Democratic discontent, here are some good reads that have been percolating through my brainpan:

## George Lakoff’s name is well-known in the blogosphere, and his theories about framing and context are not exactly news, but his piece on “How to Respond to Conservatives” deserves even more attention than it has already received. Here’s a taste:

  You should be able to recognize the basic frames that conservatives use, and you should prepare frames to shift to… Example: Your opponent says, We should get rid of taxes. People know how to spend their money better than the government. Reframe: “The government has made very wise investments with taxpayer money. Our interstate highway system, for example. You couldn’t build a highway with your tax refund. The government built them. Or the Internet, paid for by taxpayer investment. You could not make your own Internet. Most of our scientific advances have been made through funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health — great government investments of taxpayer money. No matter how wisely you spent your own money, you’d never get those scientific and medical breakthroughs. And how far would you get hiring your own army with your tax refund?”

## Over at Personal Democracy, Dean campaign veteran Zephyr Teachout outlines how little of the Internet’s potential the Kerry campaign really harnessed and lays out the still-unfulfilled but still-huge potential for Net-based collective action.

  For all the money-raising, perhaps the most powerful use of the Internet was by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which framed much of the debate for a third of the last critical months. Of all the speedy, turn-on-a-dime fundraising efforts, this one was the most potent, if also the most pungent. But basically, in the political evolution of the Internet, we have barely touched the surface of its potential to shift the locus of real political power. Never before in history have we had a tool that enables–with so little work–local groups to act in coordination with other local groups elsewhere. Never before in history have we had a tool that at its core holds the solution to the most difficult collective action problems in democracy. And almost no one used it.

##These November 3rd Theses, suggesting that Democrats need to figure out how to “communicate with the core needs of the American people,” make for bracing and provocative reading. Memo to organizers (who seem to include Adam Werbach and others): Tell us who you are, and publish your manifesto in text form (what’s there is a big old graphic file and PDF) so people can actually quote from it.

## Micah Sifry surveys The Rise of Open-Source Politics in The Nation. Most interesting to me here is the perspective on the political pros’ fear that they, like so many other middlemen, will be squeezed out by the rise of new Net-based approaches to political organizing:

  “Anybody who does politics the old way will fight doing things the new way because it’s harder to get paid for it,” says Mark Walsh, CEO of Progress Media, the parent of Air America and a veteran of such companies as VerticalNet and America Online. “Look at every other industry and how the Internet has altered it. Take E-Trade and the selling of stocks. Or Orbitz and the travel industry. In every case, the Internet enables getting rid of the middlemen.” For about a year, starting in late 2001, Walsh was McAuliffe’s chief technology officer, earning $1 a year to help the Democratic Party upgrade its tech systems. “Terry did want to do the right thing,” Walsh says, “but I found the same buzz saw — legacy behavior and consultants who are compensated highly for non-cyber-centric behavior. TV, telemarketing, direct mail — that’s where the margins are.”

The great Social Security swindle

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“You’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . .(to one of the men) . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can.”

Christmas season is “It’s a Wonderful Life” season, and anyone who has seen that movie — which ought to be pretty much everyone by now — will remember Jimmy Stewart’s plain-spoken explanation of banking, delivered to angry customers who have begun a run on the bank where he works.

Today it’s the Bush administration that’s started a run on the institution of Social Security. And so far no one in Washington has had the gumption or the forthrightness to get up, like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, and tell the American people what’s really going on.

The Democrats have long been accused of overstating the case in defense of the Social Security system and “scaring seniors” by warning them that the evil Republicans are going to cut their benefits. Seniors may not, in fact, be in too much trouble — but people in their mid-’40s like me, and anyone younger, have every reason to fear.

What am I so worked up about? This piece in yesterday’s New York Times, headlined “Bush’s Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast Borrowing.” Richard W. Stevenson’s article is a highly problematic example of pseudo-objective “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism — but even through the haze of official mendacity, the message is clear.

For months — years, if you go back to the 2000 election cycle — serious economists have been saying that there is no way to pay for President Bush’s scheme to privatize part of the Social Security system without running up huge deficits. At this point in Bush history, of course, the huge deficits have arrived even without “reforming” Social Security. So the Bush line now appears to be: Hey, “vast borrowing” hasn’t hurt us yet; what’s a few huge deficits more?

As the economist Herbert Stein famously said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Let’s recap some of the history here: The Social Security time-bomb — a side-effect of the Baby Boom demographic bulge passing through the employment lifecycle — was evident a generation ago, certainly by the waning years of the Reagan administration. Bipartisan efforts — including the first President Bush’s acceptance of a tax increase, despite his famous “Read my lips” promise — set the nation’s finances on course again. By the late ’90s we began racking up significant budget surpluses.

These surpluses were supposed to be set aside to keep Social Security solvent for us and our children. That was the famous “lock box” that Al Gore was unfairly derided for talking about. This money wasn’t “ours,” as George Bush fatuously and insidiously told the nation in 2000, justifying his call for tax cuts. It was cash that had been raised to solve a long-term problem.

Bush and his team broke open the lock-box and handed the cash out, mostly to the wealthiest tier of Americans, and began running up deficits like there was no tomorrow. Now they want us to buy into a fraudulent scheme to hand chunks of the nation’s obligations to future retirees into 401k-like private investment accounts. But since the money today’s workers now pay in Social Security taxes actually pays today’s retirees, any cash diverted to such investment accounts will have to be made up somehow.

Bush’s answer? Charge it!

In theory, the economists who like this privatization scheme see it as a way to boost the nation’s total savings, which is a good thing for the economy and should increase long-term growth, ultimately helping put the federal budget back on track. But, er, if the feds are borrowing the money for the citizens to save, then there’s no real increase in total savings, and no long-term benefit — as Stevenson’s article lays out. All we get are bigger and bigger deficits as far as the eye can see, with the looming possibility that, sooner or later, our lenders will grow tired of the game, and we’ll face a catastrophic drop in the dollar, a skyrocketing inflation rate, and the prospect, at worst, of a Weimar-like fiscal collapse.

Meanwhile, what are we taking this huge risk for? For the sake of letting individual investors take a modest portion of their retirement money and put it into mutual funds? Of course, we’ve recently had a national refresher course in how the mutual fund industry works; even without crooked kickbacks and such, the service fees eat up a significant chunk of the ostensible advantage you get from investing long-term in stocks over more conservative choices. And those financial advisers who love to tout the long-term advantage of stock investments are rarely willing to come clean on the risk to retirees: Growing older is not a choice, and if you’re unlucky enough to need to retire during a market downswing, you will not find much consolation in knowing that your portfolio would have averaged out a winner if you’d only had another decade or two.

In the long term, stocks may be better; but as a famous economist once said, in the long term, we’re all dead, too. The long term is always iffy. That’s why the best retirement safety nets are built out of safer materials than stock-market investments — and why Social Security should be kept out of the hands of the brokers.

Consider this other piece from yesterday’s Times, in which Mary Williams Walsh explains a little-known paradox of the pension world: It seems that, despite the woes so many pension funds now face, a handful of them have managed to prosper by choosing conservative, safe long-term investments. Meanwhile, the pension funds that are in trouble are those that chose riskier stock-market portfolios. Imagine that! This, of course, is precisely the course that Bush wants to put Social Security on. In a better world, Walsh’s piece would have been put on the Times front page right next to Stevenson’s, as a cautionary counterpoint to the president’s folly.

Everyone in Washington knows we need to fix Social Security. But the Bush approach, while it could win support in the short term in a Republican-dominated Congress, is a long-term disaster. The worst scenario here is one that no one in the administration would ever admit to, but if you listen in on the loony right fringes (who are closer than ever now to the levers of power) you’ll hear it: The idea is that if we undermine Social Security enough today, when the fiscal train-wreck hits tomorrow the government won’t have any choice but to scrap the retirement system entirely — fulfilling, finally, the dreams of its original die-hard Republican opponents, who saw FDR’s pledge to America’s working families as an evil efflorescence of socialism.

The Bush economists are ready to begin the dismantling. Wall Street is teeming with brokers slavering to get the commissions on this vast new influx of accounts. And, just when we can no longer count on Social Security to cushion our retirements, the borrowing the Bush plan demands will spark inflation or undermine the dollar or both, devaluing whatever savings we may have been counting on to augment those Social Security checks.

Maybe seniors — and the rest of us — should be scared.

Random links

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## Oliver Willis (who I met last year at the first Bloggercon) is having fun dreaming up pithy ads for “Brand Democrat.”

## Merlin Mann of 43 Folders offers some good tips on breaking thru writer’s block — not my particular affliction, thankfully, but the advice is useful for all sorts of creative logjams.

## Reason #5637 to love RSS: I knew that NPR offered RSS feeds, but only recently did I realize that they’ve intelligently broken up shows like “Fresh Air” into individual segments — so that, for instance, I can listen to my friend David Edelstein’s movie reviews even when I don’t have a full hour to hear the whole show.

The Iranian information blockade

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I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:

  Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing “materials not fully created and in existence.” Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me.

We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it’s counterproductive to the United States’ larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations — not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.

Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, “mandate”-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.

Doctorow at WIPO Geneva

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Cory Doctorow’s reports for the Electronic Frontier Foundation from the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meeting in Geneva are fascinating for what they illuminate at this bizarre crossroads of global bureaucracy and globalized corporatocracy. But most peculiar of all is his tale of how “all of the handouts set out by the ‘public interest’ groups (e.g., us, civil society coalition, IP Justice, Union for the Public Domain) were repeatedly stolen and pitched into the trashcans in the bathrooms.”

Here’s an excerpt of the full saga:

  Let me try to convey to you the depth of the weirdness that arose when all the public-interest groups’ papers were stolen and trashed at WIPO. No one gets into the WIPO building without being accredited and checked over, so this was almost certainly someone who was working on the treaty — in other words, a political opponent (none of the documents promoting the Broadcast Treaty were touched).

As the Indian delegation put it, WIPO is an organization based on information. For someone who believes in an information-protection instrument like the Broadcast Treaty to sabotage the negotiation by hiding information from the delegates is bizarre. The people who run the table were shocked silly — this has apparently never happened before at WIPO.

(Fwd) Re: Election fraud!

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My little coda below about exit polls and the thirst for tales of a stolen election among the throngs of disappointed Kerry voters, of whom I am one, led to a little fracas in the comments. So here’s my position, plain and simple, and maybe we can move on:

There’s no question that the paper-trail-free, unaccountable, closed-source model of electronic voting is flawed, precisely because it leaves no room for after-the-fact authentication, and allows rumors and suspicions of skulduggery to ferment. We need to change that system. Salon, and particularly our reporter Farhad Manjoo, have been at the forefront of coverage of this issue since long before the current election.

When complaints of problems at the polls arise, it’s the duty of responsible journalists, including us here at Salon, to take them seriously and try to evaluate them. If reported patterns of voting raise questions of any kind, that’s worth looking into. Nothing is more important than assuring ourselves that our elections are won fairly.

But elections are messy exercised in democracy — there’s no such thing as a perfect one. There’s always some conniving local official trying to win an edge for his side; the history of voter intimidation and voter-roll tweaking and political-machine tampering is endless. (“Vote early, vote often” was not a joke in Daley’s Chicago, and most historians have concluded that in 1960 Kennedy probably won Illinois, and the White House, thanks to some deft ballot-box stuffing.)

The inevitability of problem precincts and questionable tallies is a given. They demand our inquiry nevertheless. But their presence does not, in and of itself, offer proof of electoral crookedness or a stolen election.

My beef is with the legions of outraged and aggrieved e-mail correspondents who are utterly convinced that the election was stolen. Why? They got an e-mail that told them! They read an article by Greg Palast! And they’re not going to be satisfied by the work of some Salon reporter who went out and actually reviewed the evidence and talked to the participants. (Here’s the most recent back and forth between Palast and Manjoo.)

There’s a dynamic at work here that people really ought to be recognizing by now — the “I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll pass it on anyway” meme-propagation that the Internet so efficiently accelerates.

The worst case is that the more gullible and misinformed wing of the Democratic left will turn into our side’s version of the gullible and misinformed legions of Republican voters who believe that Saddam had WMDs and worked with al-Qaida. We’re not there yet, but if we keep going down this road of crying “fraud!” at the drop of a dubious e-mail tip, we’re in for trouble.

We need to become smarter, more skeptical consumers of the information we get online. All the information, including — no, especially — the information that confirms our preconceptions and prejudices. If we (here at Salon, or in the blogosphere, or even on CBS or Fox!) find real evidence of the sort of significant voting problems that could affect the election’s outcome, then I will join the charge. But I won’t leap to the barricades on the basis of me-too forwards from people who are desperate to believe and unwilling to face facts.

The 2000 election, with its razor-thin margins, its rampant problems at the polls and its ultimate resolution by a partisan Supreme Court, left us all understandably hyped up on this issue. This battle should have been fought then, and wasn’t. But 2004 turned out to be a different sort of disaster. We can close our eyes to that change and pretend it’s still 2000, or we can look around at the landscape of reality and figure out what we have to do to pull our nation back from the brink of its current madness.