Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan made a big speech at the Council of Foreign Relations today deploring the federal government’s fiscal profligacy as representing the single largest threat to the economy’s future. Bigger than trade deficits. Bigger than low savings rates.So maybe that’s why he recently called for making the 2001 tax cuts that largely created the fiscal mess permanent, along with additional measures to enable high-income Americans to shelter even more income from taxation through savings accounts.Hate to sound like a broken record about this, but it still just blows my mind: four years ago, Greenspan endorsed the Bush tax cuts on grounds that the United States was in danger of prematurely retiring the national debt. And now he’s endorsing new tax cuts as a way out of ever-rising national debt. Just like his buddies in the Bush administration, Greenspan has a single answer for every question and every circumstance, and that’s why his credibility is collapsing like a grossly overvalued stock in a bear market.

As the heir of a long line of debtors, from a state founded as a debtors’ prison, I was genetically unhappy with today’s Senate passage legislation tightening grounds for filing bankruptcy.But there was better news on a more celestial issue this week: the Bush administration’s lame-o “Clear Skies” air pollution proposal got stopped again in the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, and may be dead for the year. (It’s too complicated to get into in one blog post, but the biggest problem with “Clear Skies” is its avoidance, contrary to a 2000 Bush campaign promise, to impose any limits on the most dangerous greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.)And even as the administration lost an environmental battle on earth, it’s not exactly storing up treasure in heaven. Leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals spent much of today in Washington working on a statement endorsing strong action on global climate change. They were addressed by Joe Lieberman, who with John McCain is cosponsoring the most prominent proposal for capping carbon dioxide emissions and guiding the U.S. towards something like a parallel track with the Kyoto process that Bush unilaterally abandoned. The small remaining band of moderate Republicans (exemplified by McCain and by Lincoln Chafee, who helped stop Clear Skies in the Senate) is already in revolt against the administration’s retro environmental policies. If a slice of politically active evangelical Christians get a little greener as well, we could finally see the end of a long period of gridlock on environmental policy, and a stretch of better weather.

Lots of people (including, today, the New York Times) have gone to town on U.N. Ambassador-designate John Bolton’s rich record of extremist foreign policy views. I did the same myself yesterday. But of all the stuff he needs to be held accountable for in his confirmation hearings, the really important thing is the job he has been primarily responsible for at the State Department over the last four years. It just happens to be the single most important national security issue of all, according to no less a figure than Vice President Dick Cheney: avoiding nuclear terrorism.But as arms control chief at Foggy Bottom, Bolton is responsible for a set of policies that have left us unconscionably vulnerable. Who says so? Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, hardly a big-time partisan Democrat these days (disclosure: I was once on his staff). Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, didn’t mention Bolton’s name in remarks at the National Press Club today, but his indictment of how seriously this administration has taken the threat of nuclear terrorism is unmistakable:

In measuring the adequacy of our response to today’s nuclear threats, on a scale from one to ten, I would give us about a three, with the recent summit between Presidents Bush and Putin moving us closer to a four.American citizens have every reason to ask, “Are we doing all we can to prevent a nuclear attack?” The simple answer is, “no, we are not.”… Increasingly, we are being warned that an act of nuclear terrorism is inevitable. I am not willing to concede that point. But I do believe that unless we greatly elevate our effort and the speed of our response, we could face disaster…I am not sure we fully grasp the devastating, world-changing impact of a nuclear attack….I believe that preventing the spread and use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction should be the central organizing security principle for the 21st century. During the Cold War, we saw what it looks like when world leaders unite, when they listen to each other, when they cooperate against common threats. It is my hope that we will soon employ this model of international teamwork in responding to the threats from North Korea and Iran, in securing nuclear materials around the globe, and in confronting the danger of catastrophic terrorism anywhere in the world.

Fine advice for Bush, and an implicit rebuke to the policies supervised by Bolton. It’s bad enough that Republicans who are determined to bankrupt the public treasury are focused on cracking down on bankruptcy filings by regular citizens. To follow that up by sending Mr. It-Ain’t-Worth-Doing-If-We-Can’t-Do-It-Our-Way, John Bolton, to the U.N., is even worse, when it comes to deadly threats to our security that demand an effective international response.I’ll say it again: Bolton needs to load up a jumbo platter of crow, and start chowing down, or expect a potentially successful challenge to his confirmation.

If there was a truly bright spot for Democrats last November anywhere in red-state America, it was surely in Colorado (with Montana running a close second). Of all the Democratic candidates in close U.S. Senate races, Ken Salazar was the only winner. His brother, John, pulled off one of the few gains Democrats were able to make in U.S. House seats. And Democrats won control of both branches of the state legislature. Now they look poised to take back the governorship next year, and run the whole shooting match.With Democrats around the country looking to Colorado Democrats as role models, you’d think Chris Gates, the state party chair who oversaw this remarkable election day would be on an extended victory lap. But no: yesterday the state party’s executive committee ousted him as chair in favor of environmental activist Pat Waak (Gates is contesting the outcome based on a claim that certain proxy votes didn’t get counted).According to press reports, the coup against Gates was basically an act of revenge by “activists” unhappy with his less-than-secret support of Salazar in his Senate primary against fellow-activist Mike Miles. Presumably, Gates’ perfidious maneuvering, in tandem with virtually everybody in the national party who wanted to win a Senate seat, was responsible for Salazar’s photo-finish 73-27 win over Miles in the primary.I don’t live in Colorado, and thus don’t know if something else is going on, but it sure as hell looks like suicidal cannibalism of the highest order. And it poses a real challenge to those outside Colorado who keep insisting that the post-election activist insurgency in Democratic circles is “not about ideology, but about Democrats winning.” I know some people are unhappy with Salazar about his vote to confirm Gonzeles (which I disagreed with myself), but Jesus, folks, if the Democratic tent isn’t big enough for Ken Salazar–a guy recently touted by no less a fire-breather than David Sirota as a hero of “populist progressivism”–then we better get ready for permanent minority status.The Colorado Coup is especially bad news for new DNC chairman Howard Dean, who may now have to treat one of the most successful state party organizations in the country as yet another basket case. And it doesn’t much help that at least a few of his more vocal and visible supporters are touting the Coup as part of a “silent revolution” spurred by the Dean movement. I know Dean has other fish to fry right now, and is trying to keep a relatively low profile. But if he should happen to feel the need for a bit of a Sister Souljah moment to instill a sense of political reality in Activist World, this would be a really good occasion to indulge it.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

I’ve worried in the recent past that Democrats will fail to pick their fights carefully on Bush administration appointments, and just submerge their principled objections in a white noise of white-hot rage. But Bush sure seems inclined to pick our fights for us, as evidenced by the, shall we say, rather provocative choice of John Bolton for U.N. ambassador. Is there a single constructive impulse in administration foreign policy that Bolton hasn’t mocked or rejected in the past? Hard to think of one. U.N. reform? Bolton seems to think the organization is inherently an affront to U.S. power. Collective action to stop genocide? Bolton has opposed any U.N. role in “civil conflicts,” up to and including genocide, and as the country’s best-known critic of U.S. cooperation with the International Criminal Court, he’s certainly not in a good position to propose any immediate effort to bring the Darfur murderers to justice. Engagement with China to bring that country more fully into the community of rules-observing nations? As a former hired hand of the Taiwanese government, and an outspoken proponent of formal Taiwanese independence, Bolton isn’t likely to get onto drinking-buddy terms with Beijing’s representatives at the U.N. And then there’s the really big issue on which Bolton has had formal responsibility in his current gig at the State Department: trafficking in nuclear materials. It’s no big secret that the administration until recently treated this rather urgent threat to our lives and limbs as a second- or third-order problem, on the bizarre theory that terrorists are too frightened of George W. Bush to consider setting off a nuke in one of our cities. The current Proliferation Security Initiative that Bolton has directed is a lot better than nothing, but typically, Bolton has pushed it in the direction of ad hoc, U.S.-led action to interdict and inspect suspect cargo, rather than the full-fledged, top-priority international effort to prevent “leakage” of nuclear materials that we need. Aside from his foreign policy views, Bolton is also a stone partisan warrior. I did a couple of radio shows with him back during the madness of the 2000 election cycle, and found him to be genial and cerebral until the mikes went live; at that point, he was indistinguishable from Tom DeLay. I’ll never forget turning on the tube during one of those Florida court hearings on the presidential vote and seeing Bolton sitting there in the front row of the phalanx of GOP lawyers, hour after hour. Since I don’t think the Bush legal team was in need of foreign policy advice, it was clearly an act of hyper-partisan solidarity. (According to this morning’s Post, Bolton even got into the chad-counting act at one of the county-level election boards). Soon we will begin to hear suggestions that Bolton’s appointment may be one of those Nixon-to-China things: you know, let’s go out and find the most abrasive unilateralist in the administration to patch up our relations with the rest of the world. This only makes sense if the Bushies are afraid a more constructive attitude towards the U.N. and the world in general will make them vulnerable to criticism from the almightly Conservative Base. But if this is what’s really going on, then Bolton better make it pretty damn clear during his confirmation hearings. He’s sort of the Robert Bork of foreign policy nominees: a guy with enough material in his public record to script two or three days of tough Democratic questioning. If he expects any Democratic votes at all, he’d better start wolfing down a lot of crow. Otherwise, this is just another in-yer-face appointment that begs for a fight.

Maybe I just don’t browse around enough, but so far today, I haven’t seen any blogo-references to an interesting little note buried in the Washington Post about a survey on exactly how many people pay attention to us.

[A] new CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll…found that nearly three-quarters of the public — 74 percent — is “not too” or “not at all” familiar with the sites. Blogs (short for “Web logs”) are online journals in which amateur, and sometimes, not-so-amateur, pundits discuss whatever is on their minds, from television shows to political candidates. The remainder of those polled were divided between those who said they were either “somewhat familiar” (19 percent) or “very familiar” (7 percent) with blogs.Three percent of the respondents said they read blogs every day; 12 percent said they visit them at least a few times a month. Forty-eight percent said they never look at the sites, and 24 percent said they do not have access to the Internet.

(I can’t seem to find this survey on the CNN or Gallup sites, but will assume the Post didn’t just make it up).I’m sure the number of people reading, and for that matter, writing, political blogs is going up rapidly. And quite certainly, the percentage of politically active people who read blogs is much higher, and among political journalists, much higher still.But the overall degree of penetration at the moment should perhaps give pause to those who have made quasi-totalitarian claims about the collective importance of blogs and other internet-based political activity to politics in general, and to Democratic politics in particular.The “netroots,” significant as they are, simply are not synonymous with the “grassroots” of the Democratic Party, particularly if “grassroots” means the broad universe of elected officials, activists, and rank-and-file voters around the country. And in judging particular claims to speak for the “grassroots,” we should remember this ain’t horseshoes, where “closer” wins the contest. Even the largest and fastest-growing activist groupings are basically islands in a very large sea. That’s why we have primary and general elections, as opposed to online referenda or early-nineteenth century style party caucuses to figure out what the true “grassroots” want, and that’s why public opinion surveys, infernally misleading as they sometimes are, still matter.I write this knowing that for some bloggers, “disrespecting the netroots” is the political Sin Against the Holy Ghost, the one truly unforgivable act. But the political potential of the netroots, and more importantly, the political prospects for the Democratic Party, require some perspective, and at least a bit of the humility which “netroots” advocates rightly demand from everybody else claiming to speak for Democrats. Nobody other than Democratic voters has the standing to decide who is and isn’t a “real Democrat.” While we can argue back and forth about who’s right and who’s wrong, and whose advice should be accepted or rejected, we’ll never be a majority party again if we forget about the 74% of Americans who don’t know a blog from a frog.

The Style Section of today’s Washington Post has a typically odd but interesting Hanna Rosin feature about how Christian Right activists are settling down and getting in touch with their Inner Moderate now that they are landing serious day jobs in George W. Bush’s D.C. The poster people for this alleged domestication of the Christian Right are a couple named Jeff and Lyric Hassler, whose grinning, wholesome visages are displayed on both the cover and jump page of Style. She’s a political consultant who worked on the Bush campaign; he’s a staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (the somewhat-less-crazy of the two Republican Senators from Oklahoma).The basic idea is that people like the Hasslers, although they haven’t changed their views on much of anything, now view the extremist tactics of the Movement’s salad days as, well, kind of embarrassing. “No more thundering sermons on Wiccans and floods and child molesters,” Rosin says in summarizing the change of tone. “They may believe all the same things,” evangelical scholar Michael Cromartie tells her, “but they aren’t going to go on ‘Larry King Live’ and say all homosexuals should die. They’ve learned how to present themselves.”You get the idea from the piece that folks in the Christian Right have been engaged in their own form of Lackoffian “re-framing,” now that they are, well, partially in charge of running the country and all. But you wonder how deep the makeover has really gone.The climax of Rosin’s feature is the revelation that the Hasslers have become Episcopalians, of all things, after settling down in Fairfax County. Indeed, she quotes Lyric Hassler burbling about how much she’s come to love “High Church” stuff like vestments and traditional hymns.Smart as Rosin is, she seems to miss the joke: the particular church the Hasslers are attending is the notorious Truro evangelical Episcopal parish, home to Ollie North and Clarence Thomas, and one of the main protaganists of the right-wing movement to pull congregations out of the Church to protest the ordination of a gay bishop, and other offenses to cultural conservatism. Entering mainline Protestant Christianity through Truro is sort of like getting to know African-American opinion by listening to a lot of Armstrong Williams. I noticed looking at the church’s calender that it’s featuring a Jews-for-Jesus presentation on Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday). That shows a fine sensitivity to Jewish concerns about the supercessionist themes that have so often led to anti-Semitic violence during Holy Week, eh?Maybe the Hasslers and hundreds of their peers who have laid down their fetus posters and picked up the reins of power have mellowed, but in part that’s because Washington has moved in their direction. Speaking of how a superior in the Bush campaign looked at her, Lyric Hassler commented that she no longer “stood out,” saying: “Ten years ago she [her boss] might have thought I was a total freak. But now she just thought I was a little weird.”

Like my colleague The Moose, I was stunned by press accounts of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s testimony to the administration’s tax reform study commission yesterday. Back in 2001, you may recall, Greenspan endorsed Bush’s tax cuts on the bizarre theory that otherwise the national debt might disappear and the federal government would have to start buying equity in private businesses to dispose of excess cash. More recently he has returned to his pre-Clinton administration doomsaying about federal budget deficits. So what does he propose now? Draining more revenues from Washington by creating big, fat tax-free savings vehicles to enable high earners to shelter investment income from taxation.To be sure, what Greenspan actually wants is a national consumption tax, and endorses tax-free savings vehicles as a back-door means to that goal. This approach, of course, is a big part of the Grover Norquist “starve the beast” strategy of deliberately engineering large budget deficits in order to force big cutbacks in federal spending, or a shift in the tax base towards wage income or consumption, or all of the above.And the convergence of the Norquist and Greenspan approaches represents a stunning demonstration of how politics has completely debased a large part of the U.S. libertarian tradition.In Grover’s case, the big deal with the devil was his acceptance of the idea that repealing any sleazy corporate tax break represented a verbotin “tax increase.” Thus, instead of championing a level playing field for business competition and for tax policy, Norquist is now the tribune for corporate favoritism and reverse-Robin-Hood fiscal strategies, which help finance and politically drive an agenda that is “libertarian” only to the extent that it screws up government in a way that might eventually cause its general demise.Greenspan’s own Faustian Bargain stems from his famous “pragmatism”–barred by the limited role of the Fed, and by political realities, from actively promoting the free-market paradise he has long espoused, he consistently reaches out to endorse “politically feasible” policies that indirectly achieve his ends–typically, the free candy of tax cuts and tax breaks.Thus, both men embrace a stealth libertarianism that isn’t libertarian at all in its means. We all know Grover’s many ideological and rhetorical vices, but for all his legendary power and influence, he’s essentially just another Washington jive-ass thriving at the intersection of money and politics. But it’s beginning to become more apparent every day that the oracular Chairman has an equally twisted agenda.The Moose’s post today linked to an AEI article by Bill Bradford aboutGreenspan’s much-reported but oft-forgotten association with the Objectivist cult of novelist and proto-libertarian Ayn Rand. I thought I knew the story pretty well, but two things really startled me in Bradford’s piece: (1) Greenspan went straight from Rand’s inner circle (ironically but accurately known as “The Collective”) into the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon. In fact, Greenspan was already knee-deep in conventional Republican politics when he signed onto Rand’s bizarre excommunication of her protege and former lover Nathaniel Brandon. (2) When asked during various Senate confirmation hearings over the years if he still adhered to Randian dogmas like abolition of all regulations and a return to the gold standard, Greenspan gave no sign of a change of heart or mind.Given Greenspan’s current status as a close ally of George W. Bush, you kinda wish someone had recently asked him if he still regards belief in God as a deadly “mysticism of the mind” (corresponding to socialism, the “mysticism of the muscle”), a key tenet of the Objectivist canon. But whatever his political prudence and well-rehearsed routine as a mere economic technocrat, it is becoming clear that his formative extremism has not gone away–just the candor with which his mentor always expressed her oppressively dogmatic views about ends and about means.

One thing that most Democrats–or at least those of us who are not in denial about last year’s election results–seem to agree on is that we must become known as a “party of reform.” “Reform” may mean different things to different people, but as regular readers of this blog know, for me it means a commitment to a complete, root-and-branch progressive agenda for fixing our political system, our budget processes, our tax code, and generally, a federal government that has descended to Harding-era standards of special interest-tending and partisan featherbedding under the stewardship of George W. Bush’s GOP. For us New Democrat types, embracing this kind of reform agenda represents a return to our insurgent roots prior to the 1992 Clinton campaign, and that’s the subject of an interesting article published today on the New Republic site by by Kenny Baer.As Kenny suggests, New Dems got a little fat and happy during the Clinton administration, and also got a little too loose about loaning the “brand” to Democrats who were more interested in positioning themselves to get business contributions than in supporting any real agenda for change. But that’s all over now, and for those of you who are more interested in what we stand for as a party than in the usual Kabuki Theater of left and center stereotypes, give Baer’s take a close look.

There’s some interesting ferment going on in evangelical Christian circles at the moment which may spell trouble for the God-Mammon Alliance the Republican Party has so painstakingly put together. As Rob Garver explains in an American Prospect online piece, the National Association of Evangelicals, with 50,000 church affiliates representing 30 million or so people, is meeting next week in Washington, where it will consider a manifesto on “civic responsibility” that might cause Karl Rove some heartburn. To be sure, the manifesto reiterates familiar Christian conservative positions on abortion, gay marriage, and so forth, but also has surprisingly bold sections on economic justice, environmental stewardship, and even war and peace. This is a development worth watching. I’m sure GOP leaders think of these folk as reliable foot soldiers in the conservative movement. But they do, ultimately, report to a Higher Authority, who once said:”The wind blows where it wants to, and you hear its sound, but don’t know where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8).