Tag: 2008 elections

Everyone’s talking about Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania yesterday over rival Barack Obama.  Ten whole percentage points: may I make whoopee in my pants, now?  It’s still not enough to help the senator supposedly representing New York catch up to the one supposedly representing Illinois in terms of pledged delegates.

Clinton’s broke, trailing her Democratic rival by a small but undeniable margin, and now reduced to threatening to nuke Iran in the event it uses its non-existent nuclear weapons to attack Israel (let me reiterate: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, a finding held by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies–so the fact that Clinton and Obama keep acting as though the opposite is true means neither of them has a fucking clue on anything, and why we’re supposed to trust their judgment when they can’t even call bullshit on the lies being shat out by the Bush-Cheney regime is beyond my comprehension).  Meanwhile, John McCain gets to have the media give him another round of reportorial oral sex for his “decency” in choosing not to run a dirty ad against Obama.

As recently as last month Zogby and other polls were showing the senator pretending to represent Arizona narrowly ahead of either of his Democratic rivals for the dictatorship.  The Republican is using the time between now and the general election to win back his party’s crazed right-wing base, raise money, and plot out his general election strategy.  Do I even need to continue explaining what this all means?

Hillary Clinton wants the presidency so bad she is willing to tear the Democratic Party asunder in order to get it, leaving it too battered and weak to win in November.  She absolutely cannot let it go, cannot allow an upstart like Barack Obama to “steal” what she thinks is hers by inheritance.  And it sure as hell doesn’t help that Obama is too big a pandering, hard-headed phony to be able to seal the deal and win a clear mandate from Democratic voters by embracing the Edwards-Kucinich bloc.  No, he’d rather use them and dump them to the curb, and his piss-poor performance at the last debate proved he, too, is running out of steam.  Like Clinton, he never expected to have to compete this long for the Democratic nomination, and he is becoming dangerously low on ideas.

So no matter how the remaining primaries play out, this fight is going all the way to the convention in August.  All because Hillary Clinton won’t let go of the illusion that the presidency is somehow hers.  If 2008 accomplishes anything, it may be to finally rid Ralph Nader of the blame (wholly undeserved) for destroying any chance Democrats might have had of winning back the White House this century.

Somebody pass me a brick, so I can throw it at my television set the next time I have news coverage of the campaign on.  Oh, wait, I have my steel mace for that.  Never mind.  At any rate, I’d be really grateful for some ideas for how we might avoid this fiasco–because if we can’t, the massive ego of Hillary Clinton is going to rain shit down on all of America.

Cross-posted from my blog at Campaign for America’s Future.

In my previous entry I laid out the differences between liberals and progressives, movements and political parties.  For those of you who haven’t time to read through it, a brief recap:  Liberals believe in socio-economic justice, whereas progressives believe the same thing but also in taking it to the next step-using government as a powerful tool with which to achieve it by making Big Business behave.  The Progressive Movement, much like movement conservatism, has a definite set of goals, and the Progressive Party is the political force through which we can reach them.

Hi Folks.

Thought you should see this.

http://www.responsibleplan.com/

It seems that the democrats attempting to win seats have different priorities that those who already have them, and so are more likely to say the right things. Now, whether they mean it is a wide open question, but, when you hear what you want, you should say, “That’s what I want to hear!”…So perhaps you should do that.

I did.

Frosted Flake

PS : Thanks.

…in order be even VAGUELY viable in general election.

Well, he has to win by 20%, of course, but then he has to…

Cross-posted from my blog at Campaign for America’s Future.

Lately I’ve been getting an increasing recurrence of the same questions: what is the difference between liberals and progressives, and what is the difference between the Progressive Movement and the Progressive Party?  The answers to these questions are important, for as we inch ever closer to the general election in November and as primary battles across the country reach their conclusion the future of our country and our world shall be determined by them-and by how swiftly we figure them out.

The first question I shall tackle is, what is the difference between a liberal and a progressive?  For that I’ll quote the Huffington Post’s David Sirota, who explains it far more eloquently than I can:

I often get asked what the difference between a “liberal” and a “progressive” is. The questions from the media on this subject are always something like, “Isn’t ‘progressive’ just another name for ‘liberal’ that people want to use because ‘liberal’ has become a bad word?”

The answer, in my opinion, is no-there is a fundamental difference when it comes to core economic issues. It seems to me that traditional “liberals” in our current parlance are those who focus on using taxpayer money to help better society. A “progressive” are those who focus on using government power to make large institutions play by a set of rules.

To put it in more concrete terms: a liberal solution to some of our current problems with high energy costs would be to increase funding for programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). A more “progressive” solution would be to increase LIHEAP but also crack down on price gouging and pass laws better regulating the oil industry’s profiteering and market manipulation tactics. A liberal policy towards prescription drugs is one that would throw a lot of taxpayer cash at the pharmaceutical industry to get them to provide medicine to the poor; a progressive prescription drug policy would be one that centered around price regulations and bulk purchasing in order to force down the actual cost of medicine in America (much of which was originally developed with taxpayer R&D money).

Let’s be clear: most progressives are also liberals, and liberal goals in better funding America’s social safety net are noble and critical. It’s the other direction that’s the problem. Many of today’s liberals are not fully comfortable with progressivism as defined in these terms. Many of today’s Democratic politicians, for instance, are simply not comfortable taking a more confrontational posture towards large economic institutions (many of whom fund their campaigns)-institutions that regularly take a confrontational posture towards America’s middle-class.

ABC is the network that BROKE the story of the Torture Conspiracy for gawds sake. But somehow, in spite of the efforts of non-Villagers….the subject never came up.