I just tumbled onto an awesome liberal/progressive blog.

Image from thepeoplesview.net

New to me, anyway. It’s called The People’s View. Great stuff. The “About” page impressed me a lot. Here’s an excerpt:

The People’s View is primarily a political blog, published by Spandan Chakrabarti (that would be me). I have been participating in online and offline liberal activism since 2003, when Gov. Howard Dean ran for president. I am a proud liberal and proud American who believes in pragmatic solutions.

The word “view” in the name of this site is not meant to define “opinion.” For any blog or blogger to claim to represent “the people’s” opinion would be foolish. The word view here is view as in a “bird’s eye view” – in other words, perspective. Our goal is to analyze issues with the primary perspective of how totalities policies affect ordinary people, and what it means from that view, or perspective.

This blog is devoted to examining issues from a liberal perspective, on factual bases and on fair analysis. This site is also deeply zealous about liberal Democratic activism. At The People’s View, we are committed to giving readers as much additional resources (mostly via links) as possible to educate as well as activate.

If you’ve paid even half-hearted attention to this blog, you know I’m a liberal yellow-dog Democrat. Big time. I’ve voted in every race in every election since 1974, and only once did I ever vote for a Republican (for completely stupid reasons). My friends accuse me of being “embarrassingly liberal,” somewhere to the left of Eleanor Roosevelt. And mind you, that’s from my friends.

By the way: I embrace the term “liberal.” It is what I am, and it is what it is. The term “progressive” is fine for some, and it has a great history behind it, but it seems like weaksauce compared to “liberal.” And my New-Deal-era grandma dubbed me a “yellow-dog Democrat.” She said it’s someone who would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican. With that one regretted deviation, that indeed is me.

But about eight years ago William Pitt, one of my favorite political writers, wrote a blog post called “I Hate Liberals.” Here are some excerpts from William’s post:

It’s funny. Find me a liberal cause and I’m probably behind it.

Find me a cause, a policy initiative, a white paper, an idea, a belief, a theory or a protest that stems from the liberal philosophy. Chances are huge I’m on your side.

But man. Man o man. I hate liberals.

Liberals complain. They go to meetings with other liberals and listen to speeches filled with facts they knew before they got there, and complain to the person sitting next to them who already knows what they know and is ready to rock’n’roll with their own complaining.

All too often, liberals would rather complain and feel good about themselves than choke down the hard stones that sometimes have to be swallowed when seeking a solution that might actually work.

Liberals like to fight. They get into a room, either real or electronic, and wind up in huge, epic arguments about this or that while skating past the fact that the person they are arguing with and insulting agrees with about 90% of what they agree with. They forget the old rule: If you find yourself screaming in rage at someone who agrees with 90% of what you agree with, you might just be a zealot and therefore no good to anyone but yourself.

I’m a liberal. I believe in the cause, the causes, the policy ideas. We ran the country for years once upon a time while winning World War II and salvaging the national economy by coming up with ways to help the helpless. Imagine it. The things we can do for the good of this country and the world positively boggle the mind.

But I hate liberals, because they won’t let that happen. They make me absolutely crazy.

This new blog puts me in mind of that William’s post from way back when. The other day Spandan posted a column addressing who he calls “the Professional Left,” and taking them to task. Some excerpts:

First of all, election day was a rousing victory for the President. It was a rebuke against ideological purity, and a mandate for pragmatism. The President campaigned on both increasing taxes on the wealthy and doing what he called modest adjustments to entitlement programs to make them solvent for the foreseeable future. The President has the credibility to do it: I point you back to health care reform, where the president staved nearly a trillion in costs from Medicare while adding to its benefits. Second, it appears that the ideologues have stuck their fingers in their ears when the President – and every Democratic leader and White House representative, including David Plouffe – have insisted that taxes on the rich are going up, period.

Let me make this clear: this President’s record has been to expand benefits under the social safety net programs while reducing cost, while the Professional Left’s record has consisted of trying to pull him off from doing things that resulted in those expansions and cost savings. When you look at the facts, it isn’t exactly a puzzle as to who you should trust to protect and defend them. I have no doubt that should there be entitlement reform (and yes, it’s time liberals stopped seeing that phrase and having heart attacks) in the efforts to avoid the fiscal cliff, you can count on President Obama to ensure that those reforms strengthen those programs.

President Obama is not going to “cut” Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. President Obama has always protected those cornerstones of American society, and he will do it again. If you want to strengthen those programs, and make sure they are there for posterity, what you need to do is what Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers told everyone on the Left to do: have this President’s back. Focus your energy on Congress.

If you want to know who will stick by you when the going gets rough, look at the man who survived withering attacks from the Right and the ideologue Left to do the right thing for the country time and again. Look to those who have stuck by him.

This blog is talking my language. Check it out.