Tag: Democrats

Cross-posted at Progressive Blue.

Update: Obama Will Not Sign Bill Seen As Cover For Bank Foreclosures. Apparently a pocket veto.

This is almost comical. If you are a member of the “enthusiasm gap,” have watched the Democrats represent the bankers over constituents and  get the felling that Nancy Pelosi’s recent call for federal probe on mortgage lenders was nothing more than a letter to be forgotten on November third, here’s a little verification for you.  

Apparently another great letter writer, Patrick Leahy who wrote so many sternly written letters to the Bush administration but never got around to a subpoena, is capable of taking action. After claiming “constituents” called him and pressed to have the “Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act”  pushed through, he got right on it.

The Senate doesn’t seem partisan once they hear their master’s voice. Not a Democratic filibuster for a bill meant to protect bank and mortgage processors from liability, not the Democratic majority voting down “out of state electronic notarization,” but a banker’s bill that passed in the Senate by unanimous consent on the day before they all went back to their states so they can tell constituents how Democrats represent the Middle Class.  

This “debate free” bill quietly zoomed through the Senate.

The bill, passed without public debate in a way that even surprised its main sponsor, Republican Representative Robert Aderholt, requires courts to accept as valid document notarizations made out of state, making it harder to challenge the authenticity of foreclosure and other legal documents.

The timing raised eyebrows, coming during a rising furor over improper affidavits and other filings in foreclosure actions by large mortgage processors such as GMAC, JPMorgan and Bank of America.

Questions about improper notarizations have figured prominently in challenges to the validity of these court documents, and led to widespread halts of foreclosure proceedings.

The Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner had a few thoughts about timing.  

.. dems won’t have any chance of passing their progressive agenda?????

is that what you’re all going on about? if the dems lose… the rethugs are gonna do what?

ladies and gentlemen, i propose the following:

we have all, from tea parties to progressive, been David Kuo’d.

^{cross posted at dKos}

And the attacks on the left by the so-called left just keep on happening.  Rayne is at it again, this time using analysis of the failure of Howard Dean’s organizational methods as cover for once again insulting the left.

Right off the bat, Rayne dismisses the left as being “poorly informed” about how and why the Democrat Party victories of 2006 and 2008 have gone once again to the very likely prospect of huge losses in 2010.

For the last several weeks there’s been an increasing number of posts which bash all manner of Democrats, from the president to the party itself and plead for alternatives. The anger driving this bashing is understandable since the country’s economy has floundered and promises made and values shared haven’t been kept under a Democratic president with a Democratic majority in Congress.

The anger also stems from disillusionment; after the great double-emotional high of the first person of color and Democrat winning the White House in 2008, there was the expectation that winning could continue, sustained in terms of legislative initiatives.

But unfortunately, much of this anger is poorly informed. There’s backstory which explains in part why we are here today.  . . .

I find it difficult to believe that, as someone who regularly posts on a blog that goes out of its way to inform its readers about what the far right in the Democrat Party does on a daily basis, Rayne would think the left is “poorly informed” about how and why we’ve gone from victory over the GOP to facing a repeat of ’94.

David Swanson’s review of TruthDig.com’s Editor in Chief and veteran journalist Robert Scheer‘s new book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street”:

Here’s the short answer that Scheer provides: Reagan announced the robbery but couldn’t pull it off. Clinton robbed us blind. Bush Jr. and Obama drove the get-away car, with Obama disguised as a security guard.

[snip] [snip] [snip]

Candidate Barack Obama campaigned for the restoration of Glass-Steagall, and then put in place all the same people who’d destroyed it. He’d been made an insider. The day after a special election in Massachusetts to replace Senator Ted Kennedy, President Obama briefly pulled out his old rhetoric. Wall Street immediately shifted its “donations” from Democrats to Republicans, and that settled that. Obama pushed corporatized “health insurance reform,” which distracted from his absolute subservience to Wall Street on matters financial. He drew on the “expertise” of those who’d created and collapsed these mega-corporations in building on President George W. Bush’s accountability-free bailouts at public expense. It was the same pattern Obama followed in every department: Where he didn’t leave Bush’s people in charge he brought back Clinton’s. Anything to be an insider.

[snip]

“The dispiriting lesson of both the Clinton and the Obama White Houses is that the Democrats proved to be as eager to please Wall Street as their Republican rivals. The influence of big corporate money far overwhelms that of labor, environmental, consumer, or grassroots organizations, making a mockery of the American ideal of self-government when it comes to reining in the antics of the largest conglomerates of wealth.

read it all here…

Original article, Obama’s victory for torturers, by Bill Van Auken via World Socialist Web Site:

A federal appeals court’s dismissal Wednesday of a lawsuit on behalf of victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program represents a victory for the Obama administration’s defense of torture and dictatorial executive powers.

There are those who can’t wrap their minds around why the Obama Administration has become a pariah amongst some on the left, or why the Democrats are being dragged down with the President. The fact that the Obama administration would, for all intents and purposes, support torture is one of a myriad of reasons. The failure of the Administration, and by proxy the Democrats in Congress who have done little or nothing to hold the torturers accountable, is disturbing and disgusting. It shows that the Democrats in Washington are, for the most part, mad with power: For them, just as it is with many (if not most) Republicans, the ends justify the means.