THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91 GHOST IN THE MACHINE by Malik Isasis
For sixteen years, and the last eight specifically, Republicans and their conservative cabal have blamed Bill Clinton and Democrats for everything from terrorist attacks to the fall of the economy. Former President George W. Bush, I like the sound of that, former president, has removed the capstone of America’s political, economic and military dominance by completely stealing America’s wealth and prestige to enhance and maintain the wealth of a few and like in his eight years as president, Bush has escaped blame for the colossal turd he’d left on our front lawn. As the wind wafts the shitty smell of Bush’s policies, the corporate media displaces blame and continues to give the Republican Party legitimacy when discussing economic policy.
How is it that George Bush has completely disappeared into obscurity? It’s as if there is no connection between his policies over the past eight years and the death of this superpower. The corporate media and Republicans are low hanging fruit, easy to pick, but it is an obvious collusion.
Obama and the Democrats will be trademarked with Bush’s economic failures so that the Republicans can again rise from the dead and eat our brains.
THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91 THE AFGHAN TRAP by Real News Network, The Real News Network
As Obama sends 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, we look back to the roots of the conflict. Ray McGovern says that the USSR was "mousetrapped" into invading Afghanistan by the CIA under both the Carter and Reagan administrations. He adds that the CIA policies of that day are "largely responsible" for the existence of today's armed fundamentalist groups.
THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91 Obama Administration and Wall Street Predators Target “Entitlement Reform” by Bruce Dixon, The Black Agenda Report
When the corporate media, Wall Street predators and their favorite politicians talk of "entitlement reform," they are not referring to their bonuses, or tax breaks, golden parachutes or consulting fees. They mean to "reform" your Social Security, your Medicaid, your Medicare, all of which they view as "fiscally irresponsible." When President Obama endorses a bipartisan summit on "fiscal responsibility" it's time to look out.
Not satisfied with its multi-trillion dollar raids on the US Treasury, predatory bankers and the Wall Street investor class have in sight their next target of opportunity. It's what their bipartisan pundits and politicians call "entitlement reform." It's what the rest of us call Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and their "reform" is our ruin.
Wall Street is nothing if not bipartisan on this issue. The 2008 election marked a decisive shift in campaign contributions away from Republican presidential candidates and toward Democrats. Obama's economic A-Team is composed of former execs of firms like Goldman-Sachs that benefited most from the housing and dot com bubbles, and faces like those of Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin, who helped create it. But now that thieves have cleaned out the Treasury, they are ready to lecture us on "fiscal responsibility." The bailouts have blown a gaping hole in the federal budget, a hole that has to be made up for somewhere else.
Ominously, President Obama is talking about Medicare and Social Security in their language, as places where sacrifices will have to be made, and budgets will have to be cut for the sake of trimming the nation's multi-trillion dollar deficit. Words, in the worlds of politics and public policy mean everything, especially when they don't mean exactly what they say. Forty years ago public figures who opposed school desegregation would define themselves as being "against forced busing." Today's economic reactionaries, whose aim is the repeal the last remnants of the Great Society and the New Deal, claim to stand for "entitlement reform."
Among the nation's top "entitlement reformers", and therefore leading contenders for the post of Health and Human Services secretary in the Obama administration is Tennessee's Phil Bredesen, who as governor authored some of the most savage Medicaid cuts anywhere, depriving 170,000 adults and tens of thousands of children of access to medical care, condemning thousands to needless disabilities and early deaths, and their families to unnecessary impoverishment.
Since taking a chainsaw to Medicaid in Tennessee, Harvard alum Phil Bredesen has been hailed as a national model by the bipartisan champions of "entitlement reform." As President Obama's HHS Secretary he will have the power to unilaterally change rules and requirements for patients and providers across the board, and will be the presidential point-man for whatever the administration chooses to call "health care reform."
What kind of guy is Team Obama considering for HHS Secretary? While governor of Tennessee, Bredesen accepted $150,000 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee to redecorate the governor's mansion. He has since told the Wall Street Journal that the voices of insurance companies and health care providers ought to be more important in the process of crafting a national health care plan than those of ordinary people. Only the willfully blind and foolish can suppose Team Obama are ignorant of Bredesen's record and views, or that they mean nothing because the president makes the policy. The fact that the White House has not ruled out Bredesen, even though late reports indicate that Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelus is also a strong contender, are serious warnings to all who would hear.
In the same vein, the Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 14 that President Obama has given his blessing to a group of congressional Blue Dogs who will convene a bipartisan February 23 "fiscal responsibility summit" that will produce non-amendable and filibuster-proof legislation to "fix" Medicaid, and possibly Social Security.
"The president met with 44 fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
"The president met with 44 fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
"We feel like we've found a partner in the White House," said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D., La.), a Blue Dog co-chairman."
Rolling back Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare have been longstanding goals of America's bipartisan elite investor class, and these goals have always found supporters among "liberal" corporate Democrats. President Clinton too, convened a bipartisan commission headed by Democratic senator Daniel Monyhan to "fix" social security, but the fight to impeach him took all the air out of the room and left him unable, fortuantely, to pursue this agenda. Just as "only Nixon could go to China", only a popular Democrat, the political calculus goes, has a chance of putting through as enormous betrayal to his or her base as completing the repeals of the New Deal and the Great Society.
The Brookings Institution is a Democrat-leaning think tank every bit as loyal to the corporate agenda as the right wing Heritage Foundation, but a resting place for Democratic policymakers temporarily out of government. The definitive "liberal" plan for "fixing" Social Security is a Brookings Institution document from 2003 titled "Saving Social Security: The Diamond-Orzag Plan. The good people at FireDogLake.com have offered the following excerpt therefrom, along with a link to the original.
"Since Painful Choices Must Be Made, a Key Question Is, Which Ones?
"The Social Security deficit can be eliminated only through different combinations of politically painful choices: tax increases and benefit reductions. Unfortunately, too many analysts and politicians have ignored this reality, responding to the painful alternatives by embracing "free lunch" approaches.
"Our plan makes the painful choices that are necessary—selecting a combination of benefit and revenue changes to restore long-term balance. In doing so, it focuses on three areas which contribute to the actuarial imbalance: improvements in life expectancy, increases in earnings inequality, and the burden of the legacy debt from Social Security’s early history.
"Workers who are 55 or older will experience no change in their benefits from those scheduled under current law. For younger workers with average earnings, our proposal involves a gradual reduction in benefits from those scheduled under current law. For example, the reduction in benefits for a 45-year old average earner is less than 1 percent; for a 35-year-old, less than 5 percent; and for a 25-year-old, less than 9 percent. Reductions are smaller for lower earners, and larger for higher ones."
In keeping with the need to present this initiative, when it becomes public, as a howling emergency requiring immediate passage, details are impossible to come by yet. But one thing is for sure - all the economists on this "summit," all the politicians and other talking heads agree that "long term deficit strains" mean your entitlements, not those of the investor class --- Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. The economists who will be consulted by the "fiscal responsibility summit" will be all those who confused the debt creation of the housing bubble with "wealth creation," who predicted it would last forever, and who solemnly assured us that handing over a trillion or three, no strings attached, to Wall Street predators for their yearly bonuses would "rescue" and restart the economy.
Economists who predicted the bubble and the bailout, like Michael Hudson, Dean Baker, Paul Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and John Galbraith will not be invited, consulted or even quoted in the rooms where the Obama-endorsed bipartisan fiscal responsibility summit convenes. Those kind of economists have been effectively banned from the corporate media, exiled to spaces where their voices are not heard by most of the public, and blacklisted by the Obama administration, which prefers to get its economic advice from the same crew that gave us the bubble and its aftermath, and profited massively from both.
There are also whispers that the discredited former congressman Harold Ford may be in line for an administration appointment, perhaps for Secretary of Commerce or some lesser position. Since leaving Congress, Ford has a cushy job as a VP at Merrill Lynch. Within weeks of receiving billions in federal bailout money via a Bank of America buyout, Merrill Lynch paid out $800 million in bonuses, $696 million of it to its top 100 employees. Ford was doubtless one of those instant millionaires.
The idea that the man who once claimed his black grandmother was white to get a few extra votes, and who offered himself to Bush as a swing vote to privatize Social Security has anything to offer an Obama administration ought to be laughed out of any unpadded room. But after appointing a bloodstained Reaganite war criminal to head the Pentagon, with defense lobbyist William Lynn as his assistant, after Obama's CIA chief affirmed the administration's intention to continue cross-border kidnappings (called "extraordinary renditions") to hand victims over to torturers, and its lawyers blocked the attempts of torture and kidnap victims to seek redress in the courts because of state secrecy, the same grounds cited by the Bush Justice Department -- after all these things, and after the administration's defiance of the majority of US public opinion on investigating the crimes of the Bush era, nobody is laughing.
The newly confirmed deputy chief at the Pentagon was that agency's chief financial officer for most of the 1990s, when an estimated two or three trillion simply vanished without a trace. So don't expect the "fiscal responsibility" summit to even look in that direction. As the Obama administration and its rapacious economic advisers turn their attention from Wall Street giveaways to lecturing the nation on "fiscal responsibility," it's time to beware.
THE MEDIA EDITION: ISSUE 60, VOLUME 90 Obama & the Media Dilemma by Robert Perry, Consortium News
It was only a few years ago – when the Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House – that the U.S. news media offered up one-sided coverage of the Bush administration, relying on Republicans, right-wingers and pro-war military experts to shape what Americans got to see and read.
The reason for marginalizing Democrats and other critical voices, we were told, was that the Republicans were in power and it made no sense to have on guests or to quote experts who didn’t share in the power. The premium was to have Republican insiders explaining what was going on.
So, one might have thought that when the Democrats won control of Congress and the White House, Republicans would largely disappear from the TV chat shows and the news pages. After all, the Republicans today have even fewer representatives in Washington than the Democrats did during most of the Bush years.
But if you thought that, you would be wrong. Instead, the cable networks and the print media have been falling over themselves to get the views of Republicans and to disseminate those opinions widely to the American public.
During a key early stage in the battle over Barack Obama’s stimulus bill, the Center for American Progress examined the political affiliations of guests on major cable networks and found that Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 2-to-1. Suddenly, the premium was on the views of those out of power.
In other words, Republicans get to dominate the news programs when they’re in power and they get to dominate when they’re out of power. The one constant is that the U.S. news media bends over backwards to favor the Republicans; what changes is the rationale.
This dynamic was even more acute in the run-up to invading Iraq when CNN and MSNBC competed to out-fox Fox as the most aggressively flag-waving, pro-war network. Iraq War skeptics were decidedly not welcome, whether the likes of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter or Rep. Ike Skelton, who was a ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.
If you raised questions about invading Iraq, you were a flake – and no self-respecting producer wanted to risk his/her career by allowing such a dissident opinion on the air. Media insiders took note of what happened to talk-show host Phil Donahue at MSNBC when he booked a few anti-war voices to dissent from the views of a majority of his pro-war guests.
There wasn’t much difference in the so-called prestige newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. Everybody knew which side their career bread was buttered – and it wasn’t in offending President Bush, the Republicans or their right-wing allies.
A Rip Van Winkle who awoke during that period might have thought the Soviet Union had won the Cold War and had imposed its concept of press freedom on the United States.
Three-Decade Dynamic
But there was a logical explanation for this dynamic. Since the mid-1970s – when the Washington press corps exposed Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and printed the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War – the Republicans and the Right have mounted an expensive drive to label the press as “liberal” and to punish journalists who dug up undesired information.
Besides funding anti-journalism attack groups, the Right financed its own media infrastructure – from print forms like newspapers, magazines and books to electronic media like TV, radio and later the Internet. As tens of billions of dollars poured in consistently over the past three decades, the Right achieved a powerful influence over the U.S. media.
Meanwhile, American liberals and the Left largely ignored the growing media imbalance, counting on mainstream journalists to somehow resist the encroachment of right-wing pressure. The progressive side also did little when honest journalists were punished and marginalized, which left behind careful media careerists who understood how ruthless the right-wingers could be.
Over time, the U.S. national news media could be roughly defined as those who worked directly for right-wing outlets and those who survived in mainstream news organizations by recognizing the limits of how far they could safely go in annoying the Right.
Yet, since the co-opted mainstream journalists won’t admit their professional timidity, they had to come up with excuses to explain their behavior.
So, when George W. Bush and the Republicans were at the height of their power, media professionals justified booking lots of pro-Bush operatives since they were the insiders. Now, with the Republicans out of power, a premium is placed on having as many voices as possible from the GOP opposition.
Surely, if in 2012, the Republicans retake the White House and Congress, you can expect that the rationale will shift back again and there will a preponderance of Republican insiders.
As readers of Consortiumnews.com know, our view is that the only way to change this dynamic is for concerned Americans to invest substantially in building media institutions that aren’t afraid of the Right and won’t bend to those pressures. [For details, see our book, Neck Deep.]
Until that happens, one can expect this strange media dynamic to continue – and President Obama is likely to remain on the defensive.
I haven't updated the blog in a couple of days because I've been traveling. I'm currently in my hometown, Seattle. Flying has become a pain in the arse. I flew American Airlines, and I wasn't aware that they charge $15 dollars, period, to bring just one bag. I was under the impression that it was $15 for an additional bag. Not only that, if you're not flying international, they want you to check yourself in at the kiosk, AND carry your luggage over to the conveyor belt and drop it off onto the conveyor belt. Not only are we being nickled and dimed, we're also doing some of their work for them.
I finally make it to Seattle and end up with food poisoning. I'll take the weekend to recover and update on Monday.
THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 59, VOLUME 89 ISRAELI ELECTIONS: BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID. by Donald Macintyre, The Independent/UK
Israel's Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, last night launched a concerted final effort to become her nation's first woman leader since Golda Meir, despite the rightwards shift in public opinion that has threatened to propel Benjamin Netanyahu back into the premiership.
he leader of the centrist Kadima party, who began the closing stages of her campaign with a rally for Druze Arab voters in Galilee last night, issued a direct personal challenge to Mr Netanyahu to agree to the television debate which he has consistently refused.
As polls showing the lead of Mr Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party has narrowed to only two seats ahead of Kadima, Ms Livni's campaign team believes she can overtake her rival by the time Israel goes to the polls on Tuesday.
Mr Netanyahu has emphasised the threats from Hamas and a nuclear Iran in his campaign.
Ms Livni, who strongly supported the recent invasion of Gaza, but has pledged to continue talks on a two-state solution with the moderate West Bank Palestinian leadership, said there was a public demand from potential leaders "to specify with which policies they plan to cope with the threats, and lead [Israel] to a better future of peace and quiet". Meanwhile the outgoing Kadima premier, Ehud Olmert, was making what the Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said were "supreme efforts" to leave a positive legacy by securing the release of Gilad Shalit, the army corporal seized by Gaza militants in 2006, before polling day.
Turkish TV reported on Friday that Turkish officials were holding talks in Damascus with exiled leaders of Hamas, which has been seeking a large-scale release of Palestinian prisoners in return.
At the same time Mr Barak, Labour's prime ministerial candidate, told Channel 1 TV that Cpl Shalit was known to be "well, alive, breathing and OK".
He added: "You know that I am a fierce critic of the Prime Minister, but in these matters, in these days, he is making a great effort, as am I ... in order to expedite the process." Whether the formidable obstacles to securing the release can be overcome remains to be seen, however.
A Hamas official, Osama al-Muzaini, said talks on the issue had so far made little progress because Israel "remained unwilling to pay the price".
While Mr Barak warned the release of Cpl Shalit would require "painful decisions" - presumably on a prisoner exchange - the electoral effect, if it happened, would probably be to help Labour and Kadima at the expense of Likud and the increasingly popular Yisrael Beiteinu, led by the hard-right Avigdor Lieberman.
According to the polls, the main features of a relatively lacklustre election so far have been the Likud comeback under Mr Netanyahu from its three-decade low of just 12 Knesset seats in the 2006 election, and the seemingly relentless rise of Mr Lieberman, who could yet prove the kingmaker in forming a coalition after Tuesday.
Polls published on Friday - the last allowed before election day - showed Likud with 25 to 27 seats, just ahead of Kadima, with 23 to 25. Mr Lieberman's party with 18 or 19, which, if fulfilled in actual voting, would push the once-dominant Labour Party into fourth place.
Most analysts think the rightward shift has resulted from a combination of two factors. One is Hamas's continued control of Gaza. The other is the stillbirth of the centrist programme under Mr Olmert of withdrawing from settlements and negotiating a peace deal with the moderate Palestinian leadership. This was envisaged at the international Annapolis summit sponsored by President George Bush at the end of 2007.
The change also reflects the widespread popularity among mainstream Israelis - despite the Palestinian death toll of more than 1,200 - of the three-week onslaught on Gaza. This had long been urged by Mr Netanyahu.
Mr Lieberman, a harshly right-wing West Bank settler who wants Israeli Arabs to forfeit their citizenship rights if they fail to pledge loyalty to the Jewish state, was characterised on Friday by a leading Israeli columnist, Nahum Barnea, as "the scarecrow that panic-stricken Israelis want to place in the political cornfield in the hope that the Arabs are crows... and take fright".
At least in theory, Ms Livni could be asked by President Shimon Peres to try to form a coalition even if Kadima does not emerge as the biggest single party, especially if Ms Livni secures the support of Mr Lieberman as a potential coalition partner. Like Ms Livni, Mr Lieberman is secular, and could baulk at a Netanyahu-led government which included ultra-orthodox parties such as Shas.
Nevertheless such a move by President Peres - while constitutional - would be unprecedented. It would provoke furious charges from Likud, if it is the single biggest party, of being undemocratic. For now Ms Livni will go all out to persuade the still-undecided fifth of the Israeli electorate that she is the only candidate to stop the polarising Mr Netanyahu.
Over coffee in one of the few downtown Jerusalem cafes open on the Jewish sabbath, Maya Ayvo, 35, and her husband Ezer, 38, described yesterday how 15 of their mainstream middle-class family members had discussed their "confusion" over how to vote at the traditional Friday night meal the previous evening.
While most did not want to vote for Mr Netanyahu or Mr Lieberman, said Mrs Ayvo, "they like Tzipi Livni, but are not sure about her party; others like the Labour Party, but are not sure about Barak".
Mrs Ayvo said she had been toying with voting Green, as she did in 2006, or the left-wing Zionist party Meretz, but that she had now come down in favour of Ms Livni. This was partly because she was a woman, but "I feel that this time I have to be responsible and not vote for a smaller party, because this election is so important". She said that she would be very disappointed if Ms Livni included Mr Lieberman in a coalition.
Her husband, who voted for the small Pensioners' Party in the last election because he was fed up with the larger parties, said he had not yet made up his mind, but might vote for Ms Livni. Like his wife, he supported the war in Gaza. "I wasn't happy about it, but I think it was very necessary," he said.
Meanwhile, over bacon, beer and coffee at another cafe, in the city's German Colony district, what was for Jerusalem an unusually leftist and secular group was debating the respective merits of the left-of-centre parties. Most were Jewish, but the group included a Christian Palestinian lawyer, Daoud Khoury. He and a Jewish friend, Moshe Simchovich, supported the communist Arab-Jewish party Hadash.
But Rachel, a 58-year-old teacher who asked for her family name not to be used because of her public servant status, said she would be voting for the newly combined Greens and Meimad party, led by the liberal and popular Knesset education committee chairman, Rabbi Michael Melchior. "The reason that Lieberman is doing so well is because of the one-sided media coverage of the war in Gaza,"she said.
Israel's four contenders for power
Tzipi Livni, 50
Foreign Minister and Kadima leader. Protégée of Ariel Sharon who was briefly a Mossad agent in her youth. Has staked her appeal on a cleaner politics and talks with the moderate West Bank Palestinian leadership over a two-state solution. Like Barak, has not ruled out military option on Iran. A hawk on Gaza, publicly opposed to idea of a negotiated end to the Gaza war, saying Israel's role is to "fight terror" not to talk to its perpetrators.
Ehud Barak, 66
Defence Minister and Labour leader. Prime Minister 1999-2001 and a much-decorated ex-military chief of staff. He went further than predecessors towards a two-state solution but blamed Yasser Arafat for the collapse of the Camp David talks. Favours an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Hamas if possible and was quicker than PM Ehud Olmert and Livni in seeking halt to Gaza operation. More sceptical than either about negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Benjamin Netanyahu, 59
Leader of main right- wing opposition, Likud. Prime Minister 1996-99. Strong opponent of Oslo accords and 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, over which he resigned from Sharon government. Says Gaza military operation not complete and that Hamas regime must be ended. Against territorial concessions to Palestinians and says Iran must "not be armed with a nuclear weapon". Says options "include everything that is necessary to make this statement come true".
Avigdor Lieberman, 50
Leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, secular hard-right party. Moldovan-born immigrant who wants Israeli Arabs to pledge loyalty to the Jewish state or lose the vote. Wants borders redrawn - unacceptable even to moderate Palestinians - to put more than 100,000 Israeli Arabs in future Palestinian state. Has faced corruption allegations. Israel may have to act militarily alone in Iran "in worst-case scenario". Has suggested treating Gaza as Russia did Chechnya.
THE MEDIA EDITION: ISSUE 58, VOLUME 88 H.U.A.S by Malik Isasis Updated for February 5, 2009
The corporate media are like those kids on the playground whispering destructive gossip into the ears of bullies, who in turn pounce on those kids who are afraid or unable to defend themselves. For eight years, the corporate media went silent when it came to so-called bi-partisanship in Washington. For eight years the corporate media went along with Bush no matter how far right his policies were. Now that the Democrats are in charge, the corporate media are cheering bipartisanship from the ivory tower—going so far as to call Obama a failure for not getting any Republican support on his bailout bill in just thirteen days of governance.
The Republicans who from the start of the Obama administration set out to under mind anything that the Democrats put forth because they understand that if they whine, the corporate media and political operatives posing as news anchors and pundits will manufacture fake controversies.
Only when Democrats are in charge is centrism and bipartisanship the lens in which the corporate media judge the Democrats, rather than looking at the Republicans’ ineptitude. The dire economic straits were caused by Republican policy, yet the media discuss the fixes as if the Democrats were in charge during the colossal failure of Republican governance. Now that the Republicans are no longer in power they're arguing fiscal responsibility, all of a sudden they've found morality. It goes to show that these people have no integrity, believing only in power and will say and do anything to get it.
The media are destructive, manufacturing controversies as distraction, allowing the Republicans to blunt any policies that could possibly help the working class and poor. They are quick to take the language of Republicans and call college assistant and Pell grant increases, pork. It is the HEAD UP ASS SYNDROME, the media who are subsidiaries of multinational corporations are not in the business of advocacy journalism, their objective is to turn American citizens into pure consumers, to keep us asleep. They understand that once the people become conscious of the Ponzi scheme of misinformation, it’ll be over. So, they work hard to keep the masses from consciousness, and blindly spending themselves into indentured servitude.
THE DEMOCRATS
I’ve screamed from the rooftops about the Republicans and their kind. They play for keeps, they never compromise, it is only the Democrats who give way, and it is only the middle, working and underclass that pay the price. Even in power the Democrats are lost, riding on a white horse and chasing windmills. They talk shit and nothing happens, drawing imaginary lines in the sand only to have the Republicans cross those lines and slap them in the face. The Republicans are Bugs Bunny and The Democrats, Elmer Fudd.
Obama has bought into many of the Republicans’ argument; it is why he put three of them into his administration. If he has Republicans (like Clinton) in his administration then in his mind he’s has legitimacy in the eyes of Republicans. Bush needed no such validation, did he? When Democrats accept Republican arguments, they lose because they need to marginalize their base to do so.
You cannot rationalize with those who are irrational, the Republicans are irrational, and the Democrats bleed their foreheads banging it against the wall trying to rationalize with a pathology that is only concerned with the wealth and power. I suppose this makes the Democrats crazy, right, doing the same thing and expecting different results, and all.
The Democrats are going to blow this opportunity just as Clinton had, because they cannot get over the fact that the corporate media and the Republicans will cut their throats and hang them upside down and bleed them out. Democrats need to get their heads out of their asses, just pop it out, and look around and maybe then they’ll understand that the people’s needs outweigh your need to be loved by the Republicans, it outweighs the Republicans’ need for power.
Wake the fuck up Obama.
February 5, 2009
Much better Mr. President, much better. Thank you.
THE Nth DEGREE: THE STRAIGHT DOPE STATUS CHANGE by N, The Love Correspondent
In having gone from single girl status to “in a relationship” on my face book page three months ago, I’ve started to think about what gets under my skin in any romantic relationship. Now you could call this mental sabotaging or focusing on the negative but I see it is as a positive and cathartic. I figure if I can only find ten things to “bitch blog” about than I must be in love. So here it goes the top ten things that annoy, irritate, and unleash fury in my relationship.
10. Dry Humping: Gross. No further comment. 9. The “do you want me to pay my half of dinner” conversation: Please, I already know you are paying. Do we really have to put on this charade? 8. Being His Personal Shopper: I’m sorry but when did I apply for this job? 7. Having to introduce and reintroduce him to my friends. 6. Weight Issues: His not mine. 5. Meeting his Family: If I wanted to hang out with crazy, indecisive, consistently late people who yell I could just visit my parents. 4. Sharing Food at Restaurants: If you wanted it, you should have ordered it. It is mine. 3. Morning Breath Kisses: I don’t care if we love one another, GO BRUSH YOUR TEETH! 2. Taking into Consideration His Feelings: I guess body shots at Chippendales are out. 1. Apologies: I hate to accept that I’m wrong and apologize for my actions.
With the 2009 stimulus money running dry and with businesses unnerved by Washington’s political gridlock and brinksmanship, America’s weak “recovery” has stalled, prompting more criticism of President Barack Obama. Robert Parry explores whether these complaints are fair.
Publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.
BROKEN GOVERNMENT
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