Us progressive insiders are failing. Only an uprising- a real uprising, like with the SOPA bill last year- will turn the tide and stop this bad deal that cuts Social Security.

Progressive insiders have been trying our best, doing what we do. We have reminded Democrats of all the promises they have made to not cut Social Security benefits. We have had the policy discussions about why this is a bad idea for poor and middle class seniors and seniors-to-be. There have been full page ads in the Washington Post, and coalition meetings aplenty to coordinate lobbying strategies. There have been discussions with Democrats about why this is bad for them politically, showing them all the polls that make that point. Appeals to morality and the Democratic legacy on Social Security have been made. But as of now, it has all been for naught. The President is moving forward with his plan, Nancy Pelosi has jumped on board, and things are rolling. The way DC works, if the Republicans say yes (and they very well might, it has been their goal to cut Social Security benefits ever since it was created), this will happen. Unless the people speak out very, very loudly.

Here’s how DC works: when a Democratic President decides on a policy direction, most of the Democratic insiders tend to either go along, or are very low key in their opposition. In a town built on access and power, few want to directly confront the guy in charge. And you know what? Before everyone gets all worked up about that fact, they should understand that it is the nature of DC insider-ism. It’s not that all these good folks who have been working this issue are bad people or sell-outs, it is just the nature of the DC system. People’s jobs are built around access, and if you make the powers that be too unhappy, you tend to lose access. Everyone here has dozens of fights ahead of them next year and the years after that, crucial fights, and they don’t want to lose the influence they have. Is one fight, no matter how important, worth blowing up your relationships for the next battle, and the next, and the next? That is how folks here operate, and I don’t get angry about it: it is what it is, as natural as the winter following the fall.

So what happens when a President announces a policy direction is that most insiders, even those who have been loudly opposing that direction in all they had previously been doing, soften their tone. They still oppose the policy but they are more quiet, more deferential about that opposition. I've been in rooms, including when I was representing the White House on the other side of the divide, full of people who oppose what a President just announced where very little opposition is expressed- maybe a little bit of push back, maybe some technical questions, but nothing heavy. I've been on conference calls where senior people in institutions who oppose a President’s policy are rationalizing why a President did what he did and reminding people that we have other issues to fight on.

I’m not telling you this so you will get angry at the system: like I said, it is what it is. I’m telling you this so that everyone is very clear: if you want to save Social Security from serious benefit cuts that will cause seniors to go hungry and have their utilities shut off, you have to act. You have to rise up and raise hell, because otherwise this train is going down the tracks- it won’t be stopped unless a lot of people get in the way NOW.

The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121. The White House number is 202-456-1414. You can sign a petition here. But it is going to take people doing more. Make sure your parents, grandparents, and everyone else you know does something. Talk to people at work and at church and everywhere you go. Join up with groups that are fighting the battle like MoveOn and Working America. Show up at your congressperson’s office and let them know what you think. Organize a picket outside that congressional office. Do not hold anything back if you care about this issue. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us raise some hell, this train headed down the track to cutting Social Security benefits, to taking money out of the hands of vulnerable innocents who had nothing to do with the deficits, will be forced to stop.

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[Video from 2011.]

The House results on Election Day 2012 were the only bad things that happened in what was otherwise obviously a pretty great day for Democrats and progressives. The biggest question for 2014 is whether we can find a way of turning that result around. Part of the answer, of course, is dependent on how the economy is doing. If the pessimists are right and things are not looking good, we will lose seats not gain them. But even if the economy is okay, do we have a chance at being the House majority after the 2014 elections?

As many Democratic activists have pointed out, we actually won the overall votes in House races by the same 2% plus margin that Obama did, so re-districting dominated by Republican gerrymandering clearly played a big role in them holding on to the House. Democrats, though, are making a big mistake in attributing our failure solely to gerrymandering and essentially giving up on retaking the House the rest of this decade as many pundits are suggesting. I remember the same points being made after the 2002 and 2004 failures to retake the House, and in 2006 and 2008 we not only retook the House but added considerably to the margin in 2008.

The pundits will be predicting doom and gloom for sure. Not only did we fail to win the House back in a good Democratic year, they will remind us, but in the 6th year of a Presidency the president's party almost always loses seats. But historical trends never would have predicted a lot of things we have seen in politics over the last couple of decades (an African immigrant's son with a Muslim name being elected President for one, and then being re-elected in spite of a bad economy for another), and I've been in the middle of a couple big surprises in terms of the House over the years that are worth recalling here because of the lessons they teach.

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I saw this commercial on MSNBC for the first time on Thursday morning. I truly hope MoveOn has ad buys in all the national markets on all the cable channels. If not, they definitely should.

What makes this commercial such a grabber is using women to speak the words men have spoken against them. I wasn't paying attention at all to the commercials, but I did a double take on this because what they were saying didn't make sense for them to be saying.

Which is, of course, the point. Well done, MoveOn.

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If this little gem of cognitive dissonance doesn't make your head explode, I don't know what will.

Bill O'Reilly started the show with his Talking Points Memo segment, talking all about how the #Occupy Wall Street protests were a coordinated effort, underfunded by those evil liberal groups like MoveOn and SEIU as well as the ubiquitous George Soros with the express purpose of taking the country down the dreaded path of European socialism.

Some liberal Americans continue to believe the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters have a valid beef and some may have. But these people are being exploited by powerful, radical organizations. They are being used in the hopes of embarrassing the U.S.A.

The "Occupy Wall Street" movement is not -- is not -- a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country to turn us into a western European type entitlement state.

That's what George Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and many far-left journalists want. And they are using the protests to that end.

Got that? It's all a clear plot by evil liberal forces. Not anything that we haven't heard a million times over on Fox News. But in the next segment, Billo had a little difficulty with his token liberal voice, radio host Leslie Marshall. Without correcting O'Reilly on the independence of the Occupy movement, Marshall suggests any grassroots movement is in danger of being co-opted by big money funders:

Well, first of all Bill, any organization, any movement, any protest is going to be "exploited" to use your term by somebody, whether it be the Koch Brothers of the Tea Party on the right, George Soros with the "Occupy Wall Street" movement on the left.

Wait a second, wait a second....are we going to make the equivalency argument of *EVIL* Soros and the #OWS movement and the Koch brothers with the tea parties? Gasp! Even if the equivalency is specious since there is no direct link between Soros and #OWS, this kind of atrocity cannot stand.

O'REILLY: OK, well you can believe anything you want; you're an American. But you made a statement that the Koch Brothers were tied into the Tea Party financially. Can you prove that?

MARSHALL: Well, the Koch Brothers, (INAUDIBLE) such as Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: Can you -- can you prove it. Wait. Wait, wait, wait, Leslie.

MARSHALL: Yes.

O'REILLY: Leslie, you're a Fox News contributor. You have a responsibility. Can you prove the Koch Brothers are tied into the Tea Party financially? Can you?

MARSHALL: With a check in hand, no.

O'REILLY: OK. Thank you.

MARSHALL: But the Koch Brothers have never denied the financial trail.

O'REILLY: Your turn is over, Leslie. Your turn is over, we'll get back.

And I want to remind you not to make statements you can't back up on this network. We don't do that on this network. Other networks do. We don't.

Um, excuse me? They don't make statements that they can't back up? WTF are you talking about, Bill?

"What Kind of Pie? OCCUPY!"

The mainstream media may be ignoring the protests in New York by the Occupy Wall Street group, but they won't be able to ignore it much longer as the support for their mission continues to grow. The latest development is that the Transit Workers Union voted to join the protests, with more than 200,000 members nationally.

Yesterday, Crooks and Liars writer murshedz called on progressive groups to join in support of the protests and it seems that the number of groups that agree with him is growing quickly. Blogger Matt Stoller argues that the occupation of Wall Street is indicative of much more than a simple protest.

Other groups that have expressed their support are the United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU, 1199 SEIU, Workers United, the Working Families party, the Coalition for the Homeless, MoveOn.org, Make the Road New York, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Alliance for Quality Education, Community Voices Heard, United New York and Strong Economy For All.

Separately, union members from the Air Line Pilots Association protested in the New York streets in favor of fair wages and benefits.

The actions in New York by Occupy Wall Street and other organizations are also spreading to other locations and are related to protests like the Wisconsin rallies against Scott Walker and the Awake the State movement in Florida. They are a sign that the mass of Americans is tired of conservative economic politicians and businessmen who are selling out the people while making themselves rich.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

We are getting donations together to buy pizzas for the occupiers around the nation:

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[Video via MoveOn.org]

Dean Baker has a question for Claire McCaskill:

Why Does Senator McCaskill Want to Bankrupt Our Children?

That is what people should be asking Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill along with her fellow senators who are advocated strict caps on government spending. The idea being pushed by Senator McCaskill, together with Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and several other prominent senators, would limit federal spending to 20.6 percent of GDP. It would require difficult-to-obtain super-majorities to exceed this cap. Spending would be cut across a variety of programs if the cap is not reached.

This proposal is hugely deserving of ridicule for a variety of reasons. First, it operates from a blatantly wrong premise -- that government spending has grown out of control.

Those familiar with arithmetic know that government spending had increased by little as a share of GDP prior to the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. In 2007, the last year before the onset of the recession, spending as a share of GDP was 19.6 percent. That is 1.1 percentage points less than the 20.7 percent share 30 years earlier in 1977. So the idea that there is a long-term trend of out-of-control spending is simply not true, or what they call outside of Washington, a "lie."

Robert Reich calls it "lipstick on a pig":

Republicans figure that if they can’t sell the pig, they’ll just put lipstick on it and find some suckers who will think it’s something else.

That’s the proposal emerging in the Senate from Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee and also Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri. It would get the deficit down not by raising taxes on the rich but by capping federal spending.

If Congress failed to stay under the cap, the budget would be automatically cut.

According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the McCaskill/Corker plan would require $800 billion of cuts in 2022 alone. That’s the equivalent of eliminating Medicare entirely, or the entire Department of Defense.

Obviously the Defense Department wouldn’t disappear, so what would go? Giant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and much of everything else Americans depend on.

It’s the Republican plan with lipstick. It would have the same exact result. But by disguising it with caps and procedures, Republicans can avoid saying what they’re intending to do.

Why is it that ConservaDems think that suckering for right-wing voodoo economics is some kind of "bipartisanship," anyway?

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[YouTube here.]

Big Mike -- MoveOn.org's "Break It Down" guy -- is kind of a rationalist response to Glenn Beck: He too uses blackboards, etc., to explain seemingly complex issues. But unlike Beck, who actually makes things out to be much more dense, murky, and inexplicable than they really are (not to mention inventing things that never were), Mike has the gift of taking complex subjects and actually helping ordinary people understand them.

So I every much enjoyed his latest "Break It Down" installment -- this time on the ongoing federal-budget battles. It really is about the nation's Top 1 percent income earners against the rest of us -- and it's going to become even more intense:

And all of this fighting is just over this year's budget. Next year's budget is where things get really crazy.

Because even though taxes for the rich are the lowest they have been in generations, the Republicans want to cut them even further, so millionaires and billionaires are paying 25% instead of 35%.

But where are they going to get the trillions of dollars they need to do that?

Their ideas are fairly simple: Slash $350 billion from things like food stamps, education, training, employment, Cut another $400 billion from programs that help low-income families. Oh, and get rid of Medicare.

Yeah, almost forgot about that. They're going to take away Medicare, give seniors vouchers, and throw them on the mercy of Big Insurance. Because when I think compassion, I think Big Insurance.

So if you or your aging parents actually depend on Medicare, they can look forward to a future where they can choose between buying their meds….or eating.

If we want to get serious about shrinking the deficit, it won't happen on the backs of the middle class that’s already being squeezed.

He actually might have made good use of another chart MoveOn recently published:

What a year it's been in the fight against Prop 8. What a year it could be.

In California, Courage Campaign has led the fight to repeal Prop 8, starting off with live-blogging the trial at Prop8TrialTracker.com (the #1 Google result for "Prop 8 Trial") and bringing the trial and LGBT stories into Americans' homes through the Testimony: Take A Stand project.

This month, in response to the California Supreme Court's announcement that it would drag its feet for another 6-9 months on the case, Courage Campaign collected 430 stories of couples who are forced to wait while this drags out, and started putting them on TV so the Court and public knows the human consequences of delay. Later this week, we'll be filing an amicus curiae letter to the California Supreme Court, telling some of their stories, so the Court understands: for some couples, marriage literally can't wait.

To fund and support all of that work (and to take a break and party), we're having a shindig with the help of our friends at MoveOn.org, along with Moby, Shepard Fairey, The Crystal Method, and other great folks in music and entertainment. Deets:

Who: The Courage Campaign Institute, MoveOn.org, Moby, Shepard Fairey, The Crystal Method, DJ Dan, Heather Graham, Paul Haggis, Jason Bentley, Cleve Jones, Lisa Edelstein and others.
What: Dance for Equality benefiting Courage Campaign and our work to fight Prop 8 and restore marriage equality in California
When: Wednesday, March 2nd, 8 PM-2 AM
Where: Avalon, 1735 Vine Street, Hollywood, CA
Why: A good party for a good cause!

You can buy tickets by clicking the graphic above, or by clicking here.

You can also RSVP on Facebook here.

Disclosure: I am proud to work for Courage Campaign as Director of Online Programs.

Over at my home blog, OpenLeft.com, Mike Lux had a great piece last week on what he called "The most important political story of the year"- that being the blockbuster Think Progress report on how the Chamber of Commerce is raising money from foreign corporations and using it to run ads against Democratic candidates. He wrote:

Every single Democrat should be running ads based on this story. The Republicans have blocked any action to keep this foreign corporate money out of our elections, and if we allow this to stand we will be so awash in foreign money in our elections that we will never get our democracy back. Check this story out, and tell every Democrat you know: make this an issue. This is a very big deal, and Republicans should be made to answer why they are okay with foreign corporations being allowed to do attack ads in our elections.

Hot off the video presses, MoveOn answers that call in Illinois:

Echoes of Watergate, anyone?

The best part about this that makes the ad even more effective is that Alexi Giannoulias refuses to take contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists.

Giannoulias and Kirk were on Meet the Press yesterday morning and Nicole Belle grabbed a great clip on Kirk's supposed fiscal conservatism:

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The end of that clip was left off, where Giannoulias finished:

The question is, for the Congressman, the $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, we don't have $700 billion. So my question to the congressman is, which country do you plan on borrowing $700 billion from? The Saudis, China? We, we can't afford it.

Hey, since foreign corporations are doing, maybe the Saudis and Chinese should think about contributing to the Chamber so Mark Kirk can vote for more tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, paid for by his friends overseas.

You can personalize this video at http://beck.cnnbcvideo.com/.

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