If you ever need a quick downer, go over to OpenLeft and read something by David Sirota.  I tend to agree with a lot of what he says, mostly because I'm a pessimist by nature.  Sirota ain't happy with Obama these days.  His team of rival (singular) essentially pits the progressive image of Obama versus the center-right D.C. establishment.  

In this narrative, Progressives have been played somewhat by ponying up precious time and money to get Obama in office only to find out that he's a re-run of the triangulation and lukewarm centrism that is both unsavory and unnecessary at this time.  The counter-argument is that Obama is so overwhelmingly in control that his center-right team will actually help him hone his thoughts and skills to the point that mere mortals will shutter at his deft center-leftitude.

I'm not terribly comfortable with either narrative, but I do find surprising solace in the daily emails I still receive from David Plouffe.  There is apparently a coordinated effort to continue online fundraising and drawing Progressives into the fold.  Obama's team is urging us to get together to share our thoughts for the future and actually organizing Progressive causes into some sort of lasting force.  I find this interesting.

I have a few good friends who are scientists, and the one thing they all share is zero tolerance for asshattery perpetuated by religious bigots. And with good reason. Scientists have faced a fierce assault from the religious right on all fronts, ranging from climate change to evolution and even medicine. But, to a scientific mind, the illogical objections spawned by religious dogma can be especially offensive when it comes to advancing health.

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire blogger

The gurus at the National Bureau of Economic Research have finally acknowledged the obvious: the U.S. economy is in a recession, and has been since December 2007. With Wall Street still on life support and unemployment statistics reaching levels unseen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the news was far from shocking, as Truthdig's Ear to the Ground notes, but still enough to help push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 700 points on Monday.

More frightening than the belated use of the r-word-- Kevin Drum of Mother Jones called the December start-date all the way back in February in a piece for the Washington Monthly-- is the fact that drastic government action to right the nation's faltering economic ship does not appear to be working. The current crisis has delivered a blow not just to investors and homeowners, but to the work of economist Milton Friedman, a thinker regarded with an almost sacred status in conservative circles. Over at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard highlights a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman on how Friedman's monetarist economic theory has taken a hit over the past year. Friedman's doctrine calls for restricting government relief in times of economic strain to the arena of monetary policy--that is, central banks should increase the supply of money in the economy, but governments should not directly undertake spending initiatives to boost demand.

We had a pretty good night on election night in the Northeast. We cleaned house. We nailed 1 GOP Senator, 6 House of Reps Districts, 1 State Senate and held on to all of the State Senates, State Houses, US House Reps and US Senators we had coming into this cycle.

That the Northeast is rapidly realigning towards team Blue is undeniable!
But the work my friends has merely begun. Forget the bunkum about us being irretrievably on defense in 2010 come below the fold to see who should be in our sights in 2010 as we stay on offense in the Northeast........

I condemn the murder in all of its forms.  This is a conversation about terrorists and attacks on civilian populations.

Last week's brutal attacks of unarmed civilians in Mumbai got me to thinking about the nature of attacks on civilians.  For many years, I accepted the given definition of 'terrorists' as people that are so filled with evil that they want to frighten and kill us all.  There are always sociopaths out there to fit into this mold.  I think that for the sheer numbers of civilians killed in targeted violence, sociopaths are not the only explanation.  The large role of religious / dogmatic programming in targeted violence against civilians eliminates sociopathology as a cause because the sociopath has no conscience or care for his/her impact on society.  For the most part, the religious killer is convinced that his/her morality is calling for the murder of civilians.

(Cross posted at The National Gadfly)

That's right. With 91.13% of the vote recounted, Al Franken leads Norm Coleman by 4,108 votes! That's 1,105,030 for Franken and 1,100,922 for Norm Coleman. Wow, let's just stop here. That's close enough for horse shoes and hand grenades. Thanks for playing Norm. We're just going to take our board and go home.

Um.......

The last 2 Mondays Citigroup has managed to land a few BIG deals.  Last Monday it was a $20 billion bailout.  This Monday it was a $10 billion purchase of a Spanish toll road company.  

He wanted to be Bill Clinton's vice president in '92. Bill didn't want him.

He wanted to be Al Gore's vice president in 2000. Al didn't want him.

He wanted to be president in '04. America didn't want him.