Spintested: 10/27/11

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

Thursday, October 27, 2011

As an old OLD liberal Democrat, active within the Democratic Party for decades, I'm here to tell you that the Democratic Party is controlled by corporations just as the Republican Party is.

A vote for any registered Democrat is a vote for the status quo, more of the same, of Democratic politicians working in the interests of corporations over the people's interests. Even progressive candidates get their orders from the party elites -- Progressive candidates may talk a good game, but if their votes are needed or wanted to pass pro-corporate legislation, they will abandon their alleged convictions and fall in lockstep with the party. Remember Dennis Kucinich and the public option. His vote wasn't even needed, but Obama wanted the issue crushed.

We're not limited to voting for just Democrats and Republicans. There are other alternatives besides sitting out the election or voting for Republicans. There are other candidates running as independents, from Green to Libertarian, in just about every race. If for no other reason than to get the 5 percent that is necessary for getting a seat at the table, I think that may be enough for great numbers of Democratic voters this time around.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama presented himself as the latest in a long line of corporate, Democrats, interested in tinkering with the system but largely agreeing with the consensus on free markets, free trade, and US. military power. As the February 2011 cover story in TIME explains, Obama even agrees with many of the fundamentals of Reaganism, telling reporters, "What Reagan ushered in was a skepticism toward government solutions to every problem. I don't think that has changed." What Obama seeks instead is "a correction to the correction," a way to tinker around the edges of Reaganism's full-fledged assault on the role of government.

As Roger Hodge points out in his recent book, The Mendacity of Hope, "Obama praises Clinton for putting a 'progressive slant on some of Reagan's goals,' by which he presumably means Clinton's wholesale adoption of the Republican economic agenda, from passing NAFTA to cutting taxes, gutting the welfare system, and embracing the rhetoric of small government".
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

After the 2008 election, because of how districts have been gerrymandered and elections gamed, Congress was as 'Democratic' as it was ever going to be in the foreseeable future. The most who would ever (in my lifetime) vote for Democrats turned out (10 million more voters), and you see what Obama did with that: Continuing just about all BushCheney policies, Republican-like legislation.

Obama's 'most ardent supporters' presume he'd really like to be FDR and put through liberal legislation if it wasn't for those "mean, corrupt Republicans", but that's not who Obama is or what the DLC-controlled Democratic Party is all about. Until you and the rest of the 'ardent supporters' get it, confront Obama and demand some straight answers (which you will then realize that Obama's idol is Ronald Reagan), we are all screwed.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

Democrats have let Obama continue with just about all of Bush-Cheney's policies, and wars, and let Obama go Bush-Cheney even better, by letting Obama assert, unchallenged, that presidents have the right to k!ll Americans with no due process or oversight, push for 'preventive detention' and no transparency of anything a president asserts should be his secret.

Democrats have abdicated their Constitutionally-required role of oversight of the executive branch; they failed to perform it during the BushCheney administration, and still don't with one of their own in the WhiteHouse.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

You cannot run for public office, you do not rise within a political party or get support from a political party's machine either locally or nationally unless you surrender to the hierarchy of power. It's the only reason there are political parties.

Democrats in both chambers of Congress work as a team. And when your party also holds the White House, all party members do what the president wants. They identify what they hope to achieve (pro-corporate legislation) and then strategize how to get it while saving each other's hides with constituents come election time.

Those in liberal districts get to talk a good game about being champions of the People, but when push comes to shove, if their votes are needed to cross over and k!ll liberal legislation (like a public option or access to ab0rtion), the DNC will make sure they are covered come election time, with massive infusions of money into their campaign war chests and crushing any principled challenges to them from the left in their primaries.

How they tag team us:

Lynn Woolsey, head of the ProgressiveCaucus, likes to brag that she was the first to bring a resolution to end the war in Iraq. She, and congressional Democrats, and Obama, ran on ending the practice of paying for the wars through supplemental emergency spending bills, and putting the wars on budget. See why that is significant here.

Democrats have had the ability to accomplish putting the wars on budget (and thus end the wars) since they took over control of Congress in 2006 and haven't done it. They didn't need Republicans to do it.

Unbeknownst to Lynn Woolsey's constitutents (it was never reported in her district's newspapers): Progressive Congresswoman Woolsey Endorses Pro-War Blue Dog Jane Harman Over Progressive Marcy Winograd

As the head of the ProgressiveCaucus, LynnWoolsey led 79 of the 82 members of the caucus to pledge that they would not vote for any healthcare reform legislation that didn't include a public option.
Woolsey then led the 79 to renege on the pledge. Even when Obama didn't need Kucinich, the last hold-out of the caucus, Obama wanted and needed to break the back of public optioners so it wouldn't be revisited during his term in office -- He put the screws to Kucinich until he caved.

KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

Make sure you know who the liberals are. If they're running as Democrats, they do what the party hierarchy dictates and are just as compromised as Blue Dogs.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Campaign Finance Reformers Launch Progressive Effort To Remove Money From Politics

"Sarcasm the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."

Simpler version: Sarcasm is the last refuge of those with no real argument.

The democratic republic exists as a careful balance between 3 branches of government, each looking over the other shoulders to keep everything on the up and up.

In 1978, the FISA court was established, over my (and many others) objections and warnings. It was specifically for the purpose of hearing information that the government claimed was too sensitive to be known publicly and had to remain secret. Information so secret that even a defendant's lawyer couldn't be clued in, but the FISA judge would make sure that the government wasn't blowing smoke up everyone's ___.

What the Obama administration wants is to lie not just to the American people, but to the courts, too. Obama wants to eliminate the courts from the equation, to lie to the courts and say "No such evidence exists for you to even evaluate whether it should be public". That's more of the same 'unitary executive' that Obama's 'most ardent supporters' railed against when it was Bush and Cheney asserting it.

We on the left saw where such a precedent and departure from the Constitution the creating of the FISA law could and would lead. But due to those like you (cognitively challenged), we were shouted down. Just as you're trying to do now.

What you trust is a facade, a persona of no substance, a fakir, created specifically to appeal to the weak-minded and ignorant. Obama is a product that was marketed, nothing more. You really have no business offering opinions when, in fact, you don't know what you're talking about and should be asking questions of power, and demanding they answer. And if you don't know what questions to ask, then you'd better get the heck out of the way and leave it to those who do know.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

Without a doubt focus group-tested to target particular interest groups within the Democratic Party.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Campaign Finance Reformers Launch Progressive Effort To Remove Money From Politics

Did you not read that the Obama administration seeks to codify (make legal) an existing practice initiated by Ronald Reagan's AG by way of a memo that allows federal agencies to deny Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by falsely claiming that documents that do exist don't? And Obama's rule goes further than Meese's memo mentions, including the courts in who can be lied to about the existence of documents.

Obama's was to be the most transparent administration in history, bent on correcting the wrongs of the previous administrations that have gotten us to this point where more of our government operates in secret than ever before in its history.

How can any Constitution loing citizen defend this effort by Obama?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Campaign Finance Reformers Launch Progressive Effort To Remove Money From Politics

Obama, in his own words:

"Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public, no more secrecy.....No more secrecy.....":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQbQTrm_pSA

Transparency Will Be Touchstone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72g7qmeP1dE

"Clintons did health care the wrong way, behind closed doors":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvyharXBI0Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0m6Rxm9vU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBtIKgGHYPQ

"On transparency", "About inviting the people back into their government again", & "Part of the job of the next American president is making Americans believe that our government is working for them, because right now they don't feel like it's working for them. They feel like it's working for special interests & it's working for corporations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97hvOOdy_I

"We need a president who sees the government not as a tool to enrich well connected friends & high-priced lobbyists, but as a defender of fairness & opportunity for every single American. That's what this country's been about and that's the kind of president I intend to be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEMxfme7OQI

"The American people are the answer":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2cvru2TH-s

Obama's Transparency Problem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IODbwOhZYEM

Obama's campaign rhetoric was just that -- Rhetoric.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Campaign Finance Reformers Launch Progressive Effort To Remove Money From Politics

Obama's Justice Department wants to codify a repulsive existing practice that allows federal agencies to deny Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by falsely claiming that documents that do exist don't.

Genuine government transparency is fundamental to all Americans, which is why this twisted take on transparency has struck nerves across the political spectrum. Both the liberal ACLU and the conservative Judicial Watch oppose the warped proposal.

Justice already can legitimately deny FOIA requests to protect information about ongoing investigations. But falsely claiming documents don't exist would discourage FOIA filers -- who'd have no way to know such claims were false -- from suing over rejected requests.

Yet court challenges will be Americans' best hope for ultimately derailing this attempt at disingenuous deception, should Justice implement it. Bolstering that hope, The Daily Caller reports, is a federal judge's ruling in a case involving FBI records: "Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the court."

Government must not "affirmatively mislead" the American people, either. Justice's bid to do so reveals Obama administration "transparency" as the travesty it is. If not much more.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Campaign Finance Reformers Launch Progressive Effort To Remove Money From Politics

Click on "More Obama treachery:". Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Campaign Finance Reformers Launch Progressive Effort To Remove Money From Politics

More Obama treachery:

The Obama administration wants a new rule to the Freedom of Information Act which would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist – even when they do.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

How to Achieve Transparency for the Super Committee

The Obama administration wants to make it more difficult for the public to determine if secret documents exist by allowing agencies to lie about them.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

And the proof of what I'm saying was evident for all to see in the 2010 midterm elections, when Obama and the DLC worked their butts off preventing progressive/liberal Democrats getting into office. Read about that here.

To add insult to the injury, before the 2010 midterms, Obama broadcast that he would be doing more of the same, more caving by Obama & Democrats, to Republicans, even if Democrats remained the majority and in control of both Houses of Congress:

Aides say that the president's been spending "a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0," brainstorming with administration officials about the best way to revamp the strategies & goals of the White House.

And despite the predictions that Democrats may relinquish a large degree of legislating power, including perhaps control of the House & even Senate, Obama isn't thinking of the next two years as a period that'll be marked with the same obstructive nature from the GOP.

"It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, [Republicans] feel more responsible, either because they didn't do as well as they anticipated, & so the strategy of just saying no to everything & sitting on the sidelines & throwing bombs didn't work for them," Obama says. "Or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals & work with me in a serious way."

Dick Durbin says Obama's post-election agenda "will have to be limited & focused on the things that are achievable and high priorities for the American people." Tom Daschle says Obama has to reach out more: "The keyword is inclusion. He's got to find ways to be inclusive."

Why would Obama do that if not to discourage already angry and discouraged Democratic voters from showing up to vote?

Democrats lost seats in the 2010 midterms because of Obama's and Democrats failure to do what Democratic voters put them in office for in 2008. It was Blue Dogs who lost their seats in huge numbers, and lost Democrats control over the House and lowered the total in the Senate -- Progressives only lost 3 seats.

Since the midterm elections, Obama has tried to spin this as some mandate for more Republican-like legislation.
About Herman Cain
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

Obama never pressured BenNelson (or BlancheLincoln, or any BlueDog). The Democratic leadership could've taken away committee chairs (BlancheLincoln's, too) of members in their caucus that filibustered a PublicOption for healthcare. They didn't.

The DNC could've taken away reelection funds. They didn't.

Reid could've actually forced Republicans and turncoat Democratic senators to filibuster. He didn't (and doesn't).

The ProgressiveCaucus could have kept their pledge about not voting for a bill that didn't include a robust PublicOption. They didn't.

Obama DID unleash the attack dogs to go after HowardDean when Dean said it was a lousy bill. Dean was then forced to get back into line. Obama went after Kucinich, the last remaining holdout on the ProgressiveCaucus, for threatening to vote no on the healthcare bill, and we all know how that ended.

There is nothing that Lieberman (or Nelson or Lincoln) is doing that Obama hasn't ordered. Obama and the DLC-Democrats want Lieberman there, doing what he's doing, which is to take the heat off of Democrats.

And the proof of this is that (since you mention Nelson), when Obama needed Nelson re: StupakAmendment, he 'bought' his support. That's what Obama could've done for Nelson's or Lincoln's vote at any time, on any legislation.

There could be 100 "progressives" in the Senate and 435 in the House, and they and Obama would still find a way to deliver to corporations instead of the People and blame it on Republicans. Because they're DLC, aka Republicans-in-Democrats'-clothing.

Republicans, with the smallest minority, have managed to thwart Democrats, who've had the greatest majority in decades. You would think that with Republicans controlling the House, Democrats would've turned the tables and thwarted Republicans' continuing legislation like Bush's tax cuts for the rich? Are Democrats just stupld?
About Herman Cain
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

GOP's War on Working Americans: Our Best Path to Victory

Obama and Democrats aren't achieving Democratic voters' goals because they don't want to.

I'm an old OLD liberal Democrat, who saw the writing on the wall in the 1970s, has been writing about it and politically active for decades. Reform isn't on the agenda of either party. Republicans don't have to bother trying to keep progressives out of office -- Obama and the DLC worked their butts off to PREVENT more progressives/liberals from getting elected. Obama and the DLC put the power of the White House, the DNC, and the Democratic congressional committees behind Blue Dogs, Republicans and Independents over progressives/liberals and real Democrats. Some, but not all, examples:

Blue Dog Blanche Lincoln over progressive Democrat Lt. Governor Bill Halter.

Republican-turned-Independent Arlen Specter over progressive Democrat Joe Sestak.

Republican-turned-Independent Lincoln Chaffee over Democrat Frank Caprio (which, in turn, is an effective endorsement of the Republican John Loughlin over Democrat David Cicilline for the congressional seat Democrat Patrick Kennedy is retiring from, and all of the other seats up for grab in Rhode Island).

Republican-turned-Independent Charlie Crist over liberal Democrat Kendrick Meek.

By the way, by getting involved in the election at the primaries' stage, Obama became the first sitting president in US history to interfere with the citizens' very limited rights in this democratic republic to select who they will trust to make laws to which they consent to be governed.

Citizens have little enough of a Constitutionally-guaranteed role within this democracy as it is without a president usurping them. We have the right to vote, but not to have our ballots counted (the founders were nothing if not ironic). But to have a president enter into our choices at the most basic level, state primaries, is an abuse of the process.

Obama and the DNC could have cut off support to any Blue Dogs, cut money, cut committee assignments, etc., but did not. Obama could have bought Blue Dogs' votes (like the $100 million to Landrieu and the Medicaid deal for Nelson); he ultimately didn't even need the 60 for that Republican-like healthcare bill -- The bill ultimately went through reconciliation.

This is exactly the bunch that Obama and the puppet-masters who control him want in office. On both sides of the aisle. Obama, Ds and Rs in office, working on behalf of transnational corporations.
About Herman Cain
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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