Highlights three statewide groups laying foundation for a bottom-up, democratic, progressive movement: the Virginia Organizing Project, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and Maine People’s Alliance.

On Friday, April 30, 2010, Bill Moyers broadcast his final program of the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. This diary is a thank you for all of the years of insights that Bill Moyers has provided to American citizens.

If there’s a social program left standing in the moonscape Obama’s Hamilton Project masters inflicted on America, Greenstone and the Project are there to ensure Obama nukes it.

If someone you care deeply about depends on Social Security – or will depend on Social Security – call them up today and tell them you love them. Because Team Obama has targeted Social Security…and your loved ones are just the MOTU’s version of collateral damage.

Deaths you can believe in, right?

Michael Moore has a witty, eloquent column up over at the Huffington Post in which he challenges Barack Obama to replace Rahm Emanuel with Michael Moore. It’s a funny post and digs both Obama and Rahm. But at its base there is a misperception by Moore: Obama isn’t hostage to the right, hostage to Rahm, he’s a willing partner.

At least Bill Moyers still pays attention to single payer.

It’s clear that Obama’s strategy for 2010 is to talk, but not act, like a populist.

It’s been a full year since Israel unleashed ‘Operation Cast Lead’ against the people of Gaza, leaving 1,400 dead (mostly civilians), and the entire place in complete ruins. Israel’s contention all along has been that this annihilation of Gaza’s civilians and infrastructure was merely collateral damage.

And then Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine exposes its ugly head to Richard Goldstone …

Avatar, Joseph Campbell & you. What myth do you believe in? Every heard the Bill Moyers interviews of Joseph Campbell? If Joe was alive today he would be able to teach Intro to Mythology to his kids at Sarah Lawrence College using Avatar.

Have we become too comfortable, sitting behind our keyboards and silently typing away our anger? Has the progressive movement embraced the wonderful technology of the internet at the expense of real world activism and organizing?

I’m afraid this might be so. And it’s time to turn that around. On Bill Moyer’s Journal this past Friday, economist Robert Kuttner brought up a striking fact that is missing from nearly all of the plethora of analyses – ranging from Obamapologist to Obama hater to everything in between – that I’ve seen of this presidency:

ROBERT KUTTNER: The other thing that’s missing, if you compare him with Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, the other thing that’s missing is a social movement. In all of these great periods of transformation, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president, where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson. It describes the abolitionists and Lincoln. It describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. Where’s the movement?

Bill Moyers hosted an interesting conversation the other day among Robert Kuttner, Matt Taibbi, and himself about health care reform, the performance of the Administration to this point, and the relations of progressives with the President. The conversation focused in part on how Taibbi and Kuttner would vote on the Senate’s pending legislation, if it were up to them. Even though they both agreed very closely on the shortcomings of the Senate’s bill thus far, and also on how far from what’s needed this bill is, they disagreed about what should be done. Matt would vote against the bill, thinks that President Obama, would learn from the defeat, and believes that it ought to be killed; and Bob thinks that progressives ought to hold their noses and vote for it, because the political damage the Administration would suffer if it were defeated is so great, that the Democrats and the President would both be set up for defeat in the next elections, and any opportunity for the President to change direction, and for progressive legislation to succeed in the future, would be gone for many years. So, in short, Bob would support this legislation out of fear of the consequences for the larger political context in which progressive efforts to transform the political system are embedded.