Tag: Nancy Pelosi

Virtually everyone, it seems, is cheering the electoral victory of Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race. The obvious exception is the Republican Party, which is likely to shift even further to the right in the halls of power due to moderate and semi-moderate GOPers losing out to Democratic challengers, but that’s a given.  You can count on them being the most obstructionist minority party in Congress since the Gingrich revolution in 1994, laying the groundwork for a similar event in 2010.

That’s to be expected.  What seems to be going ignored in the victory celebration is that the increased Democratic majority is prepared to waste the next two years accommodating this obstructionism.  Nancy Pelosi, who fended off a challenge from independent Cindy Sheehan, proudly boasted that Democrats would legislate from the right, not the left (though she called it the “middle”).

This should be the first sign that progressives frittered away their chance to shape the political landscape.  Don’t count on Senate capitulation leader Harry Reid to suddenly grow a pair or the Democratic Caucus to cease coddling Joe LIEberman now that the majority has been expanded; electoral fraud is likely responsible for the failure to win the filibuster-proof number of sixty senators, but even if Democrats had gotten it, Reid has bent over backwards to please GOPers and refused to enforce party discipline within his own ranks.  The result, as it was in 2006, is a Senate paralyzed by Republican obstructionism and Democratic appeasement.

We have a president-elect who is prepared to name Rahm Emanuel, a top-ranking Bush Dog, as his chief of staff.  Robert Rubin, a top architect of Clintonian economics and welfare-gutting, is on Obama’s economic advisory team, as are a number of other corporate marketeers.  Don’t expect sound environmental, health care, economic, or energy policy from the White House.  Nor should you expect an end to the occupation of Iraq, the unconditional support of the Israeli apartheid state, the lifting of the embargo on Cuba, or a shift away from imperialism.  There has been nothing in Obama’s campaign or his legislative record to suggest he’ll suddenly do a 180 now that he is prepared to inherit the presidency.

Nothing is more indicative of this than the popular vote.  Obama received a pitiful 51% to Republican John McCain’s 48%, a mere three percent difference.  The new president is smart; he knows just as much as the Republicans do that this election was not a huge repudiation of Bush policies.  Obama did not win so much as McCain lost, and he knows it.  He’ll govern from the right to appease his corporate backers.

We had what was probably our last, best chance this year to force Democrats back to the left.  We blew it.  Neither Obama or the Democrats have any incentive now to even listen to us, to say nothing of governing from the left.  What, then, is our recourse?

We can still walk away from the Democratic Party, and we must do so if we are to have any hope of salvaging the progressive movement.  We must build locally, work our way up to state-level, and finally, organize at the national level.  At this point it’s all we’ve got left.  Enjoy your celebration, for the hangover we’re about to suffer is going to be a long one.

http://www.cindyforcongress.org

Pelosi has been a disaster as speaker of the House, and a traitor to the Constitution.  She has removed impeachment from the table, enabled Bush’s warrantless and illegal surveillance of American citizens, continued to fund the occupation of Iraq, and supported the nearly one trillion dollar blank check to bail out Wall Street.  Whatever your party affiliation, whatever other feelings you might have about the candidates, if you care about your country and the direction in which it is headed, now is the time to make genuine change for the better.  Unseat Nancy Pelosi, vote in Cindy Sheehan, and send a message to the rest of Congress: NO MORE!

Duke has an essay over at The Sanctuary about Nancy Pelosi’s latest capitulation, this time on the subject of immigration.

According to the essay, Pelosi was talking about comprehensive immigration reform and decided to throw under the bus the idea of a real path to citizenship for many of the 12 million undocumented workers in this country.

The link in the essay to the LA Times article is not working, but here is the money quote:

…Pelosi also said Congress would have to tackle the politically sticky job of overhauling immigration laws in the new Congress, after a bipartisan measure collapsed last year.

The estimated 12 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally “are part of the U.S. economy. We cannot send them all home, and we cannot send them all to jail, so we have to address it,” Pelosi said.

Any solution would have to be bipartisan, she said, so it may require sacrificing some of Democrats’ past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

“Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally,” Pelosi said. “I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn’t.”

As Duke states, the egregious policies of the Repubs have drawn Latino immigrants in waves to the Democratic Party.

Yet here we have Pelosi, once again, speaking of capitulation and calling it “bipartisanship.”

Original post here:

The past few weeks have been a little strange at Cindy for Congress and, I guess the things that have been happening could just be coincidences, or a run of bad luck, but the climate for the possibility of campaign hanky-panky certainly exists.

Campaigns have been compromised since the beginning of campaign history, but these days with legal warrantless wiretapping and political party conventions sponsored by AT&T and the constant call of “all hail to my political party” and obeisance to the banksters above what’s good for our nation, maybe what’s been happening on my campaign isn’t coincidental or “Mercury retrograde,” or whatever.

Starting with the necessity of “changing a light bulb” (bugging my phone) in my hotel phone at the DNC (brought to you by AT&T) while I was out of the room, Cindy for Congress has had an increasing number of attacks. Two weeks ago, we were begged by organizers of a “radical” music festival called “We the People(Sheeple)” forbade me from speaking after having begged me to be there. An article in LA Beat said that the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigoso was involved in the decision to silence my voice. Not only did we go down to L.A. at our own expense, but also we took an entire day of valuable campaign time to do so.

The past week, though, has been incredibly trying. First of all we had to file a restraining order against a former volunteer whom, with hindsight, we now know was probably spying on us for the Pelosi camp. After we let this person go, his emails to us became increasingly hostile and threatening. After that happened, the tail lights in our campaign-mobile were busted out (the campaign mobile that has Cindy for Congress signs all over it and pictures of it were in an AP story.

Towards the end of the week, four young men walked into our office and they were acting quite suspiciously as they pretended to be registering to vote. One of our interns was helping them when I heard her yell: “No! Stop!” I heard an awful noise and ran out of my office to see the young men run off. They had grabbed one of our computers (leaving a jar of donations on the front desk) and beat our intern over the head when she tried to stop them. Our front windows are almost totally covered with signs and posters and it would be hard to see what we have from the street…we did, thankfully, recover the computer which has sensitive material on it and we are even more thankful that Somer is okay. (She’s tough like her boss).

After several days of harassment, I got home late one night to discover a jury summons in my mailbox. I have been summoned to jury duty the week of, you guessed it, the elections!

The final (and in my opinion worse) weird thing happened on Saturday night. We had scheduled a group of “robo” calls to go out today (Monday, Oct 13). At 10:30 Saturday night, we started getting phone calls and emails blasting us for sending out the calls at 10:30 on a Saturday night, which is not only illegal, but extremely annoying. The company had approached us to donate 10,000 calls to us and then was charging us a small fee for the rest of the calls. 38,000 early/absentee voters received this call and my office has been overwhelmed with angry voters who won’t be voting for me now and some of the good will that we have been building here in San Francisco for the last year went down the drain in just a few minutes. Was it just a “glitch” in the system, as the owner of the robo-call company claims, or overt sabotage of the campaign? Isn’t it sad that we have to be paranoid about all of this? To be sure, our office is in a rough part of town, but the frequency of the harassment is certainly intensifying.

The stakes are high and I have a feeling “they” won’t stop at anything to assure that the tyranny of incumbency continues.

This is brief, and I cannot be here today to visit; but, I’ll be back this evening, and I appreciate your interest in reading this and commenting.

Cindy Sheehan and her supporters collected enough signatures to place her on the November ballot for California’s 8th congressional district, challenging Nancy Pelosi.

I personally celebrate this because I have felt very frustrated by House Speaker Pelosi’s refusal to follow through on accountability of this administration, and because she insists on taking “bipartisan” rhetoric to the point of submission to Republican policies.

I realize that electing the representative for CA 08 is up to the constituents there; but, because Pelosi’s decisions affect us all, I will support Sheehan to try to unseat Pelosi.  I’m going to send Sheehan $10.00, because that’s what I can afford right now (I hope to send more between now and November); if all of us chipped in, I think we could make a significant contribution to her campaign.

We’ve had some excellent essays on the subject of Pelosi, including those posted last week by dharmasyd and Edgar.  I think we understand the situation, and  some of the things we can do to help.

Please, support Cindy Sheehan – please, send a message to Pelosi that we need representatives who respect the values and laws of this country.

Thank you!

Note to my good friends at Docudharma:  This diary and the criticism it contains is not aimed at you but at the GOS.  I post it here for your amusement and out of respect for my brother buhdydharma and for all of you here at DD.  Peace.

The fact that we welcomed Nancy Pelosi to Netroots Nation, purportedly a gathering of leftists and progressives, has to make you wonder.  For the most part we sat there with our thumbs up our asses, drooling like idiots and lapping up the ‘respect’ we were shown by the mere presence of this illustrious traitor to everything I thought we stood for.

NN08 was everything I hoped it would be and considerably more.  I saw many old friends from last year, met face-to-face many old friends whom I had not met before and made many new ones as well.  There is something totally amazing about meeting an online friend in meat space for the first time.  In the Paradise restaurant on 6th Street in Austin on the first night of the conference I witnessed it happen five times back-to-back one right after another.  It was pure magic.