Peoples' Judean Front vs the Judean Peoples' Front. It is not just a joke from Life of Brian it is a dead on diagnosis of the kind of splinter group manuevering that characterized the Left for most of the last century. FDR welded together southern bigots and northern machine politicians and put through the most progressive policy agenda in history. He even put Wallace on the ticket. And yet the far Left ended up turning on him.

Excuse me for living in the real world. And by the way Embrace your Inner FDR.

Social Security: Changes in trustees' projections over time

Blogs are private property, you are a guest. If you want to express yourself freely get your own free blog. The people at Democratic Underground tap into this best with their Hate Mailbag. Wingnuts for years have come on and complained about being deleted. To which the DU says "fuck you, what part of DEMOCRATIC Underground didn't you understand" I have weeks and weeks of outraged wingnuttery to catch up on. But some people here might want to consider what distinguishes them from these wingers:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/mail/index.html

Social Security: Changes in trustees' projections over time

I've tried to go cold turkey on the site (particularly after the hairy-legged womens studies major crack) but haven't been successful as of yet.

What strikes me as ironical is that Kos slams the DLC for  clinging to their narrow interpretation of "centrism" (which hasn't brought the party  notable success in over a decade) and yet he seems to be promulgating a slightly different version of the same thing. The major difference is that it is stridently against the invasion of Iraq, and that it is markedly more friendly to labor. But the pro-choice plank in the party's platform, as far as Markos is concerned, can be discarded.

Markos, like the DLC, seems to have inherited a fear of the Left (ie, I feel as if he buys into the stereotype of a leftist fringe where women don't shave their legs, or wear lipstick, and dress like a convention of librarians and/or dykes -- at least, when they're not tearing off their bras and throwing them in flaming garbage cans -- while the men have long hair, scraggly beards, and say things like "peace, dude" in an exceedingly, ah, mellow fashion.

Kos, IMO, wants to remake the public's image of a "grassroots" Democrat into the existing image of a yuppie (the same image that the DLC wants to cultivate) while simultaneously pushing the frame vaguely leftward from where the DLC has mounted it.

In some ways, I get this and can sympathize it. I, often, felt like frothing at the mouth when my extreme opposition to invading Iraq meant people automatically categorized me as anti-war (ie, a peacenik) when, while I don't think war is a "good", I do firmly believe that it is, sometimes, necessary (I was, for example, for the invasion of Afghanistan).

Given that this is the  internet, and none of you can see me, I can loudly declare that I am not absolutist in my anti-war stance, and furthermore inform you that I don't wear peace signs, or beads (and do wear a bra), and am, in fact AM a (relatively) young urban professional who wears business attire on a regular basis. But none of this is provable, and I feel as if, when I assert my pro-choice stance on DailyKos, Kos relegates me (not me personally, perhaps, but the aggregate of others like me) to hair-legged feminists who overthink things and get hysterical at the least provocation.

Which, frankly, is the exact same dynamic that was at work when all of us who opposed invading Iraq were dismissed as peaceniks, ie, we were assigned to an easily dismissible (stereotyped) category, which meant that our arguments could be just as easily dismissed.