Lately there has been a spate of diaries at such web sites as FireDogLake and "Open" Left wherein lay members — typically under attack from site moderators, who act as Democratic Party hacks and gatekeepers — have sought ways to bring back the Progressive Party, or join the Greens, or build up some other institution, that will allow progressives to act together as a cohesive political unit. (I posted an entry there myself, only to end up being attacked by site moderators, threatened with banishment, and ultimately banned when I refused to back down against their incessant bullying.)

FDL's iphelgix explains the reason for leaving the Democrats.

Fellow FDLer TalkingStick points out the wisdom of studying the teabaggers for ideas about how we progressives can rebuild our own movement.

Mason calls for progressives to join him in building a Progressive Party from the ground up, apparently not aware that it already exists in states such as Vermont and Washington, and as Green Party affiliates inMissouri and Wisconsin. He is joined in this effort by MadHemingway, who posted the 1912 platform the Progressive Party ran on.

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At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.

How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.

My political activities now are focusing on the building of a viable third party as a tool of a reinvigorated and independent progressive movement. No efforts to reform the Democratic Party from within can succeed so long as the upper-level of the party establishment is able to crush dissent from within, as is explained here.

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Ben Bernanke, who helped preside over the collapse of the American economy, was confirmed to a second term as Federal Reserve Chairman so he can continue to destroy the economy. The re-confirmation vote was seventy to thirty, with most senators moving to kill a filibuster seventy-seven to twenty-three.

On a second vote, to confirm, the 30 dissents came from 18 Republicans, 11 Democrats and one independent, Bernard Sanders of Vermont.

Each and every single Democrat who voted to confirm Bernanke and who is up for re-election this year must be voted out of office. Each and every Democrat who voted to confirm Bernanke and who is up for re-election in 2012 should face removal as well.

The tally on cloture is here.

Voting yes on cloture:

Akaka (D-HI)
Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bennet (D-CO)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Bond (R-MO)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Burr (R-NC)
Burris (D-IL)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Chambliss (R-GA)

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Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in yesterday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

Not only will Democrats lose badly if they adopt this strategy, but they will be laughed at. Republicans never had 59 Senate seats, and that did not stop them from passing the legislation they wanted. Trying to explain to the American people how, despite controlling everything, Democrats cannot do anything, because a mean minority of 41 Republican senators won’t let them, is a message that will go over like a lead balloon. If you try to use that excuse, people will think elected Democrats are liars, wimps, idiots, or an ineffectual combination of all three.

Right now the corporate-owned media is all atwitter with how the loss of the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in what should have been a shoe-in election stands as a repudiation of Obama's nonexistent leftist policies. Actually, his policies have been nothing but a continuation of Bush-Cheney (Glenn Greenwald has compiled some of the better entries describing how closely Obama mirrors Bush), but never let it be said that the right-wing media can be counted on to tell the truth.

The fact is that Coakley lost because of something comedian and political commentator Bill Maher pointed out last year that bears repeating:

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According to the Boston Globe, nearly half of Americans polled believe that U.S. dictator Barack Obama is not living up to his campaign promises.

Nearly half of the Americans surveyed said Obama is not delivering on his major campaign promises, and a narrow majority had some or no confidence that he will make the right decisions for the country’s future.

More than a third saw the president as falling short of their expectations, about double the proportion saying so at the 100-day mark of Obama’s presidency in April. At the time, 63 percent said the new president had accomplished a “great deal’’ or a “good amount.’’ The percentage saying so in the recent poll dropped to 47 percent.

Although the article does not mention the loss of left-wing support as reason for the drop-off, choosing instead to focus on right-wing discontent, the overall attitude indicated by surveys is that he is either incapable or unwilling to make good on public expectations of change away from the institutionalized horrors of the Bush-Cheney regime.

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Because that's what it's going to take, the netroots joining together to actively campaign against the Dems, in order for the left to be taken seriously. This will require playing genuine political hardball going into next year's midterms, and building up going into 2012.

Before I proceed, let me just point out that I am a progressive first and a Democrat second. This is because as an activist, I recognize that movements must control political parties, and when the reverse is true, bad things happen. See this column for elaboration. Therefore, I recognize that it is time for the left to start waging all-out war.

The following is based largely on the entry, "For a Full Court Press". It proposes action going into the 2012 elections, but it seems to me that we can and should begin building the foundations next year (which is only days away) for the midterms. The point is this: if progressives don't start getting genuinely tough with the Democrats, and start making the party accountable to us, then it's going to continue behaving like a party of Republican-wannabes that simply use and abuse us while implementing Republican policies — which we all know are utterly disastrous for the country. Here is what I propose.

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In two separate entries, here and here, Chris Bowers discussed what he feels are the likely consequences if the nightmare bill now in the Senate doesn't pass. He's assumed the worst-case scenarios in every one of them, it seems, and is using them as an excuse to say we shouldn't kill the health care reform bill in the Senate.

This to me is an utterly defeatist attitude to take. We shouldn't fight this because Rahm will run right-wing primary opponents against our people, something he's already been doing for years and will do no matter what, and that's why we should give up now? With all due respect to Mr. Bowers, this is neither realistic or helpful. I don't think the people who are telling us we need to pass this bill realize what the public really thinks about health care reform or the likelihood that we will end up with something that will force us to buy unaffordable junk insurance under penalty of increased taxation we can't afford to pay -- all without doing a thing to bring down costs.

I think we have the Democrats by the gonads here, but how many of us really know it? Every single member of the House is up for reelection next year, as is a third of the Senate. Why can we not call them up and threaten to withdraw all support -- money, votes, and campaign volunteers -- if they don't kill this bill and pass something acceptable, and then follow through on it?

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Leave it to Ohio's Dennis Kucinich to do what no one else in Congress has the courage to do. The Representative from the Buckeye State's tenth Congressional District is looking to force a vote on withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a report by RAW Story.

For congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement Tuesday that his country would need the US's military support for another 10 or 15 years seems to have been the last straw.

The outspoken House representative says it was Karzai's statement that prompted him to draft a resolution calling for a House vote on the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We shouldn't be there another 15 to 20 months, let alone 15 to 20 years," Kucinich told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "When I'm in my district talking to people, nobody has come up to me and said we need to be in Afghanistan for the next 15 to 20 years. They do say we need jobs, we need to protect our basic industry, we need education, we need to protect retirement security. I'd like to see us start taking care of things here at home."

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It's no secret that the far right loathes anyone and everyone to the left of Adolf Hitler. Just try to get into one of Sarah Palin's Nuremberg-style rallies; you'll find plenty of evidence for that statement. But a certain branch of liberalism is hated even by unapologetic left-wingers.

In a 1996 column by Adolph Reed, reproduced this week on CommonDreams.org, the progressive writer summarized the reason for his hatred in one paragraph:

during the '80s liberal opinion gradually accommodated to Reaganism by sliding rightward. Two rhetorical justifications emerged for this adaptation. The Democratic Leadership Council called for a new centrism, jettisoning egalitarian politics and the constituencies identified with it. Additionally, an excesses-of-the-'60s-as-fall-from-grace fable propelled this slide and justified the smug dismissal of those of us who didn't want to go along. This new liberalism curtly demanded that we grow up and accept the realpolitik; Reaganism was all our fault for going too far anyway.

That evaluation is echoed this week by self-professed socialist and TruthDig.com writer Chris Hedges, who writes:

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You just knew this was coming. Unsatisfied with stealing trillions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize Wall Street's gambling habit, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke wants to raid Social Security and Medicare to pay for it, according to The Huffington Post (image of Bernanke supplied by the HuffPo article). This has even GOPers nervous, considering the pounding they took when George W. Bush proposed privatizing the social safety net to provide gambling money for bankers. That may be why they're slower than usual to vote to keep the co-architect of America's financial meltdown in place.

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