Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tag: Obama
Feb 02 2010
Utopia 18: The Long Now
Feb 01 2010
Enough waiting. Let’s rebuild the Progressive Party of the United States.
At what point do progressives stop being Democrats’ whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama’s latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.
How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.
Jan 28 2010
Utopia 18: The Long Now
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jan 25 2010
“I told him he was full of sh*t”
MSNBC’s Ed Schultz talking at the AM950 Blue State Bash on Saturday night to a crowd of progressive talk radio fans in Minnesota lets go with both barrels at Robert Gibbs, at Barack Obama, at the “people who have infiltrated the Democratic progressive movement“, and at the whole delusional idea of bipartisanship.
“I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him,” Schultz said. “And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb the same way Senator Leahy got it on the Senate floor. I told Robert Gibbs, I said, ‘I’m sorry you’re swearing at me, but I’m just trying to help you out.”
“I’m telling you, you’re losing your base,” he continued. “Do you understand that you’re losing your base? And that the American people don’t want public option, the American people want single-payer!?’“
Watch this…
Jan 20 2010
Harry Truman: Phony Democrats
In only one short year, Democrats have managed to redirect away from the Republicans and at the Democrats the rage voters felt at Bush, Cheney and Republicans for destroying our economy and our country .
In only one short year, Democrats drove up deficits to bailout Wall Street and fund two wars nobody wants but Republicans. They couldn’t manage to reinstate usury laws or Glass-Steagall, but they sure as hell could pass bankruptcy reform just in time for the meltdown. Only tone deaf, elitist Democrats living in Washington’s bubble could possibly blow blue MA and lose Ted Kennedy’s seat.
Democrats ran on change and proceeded to deliver Bush and Clinton’s third terms. And if they think people are angry at them now, just wait until they use deficit reduction to cut Social Security and Medicare instead of raising taxes on the rich and corporations.
By surrounding Obama with Clinton and Goldman Sachs’ reruns, the idiots in charge of this Party managed to make a liar out of Obama the reform candidate, a hypocrite out of President Obama and destroy the party and country’s desperately needed opportunity for real, fundamental reform. Instead of a New Deal, a Fair Deal, they gave all of their supporters a raw deal.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
more
Jan 20 2010
Obama’s Stimulus is Working: Employers are hiring !!!
India Outsourcers Hiring Staff as US Demand Grows
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 20, 2010
Filed at 9:44 a.m. ETMUMBAI, India (AP) — India’s top three outsourcing companies are ramping up hiring and increasing pay as global corporations, mainly from the U.S., send more work offshore to cut costs as they emerge from the downturn.
Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro expanded their global workforces by an average of 5.1 percent last quarter, together adding 16,701 employees, company documents show — an early sign that the Great Recession may ultimately benefit India as cost-conscious companies outsource more work, just as they did after the dot-com bus….
Heck of a job there, O.
Contrast the US response /stim to France:
Ghosn was summoned to meet Sarkozy after France’s second- largest carmaker floated the idea of shifting production of the next Clio compact car to its plant in Bursa, Turkey. The suggestion came after France spent about 600 million euros to boost car sales and provided Renault with 3 billion euros of aid in the face of the worst recession since World War II.
“We haven’t invested all this money supporting our carmakers just to see all the factories moved overseas,” Sarkozy told lawmakers in the National Assembly Jan. 13. The French state is also Renault’s biggest shareholder with a 15 percent stake.
That’s what could have been.
Jan 20 2010
Obama decides to ram iceberg head-on.
Democrats suck. They do not learn that good policy is good politics.
The Democratic reaction to losing Kennedy’s seat will be to do exactly what voters were punishing them for.
From a perspective of operant conditioning or other theories of what constitutes rational behavior i.e., the theory of learning to “earn rewards” and “avoid punishments,” the behavior of Democrats is what behavioral learning theorists refer to as “misbehavior,” because it doesn’t fit their theory of what rational behavior should be like, dammit!, assuming, of course, that behavior is rational in the first place. In plainer, descriptive language this behavior might more simply be called “working for pain” or “earning pain.” Earning pain is a real phenomenon in both rats and humans. And can be downright amusing to watch in the human case.
Struggling against a sea of troubles, a once-in-a-lifetime president having a once-in-a-lifetime mandate for real change, Barack Obama, has made the counter-intuitive and unpopular decision to stay the course.
On war, health care, the economy, on justice and accountability, on the rule of law itself, Barack Obama, and Democrats more generally, have opted to stay the course. They view staying the course as the safe option. Freeze when Republicans are in power, and run to electoral safety when they are out. Just like rats irrationally yet repeatedly running between electrified grids and freezing after each shock, in various states and fits of fear, if I may deign to notice.
Following an epidemic of fraud, a tsunami of foreclosures (with a second tsunami in short order), and record gambling losses transferred to the public balance sheet, former Fed vice-chairman Alan Blinder is scared:
My fear is that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a sturdier and safer financial system is slipping away.
There will be no consumer protection legislation. No clawbacks of ill-gotten gains. No regulation of on- or off-balance sheet financial instruments. And no prosecutions of fraud.
Scott Horton’s expose of obvious war crimes will also go unheeded.
Barack Obama will not be content to simply re-arrange the deck chairs, he’ll say. Americans do not run from their troubles, but take them head-on, he’ll say. What he means is,
All ahead flank!
And all ahead flank it will be.
Jan 15 2010
Security Trumps All
It’s a big, bad, nasty dangerous world out there. Full of fanatical killers who hate you because you’re free. You got to make sure you’re safe. That’s the most important thing, right?
Everything else ain’t worth sh*t without you’re safe and secure, right?
Right. No question.
I heard on the news today that they’re closer now. In my town.
Sh*t. Now what? I’ve got it! I’ll put up a steel fence around the house. To be safe and secure.
Ahhh, that’s better.
Jan 15 2010
A Farewell to Arms: Why I Left ‘The Left’
Barack promised change — and sure enough, things changed for the worse
-Joe Bageant
To Hell with the ‘left’! I am finished, done, disillusioned and over it, the divorce papers have been filed and are now finalized and I am not going back. As of this day, I will no longer allow myself to be affiliated or endorse the ‘left’ in any way, shape or form. So long folks, it was real and it was fun but in the end it was unfulfilling and dare I say, a waste of time and effort. Is this overly harsh? Perhaps it is but the break had to be made and it can no longer be put off. I assure you, this was no hasty decision but rather something that has been a slow and agonizing process, a steady drip…drip…drip.., like Chinese water torture and suddenly the mind goes, the spirit breaks and the ugly reality of the situation cannot be denied or disguised. So to all of my good friends on the left I wish you the very best but I am no longer one of you and maybe I never was, it was never dogma to me only a desire for some sort of social fairness and a fair shot but the American left being a shell of it’s former self with labor broken and the DLC corporatists having taken over the Democratic party it has been reduced to shills for the Democrats and squabbling identity groups each with an agenda that prevents any sort of unity necessary for a mass movement for real change. Sucks but that is just the way it has to be.
Jan 14 2010
Bring It, Douchebag
This is the left’s equivalent of John Yoo.
http://www.informationliberati…
On second thought left/right means nothing as the fascist New World Order takes shape. Want to tell me how I should think now? Fuck You. One can only tread water in the cesspool for so long. I came before the great American dumbed down generation so Fuck You and two middle fingers straight up.
Are you talking to me Mr. Sunstein? You should be. I note the omission of the now global 911 truth movement from the list of conspiracy theories.
Jan 04 2010
Afghanist- yemen- omalia- bama, & Good Intelligence
Al-Qaeda shifts into dangerous new territory
UK Telegraph, January 04, 2009
The key to success against the jihadists will always be good intelligence.
President Barack Obama’s statement on Saturday linking the failed airline bomb attack over Detroit on Christmas Day to an al-Qaeda group based in Yemen will have surprised no one. It confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that the coming decade will be as dominated as the last by the threat posed to the West by Islamist terrorism. The focus of the battle is, however, shifting. Significant successes by the United States and its allies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have forced al-Qaeda largely to re-locate to Yemen and Somalia.
It’s a goddamn good thing he’s keeping you “safe” by upping the number of troops in AfPak to 100,000 or more and shooting handcuffed children, right?
Real News Network – January 4, 2010
Afghanistan and global dominance
Engdahl: US China strategy driving Afghan war, but no real long range thinking in place