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The comparison of Ronald Reagan's speech in West Berlin with John Kennedy's speech 25 years earlier is ahistorical and completely bogus. It's a complete rightwing fabrication that's swallowed whole by the MSM.

NPR Host, Melissa Block brings up the myth in this evening's 'All Things Considered' only to be swathed down by SUNY Buffalo Prof. Andreas Daum who actually knows something about the two events.

All of West Berlin turned out to hear Kennedy. It was a speech of historic proportions that served to mark an era. It had an extraordinary effect on all who participated. You only had to ask Berliners about this as I repeatedly did while I was living there during the 1980's.

The visit by Ronald Reagan on the other hand was a completely orchestrated event with maybe 20 thousand "hand-picked" participants, as the Professor puts it. Many parts of the city were in complete lock-down by the police to prevent the kind of civil disturbances that had erupted during Reagan's earlier visit in 1982.

The truth is, most Berliners thought of Ronald Reagan much in the same way they now think of George Bush. He was no liberator -- except in the minds of his modern-day partisan defenders who are hell-bent on re-writing history. The only affect his visit had on Berliners at the time was relief to see him go.

It's ironic that NPR points to the "legend" on its site of John Kennedy calling himself a jelly donut. Yet it doesn't realize that it's indulging in a historical fiction of equal proportions which it uses as the premise no less of its entire segment.

In any case, the segment closes with Melissa Block wondering what few words in German Barack Obama might tell the Berliners. I think I'd suggest something we haven't heard from a Leader of the Free World since George Bush took the oath of office:

"Wir Kommen als Freunde..."

On the anticipated reception of Obama in Europe:

It's not only Obama's youth, eloquence and energy that have stolen hearts across the Atlantic. For Europeans, there have always been two Americas: one of cynicism, big business and bullying aggression, another of freedom, fairness and nothing-is-impossible dynamism.

If President Bush has been seen as the embodiment of that first America, Obama has raised expectations of a chance for the nation to redeem itself in the role that — at various times through history — Europe has loved, respected and relied upon. [Matt Moore and Melissa Eddy, "Obamamania in full flight ahead of tour of Europe", AP]

Dan Johnson Weinburger makes the case for a ConCon but I remain unconvinced. As he portrays it, it's all upside and no downside. If there are any doubts, Dan argues, it's ultimately "we the citizens" who are in the driver's seat.

I think Dan is wrong. I don't think it's "we the citizens" who'll be in the driver's seat. I think it'll just be that tiny minority of our population who get off on the minutiae of government. Most people have better things to do.

The whole purpose of representative government is that you elect people who then go on and work out the details. You re-visit your decision every two or four years. You even have the right, should you so choose, to keep on sending the same people to represent you year after year free of any term limit.

Advocates of initiative, recall and term limits call their policies extensions of democracy. But in fact what they're doing is exposing the wrong parts of the process to popular approval. It guarantees low turnout or decisions based on whatever special interest has the bigger advertising budget.

Dan calls this the "politics of fear versus the politics of hope". I would call it the politics of bad versus the politics of worse.

The good people over at Wal-Mart Watch had an "unofficial" contest to redesign the Wal-Mart Logo.

Results are in...

The Sun-Times writes:

CTA L cars could become more like cattle cars if the transit agency goes ahead with plans to remove seats on some L cars in the next few months to squeeze in all the riders leaving their cars home and turning to mass transit.

What's next? Flatbed CTA buses?

The guy's got talent. From Marc Ambinder:

Obama, who never managed so much as a newsstand, has turned out to be a fairly remarkable leader of a what's becoming a billion dollar enterprise.

Where are all these wonderful people coming from? Yet again we had a great Saloon Democrats Session with political opinions running all over the map. All I can say is more of the same next week!

It's one thing to say advertising is down but was that the best moment to lay another $13 billion in debt on the thing? You don't throw an anchor to a man barely threading water.

Maybe the corporate model is no longer right for local media. It seems like everyone is just cashing out and leaving behind a bunch of smoking wrecks. Maybe it's back to mom-and-pop.

If you're like me, you've just about had it with how Dems are portrayed in the Media. The closer we get to the election, the more of a feeding frenzy this is going to become.

Since none of us are ever likely to go out and buy our own media/broadcast/radio/tv/newspaper company, it's important to develop ways of responding that give us at least a chance of being heard.

That's precisely what the Obama people have done with www.fightthesmears.com and the Obama Action Wire:

Join the Obama Action Wire to push back against negative or false comments. Receive calls to action and breaking news to share with your personal network of contacts.

More here...

Because every good crisis deserves a name:

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

Oddly enough, the title of E.J. Dionne's piece is, "Capitalism's Reality Check" in WaPo and "The Death of Reaganomics" at Truthdig. I think I prefer the latter.