You may have heard about this:

A Chicago pastor said Sunday that it was worth living in a tent on the icy roof of an abandoned motel for three months to draw attention to gun violence, despite the long hours of loneliness and cold winter nights punctuated by the pop of gunfire.

The Rev. Corey Brooks ended his 94-day vigil on Friday after a $100,000 donation from movie mogul Tyler Perry put him over the top in his goal to raise $450,000 to buy and demolish the dilapidated Super Motel on Chicago’s South Side. The building had become a haven for prostitution and drug dealing. Now, Brooks is seeking to raise money to build a community center on the site.

And you may have heard about this:

An activist coalition affiliated with Occupy Chicago on Monday launched a campaign against the harsh fines and restrictions Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced for the upcoming G8 and NATO summits in the city in May.

[...]

The campaign arrives almost one week after activists applying for demonstration permits allowing them to legally demonstrate against the upcoming summits called the requirements outlined in Emanuel’s ordinances “ridiculously burdensome” for protesters.

In December, Emanuel announced that the fine for resisting a police officer would be doubled from its current range of $25 to $500 to $200 to $1,000. The mayor’s ordinance also restricted the hours of public parks, playgrounds and beaches in accordance with the Chicago Park District’s hours of operation. A second ordinance applying to the protests also, among other changes, requires organizers to provide a parade marshal of their own for every 100 demonstration participants.

Emanuel came under criticism as activists pointed out that new requirements initially said to only temporarily apply to the May summits would be the new law of the land in Chicago. The mayor, in response, claimed that he had misspoke and admitted that the new fines and requirements would, indeed, be permanent.

So, what are the differences between the two events? Read the rest of this entry →

Did Dan Froomkin sneak into the Washington Post building the other night and drop some truth serum into Matlock’s Metamucil? Because that’s the only way I can envision David Broder writing a column that gets so much right (by Broderian standards) for a change (emphases mine):

In the space of 10 days, thanks in no small part to my own newspaper, the president of the United States has been portrayed as a weakling and a chronic screw-up who is wrecking his administration despite everything that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel can do to make things right.

This remarkable fiction began unfolding on Feb. 21 in the Sunday column of my friend Dana Milbank who wrote that "Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter," i.e., a one-term failure.

Broder then details all the pieces he’s noticed in the WaPo recently that originated from the pro-Rahm spin machine — and points out that this effort to protect Emanuel is hurting the very president Emanuel’s supposed to be serving.

Now, there has been plenty of criticism of Rahm Emanuel lately. But this is different.

This is the anti-DFH doing it this time. This is Mister Conventional Beltway Wisdom Boiled Down To Its Essence doing it this time.

That’s what makes it so shocking — and so consequential.

Obama may have had his BlackBerry taken away, but he still reads the hometown rag. He, who strives so hard to please and placate the purveyors of Conventional Beltway Wisdom, of whom Broder is the acknowledged Dean, cannot have failed to see this — or hear about it.

Whoever in Rahm’s press unit that was tasked with schmoozing the Dean of the White House Press Corps seems to have botched their mission. That would make this a rare failure for it — after all, they successfully smeared Martha Coakley, repeatedly. She had been doing just fine until she was made to back the Rahm-approved Senate HCR bill, and then she got shivved by Rahm’s Raiders when she most needed a helping hand — apparently so she and not they would take the fall and the blame.

Broder’s rejection of the full-court schmooze stands out in high-relief contrast to the emanations of those (like TNR’s Noam Scheiber) who fell for it hook, line and sinker. He’s actually calling out the Rahm machine — and who knows? Maybe this time Rahm will find that he can no longer dodge accountability by hiding from his current boss the way he hid from Bill Clinton.

The Conventional Wisdom, eagerly promoted by a conventional media that keeps pushing the frames of discussion inexorably toward fascism and right-wingery, holds that the Democratic loss of Congress in 1994 — an event so devastating to the party that it’s typically referred to as simply "1994" in much the same way that Bin Laden’s attacks on the US are referred to as simply "9/11" — was caused by Bill Clinton’s and the Democratic Congress’ pushing too far leftward: Raising taxes, trying to reform health care, yadda yadda yadda. This take on 1994 is being pushed very hard right now, particularly by Republicans and their conservative Dem Blue Dogs buddies, and other fellow travelers looking to kill meaningful health care reform and replace it with Co-Ops and Triggers, alive, alive-oh.

What this airbrushes out of the picture are a few key details:

– The Democrats were in the midst of the House Post Office Scandal, which ultimately took Dan Rostenkowski from the Speaker’sHouse Ways and Means chair to a jail cell [correction: Rostenkowski was Chiar of the House Ways and Means Committee, not Speaker, in 1994. At other times, the Representative was Chair of the House Democratic Caucus and Deputy Majority Whip. (h/t Mimir)]. (Ironically, he was busted for doing things that not only were penny-ante offenses, but had been perfectly legal up until recently; even Republican congressman Bill Frenzel of Minnesota said as much. Nevertheless, the media made a bigger deal out of this than they did out of Iran-Contra.)

– The Democratic base was further demoralized by the determination of the Clinton Administration to act in accordance with pro-corporate DLC, Blue Dog, Third Way principles that required them to screw their base and even Democratic legislators over issues such as "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" and most especially with the infamous "North American Free Trade Agreement", aka NAFTA — which screwed and screws both American and Mexican workers by playing them against each other to keep their wages low while American corporations make money from both groups.

And guess who was the architect and chief cheerleader for NAFTA? Just guess. (Hint: It’s the same guy who’s been allowing the Blue Dogs — many of whom he personally helped elect and who he protects above all else — to screw us on health care reform and other issues.)

That’s right: Rahm Emanuel.

The bottom line: Rahm helped cause 1994, but with the TradMed’s and Villagers’ aid successfully pinned the blame on the Democratic base for pushing Clinton to be too "liberal". Now he’s trying it again — but this time, there’s a loud and active faction in the new media that’s working to correct the record, and to keep him from screwing us yet again to make his corporate buddies happy.

Ironically enough, Rahm himself says that 1994 happened in part because Bill Clinton didn’t do what he was elected to do. In 2008, we elected Barack Obama on his campaign promises to reform health care, get us out of Iraq, and shut down Gitmo, among other things — and Rahm has been one of the key forces, if not the key force, telling Obama to "go slow" on all of these promises.

Go out and spread the word — via letters to the editor, e-mails, and the Spotlight function on posts that you like. Let’s show Rahm that it’s only 1994 again if he doesn’t stop what he’s doing now.