The Boston Globe today has an article (the link will break tomorrow) about the Dean campaign’s plan to ask its supporters MoveOn-ishly to raise money to support Democratic Congresspeople running in tightly contested elections. There are three obvious motivations for this: To take back Congress, to do favors for some Congresspeople who can return the favor, and to rebuild the Democratic base.

That last one is the kicker. This campaign from the beginning has felt more like a movement than like a campaign (to paraphrase Natasha C). Given the zealotry of the supporters, it’s even more surprising that the campaign has succeeded by not focusing obsessively on the guy at the top of the pyramid. Now, by turning the energies of supporters towards Congressional candidates, the Dean campaign is building a base for actions beyond the elections.

I don’t know of a campaign that has so successfully integrated vision, innovation and hardball pragmatics.

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Jock Gill and Michael Cudahy have an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today suggesting that maybe not everything is so great with our democracy at the moment.

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Britt Blaser:

“Every warrior knows that perfect safety is a fool’s paradise. The premise of the current war on terror is that we can entertain our way out of the terrorist threat. It’s entertainment to feel an illusory omnipotence that will hunt down every evil-doer and infidel–a kind of adolescent road rage, really. The old heads in your squadron know to protect such greenhorns from their enthusiasms, at least until they learn or die. “There are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots.”

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IowaPolitics.com has links to the text of all the candidates’ ads running in Iowa.

Meanwhile, you might want to take a look at Flat Howard, an odd bit of highly informal video from CBS. For me the best part is that Flat Howard is doing what our 12-year-old considers to be Dean’s signature finger stance. (You’ll need the Real Player unfortunately.)

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Hello! That’s me, the 107,356th person back, just to the left of that nice old man in the green baseball cap. Helloooo!

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Dennis Kucinich has posted the memos that Diebold claims we may not be post because Diebold doesn’t want us talking about possible vulnerabilities in its electronic voting machines. Nice move, DK! (And good blogging by Donna at Copyfight.)

Correction: According to Dan Gillmor, DK’s page has links to sites with copies of the Diebold memos, not the memos themselves.

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From Living Networks (the book) by Ross Dawson comes this Fun Fact:

In 1421, the government of Florence award the world’s first patent to Filippo Brunelleschi for a means of bringing goods up the usually unnavigable river Arno to the city. He demanded and was duly awarded legal protection for his invention, being given the right for three years to burn any competitor’s ship that incorporated his design. (p. 92)

How brutal and primitive! Now, of course, we take a much more civilized approach to patent infringement: We sue, destroying not just the boat but the factory, the business, the distributors’ business, and the future ability of all those who ever worked on the infringing object to earn a living ever again…unless of course the boat could be used for terrorist purposes in which case we can whisk the inventor and manufacturer away to get a twelve year tan at Guantanamo.

BTW, the source Ross cites says that before this first patent, inventors and scientists “used ciphers such as Leonardo’s mirror-image script” to protect their ideas. Now, of course, writing backwards violates the US PATRIOT Act.

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Jeff Jacoby is a conservative columnist in the Boston Globe. His response today (link will break tomorrow) to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling permitting gay marriage is to warn us — Sanctorumly — that we’ve started down a slippery slope towards polygamy and incest. After all, he writes, one of the dissenting judges said that state’s equal rights amendment was cited in the Court’s decision, and the Boston Globe in 1976 had dismissed the claim that “the amendment would…legitimize marriage between people of the same sex.” Yet, 27 years later, that’s exactly what’s happened. Likewise, in 1989, the Globe editorialized that the gay rights law does not “put Massachusetts on a ‘slippery slope’ towards” a right to gay marriage.

Cool research. But I seem not to be following Jacoby’s logic here. The ERA of the Massachusetts Constitution started us down a slippery slope that has led to gay marriage. This is evidence that the gay marriage ruling will lead us down a slippery slope to polygamy and incest. Thus the gay marriage ruling is bad. That’s his reasoning, right?

But doesn’t that logic also mean that the ERA was bad? Does Jacoby really want to maintain that guaranteeing equal rights for women was a bad thing for the state? “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.” Yeah, there’s a slope we should be afraid to get on. Who knows where it could lead?

And there’s an argument just as good as Jacoby’s that says that the 15th Amendment started us down the slippery slope to the ERA. Damn Abolitionists!

You know, there’s a reason why the slippery slope argument is classified as a fallacy. Jacoby’s just illustrated it.

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Here’s a map that shows you where each candidate’s money is coming from. Interesting. (Thanks to Darhl Stultz for the link.)

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An article in the Boston Globe (online today and tomorrow only) reports on an interview with Dean in which he calls for “reregulation“:

In an interview around midnight Monday on his campaign plane with a small group of reporters, Dean listed likely targets for what he dubbed as his “reregulation” campaign: utilities, large media companies and any business that offers stock options. Dean did not rule out “reregulating” the telecommunications industry, too.

Go Dean!

And, Gov. Dean gave an important speech yesterday that talks about the economic issues that (from my point of view) underly the question of whether the economy is trending up or down this month. Some snippets without context:

The government today is no longer working for all the people. We need a new social contract for the 21st century…

[The Bush administration has] created an economic program that enriches their friends and supporters at the expense of ordinary working Americans. A program deserving of the name — Enron Economics.”

Today, there are new technologies which can be the foundation of our economy for the next century. We can invest aggressively in them, just as our nation did when it invested in railroads, in rural electrification, and in public roads and highways.

We will never win the war on terror with a purely military strategy. Al Qaeda knows that their most powerful weapon against us is not terrorism — it is persuasion. We are waging a military campaign, but for years, they have been waging a political campaign. And our military campaign is only serving to strengthen their political argument. They are preaching fear and hatred against all that we stand for, and we are not responding.

We need a global effort to provide education, to foster democracy and to promote capitalism and economic opportunity in areas of instability. We need to champion the rights of women across the world. Above all, we must demonstrate that our vision has the interests of the world at heart, and not merely our own.

Worth reading in full.

PS: At our get-together last night, 15 of us wrote 100 letters to undecided voters in Iowa. Feels good to write the letters and even better to meet a diverse group of Dean supporters.

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