Smith should at least build a museum so that people can see King James' putter. I'd kind of like to see a 500 year old golf club -- I'd definitely go look if I was in Pendleton.

Or maybe he could open his mansion to tours Thursdays and alternate Saturdays, like one of the English gentry.

What is Ron Wyden (R-NY)'s net worth these days?

Everyone in Congress is RICH, and if they weren't rich when they got elected, they're rich now.

Well, not everyone. In 2006, the bottom end of the scale..

Rank Name Minimum Net Worth Average Maximum Net Worth 98 Jim DeMint (R-SC) $16,002 $40,501 $65,000 97 Max Baucus (D-Mont) $-71,986 $66,506 $204,999 96 Deborah Ann Stabenow (D-Mich) $66,003 $115,501 $165,000 95 Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) $49,007 $129,503 $210,000 94 John E. Sununu (R-NH) $50,008 $137,504 $225,000 93 Russ Feingold (D-Wis) $101,003 $225,501 $349,999 92 Robert C. Byrd (D-WVa) $130,003 $240,001 $350,000 91 Susan Collins (R-Maine) $145,005 $247,502 $350,000 90 John Cornyn (R-Texas) $108,010 $251,505 $395,000 87 Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga) $152,006 $283,502 $414,999

Non Issue.

Mapes wrote about this not in jest but just in passing, noting that Smith wasn't playing as often.

We should be careful here, folks. The Obamas put 100,000 in their children's college fund just this year. Barack Obama and his wife pulled in well over a million dollars last year.

Smith is a wealthy man. He's a collector of rare golf clubs and this is what they cost.

Let's get rid of this guy on policy, not on silliness.

A lot of the folks in Congress like to write books (Sen Obama has what like three? Sen Clinton at least two that come to mind) and best selling books can be very profitable. I don't begrudge anyone for multi-tasking - gotta do something while sitting on the airliners shuttling between here and there - but I hope none of our favorite upstanding Democratic Leaders earned their money the old fashioned way, dipping their beaks into the re-election fund, gifts of value from lobbyists, wives getting cush jobs or seats on the board from powerful pals in industry (in return for great gummint contracts) etc. And i hope all of our least favorite republicans did earn it that way, and are exposed and sent away in disgrace for a long time. And remember, playing golf during a time of war is a one-way ticket straight to hell!

Smith is out of touch because people don't share his values. Why is it Democrats can be rich and still look out for people who are not? It's not the money; it's the person.

That's why Mapes and I aren't writing about Smith's general wealth. We're writing about the ownership of a $1.25 million set of golf clubs. The fact that Smith would drop that kind of scratch on this item says something about who he is and his values.

Its symbolic of him being out-of-touch.

Of course, Carla and her colleagues at BO aren't really dumb enough to believe a Princeton elitist like Merkley, a guy like Wyden who has ALWAYS put his selfish career ambitions ahead of the people of Oregon, actually identifies with or cares about the rest of us in a respectful, meaningful way.

Yeah, everyone knows that only selfish elitists get involved with projects like Habitat For Humanity. What a selfish, disrespectful thing for Merkley to have done!

Merkley added insult to injury when he went on to start the Walk for Humanity, launch development of the Habitat Home Building Center, and initiate a pilot project for “YouthBuild” in which gang-affected youth learn construction and life skills while building homes in their own neighborhoods. To make matters worse, he served as Director of Housing Development at Human Solutions, where he worked to make available affordable housing complexes and launching Oregon’s first Individual Development Account program that helps low-income families save money to buy homes, attend college, or start businesses.

Yep... that's the resume of an elitist alright.

It is because of this kind of BS and the really vapid segment of the Democratic Party here in Oregon it represents that we get unworthy candidates like Merkley, and therefore that we are stuck with disgusting elected officials like Smith.

Speaking of really vapid BS... I recognize your glib irony as the trademark of a certain small cadre of bitterly angry purity trolls. The only question is which one you are.

The joke is on those readers who aren't bright enough to have it dawn on them just who much contempt the BO editorialists have for them by putting out the amateurish propagandistic pap that they do.

The only joke here - and it's not really very funny - is your stunningly obvious contempt for the intelligence of BO readers.

"93 Russ Feingold (D-Wis) $101,003 $225,501 $349,999 92 Robert C. Byrd (D-WVa) $130,003 $240,001 $350,000 91 Susan Collins (R-Maine) $145,005 $247,502 $350,000 90 John Cornyn (R-Texas) $108,010 $251,505 $395,000 87 Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga) $152,006 $283,502 $414,999"

These people ARE rich. They all earn more than 90-95% of all US households. It kills me to see the phrase "middle class" used on folks like this, and it is done all the time, particularly with respect to the alternative minimum tax. No definition of middle puts you above 80% of the rest of the sample.

Bioya,

Regarding "genuine 'activisim' which precisely seeks to make society more just by directly confronting the injustice of the status quo," as you put it:

Care to elucidate? I'm assuming that baiting the benighted here is recreational and that blog commenting doesn't really count as directly confronting injustice.

Honestly, tell me, what is to be done?

See, the thing is, as far as I can tell your inferences or imputations about the motives not only of Jeff Merkley but of most of us sheeple around here is based on the ineffectiveness of what they/we do to effect real change that resembles the ideals we voice -- or purport to hold, I suppose, from your point of view. If we keep doing the same thing, and it keeps not working, at some point it must mean that we don't really want that change, right?

And, believe it or not, that actually does trouble me too. It's been something I've thought about pretty continuously since the conditions of the late 1960s led me to buy my old copy of The Communist Manifesto at the pre-chain bookstore in my middle to upper middle class bedroom suburb of Boston at the premature age of 12, and led the petty bourgeois owners of that bookstore (nice folks) to think it financially worthwhile to carry the Manifesto, and put Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book prominently up front (possibly also to keep an eye on it).

Not so very long after, after having had time to get over my initial giddy response to the sweep of Marx's prose and my imperfect proto-adolescent grasp of what made his argument so different from anything I'd previously encountered, I began to figure out that it actually didn't do much of anything to go around hectoring my junior high school classmates for being bourgeois, or make me myself any less so.

I'm embarrassed to think back on how long it took to completely figure that out, though it fits with other social skills problems I had at the time. I think it was a more hippie-counterculture oriented fellow-alienated friend who finally put paid to it, when at some Unitarian youth event for some reason I no longer remember I was quoting Mao Tse Tung (as we wrote then)'s apothegm that "All power grows from the barrel of a gun" at her, and she came back with the requisite line of the Beatles' "Revolution."

Democrat-baiting here seems to be a somewhat similar kind of activity. Pleasurable and self-satisfying as it may be, could it actually be a form of self-indulgence that doesn't confront injustice, not really, if you think about it deep in the privacy of your own conscience? Just a thought.

My subsequent trajectory has taken me and my thinking various places on the left, but has kept bumping up something inconvenient. NONE of the approaches in which I engaged, or the groups in which I participated used, or those I observed among situational allies in all the varieties of leftness they espoused, which has pretty much ran the gamut from the DP to anarchist, produced changes in fundamental structural injustice.

Some of the struggles changed something worth changing or affected something worth affecting, but it wasn't fundamental structural change, except maybe in a creeping and highly contradictory way with the feminist movement and the liberating effects of LGBT struggles (the political structural reform changes of the Civil Rights movement, imperfect as their economic results have been, largely predate my own activism though my parents were involved). And those worthwhile changes almost invariably involved a mix of different kind of politics and actions, including engagements with the formal political system, warts and all.

So, back to that criterion of genuine authentic intention to create fundamental change and bring social justice: to not continue approaches that have failed. I really can't think of any position or activity on the left that meets that criterion.

On that criterion, it doesn't matter how confrontational the posture or pose, or how dramatic the theatricality of acts. None of us has succeeded in creating that change. So none of us must really want it, I guess. Including yourself, as far as I can see.

I think it's the Maoist International Movement that has taken the kind of argument you're advancing furthest to its absurd conclusion, with their view that in effect everyone in the United States is inherently an oppressor, given the structural position of the U.S. in the world. Their argument that their consciousness of that fact somehow exempts them seems, shall we say, unpersuasive, if not actually hilarious. That's especially true given character of their ostensibly revolutionary activities, consisting primarily leaving stacks of anonymously written newspapers scattered in places like health food stores in places like Cambridge, Mass., and now on the web I guess, where I recently had a bout of Cambridge health food store nostalgia when I came across a virtual edition of MIM Notes.

Anyway, really, please tell me either what you do that constitutes genuine "directly confronting injustice," or what you think I should do that would do the trick.

I get it that blogging here and any DP work generally don't count. Although I'm not quite sure -- would working to actually elect Dennis Kucinich to something count? Or is it only backing up stuff he says from a platform provided by other not-really-caring folks' dirty hypocritical DP work to get him elected? And should DK give up that platform by quitting the dirty hypocritical DP in order to avoid being a dirty hypocrite, or soiled by cooperation with such creatures?

And also explain to me, please, how if I "confront injustice" in whatever way, and it fails to work, that calls into question the genuineness of my intention any less than any other failed strategy is held to do?

Harry Kershner, some similar set of questions applies to how one might escape being a "crypto-neo-fascist," I think. Possibly the answer is easier because it may simply involve a correct ideological orientation, in either a broad or narrow line sense, without need for it to be effective in practice or produce actual effective actions, for which Bioya's position seems to call.

BTW the "crypto-neo-fascist" charge seems rather close to the pre-United Front Communist Party of the U.S.A. line on being "objectively Fascist" in the early 1930s. They applied it I think even to fellow-Leninist Trotskyists, but certainly to the social democratic Socialist Party and anyone further right, including the emergent CIO unions. It's also similar in a different way to the "fellow-traveller" accusation mode of red-baiting, turned in the other direction. Neither of those resemblances would make me comfortable, but maybe that's just me.

I suppose as long as we're not discussing Smith's financial antics while comparing his voting record to his rhetoric, you've achieved your aim. If that's all you have to add, perhaps FreeRepublic.com would be more your speed.

Well put.

I'm endlessly fascinated by how blind the extremist "left" is to just how closely their ethics and tactics mirror the extremist "right" whom they claim to oppose.

I think attacking him on the purchase of his golf clubs is a stretch. Let's go after him on issues, his flip-flopping on the war and his record of supporting Bush for the last 7 years.

We need to remember how badly the last challenger got thumped by Smith and run an insurgent campaign like we are down 20 points.

We need to remember how badly the last challenger got thumped by Smith and run an insurgent campaign like we are down 20 points.

Amen, brother.

I think the point was the Mapes looks like a fool for taking a swipe at the DSCC when he essentially did the same thing last March.

Ding!

Harry, You're a bit older than me, I think.

Of course you've suggested that you have a correct ideological orientation. Anyone who disagrees with you about strategy is wrong, and you're always right.

You've shown that Bill Moyers says critical things about Obama. So do I, and will say more. You haven't shown that he's opposed to Obama being president. You haven't shown that he equates Obama with John McCain. You haven't shown that he says it doesn't matter which "major" party you vote for. You haven't shown that he intends to vote for someone besides Obama or to sit out the election.

You say your label neo-fascist-sym applies to those of us who sympathize with "McBama." That of course elides the real distinctions between McCain and Obama even in foreign policy, not to mention those of us who will vote for Obama but don't sympathize at all with a great deal of his foreign policy orientations in particular.

That's where Kevin's mirror point has a point. The real right-wingers look at centrist (never mind left) liberals in the DP, as well as those who call themselves progressive in a non-DLC way in the DP, and say they/we are all promoting a socialist agenda and often that we're covert communists. Neo-socialist-symps, if you like. It's not true when they do it and it's not true when you do it. As I said, its a labeling tactic with affinities to Stalinist "objectively fascist", to McCarthy-era red-baiting (right down to the "symp" language), and to Reaganite mendacious "definition" of opponents.

Actually, you're the real neo-fascist-symp because you are working to get John McCain elected, despite having called him pathological. No, not really, it's a ridiculous charge, but in exactly the same way as yours is.

It's also a political problem if you really want to build a social movement that's capable of bringing pressure on Obama to restrain the worst possibilities of his current positions. It's going to be hard to work with you if you really think that I'm a fascist sympathizer. I'll probably resent and dislike you personally for it, not trust you, and not trust your political judgment. But I suppose it won't be an issue, because presumably you'll refuse to work in any coalition involving crypto-fascist-symps like me. And if you did, doubtless there'd be trust issues for you. An inauspicious basis for solidarity in action.

And yet you don't know the first thing about my political activism around the issues you raise, outside of the context of what I write here. You don't know what campaigns the non-electoral anti-war movement I work in, whose non-electoral stance I fully support and advocate in the movement, are planning for the coming year. There are plenty of people in that movement who have analyses of the DP that are at least broadly similar to yours, who as a matter of principle won't vote for Democrats. Yet somehow they don't think I'm a fascist sympathizer and think my willingness to do work in that context counts for something.

And I come back to the fact that it is a correct ideological orientation that you are after. Neither you nor Bioya have answered my simple practical questions about what I and other people should do, in practice. We should not vote for Obama, that much is clear. We should write analyses with which you agree (correct political orientation) apparently. But what else? What constitutes "confronting injustice" in this context? And to what end, in what ways would what you propose be effective?

In fact I might be willing to do some things you'd propose, I'm often a both-and rather than either-or kind of guy. Some of the things in which I'm part of a larger local movement against the occupation will in fact pose new challenges from what we've done before. I'm not sure that the challenges will be sufficiently theatrical "confrontation" to satisfy you, or at least Bioya.

But also I wouldn't necessarily restrict myself to those things and would certainly support others. E.g. you mentioned marching with the SPOG's at Pride, and I support their anti-recruiting civil disobedience challenges, and expect to see more of that from other quarters and to support it.

But you know the engagement with largely D & maybe some R mayors that I wrote about on another column came to me via CodePink. They are tactically and strategically flexible enough to engage and pressure in different ways -- get arrested in Congress, bird-dog candidates, see Mayors' Conference resolutions.

The Recruiter Watch group in Portland is focused these days on inequities in the choices of high schools on which military recruiters focus, and not, you can guess the pattern, and on getting equal rights for counter-recruitment presence whenever recruiters are in the school. Confronting those policies requires dealing with the school committee. Guess who's on the school committee and what party/ies the belong to? Hint, it's not the International Socialist Organization, much as I respect the anti-war work some of my movement friends in the ISO do.

Or look at Peace & Justice Works, a key and long-standing anti-imperialist group in town, one of whose leaders repeatedly violated the anti-Iraq sanctions under Clinton and Bush and was prosecuted for it, and who also does police accountability work in town. I don't know if he votes or not, I'm sure he's critical of Democrats.

But he engages with the structures that need engaging to pursue certain ends. He doesn't go around calling everyone who is a Democrat a fascist-sympathizer ipso fact, and welcomes unity in action in campaigns with people who happen to vote D.

Your assertion that people must agree with your take on how to respond to the dilemmas posed to us by a plebiscitary oligarchy in which our votes can influence some things but others not so much or else they cannot be "truly" challenging or confronting injustice is just false. It is a non sequitur.

At this point I feel as if we've engaged in discussions on a number of threads sufficiently that I don't think there's more peruasion to be usefully accomplished by either of us in this context, so I probably won't be responding much in the future to provocations like this. I'll certainly welcome links to critical arguements you think worthwhile, and maybe if we meet non-virtually in some context of common work it will change matters.

Harry, you're calling me a neo-fascist symp and you're surprised at the "degree of invective"????

Man, you don't know what invective is. What I wrote is not invective. It's probably rather defensive in some ways, but it's not invective.

I can quote this back to you and have it be word perect true of me as well "As I told you on more than one occasion, nothing any of us has done has altered the terrible suffering that we Americans have inflicted on much of the world, and we are all responsible for doing something about it. This is part of what I'm doing."

You may not agree with the way I'm doing it, but I am doing it, according to my best lights which take into quite great account the areas in which there are not much difference as well as the ones where there are. We evidently derive different conclusions about what might work, but that doesn't mean that I'm ignoring the places of similarity. It means that I'm drawing different conclusions for what they should mean at this moment in the totality of the political choices that I seem to face.

If you want to say, "I think you're making a tactical error in choosing what you're doing in supporting Obama," we can talk about that. I'd have a genuine interest in what the other tactical possibilities you see are, and why or in what way you think they'd be effective, and why you aren't concerned, or decide to put aside the concerns, that lead me to deciding to vote for Obama this year (but led me to vote for Nader in 1996 and to put genuine effort into building a Labor Party with an independent social and material base for a period in the late 1990s). I'd expect to learn something from such a conversation, and hope you might as well.

But if I took an action that actually made me into a "neo-fascist symp" -- and symp, sympathizer, involves an assertion of conscious sympathy with fascism here -- which nothing have done or plan to do, including vote for Obama will actually do, it would not be a tactical error, it would be an entire reversal of my actual values, intentions and sympathies. And for you to level that charge is at minimum a statement of the profoundest contempt and actually if I understand your outlook on things probably really is a declaration of enmity.

Words mean things. Distinctions matter and differences are real. Their significance on different scales varies of goals and within different time frames varies. Same for goals.

Either you don't know what real fascism is, or you're engaged in verbal bullying. Since I think you probably do know what real fascism is, I conclude that you're engaging in verbal bullying. Which makes the point of continued discussion hard to see.

Chris Lowe: Which makes the point of continued discussion hard to see.

Sniff Chris has finally reached the end of his rope! Quite a trolling accomplishment, Harry.

Me, personally, I would have cut to the chase literally pages ago, and simply noted the obvious: anyone who uses a phrase like "McBama" is a purity troll. And in this case, is a bitter old boomer, whose inability to grow out of his spoiled-upperclass-Communist trite teenaged alienation, and whose lifetime of sanctimoniously hating and belittling 95% of the rest of humanity, will likely cause him to leave the world without making a single real positive progressive accomplishment.

Sad, really.

where does Mapes "take a swipe" at Smith for owning expensive clubs? It says he discussed them as a way of noting Smith's fanaticism about golf. Where does he take a shot at Smith based on his profligacy?

where does Mapes "take a swipe" at Smith for owning expensive clubs?

Actually what Mapes says in total is that Smith doesn't want to talk about golf or golfing trips because of the Abramoff scandal and luxury golf trips associated with it.

The clubs are part of the swipe on Smith from Mapes in March--which makes it rather disingenuous to beat on the DSCC for going after Smith on it now.

so then he's talking about Smith's potential connections to corruption--and not as a sign of his wealth. Which is what Mapes referred to from the DSCC.

so then he's talking about Smith's potential connections to corruption--and not as a sign of his wealth. Which is what Mapes referred to from the DSCC.

Mapes uses the clubs to take a swipe at Smith for possible corruption. The DSCC uses the clubs to take a swipe at Smith for being out-of-touch. Either way, its a use of the clubs as a symbol.

I'm not sure what's so difficult to understand here...

Oh blah blah blah, Pat. I don't hate Harry. I pity him. And you, by the way. There's so much seething bitter anger in you both. You waste so much time thinking you're going to persuade Democrats they're evil by writing long screeds telling them so.

I can't even laugh at the absurdity. It's just... sad.

What, are you seeing too much of yourself in what I wrote?

What, are you seeing too much of yourself in what I wrote?

ZING!!!

"Mapes uses the clubs to take a swipe at Smith for possible corruption. The DSCC uses the clubs to take a swipe at Smith for being out-of-touch. Either way, its a use of the clubs as a symbol.

I'm not sure what's so difficult to understand here..."

Why you'd take Mapes to task for mentioning the DSCC complaining about Smith being wealthy, when Mapes didn't bring it up to note Smith's wealth. There's no explanation as to why Mapes looks like a fool for writing about one angle on the clubs, but criticizing another angle. Can't the corruption angle be legitimate (it is), but the wealth angle not (which many seem to think it isn't)?

But you just agreed that Mapes brought it up to tie it to Abramoff and corruption. Now you're trying to say he brought it up to note how wealthy Smith is. That's not the case.

But you just agreed that Mapes brought it up to tie it to Abramoff and corruption. Now you're trying to say he brought it up to note how wealthy Smith is. That's not the case

Mapes brought up the clubs in terms of Smith's wealth (the cost of the clubs and luxury golf trips) and then used that to segue into a discussion of corruption/Abramoff.

The DSCC ad only talks about the clubs and wealth to segue into the idea that Smith is out-of-touch.

Just because they didn't use the discussion of the clubs to make the same end point doesn't change how they're used by both.

Harry,

Any move to the right is a move "toward fascism" in the trivial sense that fascism defines the extreme end of the right. Not every move to the right is a move close to fascism.

Call me deluded, mistaken in my analysis, I don't care. We can talk about that. We can talk about whether misapplying the word fascist as I think you do is merely pointing out a trend pointing to a worrisome possibility, or obstrcucting clear analysis.

I was a lot more worried about fascism in the 1990s when the right wing movement was asendant in the formal electoral system, when armed, openly white supremacist militias were organizing, and a great deal of what the media (though not you) would call "the center" were looking to a Bonapartist authoritarian man-on-a-horse solution (Ross Perot). Naomi Klein is smart, but I think for myself.

Anyway, call me mistaken, even deluded, mox nix. Call me a sympathizer, I do mind. It's an assertion, and a false one, about my intentions, and it's an obstruction.

As I've said, I do or have done different kinds of politics, involving various alliances. At present one piece does involve something initiated by the person whom I think you mean, for whose personal integrity and willingness to put himself on the line I have great respect, though please understand that I am not claiming any close relationship to him.

Sorry, I keep having trouble with the idea that Naomi Wolf would write anything worth reading. I'm not saying she hasn't, it's just that she started out so badly.

You're right about the "unitary executive," that is a new development.