All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions. ...The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity...

... Now there are many who would scoff at this idea [that we're in a constitutional crisis], saying that big things don't happen. It is the strong version of the Copernican thesis - where ever you are is, by definition, unimportant. As far as I can tell there is exactly one person who has agreed with the reverse of that thesis all along, that instead we are at an important moment, and has methodically pursued the chance for the Republican Party to be the one that determines the shape of the new constitutional order. His name is Karl Rove, perhaps you've heard of him.

...The crisis isn't in the fall of the dollar, the jobless recovery, the budget deficit, voting irregularities, corruption in the media and congress - or even Iraq and Social Security.

It is in how these parts fit together to create one pervasive reactionary order. No one of them can be solved alone. One cannot fix the voting system, and not fix what people are voting for. One cannot shake up the corrupt rotten borough system of electoral districts, without changing the nature of parties. One cannot fix the jobs and debt crisis - without changing the politicians who are doing the deciding. And so on...

But there’s another analogy [than Weimar Germany, to our current situation] out there that in some ways bothers me even more, and seems even more to the point, and that’s to the 1948 elections in South Africa.
...
Every society has moments where there is a chance that the pendulum of political change will stop swinging from side to side, where forces and circumstances align that threaten to break the pendulum altogether, where the rules of the political game get so thoroughly violated and discarded that the game comes to an end. When that happens, a lot more than the pendulum of change tends to get broken, and people decades hence will find themselves shackled to a future that they did not choose, do not want, but cannot escape.

Here's a question that I find myself wrestling with: what marks the end of traditional politics, and the beginning of something else? In other words, at what point do terms like "partisanship" become obsolete with regard to the political circumstances of the day? For instance, at a certain point (here we go again with the Nazis), you were either a Nazi supporter or an enemy of the state. The same with Italian and Spanish fascists, Stalin's Communists and virtually any other ultra-nationalist or ethnic movement (Rwanda, Serbia, etc.). To say that Nazis were being overly partisan would be a gross understatement, and to say that those who resisted the Nazis were overly partisan would just be laughable. At some point, there are lines drawn, and ideas like reason and debate and normal political compromise are themselves relics of an age past. You are either zealously supporting the regime in power, zealously opposing the regime in power, or privately living in fear of the regime in power, terrified to publicly stand against it but fervently praying that it's overthrown.

Some would say that we're at that point already, others would say that we are at the very early stages of such a situation and there's still an opportunity to revive our republican ideals (small "r"). I don't know. I'm not saying that the purpose of this blog should be to aid some kind of political resistance movement; I just want to voice the question of how we'll know when we've, in effect, crossed the Rubicon. And, if and when we reach that moment, a new set of rules and understandings will crop up and be clear.

There's something that's worth noting here as well -- the conservative movement has been operating with this mentality for forty years. They see themselves as a political resistance movement, willing to go beyond the accepted norms of politics and discourse to further their goal of one-party domination. At what point is the tone of sites like Kos and Atrios considered to be the only appropriate response to such a movement?

I concern myself quite a bit with this question; whether the old rules are dead, or just dying. Whether the Enlightenment ideals have come and gone, or are in fact deeper than a mere political fad. Whether our two-party democratic system can ever again be robust and healthy as it was for most of the twentieth century, or whether the die has been cast and the twentieth century was merely an abberation of history.

I don't know the answer. But I'm troubled by the question.

Become a vital news link to the Web

The Union, an innovative daily newspaper serving the scenic Sierra Nevada foothills communities of Nevada County, Calif., is seeking applicants for its newly created Web Editor position. Serving a wired, high-tech community, we already have one of the most-trafficked small-newspaper sites in the country. This editor will work closely with the news staff and the Webmaster to develop rich, interactive Web content that amplifies coverage appearing in our 17,000-circulation newspaper. The Web Editor will keep the site updated as news unfolds throughout the day and work with staff to create Web-exclusive content. Creativity, technical innovation, editing skills and writing talent all will be vital for this position. Help shape a dynamic new job in an exciting newsroom. Good benefits include 401K; salary in the $30,000 range, depending upon skills and experience. E-mail or send cover letter, resume and work samples to Pat Butler, Editor, The Union, 464 Sutton Way, Grass Valley, CA 95945; pat b @ th eun i on. com . [Spaces added out of concern for the welfare of M. Butler, who will be plenty besieged by Nevada County residents - unleashing the spammers would be over the top.] No phone calls, please. Deadline is March 15.

It's looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a "daily basis." They reportedly made a decision to give him - one of only six - access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika[sic] Lewinsky - a tasteless episode, "inappropriate," whatever. Monika wasn't a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing?

Among the clients identified in hundreds of credit-card vouchers obtained by The Washington Times - and identified by male prostitutes and escort operators - are government officials, locally based US military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives and other professionals.

I think we are "approaching the foothills of fascism" - but that with any luck we will turn away long before we get there. But we're less likely to turn away if we don't see where we could be headed...

We tend to think of [fascism] in terms of alien things like Nazi uniforms and concentration camps. The reality is that the popular imagery of fascism ... is actually derived from its later stages, when it proceeds into serious metastasis; while in the stages at which it has traditionally obtained power, fascism is constituted of things which seem everyday and familiar to us. ... we often refuse to recognize it for what it is because it seems so ... familiar. ( * )

...I think the most important unreported story concerns the reasons for a return of right-wing extremism in Europe, and for the first time in the U.S. Since I am not a journalist I would not report such a story, but I would first find out if it is really true, and if true then study what its causes are. Is it that people are running out of hope and meaning? Have the Western democracies run out of believable goals? What conditions favor fascism and what can we do to prevent them from spreading?

Some of Paxton's important points are [that] fascism appears in failed or highly stressed democracies, that fascism involves mass politics, that fascism emerges as a reaction to perceived threats from the socialist threat, that fascism depends on charismatic leadership, and that fascism always contains a cult of violent action. A particularly important point is that the successful fascist movements, Italian Fascism and Nazism, were invited into power by traditional conservative elites seeking to coopt fascist mass mobilization in support of their own ends.
...
Authoritarian states have commonly used external aggression as a way of addressing internal problems.

It's clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood.

"I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," [Jeff Jarvis] cautioned ( * )

I hope that cranking up the politics of personal destruction yet another notch isn't what we end up being most famous for.

...local land-use regulations, traffic engineering, and a web of codes, standards, and practices that have created a mass production system for sprawl on a national scale.
...
If there is a plot running through the length and breadth of land-use regulation in the United States, it most assuredly does not favor New Urbanism.

"There is a time in the life cycle of a news organization when hiring an ombudsman is called for," says Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, which dropped its own reader representative position in 2001. "It's when a newsroom has become arrogant and detached and could not recognize its errors in judgment."
...The ombudsman concept made its debut in American journalism at the New York World, which established an internal Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play in 1913. After the yellow journalism era, the World hoped creating the bureau would help it improve its standards...
...there's a widespread perception that the ombudsman is a public relations agent for his or her employer. Not surprisingly, many public editors resist that notion. "I don't want to use the column to make excuses for the newspaper when that shouldn't be done"...

As long as they're born faster than we can make them hate us, we're in business.

["Mo Cuishle"?]
The correct spelling is "Mo Chuisle."
Clint's character's translation isn't exactly accurate. Literally, "mo chuisle" means "my pulse." It's from a longer phrase, "a chuisle mo chroí" ("pulse of my heart") and is USED to mean "darling" or "sweetheart." In other words, "blood" doesn't actually factor in there at all (unless we're being liberal here and figuring that one can't have a pulse without blood). Clint's character isn't particularly good at Irish (as evidenced by both his mistranslation and his mispelling of "mo chuisle"...)

...when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly. ( * )

I am known around the office as a "fast writer," but while I'm engaged in the process, I don't feel as if I'm writing at all; I'm taking dictation from that place within me that knows what it wants to say.( * )

When I began going through [records] in 2001, they were archived in a decaying midden of sagging cardboard boxes, covered with dust and mouse droppings and stacked haphazardly in an unheated warehouse at our ranger station, surrounded by piles of cast-off things for which there could be no conceivable use: bits of long-gone patrol trucks, shotgun racks, pieces of light bars, dial telephones, ancient sirens in tangles of wire...

"We are not at a critical juncture in history when we must take great pains to ensure the survival of those landscapes and species that have not already been massively manipulated," says Fisher Smith.

As stewards, we must preserve Northstar Mine's history

Historic buildings are among the strongest fibers knitting together any group of people...

...the Land Trust feels they acquired a house that was in danger of falling down. The roof was gone, the windows were gone, the doors were gone, and it was constantly being vandalized when they got it. It was in an emergency condition. (*)

If given a say-so in the decision on how best to spend Mr. Wilson's money, I suspect that most Nevada County residents wouldn't have placed the North Star House at the top of the wish list. Not even in the top 10.

Fight, Fight, Inner Light! Kill, Quakers, kill!
Smash 'em! Knock 'em! Beat 'em senseless!
Do it till we reach consensus!