(Note: I consciously use the word "liberal" instead of "progressive" for reasons that will become clear as this site unfolds.  It is unfortunate that so many have run from the L-word like a Tokyoite from Godzilla, especially to embrace a word like "progressive," which has at its core an implicit denial of the post-peak situation.  But we'll cover that at sometime in the future.  In any case, folks should not be ashamed to call themselves liberal.  We need to reclaim it.)

So where do we find ourselves?  What is our current situation?  We really find ourselves embedded in the center of a series of concentric problem rings, each layer being a broader set of trouble.  Think of it as a kind of Russian nesting doll of catastrophe, without the consolation of pretty folk-detail on each shell.  The tightest circle is the current financial unraveling: the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the upward-creeping and still officially understated unemployment and underemployment figures, the exploding prices of gas, food, health care, housing, and just about everything else that people need to live.  One layer out, we've got budget crises at seemingly every level of polity.  The federal government is being run like a grand vanity press, or a huge game of Monopoly where the banker runs out of money and just goes to the closet and pulls out a couple more games to use their phony money.  State governments are turning to lotteries and casinos to prop up sagging revenues (maybe state-run brothels are next?).  And local governments everywhere find themselves endlessly having to cut programming for schools or jack up already-bloated property taxes.  

As we move to the wider trouble-circles in our model, we start seeing broader-level economic and ecological conditions. When adjusted for inflation, it becomes clear that household income for the majority of Americans has been stagnant or declining since the mid-70s, and that is often with two bread-winners instead of one.  As we have moved to a service economy and unionization has collapsed, wages have been pushed lower and manufacturing has fled to the far corners of the world.  Ecologically, we're starting to hear the rumblings of Peak Oil in the mainstream press, adding to the already impressive suite of slow disasters: global warming, accelerating species extinction, fresh-water depletion, expanding food shortages, the spread of super-pathogens, etc.  

The outermost nesting doll of dilemma is really the entire human project on the planet.  Is the human brain simply too smart for its own good?  Are we so good at reproducing and succeeding as a species that we will end up wiping out the very ecological conditions that gave rise to us in the first place?  Maybe the large brain as it exists in homo sapiens is an evolutionary maladaptation, a biological dead-end, destined to destroy its carrier, or at least render human numbers more compatible with the natural milieu.  

The above list of problems is just a sample, quickly put together.  And the concentric circle metaphor is limited.  But you get the idea.  We're facing a panoply of crises and catastrophes that run the question gamut from "why does bread now cost $5 a loaf?," to "will so much of Antarctica break off that sea levels swamp all major coastal cities in the world?"  The scope of the bad news is breathtaking.  

But what are we hearing from our major political leaders?  What is their interpretation of events and the state of the country and the world?  It is here that the colossal mismatch between diagnosis and prescription becomes so disturbing, and where the meta-narratives of both conservatives and liberals fall apart.