Ken - I would suggest that you're underestimating the legitimacy that Heritage has accrued (through deception, of course) in the minds of most people. Not us, clearly, but I suspect I would get very queasy, very quickly, looking at the numbers of Democrats who consider Heritage legit, due to its ubiquitousness.

Don't play this game - the GOP and conservatives, and the GOP's policies and modern conservatism, are synonymous.

"Why, if you dig a little bit around the NDN, or its parent, the DLC, you'll hear the same songs, the only difference is that they're sung in a minor key."

There's a big difference between the NDN and DLC, and it's that Simon is, first and foremost, a partisan, while Al From, Bruce Reed, et. al., are first and foremost idealogues (Ed Kilgore, Marshall Wittman, and other good-minded people at the DLC are not, but the boys in charge are).

The DLC is a highly problematic organization, and one that I could rant about for days, but don't construct these multiple bridge of moral equivalency between groups that are quite clearly trying to undermine Democratic policies and ideals - Mercatus with Social Security - and those that are, in a real way, trying to provide some partisan backbone within the Democratic Party (i.e., Simon and NDN - and even, in the case of Social Security, the DLC).

The Democratic party has to make a choice between two fundamentally opposed economic belief systems. Any Democratic staffer or Congressperson who attends Mercatus events is signaling that they have made their choice in favor of corporate economic ideology and against the interests of the middle class and working class.

The labels don't matter, the intent does. The effor to privatize Social Security is only the tip of the iceberg of the class warfare being waged against working Americans.

As much as I disagree with several of the comments on Mercatus, I enjoy reading people's viewpoints that are different from my own.    

Don't you have anything constructive to say?  Or is destructive your mantra?  

Worst of all the progressive movement has slept for 30 years--- a generation. During that generation they've infiltrated academia. Their retrograde ideas (and goals) have been spoon fed to impressionable undergrads. Now some of those undergrads have gone on to begin dictating the intellectual underpinings of rightwing policy proposals.

I laughed when pundits suggested that the "youth vote" would save Kerry's candidacy. They're living in the past. Probably half the youth vote today is trending rightwing because that's what they've been inculcated with. (A good portion of the remainder are apolitical. They go where the best looking women hang and what seems to be best for their careers. Guess who has both assets these days.)

It's analogous to the U.S. maintaining absolute isolationism and looking inward until the Nazis had taken over or co-opted everything including Canada and Mexico. Not to mention letting a burgeoning Bundesbond movement flourish at home.

We've got to ring the warning bell and slap around   Dems like Roemer who claim to be progressive but help further the rightwing agenda.