A few weeks ago, I appeared at an event with Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont (D) to discuss my new book Hostile Takeover in New Haven. Soon after, I was asked by the Hartford Courant - Connecticut's biggest paper - to write an op-ed about the upcoming Democratic Senate primary between Lamont and incumbent Joe Lieberman, which the paper printed in today's Sunday edition. You can read it here.

The basic point in this piece is simple: Joe Lieberman has become a part of the Establishment that has perpetrated a hostile takeover of our government, and the upcoming primary is a way for voters in Connecticut to fight the hostile takeover and take their government back.

Some Washington operatives have whined and cried about Lieberman getting a primary. They seem to think that Democrats should never be held accountable, even when they sell out their constituents. But that's antithetical to what democracy is supposed to be about. When a U.S. Senator starts using their Senate seat to advocate policies that only a small cadre of Washington insiders supports - policies that the vast majority of the public opposes - voters should take back the Senate seat that they own and hand it over to someone else. Many Senators think their Senate seats are their property - they are not. They are the property of the people. And no matter how nice or friendly they may be, when they start using the power the people gave them to push policies that the people fundamentally oppose, it means they've lost touch and gone Washington in the worst way.

Lieberman - who the media inaccurately portrays as a "centrist" - is the most high-profile example of a Senator who has gone Washington, and who represents not the center - but the positions of a tiny minority of Washington insiders who have marginalized the American people from its political process. As the op-ed points out, he now regularly uses Connecticut's Senate seat to push policies that makes lobbyists and insiders in Washington happy, but that Connecticut and the American public clearly oppose. He may be a nice guy, but we live in a democracy where niceness is supposed to come second to positions and policy in elections.

This dynamic, of course, is playing out in other races as well. As just one example, here in Montana, Senate Democratic nominee Jon Tester (D) is making the powerful point that incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns (R) has totally lost touch. Burns is the guy who actually said "most [people without health care] elect to be uninsured" even as reports from his own state's government noted that "being uninsured [in Montana] is not voluntary, with 90 percent of the uninsured reporting being unable to buy health insurance after paying for food, clothing, and shelter." Burns - like Lieberman - is a Senator who has become so immersed in Washington's corrupt culture, he thinks there's nothing wrong with using the people's Senate seat to push policies that the people oppose.

Again, these people may or may not be nice, or humorous or folksly or back-slapping - that's not the point. At the end of the day, elections are about whether the incumbent in office is representing the people in the way they vote in Congress, and in the way they use their office's platform to educate the public about what's going on in our political system.

I wrote Hostile Takeover to try to force the political Establishment to start addressing the critical economic issues and the political corruption that surrounds them. The book is meant to help good people - whether activists, candidates, or just interested citizens - start fighting back. The Connecticut primary is shaping up to be a place where voters will finally have the chance to fight back against the hostile takeover at the polls. It is shaping up to be an exercise in what democracy is supposed to be all about: throwing out incumbents who ignore the will of the people.

UPDATE: I hadn't seen this earlier - but the Hartford Courant also ran a piece defending Lieberman, authored by the DLC's Marshall Wittman and Steven J. Nider. Wittman is a former top Republican operative and Christian Coalition official, while Nider was one of the major "Democratic" apologists for the Iraq War. They predictably regurgitate the fallacy that Lieberman is a "centrist" - and then these two well-known right-wingers from Washington, D.C. proceed to try to lecture Connecticut Democratic primary voters about how Joe Lieberman is supposedly the reincarnation of John F. Kennedy.

I swear - sometimes it is really just incredibly amazing how arrogant these out-of-touch, Beltway-insulated Establishment apologists are, how stupid they think the public is - and how they are willing to embarrass themselves by so publicly expressing those traits in print. But what's perhaps even more incredible is how Lieberman's most public defenders in his Democratic primary race are a top GOP operative/former Christian Coalition official and another guy who worked to deflate Democratic Party opposition to the Iraq War. That should tell Democratic primary voters everything they need to know about who Joe Lieberman really works for. It should also raise the very real question: is this the first public statement of Joe Lieberman's decision to leave the Democratic Party before the primary happens and run as an independent, so as to avoid being embarrassed at the polls? After all, the Cook Report recently noted that Lieberman "vowed" to run as an independent - is this what this op-ed is all about?

bumped - Matt

Late last night, my publisher received word that my new book Hostile Takeover will hit the July 9th New York Times Bestseller List. As the author of the book, I am obviously excited - getting onto this list is about the hardest thing to do in the book world. But the real reason I am pumped is because this means the book's message is really getting out there. And, more generally, Hostile Takeover getting on the list is the latest sign that progressive writers, authors and bloggers of all kinds are becoming increasingly influential in shaping the political debate in this country.

For years, the conservative movement has dominated the book world, and has used that dominance to pollute America's political discourse with all sorts of lies, myths and half-truths. These right-wing shills - people like John Stossel and Ann Coulter - have parlayed the support they have gotten from book buyers into even bigger platforms in magazines, as syndicated newspaper columnists, and as network news "reporters." As a result, we now live in a country where few in the media/political Establishment think twice when, for instance, our Congress uses its precious time to hold a debate about flag burning while hundreds of Americans are dying each week from problems our politicians have the power to solve.

Well, I'll admit it - even though the Colbert Report is a comedy show, I was nervous about trying to go toe-to-toe with Stephen Colbert this week in a discussion about my new book Hostile Takeover. But I think I did my best to fight him off and deliver some of the key points that I wrote about. He's a tough host, and his satire can make him even tougher - just ask some of the guests he's cut down to size in the past. But he's terrifically incisive, and a genuinely nice guy off-air. It's actually amazing how different his bombastic bloviating on-air character is from the real guy. If you missed the show and are interested, Atrios was kind enough to post the clip for folks to view. Check out the video here - and let me know how you think I handled it.

The Washinton Post today reviewed Hostile Takeover. The piece notes that "The concept behind Hostile Takeover is praiseworthy," says the book "is filled with facts along with the invective" and says "From the first chapter, no one will have any doubt that Sirota is no fan of lawmakers and regulators who in his view have been bought off or who have sold out." Reviewer Jeff Birnbaum then goes on to huff and puff about how awful it is that politics has become filled with such outrage and how the influence of Big Money in Washington supposedly isn't a black-and-white affair. His message is pretty clear, and pretty predictable coming from the Establishment: the public should just shut up and realize that the way things work in politics are way too complicated for ordinary citizens to understand and get angry about.

It's easy to forget what Supreme Court nomination fights really mean once they are over. They come along every few years, there's a whole media circus around them that focuses only on a very few hot-button social issues, and then, typically after Democrats roll over and die, there's little - if any - recollection of what it all meant, except in the few cases where the hot-button social issues actually come before the court, and they don't usually come up for years, so by that point, everyone has long forgotten which President or political party was responsible for the nominations that swung the court.

What gets buried in this cycle, of course, is the fact that the Supreme Court exerts itself most forcefully on the key financial and corporate power issues - the issues that engineer who are winners and who are losers in America's economy.

In my new book Hostile Takeover, I spend a good deal of time showing how ultra-conservative right-wingers have hijacked the terms "centrist" and "mainstream" and disconnected them from what's actually "centrist" and "mainstream" among the public. This is no small matter (and a topic I have focused on before) - it is a hugely important and powerful linguistic weapon deviously employed by the most destructive forces. That's right - today in Washington, positions that are way to the right of where the American public stands are regularly called "centrist" or "mainstream." That's no accident - it is a deliberate strategy employed by Big Money interests that run the Establishment to effectively marginalize the vast majority of the population from its own political debate and political system. It is, in short, a hostile takeover not just of our government, but of political discourse itself.

How this semantic strategy legitimates right-wing positions and politicians can best be seen in looking at Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), a man incessantly billed by the Washington media - and himself - as a "centrist." In fact, Lieberman's name has become so synonymous with Washington's propagandistic definition of "centrism" that some of the most insulated Establishment spokespeople are using the term in a pathetic attempt to defend him from grassroots primary challenger Ned Lamont (D).

The Financial Times this week published a piece about whether there is a serious anti-Hillary Clinton movement brewing inside the Democratic Party that could threaten her 2008 prospects. I'm not so sure there is a concerted effort to oppose Sen. Clinton as much as there is a new movement brewing to support candidates who are serious about standing up for ordinary citizens and fighting the hostile takeover of our government by Big Money interests.

There are a lot of Democratic operatives in Washington who bemoan the obsessive attacks on Clinton by the right - attacks motivated by a sick form of hatred of her personally that I just don't understand. That said, if Clinton becomes a target of populist and progressive Democrats, it will not be because of such disgusting personal hatred, but instead because of serious policy concerns about how she would behave as President. Lately, she has seemed all too happy to embrace ultra-right-wing zealots and parrot Bush talking points on the Iraq War - all while refusing to use her national platform to challenge the Big Money interests that run Washington.

On that last point, the Financial Times tells us why we shouldn't be shocked by that. "Mrs. Clinton has courted corporate America, raising $40 million since 2001," the paper notes. "Lawyers are the biggest single donors, but her two top individual contributors are Metropolitan Life and Goldman Sachs." That may explain why, at a time of strapped budgets, she recently appeared at a high-profile groundbreaking ceremony to hand over millions of dollars of taxpayer-backed loans to Goldman Sachs to help the already wealthy company build a palatial new headquarters in Manhattan. It may explain more generally why she has been using her platform to push flashy, clearly-calculating proposals to ban flag burning instead of proposals to better regulate Big Money interests that are running roughshod over society.

As the Financial Times noted in its piece, I don't think there is a full-on "anti-Hillary" movement yet. And let's be clear - I am not a reflexive Hillary Clinton hater, and I've praised her in the past. But here's the thing: all the talk by out-of-touch Beltway pundits about Clinton supposedly representing the "liberal" or "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party is increasingly being shown to be the farce that it is thanks to Clinton's recent behavior. That's why I've also publicly criticized her recently. And if she continues down this path, I don't think Democrats or progressives should - or will - take it sitting down by simply letting her and her giant corporate-funded warchest walk to the 2008 presidential nomination.

From the diaries--Chris
There are many reasons to be optimistic these days if you are a progressive. A look accross 2006's campaign landscape shows that our movement is no longer theoretical - it is very real, and increasing in power every single day. But as the Denver Post today notes in a piece about our growing movement, progressives also face stiff opposition in the form of a corrupt political Establishment desperate to preserve the status quo. The confrontation brewing between this new movement and the Establishment is not to be downplayed - it is escalating, and it will have profound results that go far beyond just one election.

The Denver Post notes that those defending the status quo are, to be sure, entrenched. "Political corruption comes in two varieties," the Post notes. "There are brazen payoffs, and then there is a kind of gooey rot: the venal abandonment of principles, spurred by the favors of corporate lobbyists and the need for campaign cash." Ultimately, "All but the toughest pols and pundits get seduced, and over time, the party establishment starts to stipulate: globalization is a blessing, free trade is sacred, billionaires need tax breaks, job loss is inevitable, workers are expendable, wages will decline, the war in Iraq is necessary."

The Post is absolutely right - there is a "gooey rot." But it is being challenged everywhere you look. Though both parties' Beltway-based political operatives and consultants have tried to downplay what's going on throughout the heartland, we can see the tell-tale signs of a true progressive populist movement emerging - one that is not just a wing of the Democratic Party Establishment in Washington, but an actual movemen  bubbling up from outside the Beltway, based on real conviction, and serious about seizing power.