Monday, January 25, 2010

Of His Own Making

Daily Kos: Posted without comment:

"Dear President Obama,

As someone who has been active in Democratic politics for decades and as someone who supported and worked to elect you both to the Senate and the presidency, I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I have been by your performance.

From your selection of staff (Rahm Emanuel), and cabinet members and advisors (Geithner, Summers, et.al.), you have chosen to surround yourself with those with deep histories of favoring corporations and Wall Street over the average citizen.

The result is now clear to see: a year of work on your claimed biggest priority, health care reform, going down the drain. How sad and embarrassing, not to mention devastating, to those millions needing health care and to the Democratic Party and our hopes for 2010....."
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Of his own making

Op-Ed Columnist - After the Massachusetts Massacre - NYTimes.com:

"Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it."
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Sanders nails it. Obama just hands his ass over to the crazies because of some bipartisan fetish.

Blueprint for Dems

Instead of making it clear that the first two years of the Obama administration would be about digging the country out of the incredible mess that Bush's eight years left us in, (deep recession, financial collapse, record-breaking deficits, disintegrating healthcare system, two wars, lack of respect from the international community, neglect of the environment), Obama, incredibly, has enabled tens of millions of Americans to now believe that Bush's failures are his as well.

Unlike FDR in 1933, who consistently denounced Hoover's Republican policies as the cause of the country's perilous condition, Obama appears very reluctant to be partisan and point out to the American people the cause of our current crises. Can one imagine Obama, for example, telling the American people as Roosevelt did in 1936, "I welcome" the "hatred" of the "economic royalists" whose greed has devastated the country?

In response to Obama's genteel and bipartisan outreach, the Republicans have undertaken an unprecedented campaign of rhetorical savagery. The Right-Wing Echo Chamber of Fox News and talk-radio has implied that Obama is an "illegitimate" president not born in the United States, that he is a friend of terrorists, that he is an antiwhite racist, that he rules unconstitutionally and that his administration reeks of Chicago-style corruption. And those are the respectful attacks!

In the overwhelmingly Democratic Senate the situation has been equally dismal. There, the Senate Finance Committee created a Gang of Six that included three Republicans--two of whom (Grassley and Enzi) are extremely conservative--to determine the shape of healthcare reform. Amid cries of "death panels," "socialized medicine" and "government takeover of health care," the meetings dragged on and on.
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More.....

Ed Schultz to Robert Gibbs: ‘You are full of sh*t and losing your base’ | Raw Story:

"'I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him,' Schultz said. 'And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb the same way Senator Leahy got it on the Senate floor. I told Robert Gibbs, I said, 'I'm sorry you're swearing at me, but I'm just trying to help you out.'

'I'm telling you, you're losing your base,' he continued. 'Do you understand that you're losing your base? And that the American people don't want public option, the American people want single-payer!?''"
....Democrats.....

"'We are still in an ideological fight for the country,' he barked. 'We gotta make sure that President Obama gets the message. We're with you, but you gotta be with us.'"
...Like this please dear god.

"'I probably wouldn't make a very good candidate,' Schultz admitted. 'I don't believe in bipartisanship. After the way (Republicans) ran the country into the ground for the last 8 years what the hell you want me to work with them on?'"
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Yeah, I've been kinda hoping for the reemergence of Plouffe but his initial barkings have been far more President Obama than candidate Obama.

Hopefully he's the one to marginalize Rahm et al and take back this presidency.

The Fix - Plouffe stepping up role as adviser to White House

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Here's your activist fucking judges. 5 of the motherfuckers. I'm straining but I'm don't hear any teabaggers crying about activist judges? Must have their mouths full.

Worst SCOTUS decision since Dred v. Scott.

The Supreme Court's Citizen United Decision Is Terrifying:
"If you're looking for a concise way of capturing today's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, how about: 'We are all royally, hopelessly fucked for the rest of recorded time'? It's coarse, I know, but it really does the trick."
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Doug Kendall: Citizens United: The Problem Isn't the Law, It's the Court:

"That is because today, the Court's conservative majority re-wrote the Constitution to give corporations -- never mentioned in the Constitution -- the same right to influence the electoral process as 'We the People.' As the NYT's Adam Liptak explains, 'Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court ... ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.' The justices did what many progressives feared for months it would do: hold that long-standing restrictions on corporate campaign spending violate the First Amendment."
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How will Obama respond? With bipartisanship, of course. So, yes, we are royally fucked.

Can't wait to be owned by the Saudis who will purchase the Republican party wholesale.

Critics: ‘Destructive’ Supreme Court decision ‘empowers corruption’ | Raw Story:
"With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.

This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington -- while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.

That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less."
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The fruits of Bush's labor. But, let's be bipartisan with these motherfuckers. Kumbahya and all.

GOP-linked company tracks online users’ ‘loan-worthiness’ | Raw Story:

"Everything a person does publicly on their social-networking accounts can be found by market researchers if the user's privacy settings allow it. Researchers are now looking at a person's online conversations, the groups they join, products they look at and even who their friends are to determine loan-worthiness."
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Uhhhh.

Holiday Inn location in London offers 'human bed warmer' service - a staffer to warm up your sheets:
"Guests who don’t want to hop into a cold bed at one English hotel now have a novel way to warm up: by enlisting a staff member to do it for them."
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

On Citizens United - I'm not sure how the stereotype came to be that big business only benefits republicans, but that stereotype is a fiction. GE is a great example of this. Furthermore, I can't distinguish corporations such as WSJ, New York Times, etc. from Ford or Wal-Mart. Obviously the former have free range on their editorial page to endorse or criticize candidates- can Ford be excluded merely because it does not have an editorial page? If the law were still in place, could Ford get around the law by starting a magazine, newspaper or newsstation. Could ABC have run the Hillary video as an editorial? I bet so!

I'm not comfortable extending individual rights to corporations as it seems the major purpose of the corporate entity is to shield its employees from liability, but I'm even less comfortable limiting political speech. No one should get arrested by the "thought" police.

AAW said...

I've never said 'only'. The Republican party is owned part and parcel by Big Business and there are quite a few Dems fully owned, too. But the only party in the U.S. where there are those who are populist and actually care about we the people are in the Dem party.

Look who owns WSJ and NYT.

Free political speech in this country is afforded to individuals... persons per the constitution. Businesses are not 'persons'... well, they are now. And 'free speech' is an illusions anyway.