So, how ya'll doing? Enjoy your summer? Do anything exciting? I spent mine watching the awesomeness of our new President do things that grown ups do; bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of a genuine Depression, sign meaningful legislation into law, talk to the American people in polysyllabic words that he knew the definitions of, and generally cause the far-right wing of our glorious country to collectively lose their freakin' minds (see "birthers", "deathers", and teabaggers, oh my!).
Surprisingly, it isn't just the far-right wing who are unsatisfied with our newest President. It's progressives who are showing signs of frustration with Obama. It's been said many times before that the way to know if you're composing good policy is if it pisses off both the right and the left. Moderation and bipartisanship have, in recent years, been the goal of both policy makers and political pundits who cover the major happenings in D.C.. But moderation isn't why so many progressive activists worked their butts off to get Obama elected. We wanted change and in a big way.
I've argued elsewhere that Democratic ideals could be summarized into four basic pillars: environmental, legal, labor, and LGBT issues (technically the LGBT pillar is part of the legal one, but this particular community has such a influential and cash-rich lobby, that I've made it a stand-alone unit). And on each of these pillars, President Obama has failed in some ways significantly and in other ways spectacularly. Case in point:
On environmental issues, his failure to lobby harder for a stronger cap-and-trade bill angered many progressives who feel the final draft was nothing more than a compromise with Congressional leaders who do not grasp the seriousness and urgency of the matter. Yes, it is far better than anything they could have expected from a Republican-controlled Congress, but it doesn't address the issue on a level that will have any substantive impact on the climate change crisis, which was the goal of the legislation.
Legal analysts and progressives have been dismayed at Obama's insistence that the extrajudicial torture regime both Bush and Cheney authorized will likely go unpunished. Yes, Attorney General Eric Holder has opened an investigation of the incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, but he appears to be focusing on the soldiers who carried out abuses rather than those who devised the system and those who provided legal cover for it. Additionally, Obama has been less than supportive over the whole process, stating time and time again that he wants to "move forward"; an odd statement for a Constitutional scholar who knows full well what happens when the crimes by members of the state go unpunished (they get repeated without impunity or fear of prosecution).
Labor organizations, like the AFL-CIO and SEIU, have expressed dismay that the President has largely avoided the ongoing argument over the Employee Free Choice Act, an essential piece of reform that unions have been working towards for years that would allow for unions to form easier. It's the one issue, next to health insurance reform, that unions are willing to play hardball on and one that will likely play a major role in the 2010 Pennsylvania Senate race, where the incumbent Democrat Arlen Specter is facing an uphill battle for re-election based in some part on his unwillingness to support it.
Then there is the LGBT issue, a movement that grew out of the legal community, but now has a spirit and power of its own. Obama's campaign for President always had a rocky relationship with this group, as he refused to endorse same-sex marriages (favoring civil unions instead), but opposed states efforts to make them unlawful. At one rally, he even had a pro-LGBT pastor speak back-to-back with an anti-gay one in an apparent effort to court the votes of both ends of the religious community. However, since his election, Obama has steadfastly refused to address the two issues that have mattered most to the community: the repeal of the Clinton-era "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and the Defense of Marriage Act, which legally classifies marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Obama has said time and time again that he disagrees strongly with both, but as yet has declined to do anything about it.
However, these disagreements are eclipsed by the intense debate disagreement over the battle to reform the U.S. health insurance industry and how it delivers services to people. Specifically the battle over a piece of the reform legislation called the public option. For those not following the debate, the public option is a kind of compromise between the current system and the European style of single-payer that many feel would represent true reform, but is seen as politically difficult to pass in the current climate.
Simply put, the public option would create an insurance plan that people not covered (traditionally the lower income class or those unemployed) could purchase at reduced rates. The plan would be paid for from insurance premiums and be deficit neutral. Progressive activists and Democrats are all for it, while conservative and moderate Democrats (known as Blue Dogs) are largely opposed to it. The conflict arises as the Blue Dogs keep coming up with creative ways to kill the idea, from demanding some measure of Republican support so that the legislation can be considered bipartisan, to allowing for "triggers" on when a public option could be created (the triggers proposals would place the financial burden so far in the distance so that a public option could never be activated), or the creation of co-ops, which have no track record of maintaining industry-wide cost controls in the same manner that a public option would.
Obama, while stating publicly that he supports the public option, has had his aides privately telling lawmakers that he's willing to negotiate on the issue and wouldn't be opposed to a final bill without it. For many progressives, that is the last straw. Creating a reform package that mandates everyone purchase exorbitantly expensive private health insurance plans, absent costs controls, will only increase the financial devastation that many families are already experiencing. A recent study indicated the number one reason why people are facing home foreclosure in the U.S. is the inability to pay their health care bills. How bad do you think it will get if people are forced by law to purchase health insurance they can't afford?
Now I'm not saying that Obama is necessarily a bad President, or that we'd be better off had McCain won, but he is not the man many progressive activists campaigned for. When they were told change was coming, they wanted transformational change, not nipping around the edges of policy or playing the triangulation game Clinton was so famous for.
However, unlike Clinton, Obama's team has little to fear in terms of a backlash that will reward the GOP in 2012. Their bench of potential Presidential contenders have been self-imploding so much in the last few months, they're likely to be left with either Mike Huckabee, a guy who couldn't even beat McCain, or Mitt Romney, a man most far-right Republicans can't tolerate. But what the President's campaign advisers are overlooking and should be fearing aren't the conservative Democrats, the political pundits, or the GOP. The two words that should keep them up at night are Ralph Nader. Nader, who campaigned as a Green party candidate against Gore and Bush in 2000, is largely blamed for splitting the Democratic vote, prompting Bush to the White House and into eight years of the most incompetent governmental leadership this country has seen in decades.
While Nader himself couldn't possibly hope to win a national election, it's what he represents that should cause a great deal of consternation among the Obama staff. Republicans could potentially regain the White House in 2012 if Obama finds himself under attack by either a credible progressive challenger during the primary which could tarnish his reputation enough to leave him vulnerable during the general election, or by an independent candidate who could force Obama into defending his left flank through both a primary and general election.
All the GOP would then need to do would be to run a moderate Republican (say someone like Michael Bloomberg who has spent close to $100 million of his own money in his bid for a 3rd term as New York's mayor) who might appeal to voters tired of watching Democrats fighting amongst themselves, and Obama could very well enter the club that few enjoy membership to, the One-Term Club.
hey mardod does freelance politico mean you still live in your mom's basement wich coincidently is where that obama poster that you so enjoy jacking off too hangs while you sit at your little computer desk and write bs left wing propaganda hoping that your lord obama will read it someday and give you the privilege of sucking his nuts?
Added: 4 days ago by Daffybastard
Good day fellow Americans, I have been sent back in time from the year 2016AD by concerned parties to warn you of what is to come...
In 2016 it's dark days for the American dream. The country is a desolate landscape of distributed wealth and free health care. All that's left of this barren wasteland that was once so beautiful and alive is the commie-red nutrient-free earth. And some rivers, mountains, lakes, birds, waterfalls, forests, canyons. And buildings. And people. And society. But not as we knew it. Not commerce as we know it. It's now commie commerce. Under the guise of something called taxation - I'm not sure if that's even a word in this period - they take part of our earnings and use them to fund national institutions that help the needy, and, I can barely bring myself to say it: immigrants.
America is now a socialist country, everything is owned by the people, resources are allocated equally no matter how many guns you have or how many misspelt placards you wave. There was a time, in 2009, when a misspelt placard felt like the protest equivalent of a twelve-bore opening up the back of a small mammal's skull. Not any more.
Now private health care is a story we tell our children at night to ease them to sleep, hushing their trembling cries of terror at a state funded health care system, easing their pain, telling them that one day it will be back. Bigger, better, exclusive. And more expensive then ever.
But for now the horror of the status quo, like Mexicans freely crossing the border for dental care. MEXICANS! In fact, they come across in a sort of parade, in garish colours, singing and dancing, chanting in a foreign tongue. Dressed in mutated cowboy hats or coloured bondage masks and tight lycra pants, scaring young American children, farm animals and the local sheriff alike. All this paid for by the American tax dollar. Then when they get over here they are put up in our homes, our wives are theirs to do with what they please, while they await their free moustache transplants or cancer treatment or life saving operations or whatever nonsense those creeps need. Life saving, pah!
And the president of this soured country now plagued with so much swarming vermin? Castro's son who wasn't even born here, Antonio Castro Soto del Valle, former physician (read homosexual) for Cuba's baseball team. Our relations between Cuba (Cuba!) have never been so cosy (just thinking of it has brought back one of my headaches, let me just take one of my free prescription pills...). Relations are like those between lovers in the early throes of passion. Cuba, a country who torture their dissidents rather than innocent foreigners in far off lands.
And instead of a senate, guess what we have? Czars, hundreds of the f#ckers, swarming all over the constitution like flies round a rotting corpse. They even have a Czar czar. And a Czar czar czar. I remember in President Bush's Godly reign (oh how I miss those war-torn days!), all we had was Dick Cheney. And if you disagreed with him, well, not even the Almighty could save you. Gone are the glory days when libertarians like Glenn Beck were allowed on television to proclaim the truth. Gone is that bastion of investigative journalism Fox News that struggled so hard against the filthy lies of those liberal racists to keep the country infromed, pointing out the hugh mistakes made by our government. Gone.
And in every one of America's schools evolution is taught by those godless liberal animals, polluting the minds of our young. It's worse than when that shit-eating Kenyan was in power back in the dying part of the first decade of the 21st century. And what has become of him? Hiding out with the terrorists and Sarah Palin in the caves of Afghanistan, after a visit to the troops went sour.
The only morsel of hope for this once glorious and bold nation comes from the passionate patriot, that gargantuan asylum of knowledge, Glenn "I GODDAMN F#CKING TOLD YOU F#CKING SO" Beck, who is running for the presidency. Our dear enlightened clown, who for now is a stand-up comedian, actor, waiter, shoe-shiner, writer, dentist, builder, secretary and carpenter (anything to swindle a buck, is how he puts it). He co-authored, along with Dan Brown and David Icke, one of the finest works of literature in the history of mankind: The Lost Cymbal. A touching story about a medieval jazz band who misplaces part of their percussion section; their search takes them to the Vatican where a 12ft lizard Lenin is trying to set up hospitals for the blind. A great read.
Along with these foot soldiers of the War On (the) Error (of Socialism) - catchy name, no? - is George W. Bush, who now resides in Cameroon Park Zoo, Waco, Texas. Where he mournfully masturbates once every 4 minutes, while cackling tourists throw rotting bananas at him which he devours with sticky hands, barely able to sustain breathing through his lack of intelligence. Rumours circulated that he was once beaten in a game of chess by a stone, but it's just salacious rumours. Another soldier; poor, caring, humane Dick Cheney died after a hunting incident where he was shooting at baby otters being nurtured by their mother. He scared a nearby bald eagle which shat in his eyes, causing him to panic and he stumbled off a cliff. No one could be bothered to reclaim the body, so there he rests. I often go down to the spot, hold his skeletal hand in mine, and think about all the un-American women and children we could be waterboarding if this sacred man was still alive.
But, together these brave warriors of decency and hope and money and greed are mounting a campaign to get America back to where it was 10 years ago. At least. Some say they should go back much further, to that zenith of freedom that was the late 1940s to late 1950s when a friend of America and liberty, called Joseph McCarthy, was flushing out those heathen commie rats from every industry they'd crawled their way into. Now there was a man with vision, with strength, with hate for blood. There was a man who, from just a hunch, a knee jerk reaction or taking offense at the way a man wore a tie, could have anybody out of the country quicker than you could plead, "Hey, this is illegal, what about the 5th amendment?", which many of them did of course. This isn't illegal, this is America, Joe would retort.
He would accuse someone in the morning and by lunch time they'd be living in exile in some third world hellhole, let's say Britain, eating commie rice and lemongrass. Ha! How I long for those days, for a time when paranoia and fear could be neatly packaged into mindlessly accusing whoever the f#ck you wanted to of being a commie or homosexual. Careers ruined, lives destroyed, that was what made America great. If your neighbour broke that lawnmower you lent him or he stared at you wife inappropriately, you could just point a finger and scream, "Burn HIM! He's one of them!" And before you knew it his house would be set alight, his family ground down into mince and shipped to China, and his life would become a pendulum of pain, anguish and a never-ending, eternally burning hate. And those were the lucky ones.
Ah the memories, but I digress.
I plead you to heed this sharp warning of mine, or else, suffer the dire consequences.
But for now I need to get back to my own time. Anyone know where I can pick up a flux capacitor?
lighten up guys, i think this is mostly tongue in cheek. (hope so anyway.). sarcasm anyone? yaaaaaay!!! go obama. anyway, i like how people with names like atdragon, and kontrabandman, and also the guy biting the style of the 70's show guy "topher"(real original chris.) are suddenly civics professors. get your world government learn on at kontraband. i love you all. do drugs.
Added: 53 days ago by icntblevethssht
Like George Bush, satirizing Glenn Beck and the shuffling, dribbling masses that monotonously trudge along protesting about universal health care and teabagging their ancestors, that blindly follow his decrepit words, is unnecessary. How can you satirize someone that is essentially a parody of itself. To most of us every new word Glenn Beck utters out of his gaping sh#thole of a mouth is like a rancid turd falling into our collective beer. But to some people it's like the word of God, people that are barely able to respond to an interviewer's question about why they don't like Obama, without resorting to shouting, "Communist witch-terrorist-Nazi!" People who make a retarded snow tiger look like the pinnacle of intelligent mammals.
People who are afraid of czars because they sound "Russian" and who respond to questions as to why they are protesting with terminally incoherent responses about saving the land and "our country", from the evil clutches of Obama and his fascist croons. Obama, who they liken to Hitler - a man who slaughtered millions of people - compared to a man who's trying to bring universal healthcare to a nation that would benefit from it. Some of these idiots are calling for a return to the witch-hunting paranoia of McCarthyism, while claiming Obama is a socialist? It beggars belief. And the tactless, almost infantile way they try and put their case across by name-calling and hate mongering. I'm all for people expressing their opinions, but this is more like the sound of the baying crowd's lynch poles beating down with blind anger on the guilty. People carrying signs saying, "Bury Obama Care With Kennedy." Nice. They say democracy has failed, it's failed them, that's for sure. Do they actually believe the bilious streams of p#ss that come from their salivating mouths? Do they really know what they're rallying against? Surely they need to take their meds, calm down and think about what they're saying and doing; instead of this delusion and manic fury that's no good for anybody, which is stoked by a man who makes as much sense as the frightened noises coming from a zoo in a bombing raid. Emotional, deranged, scary, inhuman.
Their saviour and cult leader, Glenn Beck, is a man who has the rationality and authority of a rabid chimpanzee in a clown suit, pant-hooting while urinating into his own mouth. Even for a "news channel" as limp, unsound, harmful and retarded as Fox News, he comes across as a man worryingly insane, a man who likes nothing more than the hysteria of his own tormented voice screeching until his teeth shatter; his show is a pantomime of the crazed, a carnival of the grotesque, a place where ignorant contempt and racism breeds like a deathly disease. He's like the monster in John Carpenter's The Thing, a metamorphosing alien, wholly evil transforming his shaky political views into whatever he thinks will get his mob to start twitching and moaning like a legion of zombies at the sight of human flesh - the only difference is the alien is formidably intelligent. Glenn Beck is not, he's just loud, and has his own TV show where he rages, and wrestles with his own fury, trapped in a cage of his own spurious delusions.
He might as well be talking about 12ft lizard people who control the planet from a base on the dark side of the moon, using techniques they learned in Project Monarch to control us using tiny unseen radio waves they emit from their butt cracks. It's hysterical. Let's lock Glenn away in a room made from mirrors that just reverberates his own repugnant voice, so he can rant and rave to himself, a form of verbal masturbation until he runs out of energy and collapses from exhaustion. Maybe then he'll shut up.
obama has the right set of mind but first he might try to get our country out of its trillion or more dollar debt.
Added: 58 days ago by Jacoby1234
