BTW, Obama raised $52 million in June.

We know the civil liberties/rule of law lobby have little to no influence over Obama - he was ok if his FISA vote was a deal breaker; meaning that our clout is non-existent.

The question for us is - assuming Obama is going to win, how do we get a seat at the Obama table to get items from our agenda attended to? Accountability Now PAC is one way. Is it the only way?

Should Kucinich be able to establish something that shocks the nation, then there might be movement.

Problem is - what will shock the nation? Torture doesn't, indefinite detention doesn't.

Anyway, everything that can be tried must be tried even if they are all going to fail.

GG,

You've written that Rep. Rush Holt is one of our best persons in Congress.

Well, what I gathered from him about an year ago is at my blog in the link. It was about impeachment of Bush, and he had two conditions for impeachment to go forward; and one was that a substantial number of Republicans be on board. He thought that the country would be in deep trouble if the attitude became that "oh, we've lost the elections, now let us try impeachment".

I would love to know what he thinks - and will try to attend one of the town halls he's holding to find out - but I imagine the same would hold for accountability of any major political appointee - unless there is some bipartisan agreement, this will be seen as a political witchhunt, and not as real accountability.

There is a bit of a point to it; we have to pressure the Republicans too to care about the law.

-Arun

I don't see anything to apologize for, but accepted. :)

Somewhere on these pages, shooter242 called NYT's Paul Krugman a partisan hack because Krugman never had anything good to say about Bush.

Question is - is (the here much reviled) Thomas Friedman a partisan hack too? In his latest column (for which click on my signature), Friedman writes that about energy policy -

"This moment — $4.11 — represents Bush’s last chance for a legacy."

Apart from noting that Friedman confuses time ("this moment") and the price of gasoline ($4.11) in his usual, one should note that Friedman is saying that Bush has not left **anything** of value to the country so far - e.g., not a balanced budget, not better schools, not a strong economy, not any chronic social problem alleviated - none of those things which get counted as a President's legacy.

Does that make Friedman a partisan hack too? Or do you see it as most of us do - Krugman suffers the chronic addiction of telling the truth?

First, the American people make it difficult to get their attention in any serious way; in election after election they have shown that the filters of the media - especially television; and advertising - especially negative advertising works. Whether it was Osama-fying Cleland, or tagging Gore with inventing the Internet, or Swiftboating Kerry - they didn't see through the bullshit, but were led by their nose.

Secondly, they are unwilling to fund their politicians. As Obama puts it in 'The Audacity of Hope', "...without money, and the television ads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.". And so campaigning "eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money."

"But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means ...I know as a consequence of my fund-raising, I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population - that is, people I'd entered public life to serve."....

"And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don't want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments again. You realize you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven't changed Washington, and you've made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance - of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops - starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don't quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes...."

---- If we as a people spent a fraction of the time, passion and money on politics as we do on football and baseball we would have a government to die for.

Until we the people can just as easily fund the Democratic Convention as the corporate donors, we can't really change anything.

The number of pledges has been languishing in the twentyeight hundreds for days. Without out a serious push, the money bomb will be a damp firecracker.