Tag: change

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    If you missed the last two nights of Countdown with Keith Olbermann you missed a lot of new details in the Health care Reform debate, and I don’t want to sound bleak, but things do not look good. The main points are these.

Wendel Potter:      “If there’s not a public option, the plan that is passed, if it’s passed and signed by the President, will not be sustainable. And it ultimately will be a disaster for the middle class and ultimately be a disaster for the Democratic party . . .

~snip~

    “We’ll be paying a lot more out of our own pockets. We’ll have the appearance of being able to afford premiums but we won’t be able to afford health care. That can not be sustained.”

    You can watch the video here

    And then there is the news that Rahm Emanuel will be representing the White House in the presumably upcoming Houuse-Senate Conference committee. Thus the title “If you wanna kill the (Public Option) you gotta do it yourself.

    More below the fold, and it ain’t pretty, with a call for action that puts it all on the line.  

    More than eight months after President Barack Obama took office, one third of the country’s U.S. Attorney offices are still run by prosecutors appointed during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, according to a review of data by Main Justice.

    At this point in October 2001 – after Bush succeeded Democrat Bill Clinton – less than 9 percent of the slots were occupied by Clinton holdovers.

mainjustice.com

    Change? Well, I guess if you consider taking a dollar and giving you back 67 cents change, you can count it as change, right?

    In an Administration so dedicated to bipartisanshit that they are seemingly willing to take the blame for fuck ups caused by their predecessors and risk becoming complicit in the last administrations war crimes, nothing speaks to the ineptitude of this current administration to distance themselves from or even address the failures of the criminal Bush/Cheney Administration than the fact that the Bush US Attorney’s who politicized the process of prosecuting matters of law is still more Bush than the Bush Administration was Clinton by this point in unpopularly elected, Supreme Court imposed Ex-President Bush’s first term.

    Between that and the Republiican dominated military appointments made by the Obama team since his election, the team of rivals is quickly starting to look like the team of people who undermine one another while appearing to not know what the fuck they are talking about.

    But as president, Obama has moved cautiously to replace U.S. Attorneys. While Bill Clinton asked for the resignation of all U.S. Attorneys after taking office in 1993 – a move that was criticized at the time as disruptive – the Obama White House has consulted closely with Republican senators. At times, the White House has delayed moving forward when GOP senators objected to an intended nominee. At the same time, some Democratic senators and House members have been slow in forwarding their recommendations for U.S. Attorneys to the White House, c0ntributing to delays, say people familiar with the process.

mainjustice.com

    Among the Bushie leftovers are Middle Alabama District US Attorney Leura Canary, who prosecuted Don Seigelman in a fradulent case, Bill Mercer of Montana, who managed to hold two jobs at once during his tenure and in New Mexico, Gregory J. Fouratt, who replaced US Attorney David Iglesias who refused to stage a witch hunt against ACORN, that evil group whi si guilty of the heinous crimes of registering minorities to vote and fighting Corporate America for a living wage for the proletariat.

     The end story, Obama really isn’t that different from Bush after all, or at least not as of now, almost a year since he won the election.

     But you can still cheer for change if you want. Hell, 2/3rds of change is better than nothing, right?

Wasington Post:

The Obama administration has decided not to seek legislation to establish a new system of preventive detention to hold terrorism suspects and will instead rely on a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing military force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to continue to detain people indefinitely and without charge, according to administration officials.

Leading congressional Democrats and members of the civil rights community had signaled opposition to any new indefinite-detention regime, fearing that it would expand government powers and undermine the rule of law and U.S. legal traditions.

The administration’s decision avoids a potentially rancorous debate that could alienate key allies at a time when President Obama needs congressional and public support to transfer detainees held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States for trial or continued incarceration.

The administration has concluded that its detention powers, as currently accepted by the federal courts, are adequate to the task of holding some Guantanamo Bay detainees indefinitely. And although legal advocacy groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are unhappy with the existing system, they acknowledge that it has enabled some detainees to win their release and limited government power in ways that any new law might not.

So, I guess we don’t need to worry about this, anymore, either.  

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  But when life gives you pickles, you’re screwed, because nobody likes pickleade.

The last few days have seemed to become days of reflection, at least for me.  From the appearance of the recent diary list periodically today, I was not alone.  But I don’t want to reflect on 9/11.  That has never been the way I have operated.

Meanwhile I have to eulogize my colleague who died last May at a memorial service on Tuesday.  That may seem to you to be an extremely long interim period between dying and memorial, but that’s the way stuff happens in a college.  She died between Finals Week and graduation.

When he was asking Americans to vote for him during the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said . . .

We’re looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington.  It’s a status quo that extends beyond any particular party and right now that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got, with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face, whether those problems are health care that folks can’t afford or a mortgage they cannot pay.

Before Obama appointed Wall Street insiders to run his economic policies and a Blue Dog to be his chief of staff, he told us . . .

Make no mistake about what we’re up against.  We’re up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government, that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem and this election is our chance to say that we are not going to let them stand in our way anymore.

Obama’s not only letting them stand in our way, he’s helping them stand in our way.  He let lobbyists write the Senate Finance Committee bill.  He campaigned for the public option, but now he’s caving to the Republicans and Blue Dogs who are telling us we can’t have it. They’ve viciously attacked the public option from the very beginning and they’re continuing to viciously attack it.

When he needed our votes, Obama condemned the very people he’s caving to now . . .

There are those who will continue to tell us that we can’t do this, that we can’t have what we’re looking for, that we can’t have what we want.   But here is what I know.  I know that when people say we can’t overcome all the big money and influence in Washington, I think of that elderly woman who sent me a contribution the other day, an envelope that had a money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope.

I’m not sure what you think you know, Obama, but here’s what she knows–she knows what Democrats used to stand for, she knows what they must stand for again.  She remembers when FDR showed America what real change looks like, she remembers him winning the fight for economic and social justice . . .  

From a wheel chair.  

FDR’s legs were paralyzed, but his moral courage wasn’t, his heart wasn’t, his determination to fight for the Americans who elected him wasn’t.  Unlike you, Obama, FDR wasn’t paralyzed by moral cowardice, he didn’t reach out to Republicans, he didn’t compromise with the liars and hypocrites of that degenerate party, he governed as a Democrat because that’s what he promised he would do.    

That elderly woman who sent you $3.01 remembers when Democrats were actually Democrats, she knows how desperately America needs another Democratic President like FDR.  She believed in you, Obama.  She trusted you.  She had faith in you.  She believed you when you told her last fall, when you told all of us last fall that . . .

We’re up against the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election.  But we know that this is exactly what’s wrong with our politics. This is why people don’t believe what their leaders say anymore. This is why they tune out.  And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.

You’re throwing that chance away, Obama.  You’re letting the losers of that election kill reform, you’re shattering the trust so many Americans had in you, you’re giving us no reason to believe that anything will really change.

Crossposted at Daily kos

    I am beginning to believe that President Obama has this figured out, and that we WILL get HCR and a Public Option.

    Why do I believe this? Let me explain.

    But first you have got to FIGHT, DAMMIT ROCKY!

    So here is some inspirational music to inspire Hope, and while you get riled up let me take you below the fold and reveal the genius of 9-sided chinese chess, exposed.

Crossposted at [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/9/151935/4860 Daily Kos}

Change Vs NOOOO!!!

    This is my personal account of Saturday’s town hall with Representative Scott Murphy.

    I have met the wingnuts and looked into their eyes, and they are very scared, badly misinformed, angry, and dumb as hell.

    Early on the screamers tried to troll out the event. Representative Scott Murphy (D-NY20) answered back with a line that sums up the whole argument when he said

“When we are done people can tell me what they hate.”

    I have broken this diary up into four sections, including a breakdown of Congressmen Murphy’s conversations with the public and his stance on Health Care reform, as well as pictures from the event, the lobbyists role in all of this, and a statement on the need to throw bipartisanship overboard from now on.

   Having engaged the GOP base firsthand, I can easily state that these are the dumbest people in the country.

The Progressive Movement is busy being born.  

The Conservative Movement is busy dying.  

New media is busy being born.  

Old media is busy dying.  

Multicultural America is busy being born.  

Racist America is busy dying.  

Why are they howling and screeching with such fear and fury?  

Because they’re dying.

And they know it.  

Q:     “So, what are we supposed to do when our own leadership is somewhat apathetic to what we voted for them for?

   

thinkprogress.com

    Push harder, YELL LOUDER, whatever it takes, Harry Reid. I think many of us in the Democratic party would agree. Now is the time, Harry, now. One or two rogue sell out Senators can not be a monkey wrench in the works, not on health care or EFCA or anything else that this Congress needs to do. That is why we elected you people, for action, not excuses.

PODESTA: And I think that – I suppose I have a little bit of sympathy for Sen. Reid, in the sense that I look around at his caucus and understand how hard his job is. But I don’t think you can settle for a statement like that. I think you have to call out the fact that we’re demanding serious change, and indeed, it is the job of the leadership to round up votes, to push legislation through, to try to get the kind of bold initiatives that the President is talking about passed, and to his desk, and signed. […]

   And that, I think, is what we should expect, that’s what we should demand, and that’s what we should put pressure on the members of their caucus to push back on their leadership. You just cannot settle for “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got one outlier who won’t vote for cloture.” We’ve got to both put pressure on the members who are not supporting a progressive agenda, but we’ve also have to put pressure on the leadership to come up with a strategy to find the votes to kind of get these things and move them forward. And we just can’t settle for less than that.

    The “statement like that” pointed out by Podesta refers to Reid’s recent statement that Democrats can’t “bulldoze anybody” because we all know that if the GOP had the White House, a filibuster proof Senate and a huge House majority they would never in a million years do that to us, right?