Please excuse the drive by post.  There was no open thread and did not see this on the board.  I will delete if asked.  I just wanted to point out that the top story on Yahoo News, and impossible to miss for anyone checking Yahoo Mail, bears the headline "Democrats Bicker over how to Hit McCain".  The first sentence also begins,

"Democrats bickered among themselves Tuesday. . ."

"Convention strains persisted between Obama and some former Hillary Clinton supporters"

"The next two days give star billing to the old Clinton regime even as the party delivers to Obama its presidential nomination."

I may write to Yahoo and explain I'm switching to another mail service just to avoid such partisan framing.  If I wanted to watch FoxNews or read the Wall St. Journal I would do so.  Good day, sirs!

Update:  How Very f*cking interesting.  The headline has now changed to "Hillary Clinton's Convention Hurrah."  They've also completely rewritten the lead.  Wonder who intervened. Screen shot below jump.

If you haven't read it yet, check out George Packer's essay in this week's New Yorker magazine titled "The Fall of Conservativism."  It is an obituary and a chilling history lesson well worth reading in its entirety.

But what I want to highlight is a section on the work of a young political strategist named Patrick Buchanan in advising Richard Nixon.  Of course, we all know about "the southern strategy" and "the silent majority," but it is quite revealing to read the original and specific language that was used to launch these initiatives, especially when the author is still enjoying a seat at the table, still deploying a powerful megaphone to do EXACTLY what is indicated in the title of his 1971 memorandum:  "Dividing the Democrats."  Follow me below the jump for the full quote:

Please pardon the thin diary entry.  I didn't see anything about this on the list and there was no open thread. My wife is a Spanish scholar and has been monitoring El Pais (the NY Times of Spain) and reports that the Rightwing Partido Popular (led by the Neo-Francoist and Aznar protege Mariano Rajoy) is being crushed by the Socialist party led by Jose Luis Zapatero.  The P.P.'s agenda has been a virtual clone of BushCo -- focus on terrorism, xenophobia, homophobia, "family values" B.S., the erasure of the separation of church and state, etc.  They have blamed their loss in the last election on the '04 train bombings (which they had hastily and incorrectly tried to pin on Basque terrorists).  But now they are being soundly repudiated in a nation where upwards of 75% of eligible voters turn out to vote.

BBC covers the story in English here.

NY Times covers it here.

This is just a brief diary to raise the question and to hazard an answer.  As crazy and truly conservative as John McCain is, he has been subject to withering attacks by the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingram and the rest of the wingnut flying monkey squad.  They have obviously settled on Romney in recent weeks as the only man capable of stopping McCain, despite Romney's lack of true conservative credentials, etc.  My question is why?  

I don't have any great love for or belief in Edwards personally.  He's a politician and a rich lawyer (albeit one who made his money keeping corporations honest).  I am not particularly moved by his "son of a mill-hand" story, his son's death, his wife's cancer, his change of heart about Iraq, etc. etc.  I don't love the guy personally.

Please pardon the drive-by nature of this post, but I just wanted to share a brief quote with the Kos Kommunity that hit me like a ton of bricks, bringing to mind the slavishness and insularity of today's Beltway media elite.  The book is a history of communications textbook and the entry is from the great Canadian media theorist Harold Innis, whose masterworks, The Bias of Communications and Empire and Communications inspired his much more famous junior colleague Marshall McLuhan.  

In "Media and Ancient Empires," Innis writes about the Egyptians after 2000 B.C., when writing on stone gave way to writing on Papyrus:

This is just a brief diary to explain a system I've developed for listening to blogs and other online text content as I drive to and from work every day.  This is much better than anything on the radio and can work for others who are willing to make a modest investment in software and technology.  I will mention specifics only for the purposes of information, not to promote any company's products.  I know for a fact that a similar system could be created using different components.

The best blogger in the world, Glenn Greenwald, just announced that he's moving his blog over to Salon.com  Starting next week, Glenn will be offering the exact same content that he's been producing for his blogspot site to a much, much larger audience.

Glenn assures us in his announcement that:

Other than some design changes (actually, design improvements), the content of this blog will remain exactly the same. The first term I negotiated with Salon was complete editorial freedom -- no editorial interventions, no topic "assignments," and no content, length or topic restrictions. I can post when and how frequently I want, and I have access to post 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and posting is immediate. In essence, Salon wants to publish this blog, not some modified or constrained version, and so I have exactly the same freedom to post there that I have here.

Pardon the "drive-by" nature of this diary.  I posted this link to an open thread and was encouraged to make it a full-fledged diary so it would get the attention it deserves.

Here is an infuriating and heartbreaking video posted on YouTube that shows American G.I.'s riding through a bombed-out Iraq neighborhood, taunting ragged Iraqi children with a bottle Evian water.  I originally saw the link to this video on the WFMU radio blog under the title "Cruel to be Thirsty."

I think we are all aware of how our soldiers have been put in an impossible situation, with horrible, delusional leadership, no clear plan, faulty equipment, etc.  I look at a video like this and while I do not excuse the behavior of the soldiers, neither do I let my rage and sadness at it settle upon them.  This is---unfortunately---an iconic image of what the USA looks like to much of the rest of the world.  

I'm a transplated easterner from the NYC area, living In SW Missouri for the entirety of the Bush years and let me tell you it has NOT been easy.  This is the land of the gun rack and mega church and xenophobia, homophobia, and radical anti-choice activism.  We have 4 Walmart super-centers within a ten mile radius which have driven out local businesses like supermarkets, hardware stores, etc.  In short, it's a total red state nightmare.  Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were regarded as Gods here just a few short years ago, and Democrats were shut out of virtually every office in the state, from Governor to dog catcher. [more below]

I've written a few diaries about life in Roy Blunt's district  in SW Missouri, including the efforts by my own MSSU College Democrats to bring a bit of reality to their ditto-head neighbors through a ceremony honoring the Iraq and Afghanistan War dead and a visit to our campus by Bush and Rumsfeld critic Ray McGovern.

But I want to call attention to a letter (and the online reader comments it generated) in today's Joplin Globe to indicate just how desperate Bush defenders have become here---and how much they've been knocked off their game of message discipline, consistent emotional narratives, and arrogant triumphalism. [More below the jump]

Americablog has front-paged a selection from this bellweather article from conservative homophobe Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media entitled "Homosexual Blackmail on Capital Hill."  As difficult as it is to read the bigoted, McCarthyist rhetoric of Mr. Kincaid, it ought to be very encouraging to progressives to see BushCo's unholy coalition crumble so dramatically.  

My rhetorical question at this point is:  is this not the time to remind our friends, neighbors, family members, and readers of our local paper of the largely-buried Jeff Gannon (AKA James Guckert) scandal from 2005?  An informal survey of people I know indicates that the average American, even many progressive activists, have no idea that a homosexual prostitute was given free run of the White House for years and allowed to pose as a news reporter in order to lob administration-friendly questions to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. [more below the jump]

As the faculty advisor for a tiny band of College Democrats at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, MO, I have never been prouder of or more encouraged by the brave and determined students here who have decided to "take back the flag" in one of the most conservative and Republican districts in the U.S., Republican Majority Whip Roy Blunt's 7th District of Missouri.

Inspired in part by a Dailykos diary back in April about efforts to honor the U.S. service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, our students set about replicating the effort here---and turning it into a statewide movement.

Follow me after the jump for picture and details.

I recently received a mass e-mail from a colleague who is involved in local progressive politics.  The email contained a link to a story on DailyKos and mentioned, as an afterthought:

This is a sort of lefty news/blog site with some interesting stuff.

As a dedicated Kossack of some two years standing, I was at first a bit puzzled and amused by this description.  We get so self-involved here that it's easy to forget that most people, even liberal activists who use the Internet, have only the foggiest notion of what's going on here.  The fact that DK has gotten big enough (especially in the wake of the Lamont win) to garner "enemy of the people" status with the right-wing hate machine doesn't necessarily mean that our own natural allies are aware of what the site really is.

[more below the jump]

I assmue a lot of folks here already know that the NY Times has published two op-eds over the past week by Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas?, One Market Under God, The Conquest of Cool, and the prime mover behind the legendary Gen-X lefty journal, The Baffler.

This, of course, is welcome news, especially if this is going to become a regular thing.  Frank, whom I've been reading for many years, is one of the most promising young voices of the left.  With a PhD in US history and a writing style that harkens back to H.L. Mencken and other inconclasts and muckrakers of a century ago, Frank brings both humor and historical perspective to everything he writes about.  For instance, follow the jump for this selection from his op-ed from yesterday, "A Distant Mirror":

I just discovered a couple of amazing posts over at David Neiwert's excellent Orcinus blog written by Sara Robinson, a former fundamentalist Christian who now counsels others who are having doubts and want to break away from their authoritarian churches, families, marriages, etc.

If you haven't visited Orcinus, you are in for a real treat.  David is a journalist specializing in fascism and authoritarianism and his "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism" series won the Koufax award for 2003.  His current book  Strawberry Days details the experiences of a Japanese-American community during the internment era.  I read his work religiously and I'm delighted to see him featuring the work of other writers who share his concerns (as well as his research and writing talent) about this topic.

More on Sara's work after the jump.

I'm throwing out an idea that just emerged during a long conversation with a close friend.  We were talking about how the feeling of rootlessness makes Americans particularly vulnerable to authoritarian appeals to phony ideas about the nation, "family values," etc.  We agreed that most Americans would be shocked to learn how far the American consensus has shifted over such issues as labor, the role of government, corporate power, taxation, etc.

At that point I mentioned a point that Thom Hartmann often makes about the media.  Thom claims that most US newspapers (up until the 80's) had whole "labor news" sections.  This got me thinking. ----more below the jump.

Oh no he dih-int!!!

Ah, but it's true.   Atrios has reported:

From a press release just issued containing a speech he's delivering at a campaign event with Max Cleland.

   

"Sadly, my opponent has done his best to distort my record, spending at least $4 million of his own money to mislead people into thinking that I am someone I am not. Not unlike what happened to Max Cleland four years ago.",

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_08_06_atrios_archive.html#115489922498832977 http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/08/liebermans-last-stand.html