2005 MVP Awards

John Nichols has an inspiring end-of-year wrapup in The Nation limning some of the folks who did heroic service in progressive causes this year. Excerpt follows, but I strongly urge you to check out the whole article (Nichols IMO does a fine job of acknowledging the primary competition for many of his "awards" - and it's great to be reminded that there is finally some notable competition for these truly patriotic acts). I also encourage those with more inspired (gargantuan?) appetites, due e.g., to stomachs stretched from relentless holiday grazing, to browse the follow-on comments, which are kicked up a notch due to sparks from a few hard-core naysayers and reality-deniers.

The Most Valuable Progressives of 2005
It is hard to complain about a year that began with George Bush bragging about spending the "political capital" he felt he had earned with his dubious reelection and ended with the president drowning in the Nixonian depths of public disapproval.

But the circumstance didn't just get better.

A handful of elected officials, activist groups and courageous citizens bent the arc of history toward justice.

Here are this one columnist's picks for the Most Valuable Progressives of 2005:

MVP -- U.S. Senate:
[snip]
. . . there's no question that Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold was the essential senator of 2005. He was the first member of the chamber to call for a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq -- a stance that initially was ridiculed but ultimately drew support from many of Feingold's fellow Democrats and even a few Republicans. And he ended the year by forging a bipartisan coalition that beat back the Bush administration's demand for the long-term extension of the Patriot Act, scoring one of the most significant wins for civil liberties that Congress has seen in years.

MVP -- U.S. House:
[snip]
. . . the essential member of the House in 2005 was Michigan Democrat John Conyers, the ranking member of his party on the Judiciary Committee. No one used their bully pulpit better in 2005 than Conyers, who gathered damning information about electoral irregularities in the 2004 Ohio presidential voting and then led the challenge to the certification of the results, held hearings on the Downing Street Memo's revelations regarding the Bush administration's doctoring of pre-war intelligence, and ended the year by moving resolutions to censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney for lying to Congress and the American people -- and to set up a committee to examine the issue of impeachment.

MVP -- Executive Branch:

Yes, there was one. It's Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the retired U.S. Army colonel who served as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell until Powell exited the State Department in January, 2005. After leaving his position, Wilkerson began revealing the dark secrets of the Bush-Cheney interregnum, telling a New America Foundation gathering in October that during his years in the administration: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." Wilkerson warned that, with "a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either," the country is headed in an exceptionally dangerous direction.
[snip]

There's lots more at the link. Enjoy - and may 2006 bring even more Progress and heroics than did 2005! (After all, there's an awful lot of ground to be made up.)

Holinesia??

Whoa! Is this like what old Rip van experienced? Where have I (or you) been? The last thing I remember is a lot of colored lights and evergreen boughs, crowds and long lines of crabby people, a mere sip of eggnog, and then it's a big blank.

I'm trying to get back to a state of something like normality and gain some understanding why so much of the news has a sort of Inquisition flavor to it. But I'm pleased to find humor still exists and that it's still apparently possible to achieve celeb status by parroting the behavior of our appointed ruler, err non-elected president. You probably can't imagine from my boyish charm, but I'm actually old enough to remember when long-playing records were made mocking the Kennedys (during that brief innocent fling we shared). I think there was a "van" involved that time too (that's enough coincidence to cause suspicion - whatever we do, let's not set the CIA or NSA on it though). Or maybe it's van Cliburn I'm thinking of. Wish there was a faster antidote for this holidaria.

Anyway, while I try to work out why this keyboard has a non-alphabetical order to it, try a taste of this:

Tacoma News Tribune
Rep. Brian Baird, with his wicked impersonation of President Bush, arguably is the funniest of [all the comical congresspeople]. Earlier this year, he claimed the title of “Funniest Celebrity in Washington” at a charity event competition.

The Vancouver Democrat is on a roll. First, he tosses off a few one-liners, capturing the president’s voice, mannerisms, cadence and inflection:

• “Saddam Hussein has escaped. It seems someone put him in a lockbox with Social Security.”

• “We have created 10 million jobs. They’re in India and China, but I am proud of it.”

• “Last time, Democrats said I stole the election. This time I’m going to buy it for $250 million.”

[snip]

This year we are going to launch a lot of operations. We’re doing that because you in the press will print anything if we call it operations. We are launching Operation Simplified Grammar. Last year it was Operation Simplified Spelling.

We took unnecessary letters out of certain words, like agriculture used to have two R’s in it. It’s got one now. Terrorist has one R in it. It used to have two. This year we are taking the verb ‘are’ out of the English language because there is way too many rules in the English language.

[snip]