We have been following the story of Betsie Gallardo lately, she being the woman that, due to a medical decision, was being starved to death in a Florida prison.
She has inoperable cancer, her death is imminent, and her mother was working hard to make it possible for Betsie to die at home with some dignity.
As we reported just a couple days ago, half the battle was already won, as the Florida Department of Corrections had agreed to place her in a hospital so that she could again go back on nutritional support.
On January 5th, the Florida Parole Commission voted to allow her to end her life at home-and that means you spoke out, made a difference, and achieved a complete victory for the effort.
But even as we celebrate that victory, I think we should take a moment to realize that there is a bigger lesson here: the lesson that the fights over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), benefits for 9/11 first responders (the Zadroga Bill), and Betsie Gallardo's imminent release are all actually pointing us to a political strategy that works, over and over, if we are willing to understand the wisdom that's been laid before us.
We at Open Left are taking the New Year's weekend off. Golden Oldies will run in their place. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on January 4th--Chris Bowers
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Oct 06, 2007. Original HERE.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
I saw this excellent entry over at Docudharma and just HAD to share. Specifically, I want to hightlight a couple of paragraphs, because they relate very much to how the left has been thoroughly brainwashed by the right into adopting a permanently defensive, always-ask-for-crumbs mindset.
If you can change the way people THINK about an issue you can...and Rove did...change the way people talk about it and act on it. And it worked.
...
Somewhere in the back of our mind a nagging little voice cries out to us..."What will the Republicans think."
"How will the Republicans react?"
And the meaning of that voice is...."How can we PRE-compromise to the Republicans?"
In the Dem politicians mind, that translates into mental, almost unthought about, nearly unconscious phrases like... We have to GIVE THIS to the Republicans or they will be mad."
In bloggers minds that translates into mental, almost unthought about, nearly unconscious phrases like.... "We can't have Single Payer or a strong Public Option."
"We can't call for an end in Afghanistan."
"We have to compromise on Coal."
"We have to use the (demonizing) phrase illegal alien."
And of course the worst one, the grand daddy of them all, used by both the Polilticians and the Bloggers.....
"We don't have the votes."
When Mr. Bowers urges people here to throw everything we have into pushing a "public option" that really won't do the job of reforming health care and certainly won't lead to anything like single-payer, or when Mr. Rosenberg harps on the evils of the sellout Democratic Party yet always steps up to beat down any notion of actually leaving the Republican-wannabes to their political party of choice, what are they doing if not writing from the very frame of mind right-wingers want them to?
It's worth pondering. Anyway, read the full entry. It's quite eye-opening, for those willing to have their eyes opened.
In my 2007 diary series, "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", I argued that Republicans were as sophisticated in the realm of political manuevering as Democrats were in reality-based policy analysis, and that Democrats were as clueless in in political manuevering as Republicans were in the reality-based policy world.
A couple of things have popped up recently to make me think this analysis is not only still valid, but that it reveals itself in a new wrinkle: while the Democrats are focusing on the need for massive efforts to clean up the countless messes that conservative governance has made, conservatives are zeroing in on prospects for screwing up stuff on the political process level, "big time," as America's #2 War Criminal would say. While the attempted scuttling of the auto industry bailout is an obvious example, a few more recent examples are what made me think of this, such as:
#1: At Calitics, Robert in Monterey focuses attention on a multi-pronged ploy surfacing in the WSJ, in "Prop 8 Supporters Launch Attack on Campaign Finance Disclosure Laws". Conservatives are always about blocking transparency, and Robert's got some sharp things to say about how this is being rolled out and where it could lead.
#2: Also at Calitics, dday's pre-Christmas Diary, "Budget Hell - Grassroots Reinforcements" has an update that mentions "three issues: 'rollback of environmental review for construction projects, greater use of private investment and contractors, and deeper spending cuts.'"
Which issue is most important to you?
- Economy
- Taxes
- Iraq
- National security
- Health care
- The environment
- Abortion
- Energy
- Other
I've been so caught up in the political tactics of the elections that it's been a long time since I thought about American politics from this perspective, so answering this question was a bit harder than I thought. However, I think this is an important question for all of us to consider, if only briefly, before the election. I share my thoughts (and ask for yours) below the fold.
One of my very best friends has hated Obama from the very beginning, especially since the Rev Wright controversy erupted. He's not a far rightie, I would describe him as a moderate conservative that frequently will vote for the Dems on a state and local level. We've been having a fairly friendly debate on the presidential race. Finally, I sent him a list of 10 reasons why he shouldn't vote for McCain, issues that I know he doesn't agree with McCain on. Including anti-abortion, anti-SCHIP, tax cuts for rich, privatize Social Security, and a few more. Here was his answer:
I do not vote for policies. No one implements their campaign promises, neither those you fear, nor those you cannot wait for to arrive.
I vote for character; I see little of it w/ BO and a lot of it w/ JM.
How do I answer something like that? He sees little character in Obama? I think it's because of Rev Wright, he's brought that issue up several times.
I'd rather not do it the Rove way, by mentioning McCain's adultery, flip-flops, ambition, lobbyists, etc. And I don't want to screw up our friendship, it is only 1 vote. And the rest of his family will be voting for Obama to more than offset his vote. But I can't stand to think that my friend is voting against his own best interests like so many Americans continue to do because of personality, not issues. He's very smart, very well informed (although he does get too much information from the right wing noise machine). I feel like if I can't convince him, there isn't much hope of convincing many other intelligent voters in this country either.
Any suggestions? Or should we just agree to disagree and move on?
Elizabeth Edwards articulated the differences of the health care plans of all three candidates on both the Today Show and Morning Joe. Here's the clip from the Today Show, courtesy of Petulant at Shakesville:
Yesterday, John Edwards spoke at the NC Young Dems conference and focused on issues such as getting out of Iraq, universal health care, raising the minimum wage, and the right to organize in NC, a taboo subject in that state. (photo credit: Sara Davis, AP)
Although the conference was about state races, both of the remaining candidates sent surrogates to speak at the conference. I know James Carville was a lunch time speaker and I believe Chelsea Clinton was a speaker too. Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ spoke as a supporter for Obama. And I wouldn't doubt if they continued to lobby JRE for an endorsement.
Yesterday LithiumCola wrote about the Boston Globe's questionnaire about Executive Power. S/he wrote about the strong answers Senator Obama gave. We'll I thought I'd focus a diary just on his answers and not just on the two questions LC highlighted. The questionnaire is quite informative and gives you a good look at were the canidates stand. All except Fred Thomson who was asleep and Rudy Giuliani who was day dreaming about 9/11.
The FCC wants to give Big Media a big handout on December 18 - but we can stop them. There is only about one year left of the Bush Administration and they are rushing to give big rewards to there giant corporate friends. One of those big corporate friends is Big Media. And Kevin Martin, the chair of the FCC that deals with media policy wants to give another hugely unpopular giveaway to Big Media. Thankfully the democracy fighters at Free Press have assembled a massive coalition that is fighting back. It's called Stop Big Media and they've been doing great work. And now that there is only a week left until the ruling I decided to write a action diary because this is one of the most important issues out there for progressives and all who believe in fairness.
In my Part Two of this series, Why Conservatives Can't Govern, I argued that (a) the world is simply too complex for the Level 3 conservative mind [in Kegan's typology] to handle and (b) movement conservative political discourse often doesn't even rise to Level 2. This raises the obvious question: if they're so stupid, and we're so smart, then how come they're running everything?
The simple answer is: wealth and power. But a secondary answer is that they're not all stupid (besides which, cognitive complexity and intelligence are two different things).. In this diary, I'm going to lay some groundwork, and then begin discussing how the lens of cognitive complexity can illuminate why conservatives have been so much better at politicking, when they suck soooo bad at governing.
One key to why movement conservatives are so successful is that they are playing a different game than everyone else-even most conservative voters, who really have no idea what they've signed on for.
What they are after, at a minimum, is a return to the Gilded Age system, when big business owned Congress outright, and the country was run directly for their benefit, and little else.
I'm going to be talking about this in an upcoming diary, but to illustrate it a little more fully, I created this standalone diary.
In The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, I made the claim that Republicans and Democrats are inverted mirror reflections of one another:
(A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
And I argued that there is a deeper, more specific explanation for why this is so. To lay the groundwork for that argument, I spent most of the diary laying out two related schemas for understanding human cognition in a stage-like developmental framework, and I presented an initial argument that liberalism represented a generally more advanced way of thinking about the world. In this diary, I want to take one main example-the defining example of the "war on terror"-to flesh out that argument some more by showing how the "war on terror" is heavily dependent on a low level of cognitive development. I will add some comments at the end about several other issues as well, to give the flavor of how such an analyisis can be generalzied into other areas as well. Then, in the next diary, I will look at how liberals and Democrats tend to be as clueless about politics as conservatives are about governance.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
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