Quote of the Day from the Rude Pundit, on how we ought to be spending our summer:

If this was a real democracy, we’d be out in the streets shutting the nation down until Bush resigned, taking Cheney with him. The unions would call for general strikes, as would immigrant rights groups, poverty groups, families of soldiers. All seventy percent of us. Clogging the cities and towns, demanding that we take back the country from the people who want to harm us.

But this is not a real democracy. It is a group of geographically tied together people with pretense to democracy, fearful of actual power because it means actual responsibility for themselves, for each other.

Imagine what we might be able to do if we took responsibility for the fact that we—collectively, the American polity—put Bush and Cheney there, and if we truly believed it was now our duty to take them out, rather than to grit our teeth and wait them out.