Sorry for the brevity here, but people might be interested in the breaking news. Just receieved an email message from Charlie Brown's campaign, as follows:

Seems like everyone else has posted a John Edwards diary, so here’s mine :)

At the level of low-res stereotypes, Edwards’ big issue is poverty. My issue is sustainability. Well, that plus health care. And immigration. Also fair trade, and choice. Did I mention Iraq, education, and Katrina recovery? OK, so I support the entire progressive agenda, but ... what I’m saying is, my BIG issue is sustainability. Why, then, am I so completely committed to John Edwards as my candidate?

Answer: Because the way Edwards views poverty is the essential moral value that must under-gird the entire movement for sustainability. If we get that foundational value right, the rest of the policies we need will fall into place. If we don’t, then IMHO all the hybrid cars and solar panels in the universe will not be enough.

I’ll try to explain below the fold.

Well, there does seem to be a LOT of heat out there, and not so much light, about whether or not to give drivers licenses to "illegal" immigrants. It’s shaping up to be another one of those emotional hot button issues that regularly distort our elections.  With the debate coming up tonight on CNN (which, dammit, I won’t be able to watch live), I want to get a progressive analysis of the issue out there. I’m tired of seeing Democrats with that deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces, as they get hit with questions to which they have not thought through a good, progressive answer.

This is a framing problem. Thanks to the efforts of George Lakoff, Drew Westen, our own Jeffrey Feldman, and a thousand others, we are (hopefully) coming to understand that the frame within which we discuss an issue has a powerful influence on the outcome of the discussion. We need to get control of the frame within which the discussion of drivers licenses for "illegal" immigrants takes place.

For some time now, I’ve had a persistent intuitive notion that the Republican Party has become, for its various factions, like a marriage from Hell. Now comes confirmation from the Wall Street Journal, in a long article by Jackie Calmes. (h/t to HuffPo)

New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party's identity -- what strategists call its "brand." The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs, which could alter U.S. politics in the 2008 elections and beyond.

To me, there seem to be some radical incompatibilities within the Republican coalition. How did hard-headed businessmen wind up in the same party with religious fundamentalists? How long can well-mannered, old-money bluebloods comfortably share a platform with lower income, less-educated, NASCAR-lovin’ Southern white males? What serious person outside of the neo-Nazi community wants to be in the same party with anti-Latino racist xenophobes?

When we read that 47 million Americans are uninsured, a lot of us think that’s awful. Then when you lose your job and your health insurance, you start to understand what "awful" really means.

When we read that Big Insurance is making it harder for traditional small family practices to make a go of it, we wonder when America’s policy elites will begin to care about something other than the stock prices of giant corporations. But when the only private practice physician in your small town (and entire rural area) announces she’s closing her practice, it’s a total gut-punch. You feel like puking.

I’m just back from my evening with Rep. Lynn Woolsey. Quite uplifting.

The event was held at Toby’s Feed Barn in Pt. Reyes Station. Lynn’s district includes large rural areas, and in this small town there aren’t a lot of big halls. So the choice of the feed barn, where we sat on folding chairs and hay bales, was both folksy and practical.

Before the main event there was a reception ($50 a head) with a smaller amount of people. We were served locally grown food which was superb. It was a chance to get some face time with the congresswoman, but aside from purely social stuff I mostly used it to talk with my county supervisor about funding for our local health clinics, of which I am board president, and to meet an interesting fellow who wants to run for state senate. I did toss a snarky question to her—"When are you going to get us out of Iraq?"—in response to which she was kind enough to laugh. What a gal!

Couple years ago, much distressed by the state of the world in general and the sustainability challenge in particular, I wrote a long essay (unpublished) to calm myself and organize my thoughts. This diary is adapted from one section of that essay.

Three books greatly influenced my thinking: Moral Politics by George Lakoff, Collapse by Jared Diamond, and One With Nineveh by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. If you care about the Earth, about life on Earth, about the human family, your own family, or even if you just care about your own individual life and you plan to live longer than a few more years, please read these books. I already knew something big is happening here; after reading these books I have a much better understanding of what it is.

Almost as soon as the Foley scandal broke, we learned that the GOP leadership in the House had known about Foley's "overly-friendly" emails for nearly a year. The question that immediately came to mind was "Why did they not immediately remove him from all contact with the pages?" With almost a full year to go before the elections, they had plenty of time to recover from any incidental political fallout-- that is, as long as the fallout was within a normal range.

Over at HuffPo, Earl Ofari Hutchinson offers a startling (to me, at least) hypothesis: Foley knows where the bodies are buried re the infamous stolen 2000 election in Florida.

For years now Democrats have been losing elections because Republicans exploit issues that they "own" as a party.

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans own toughness, national security, taxes, deficits, religion, and morality. Democrats own compassion, civil rights, labor, the environment, and diplomacy. Republican electoral victories have resulted from the voters deciding that the issues owned by Republicans are more solid, more essential than those owned by Democrats.

All that is about to change though, because the Democrats have just been handed an issue that trumps all other issues. By default, Democrats are the proud new owners of Trust. And Trust is a must, a quality without which nothing else has value, not even Values.

When I was a kid, I lived for a year in Germany. This was 1960 - 61. My dad was not military, but there I was anyway living in post-war Munich, not speaking any German (at first) and listening all the time to the Armed Forces Network because it was the only English language radio I could find.

The Bay of Pigs invasion happened while I was there, so I heard the official version of events on AFN. It went like this: There's an amazing invasion of Cuba... the brave partisans are sweeping the wretched Commies away... Castro's troops are deserting en masse... the noble Cuban exiles are moving on Havana! ... oh wait ... the invaders have been crushed, the remnants are scrambling back to Miami ... now we return to our regular music programming. Never a word of explanation about the previous several days of bogus "information". Just back to the program.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This diary is a reflection on the way that the march of history seems to keep bringing us back to the same infinitely tragic themes. I asked my son to preview it, and he said he hopes people will "read through to what is actually a punchy and poignant ending".

First, there were gardens
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors found their food in the natural world through which they roamed. All able bodied humans were engaged in this activity. Since a wandering lifestyle precludes the accumulation of much material wealth, the societies of hunter-gatherers tended to be pretty egalitarian. But then the Angel drove us out of Eden, and we've had hard luck and trouble ever since...

Few on dKos believe that the Cheney/Bush administration's wars on Iraq & Afghanistan have much of anything to do with their stated purposes. Michael Klare has an excellent article over on Alternet [http://www.alternet.org/...], in which he (once again) exposes the project for US domination of global petro-resources. If anyone reading this believes Cheney/Bush have some other purpose--such as spreading democracy or fighting terror--we could have a separate discussion about that. Let's meet later and arrange for remedial tutoring until everyone catches up.

For the rest of us, let's look a little deeper into the subject of US domination and petro-resources.

Don't get me wrong. I'm just as bitter and angry as any progressive Democrat. The killing, the rip-offs, global warming, peak oil, growing wealth disparity and disappearing jobs, the moralistic posing, the screaming hypocrisy and sheer dumbheadedness. But you know what? I had a GREAT 4th of July.

Why did we invade Iraq without provocation, why impose this bloody and brutal occupation, and why are we still there? Well, IT'S THE OIL.

Recommended reading: Michael Klare's article [http://www.tomdispatch.com/...] posted on TomDispatch, in which he discusses the geo-political chessgame being played over the energy resources of central Asia and the ME. This is the elephant in the room that is almost never mentioned in the MSM, or even on this blog, while we conduct furious debates over the incompetence of the administration, the nature of Evil, the morality of war, and the honor of the nation.

This started out as a comment on Yoss' excellent post [http://www.dailykos.com/...] on the sunset of conservatism, but then I thought "just make it a diary, dude".

So what is it that conservatives conserve, and what does that have to do with immigration?

Thomas Palley is a well-credentialed liberal economist with a knack for explaining complicated policy ideas in plain English. His current blog post, Markets and the Common Good [http://www.thomaspalley.com/...], discusses the essential differences between conservative and progressive economic philosophies.

IMMIGRATION is going to be a huge hot-button issue this election year. Talk about an inconvenient truth! The party that gets this one right is going to win big. Neither party has the advantage on this issue coming out of the gate.  Republicans are caught between their emotional message (we'll use a heavy hand to smite "the other", especially if they aren't white) and their main interest group, corporations and the rich, who like immigration because it depresses wages. Democrats are caught between their core ideology (we'll help the average guy, extend more rights to more people) and their main interest group, working people, who dislike immigration because it depresses wages.