Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Cole Hickman, who was very active in the ASU Young Democrats, is in basic training for the US Army. He has sent letters to Tony Cani, who posts them on his blog, Fear Itself. Expect these to be pretty regular, since basic consists of all that exciting obstacle course stuff you see on the ads, plus long periods of boredom. When my brother was in basic, his DI made all of them take time to write letters. I have no idea where Cole will be going when he is done. Tony has also posted news about former YDAz Veep Vince Enriquez, but news comes from him a little less frequently. But, given that most of it would me “your mom” jokes, maybe it’s for the best.

Former U.S. Representative Sam Coppersmith has a blog called Liberal Desert, which consists of editorials he writes for the East Valley Tribune. I worked as a volunteer in Coppersmith’s 1994 U.S. Senate race against Jon Kyl. Well, we lost, but what Democrat won that year? Coppersmith spent only one term in congress, representing the most conservative district in the state. Matt Salmon was his successor, if that gives you a bit of a clue how conservative. His term in congress was an interesting one. Basically, he was the sort of Democrat that the DLC loved when they were still interesting, before they became yet another whiny pressure group in our party. He was tough on budget issues, but he also looked for programs that were wasteful but environmentally detrimental as well. He managed to get Republican budget hawks (there were some back then, it wasn’t so long ago) together with the environmentalists and managed to kill some programs. This week’s post is an excellent criticism of the Proposition 200 law. He didn’t include this stat in his article, but apparently a grand total of four aliens have been “caught” because of Prop. 200.

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story about the new class of summer interns at the Heritage Foundation. I found out about this article in the &c blog on The New Republic site. &c seemed to be most struck by the fact that one of these New Model Army types voiced her yearning to be a pharmeceutical lobbyist. It really doesn’t suprise me though. Money will always trump ideology for the careerists.

The thing that struck me the most was this:

It is an alternative with few rivals. The Brookings Institution, a centrist group more than 50 years older than Heritage, has no paid interns. Neither does the Progressive Policy Institute, which promotes a centrist version of liberalism. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a premier antipoverty group, has 10 paid interns. People for the American Way, a bulwark of Beltway liberalism, has 40 – but no dorm.

As much as it’s easy to make fun of the conservative geeks that are pictured in the article, you can at least say that the conservative movement is taking youth seriously. I often hear that we on the left don’t have the same cohesive network of think tanks and pressure groups. One of the reasons is that these guys bring in their people early. The young folks are networking before they even have serious careers. It wouldn’t be that hard for Brookings or PPI to do it. Instead, we have these nearly useless wank fests like Camp Wellstone and get our asses kicked.