Odds & Ends

100 Years of The Progressive
I'm just back from a wonderful weekend in Madison, WI, celebrating 100 years of The Progressive magazine.  It was everything I expected and more.  How's this for a lineup?  Howard Zinn, Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Amy Goodman, Delores Huerta, Naomi Klein, Jim Hightower, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Katha Pollitt, John Nichols, Bob McChesney, Will Durst, and Robert Redford.  And the whole thing was held together by the unassuming miracle worker Matt Rothschild, Progressive editor.  Extended thoughts (and pics) on the conference later this week.  For now, I'll just say that it was a great weekend with wonderful people, and I came away from it with my spiritual tanks refilled to the brim and my physical energy supply running on empty—just the way they should be after a good weekend house party.

Stuff I learned on the trip (unrelated to the conference content)

First of all, I learned that my much-loved new do-everything smartphone has a seriously crappy camera.  The shot on the left is John Nichols.  Nice, huh?  Better ones of Zinn and Redford, but not very.  Next time I take the Nikon.

Then there were the roads.  Somebody please tell Pat Quinn that when Illinois gets that extra highway money from the stimulus, he needs to make sure not one penny gets diverted to anything but repairing our interstate highways!  There are holes in I-39 between Bloomington and Rockford you could lose a Mini Cooper in, and there are no signs, no orange cones, no warnings—just gigantic holes in the pavement, and you're on your own, thank you very much.

My Prius is not my Saab.  And that’s a subject for another diary or two (one on stupid things about the Prius, and one on the auto industry).

There are crazy people and assholes on the left as well as the right.  The right has no monopoly on this one.  The most obnoxious were the single-issue folks who used public discussion time to push their agenda, regardless of the topic.  But for me the most annoying were the self-absorbed (and they're at every conference) who spent the entire presentation time formulating their clever little statement, totally missing that the speaker(s) had just spent 20 minutes either supporting the point in great detail or blowing it out of the water. 

There is sadness in seeing movement heroes from one's own salad days suffering the physical deterioration of age.  Howard Zinn, 24 years my senior, will be 87 on his next birthday, and it shows.  But, oh, the mind!  If I were 1/10 as sharp at 63 as Zinn at 87, I'd still be grateful for the intelligence boost.


Replacing David Souter
They say that Team Obama has been thinking about a replacement for Souter since even before the primaries.  Obama, himself, has been quoted as saying that Souter is an example of the kind of Justice he would like to appoint.  Me?  Not so much.  Souter certainly has been better than we expected when he was appointed, but he's sure not my idea of the kind of forward-thinking progressive that I'd be looking for to help restore what Rehnquist and Roberts and the Scalia-Thomas ideology have done to the SCOTUS.  I'm prepared to be disappointed by the appointment.  But I'm also aware of the long history of ideological surprises that have followed Supreme Court appointments.  What progressive Senator gleefully would have voted to approve nominee Earl Warren in 1963?  We'll see.