Good E. Clift column this morning

[TallahasseeGrannie]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9368131/site/newsweek/

[Armstead]

1. Great columnwith a sober warning

As she often does, Elanor Clift hits the nail on the head.

With all that has gione wrong under conservative governing, the nation is ripe for a turn to the left.

However, once again, Democrats, liberals and progressives are poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The GOP is preparing a vigorous, ideological and corrupt Big Vision for the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, while Democrats dither and snap along the margins.

As a result, even though the majority is beginning to see through the canard of corporate conservativism, Rive and Company are going to steamroll through more of the same, while we on the left stand by and scratch our heads.

We need to get our act together and stop being so timid about our ideas and solutions NOW.

[confludemocrat]

2. Clift: Alternative vision needed; Demos also need some initiative to go al

ong with it, not some third rate plan to help small businesses as the only thing they can come up with (Kerry). I read and heard Democrats suggesting a New Deal-type TVA-like reconstruction authority for the gulf coast, but they got beaten to the punch with Bush's corrupt, perverted analogue of such an idea.

[Pirate Smile]

3. Here are four paragraphs:

Bush Repackaged

The White House hopes to repair the president’s image by throwing money at the hurricane zone. Progressives need to come up with an alternative vision ahead of the ’06 election.

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 2:17 p.m. ET Sept. 16, 2005

Sept. 16, 2005 - You can tell that Karl Rove is back in the game after a bout with kidney stones that landed him in the hospital during the height of Hurricane Katrina. Rove’s absence explains in part President Bush’s curious aloofness in the face of looming disaster. Returning to the Gulf Coast on Thursday for a fourth visit, Bush is trying to make up for the lapses that tarnished his image as a leader and to repackage himself as a visionary for the next phase, a rebuilding effort that will dwarf Iraq's reconstruction and likely make Halliburton even richer.

To hear Bush talk, we’re about to witness a Republican utopia in the hurricane zone. Children will go to school with vouchers. Wages will be lowered and regulations waived to accommodate the big contractors. The entire area will become a free-enterprise zone. And the GOP, under the guise of economic revival, will impose one of its favorite ideas, the flat tax. It’s reminiscent of the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show,” where Carrey lives in a picture-perfect town--except it turns out all the residents are actors. In Bush’s version, everybody’s a Republican.

There are Democrats on Capitol Hill trying to put out alternative visions and progressive think tanks churning out position papers, but they are powerless in a government controlled top to bottom by the GOP. A cacophony of voices on the left can’t compete with a presidential primetime address, and it’s the nature of an opposition party that there is no unity of command. Democrats are up against a coordinated, energetic effort on the right to implement policies conservative theorists have been hoping to put into place for a long time. The rebuilding effort is ideologically motivated and influenced by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that fueled the Reagan presidency. The proposals in a report titled “Tragedy to Triumph” are premised on the belief that corporations freed from labor unions, environmental restrictions and onerous taxes will reap huge profits and those profits will grow the pie for everybody--and at least create some crumbs for the masses.

This is a pivotal moment in politics with a president severely compromised and the country poised to embrace a contrary view of government that rejects the Darwinian capitalism of the Reagan-Bush era. If ever there was a time for the progressive community to step forward and offer ideas, it is now, however hard it is to penetrate the Rove message machine and its many allies in the media. The White House, in order to repair Bush’s image, is doing what Republicans used to accuse Democrats of doing--throwing money at the problem. The Katrina recovery is on track to cost more than the war in Iraq, but the ideologues on Capitol Hill are content to balloon the deficit and see no need to trim pet projects elsewhere to pay for Katrina. Majority leader Tom DeLay had the gall to boast of an “ongoing victory” under 11 years of Republican control, but he may have to eat those words next November. The ’06 election will be a referendum on Republican governance, and in the wake of the Katrina debacle, the GOP has lost its aura of competence. If they can’t get hurricane relief right, how can they keep us safe from terrorists?

[Armstead]

4. Kick

This is an important article

[Gloria]

5. kick