"Unregulated Political Warriors"

Brave New Films is in The New York Times.

Culver City, 2008 = St. Petersburg, 1917.

The Barack Doctrine

Naomi Klein is brilliant.



She's just about the only progressive public intellectual around right now who's even trying to put the dark days of the post-9/11 era into a broader historical context without resorting to the same tired-ass, over-simplified, 1960s Chomsky-ite critique. And she's not giving Obama a free pass:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/klein

Obama's not Superman, and he has to obey the laws of political science just like everyone else, so there's no reason to get hysterical over his general election centrist pivot. But is it too much to ask that the candidate of change throw his base a bone between selling out on FISA, supporting the death penalty and thanking the Supreme Court for handing gun control advocates the biggest setback in history?

Staffing up his economic team with a Friedmanite Wal-Mart triumphalist is not the bone we're waiting for.

Lieberman Must GO

New from Brave New Films:

Cora's Coffee Shoppe

Ok, so people have discovered the hell out of this place on yelp, but I've only lived in L.A. about 16 months, all of them on the east side, so it was new to me.

Anyway, contrary to a few of the yelp reviews, I thought the service sucked ass. Everything else was fucking fantastic. Including my Caesar Salad, and especially my asparagus soup.

Why they feel the need to Europeanize "coffee shop" speaks volumes about Santa Monica. Or at least paragraphs.

UCLA Undie Run

In the middle of final exams each trimester, UCLA undergrads strip down to their chonies, fill up on keg beer, and go for a midnight run. As with all such rituals, the tradition started as a spontaneous act of defiance and exhibitionism (in response to cops cracking down on the prior -- and lamer -- tradition of the "Midnight Yell"), then became an institution that eventually earned itself its own police escort. Now Undie Runners gather by the thousands for what's got to be the most photographed and flickr'd event in Westwood. Here's a booty from last night's run.

Barbarians at the Gates

Next weekend, all over the Golden State, Democratic Party activists will be running for delegate positions to the state party. At a minimum, being a party delegate means attending a yearly convention and voting on resolutions, a platform and candidate endorsements. Symbolically, it also means being an official part of the party, which has an inherent appeal to netroots-type progressives heeding the battle cry to "crash the gate".

Accordingly, the Progressive Democrats of America this year is organizing like-minded Dems to join "progressive slates" in Assembly District races everywhere. The idea, according to a website dedicated to the project, is that "the power to change our party comes from a cohesive group of individuals dedicated to making change happen" (which is funny, since one might do worse than "a cohesive group of individuals dedicated to making change happen" as a definition of a political party in the first place, though I suppose it works just as well as the definition of a faction). To be a "progressive" -- again, according to the site -- is to believe in universal healthcare, to oppose pre-emptive war, and to oppose the death penalty, among other principles (nothing in there about a worker's right to join a union....oh, well). Their policy platform calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, clean elections, "elimination of poverty" (big enough?), and "investigations toward impeachment."

So far, their efforts seem to be gaining some traction, at least among bloggers. DDay's post on MyDD and cross-post on Calitics have sparked lively discussion threads, and who knows if Chris Bowers' entreaty back in early December was what drove the unwashed masses to the barricades in the first place? If you believe what you read on blog comments, it sounds like there's at least a handful of reasonably organized rank-and-filers running slates, and if you believe idle chatter from electeds and their aides, at least a couple of them are serious enough to pay attention to, if not necessarily to fear.

However these slates play out, next weekend's DSCC elections should be at least a little more interesting than usual.

Seymour Martin Lipset, deceased at 84

Seymour Martin Lipset was one of the giants of American academia and progressive political thought. As a student of American society and government steeped in the intellectual traditions of European social theory, Lipset brought to the social sciences a highly original and cosmopolitan perspective on "American exceptionalism." Lipset brought light to such conundrums as the extraordinary vibrancy of voluntary associational life in the U.S. and the conspicuous absence in U.S. history of a serious American socialist challenge. As a committed Socialist in youth, Lipset helped build an aspirational American social scientific tradition that dwarfed in creative fecundity the plodding methodicalness of Talcott Parson's reigning postwar paradigm of Structural Functionalism. Yet, as an intellectual offspring of Max Weber and Roberto Michels, he was finely attuned to the capacity of ideology to yield and give shape to new modes of domination within the structures of workers' organizations and political parties ostensibly committed to egalitarianism and class struggle. This combination of moral vision and disciplined skepticism engendered a social analysis that cut to the core of a culture so profoundly shaped by moralism in a society so fundamentally perverted by inequality. Lipset's contribution to the U.S.' understanding of itself looms as large as that of Toqueville. For as long as American civilization lasts, Lipset's intellectual legacy will persist.