How aboutA Turn-the-Tables strategy? We can be the side of K.I.S.S.

No, not the rock group.

It's the acronym KISS as in Keep-It-Simple-Stupid.

Obviously not a good slogan, but that is a message that might work for us, politically and in terms of acually making a positive difference.

Background -- The Repuglicans and Right Wing gained dominance partially by playing to a strong dislike among Americans of confusing and annoying bureaucratic solutions and excessive complexity. They successfully branded liberalism as being associated with that, while the GOP promised to remove the stifling bureaucracy and allowing the energy and smarts of Americans to be unleashed.

But, times have changed, and we can turn the tables. Several reasons for this.

1)Corporate America has become as big and stifling and abusive as any government agency. Try to deal with a mega business, for example, and you get shuffled from this voice mail to that one, before maybe reaching a real person. And they put stifling restrictions and burdensome terms on everything, and make you give your first born just to be a consumeer of their products or services.

2)The GOP has become the party of Baroque and Confusing Policies. They are trying so hard to juggle their loyalty to their corporate backers with the demands of the public that they make government programs even worse. Exhibit A is their Medicare Drug Plan. Exhibit B is Bush's "health care reform."

Point 2 extends beyond just those. Policies like Energy Deregulation and "Privitization" have taken public infrastructures and made them baffling. And they have made the old problems with public utilities seem straightforward and benign by comparison.

Sooooo, with that in mind, liberals/progressives/democrats are in a position to turn the tables on the right-wingers and corporate oligarchs.

"Back to basics. These people have made life much more complicated and unmanagable. You get the worst of regulation without the benefits of accountability or obligation to the public."

So we offer simple but effective proposals. Such as:

-- Health care based on a public system with care as the bottom line, without all of the complexity and barriers that private profit-driven medicine has created.

-- Restoring the idea of utilities as public services. Back to the idea of regulating rates, and requiring utilities to justiufy and receive permission for rate hikes and investments. This can include returning private utilities to the ideas of regulated monopolies, inmstead of unregulated monopolies. Make them safe but not sexy investments -- Blue Chip stability instead of Enron speculativeness.

-- Use anti-trust and anti-monpopoly regulation so businesses concentrate on their core competencies, instead of trying to build scattered empires. Clear rules that protect the actual practice of competative free enterprise, instead of the CONservative "free market" system of monopolistic dominance and rigged regulations to protect the powerful.

The same can apply to many otehr issues.

The bottom line is that we can promote liberal and progressive values in ways that also resonate with the distaste of burdensome bureaucracy and needless complexity.