Tag: failure

There is a crack daylight, that may topple the Republican’s Wall of Inaction.

Voinovich breaks with GOP to push for small-business incentives

Lori Montgomery, Washington Post Staff — Sept 10, 2010

Retiring Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) said he plans to help push a package of small-business incentives through the Senate next week, a move that would give President Obama and congressional Democrats a key victory on the economy in the final weeks before the November midterm elections.

In an interview, Voinovich said he could no longer support Republican efforts to delay the measure in hopes of winning the right to offer additional amendments. Most of the proposed GOP amendments “didn’t have anything to do with the bill” anyway, Voinovich said, and amounted merely to partisan “messaging.”

“We don’t have time for messaging,” Voinovich said. “We don’t have time anymore. This country is really hurting.”

Finally a Republican Senator with some Integrity, who is willing work for the folks, that Voted him into Office  (instead of working against their interests, for his own gain …)

Original article, by David Michael Green, via counterpunch.com:

Warning: If you like Obama, you won’t like the article.

Cross-posted from Progressive Independence.

A while back I linked to a blog entry that reported on the abandonment of Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy that put Democrats back in real political power after sixteen years in favor of what’s shaping up to be the DLC’s preferred method of losing elections by ignoring everything but the so-called “swing states.”  This horrendously bad decision is bound to cost the party dearly next year, especially as voter dissatisfaction with the current dictator’s failed economic policies and ever-more-fascistic behavior grows.  As early as January, prominent Democrats voiced their concerns over the dismantling of a successful electoral strategy:

(Full story reproduced below the fold.)

The first, Top Economic Strategist warns of ‘Catastrophe and Revolution’ by Rob Sewell looks at warnings from a leading strategist of capitalism in the City:

We are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Despite all the efforts to bail out the banking system, the economic crisis has only just started to bite. How deep or long the crisis will last is difficult to estimate, but given the financial house of cards built up in the last world boom, the capitalist system has entered unprecedented times, in which a depression cannot be ruled out.

Hat-tip Chris Rodda for this story; his her piece is currently sitting at the top of the Recommended list over there.  Please help get the traditional media to cover this story, and make sure they call it what it is: domestic terrorism.

Terrorists have struck on US soil again.  All the bluff and bluster of “we’re fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here” — along with all the idiotic, illegal and unconstitutional surveillance, searches and seizures, have finally been put to the test and found ridiculously wanting.

The attack was by domestic terrorists, the most insidious kind.

They struck, as if on some unholy jihad, against children.¹

Mr. Obama:

  As one of the relatively few people in this country who saw through your act early on, and for the right reasons, let me first say how utterly ashamed I am to call myself a registered Democrat.  You are a disgrace not only to the party at large, but to the thousands — perhaps, dare I say — even millions of Americans who were and remain so desperate for someone to come and rescue our once-great nation from the fascists that they placed their hope and faith in you.  Hang your head in shame, and then look me straight in the eye and don’t turn away until I’m done.

  According to an article in New York Magazine, the electorate has had about enough of you.  A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has you running in a statistical dead heat with Republican John McCain, FiveThirtyEight.com’s poll doesn’t look good for your chances either, and Zogby has your GOP counterpart five points ahead.  Are you trying to blow this election for us?!?  Because it sure as hell seems as though you are.

  The NY Magazine article gives several reasons for your pathetic performance thus far, but it left out the most obvious: not only your consistent refusal to fight back against the smears of the far right and its tired old champion for this election cycle, but, most importantly, your deliberate alienation of your own political party’s base.  Time and again, you have demonstrated that you do not represent Americans on any issue of importance, and voters realize this.  Long before you secured the Democratic Party nomination to be the ringer candidate against the election sham’s already-chosen victor, you were taking positions including (but in no way limited to):

• Your vile “Harry and Louise” attack mailers, which used the same right-wing talking points against Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals that were used to great success in the 1990s,
• Your purging – quickly followed by a reinstatement after the inevitable uproar from outraged supporters – of roughly nine hundred anti-war delegates from California, probably out of fear that they would defect over to the Clinton camp once they caught wind of your impending flip-flop regarding a pullout from Iraq,
• Your regular, condescending, talking down to Blacks in speeches,
• Your praise of the traitor Ronald Reagan,
• Your betrayal during the FISA battle,
• Your allegedly telling the Canadian government that your initial apparent criticism of NAFTA was “just campaign rhetoric,” which was quickly buried thanks in large part to a denial by Canada that you had said any such thing,
• Your provocative and unnecessary pandering to Israel’s fascist government over the topic of Jerusalem, and
• Your embrace of the horrendous Friedman school of economic policy.

  That’s just off the top of my head, nor is it the most worrisome reason for your refusal to campaign like someone who wants to win.  I have a friend named Dave who has worked on numerous Democratic political campaigns, including yours.  He is witness to the stupid things you’ve got your people in critical states such as Ohio doing, such as:

• Failing to even install a working telephone system in your Lakewood, Ohio, campaign office,
• Sending your people out to register voters — REPUBLICAN-leaning ones at that — whom you MUST know will NEVER vote for you, and
• Deliberately avoiding mentioning that it was under the presidency of Bill Clinton that average American incomes were higher, while it was under the shrub that those same incomes fell.

  This isn’t rocket science, Obama; it’s politics.  You’ve been in the proverbial game long enough to know this.  You seem hellbent on losing this election, and you need to explain why to those who placed their faith and hopes in you before you dash them just a little over two months from now.  It’s that, or pull your head out of your rear orifice and start trying to win this thing.  This race has never been, nor shall it ever be, about you; it’s about this country and the people in it, and turning back from the precipice of fascist empire your predecessors have brought us all to.

  That’s all I have to say to you, Obama.  You have your choice to make, though I am certain you made it long ago.  Just know this: no matter what happens in November, you’ll still be comfortably employed, while the rest of us will have to continue suffering the conservative policies you support.

Sincerely,

Archangel M

One of my favorite quotes from Mahatma Ghandi equates violence with evil:

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

The war in Afghanistan proves Ghandi’s point. Seven years of war under Bush and Cheney dislodged the Taliban from power, but has failed to bring peace, rebuild the war-torn infrastructure, foster human rights, or create a viable economy. To date, 491 American and 295 NATO soldiers have given their life in Afghanistan. The civilian and military toll among the Afghanis is uncounted. The American taxpayer is now paying 100 million dollars a day in Afghanistan. The only viable economic options in Afghanistan are growing opium and carrying a gun for the Taliban or a war lord. Education and health care are non-existent. In fact, Iraq is more stable than Afghanistan, a clear sign of failure.

A recent article in the Guardian shows why the American neocons cannot win a war and create a lasting peace with the most powerful military force in the world. Bush and friends live by the following credo:

I love violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the opportunities for corruption and exploitation are endless.