This is key...

he and his team concluded that he needed to shift his message to show that he shares the goals of his increasingly restless Republican caucus and the broader public.

More propaganda of assimilation from the Bush League, coming up. Their speechwriters are busy drafting cue cards for Bush, buzzwords, all that stuff, in the long coast for the endgame of this rogue presidency.

Interesting review of an intriguing book. I've worked in nonprofits since 1994, and I always chafe at the perception that nonprofits are somehow more noble and virtuous than for-profit work. Saints or sellouts? Feels like a false dichotomy -- the biggest difference I've seen between nonprofits and for-profits is purely pay level, with the former paying much less for more work.

Everything else is there -- power games, grandstanding, privilege, favoritism, ruthless politics, scheming, skullduggery, ego trips, administrative incompetence, vindictiveness -- all of it, except served up with the thin, guiltmongering broth of righteousness as an excuse for it.

It's very stressful and frustrating, that notion that people are somehow more noble in the nonprofit world. They're not; they only think they are, and that's a dangerous conceit -- the old saw about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions is, to me, a warning for the nonprofit world.

The professionalization of activism is kind of scary to me, creates political vanguards whose vision correspondingly narrows, until The Cause(tm) consumes all. Everybody's supposed to drink the Kool-Aid.

I think most people are better off following whatever interest(s) truly and personally move(s) them than the expectation that they become activists -- doing something one loves to do is more healing, and gives people more of a reason to care about the world they live in than anything cadres of professional (or volunteer) activists can hope to do.

Having something to live for that's personally meaningful flies in the face of everything our culture stands for in practice, and is far more revolutionary than a protest march organized by the usual suspects. The personal truly is political.

He was DOA before his campaign really started; this is just the first twitch before it all comes down. His chance was in 2000, and everything he's done since then has scotched his entirely undeserved reputation as a maverick.

The GOP changed the rules of their own game, and McCain is a relic of the pre-Rovian political age, when somebody could pretend to be representing the mainstream when they were a Republican.

Quoth McCain...

"And a lot of us do what is right, no matter what the polls say."

Yeah, right. Right-wing, that is. His maverick paintjob is peeling and leaving him with nothing to dupe voters with. I'm loving it, although I heard NPR continue to play up that bogus "maverick" line with McCain -- seems like when they cover a public official, they find a buzzword like that, and they always dredge it out when that individual appears, trusting on media noise machine inertia to keep it going. I'd love to know who first labeled McCain a maverick, given his voting record for his whole time in the GOP, which is solidly right-wing.

As Yellow Dog put it, with him gone, any pretense of a crossover candidate goes out the window, with the GOP forced to "narrowcast" to their hellfire-and-brimstone base, which'll put them further out of step with everyday Americans, assuming Bush and Cheney permit elections at all (saw on the news about Homeland Security intoning ominously about possible terrorist attacks this summer -- they're beating the drums again, hoping to terrorize the electorate into fearful immobility again).

Good riddance, McCain.

Leahy and Specter are buddies. They're Senators, longstanding members of the club. So, yeah, of course they'll be chummy. Specter is a rat-and-a-half, one of the old guard of "Respectable Republicans" who shamelessly push for partisan advantage while pretending to be doing the country's business (in the GOP, you either have outright partisans like Orrin Hatch or "covert" partisans like Specter or Joe "GOP" Lieberman). The Democrats have a whole wing of members whose job is apparently to stab each other in the back, while the GOPeons know exactly which backs to stab.

I agree, though, that the Democrats need to start playing for keeps on these issues, rather than letting the White House rope-a-dope them yet again.

Or will "I don't remember" and "I can't recall" simply become the mantra for all subsequent committee hearings for the remaining years left to this country, since the Bush League has demonstrated how effective it is in derailing investigations and accountability?

"I don't recall." -- Sara Taylor

I haven't counted them, because they keep coming. At least Leahy is pointing out how overbroad the Bush League's notions of executive privilege are. Especially revealing was Taylor trying to hide behind it, then stammering and pausing awhile to talk to her attorney, and then answering "I don't recall." and Leahy saying "You could have said that at the outset."

It's odd about Chertoff; my own gut feeling is that we'll have some kind of terror alert hysteria around election time 2008. Why put it past this administration, given their track record to date? Maybe this year's gut feeling is just a dry run for next year's -- just to kind of get people properly afraid. I know, I know, this administration would never cynically and mendaciously manipulate people's fears for political gain.