Over at Commondreams

Realism does not seem to be the order of the day over at Commondreams. You have a nice article by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman in which they visit a policy discussion seminar and disrupt it because it fails to sufficiently address corporate crime, corporate welfare, and corporate violence. They relate their experiences in a question and answer session on the magazine.

"Here you have The New America Foundation and the Atlantic Monthly taking money from Shell, and ADM, and Lockheed Martin, The Hartford, and the Nuclear Energy Institute to write about the real state of the union, and you ignore corporate power -- just don't talk about it?

At this point, one of the young New American kids takes the microphone from our hands and won't hand it back.

We pry it from his hands and continue to address Fallows.

In the essay about crime, why do you write nothing about corporate crime and focus solely on street crime, ignoring that corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined?

And in the essay on welfare, why do you focus solely on black Americans, and ignore corporate welfare, which costs more than all individual welfare combined?"

The lousy part is that they do have some good points. Corporate crime and corporate welfare are serious issues. But it's clear that these two chaps are far more interested in provoking a response than in changing anybody's minds. The truth is that Mokhiber and Weissman don't think that these people are capable of changes. So why bother? More fun to just fight.

In lighter news, Max Page, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, suggests that Democrats unpack the court. Yes, they should interfere with the President's power to appoint people to the court. "Democrats should now stall all new appointments to the Supreme Court, as they come available, in what many still consider an illegitimate Bush presidency." There's no way that scheme could backfire on the Democrats. That scheme just doesn't have the potential to play into the President's hands. And the case he references--President Roosevelt's Court Packing scheme--worked out perfectly for the Democrats.