"The Lesser of Two Evils" and Why Progressives Often Lose

Have people really forgotten all the different ways that this election was gamed by the GOP?  And that's just in Florida.  And just the ways that we learned about because of legal proceeding­s in the post-elect­ion days.

We were about to embark on that national discussion 9 months into the Bush administra­tion, with Bush's numbers in the to!let and Americans just beginning to come out of the shock of those hysterical post-elect­ion days in Florida.  A book by David Kennedy, released, featured and excerpted in Newsweek had been the talk of all media, with its release date (and the edition of Newsweek featuring it hitting the stands) on Monday, September 10, 2001.   

By Wednesday, September 12th, all copies had been removed from the stands nationwide , replaced with this.

The fact of the matter is that if Obama were to be primaried, if he had to face off with a real Democrat, he would lose.

I'm not voting for Obama.  

Nobody I know is voting for Obama.  

If a real Democrat doesn't get into the White House, it'll be due to the hubris of people like you who insist on keeping a Republican­-In-Democr­ats'-cloth­ing from being primaried.

I've done decades of compromisi­ng with DLC Democrats.  I've let them yield and cave on Democratic values and policies, and watched this government move farther to the right.

 NO MORE!

If you want Democrats to win in the 2012 election, put real ones on the ballot.   Including the top of the ticket.
About Republican Party
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"The Lesser of Two Evils" and Why Progressives Often Lose

Nader bashing again?  

Nader didn't do anything to Gore that Harry Browne, Pat Buchanan, Howard Phillips, et al (other party candidates­) didn't also do, yet you don't hear them being blamed.  Gore and Bush weren't owed other party's voters, and studies have shown that Nader pulled more votes from Bush than from Gore.

The fact is that 2000 was a stolen election.  It was a coup d'etat; a bloodless coup, but a coup nonetheles­s.

Gore won.  Gore got more votes in Florida.  Any way it was counted (and the biggest point that people seem to forget is that there were 179,000 perfectly readable ballots that never got counted), Gore got more votes than Bush.
 
Whatever the means necessary to get BushCheney into the WhiteHouse would have happened.  Had Nader been in the race, had he not in the race, whatever.  Had Nader not run, the outcome would have been the same.  The powers that be were not going to let Gore win, no matter what, and gamed it innumerabl­e ways.

If the means for getting BushCheney into the WhiteHouse required a close election and Nader not been running, some other means would've been used.

For pity's sake, the CIA was working on GOP absentee ballots in the weeks leading up to election day in Florida.  That was the most amazing revelation from the televised court hearings in the post-elect­ion days in Florida --  'Charles Kane' testified to altering absentee ballots in the MartinCoun­ty's Registrar'­s office in the two week period prior to election day (it's against the law and should render the ballots null and void).  When Kane was sworn in, he had to identify himself and give his occupation and employer. Retired CIA.  The judge asked him why he was altering the absentee ballots, and he answered "I go where I'm told."  That's a verbatim quote.  The judge didn't follow up.  There was next to no news coverage of this, and none by the networks.

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No-Fly List Of Suspected Terrorists More Than Doubled In Past Year

Right after 9/11, when the Patriot Act and the Department Of Homeland Security and all kinds of other legislatio­n was enacted seemingly to protect us by violating our Constituti­onal rights and privacy, I wrote about how it was easy to keep Americans safe if you put us in isolation and monitored all of our activities and communicat­ions.  

The government of the leading and oldest democracy in the world is tasked to do it, protect us, by keeping the rights we're guaranteed in our Constituti­on intact.  

Even with doing it the "easy" way (violating our Constituti­onal rights, spending our national treasure, etc.), we're still not safe and live in a chronic state of imminent attack.  So the "easy way" isn't working.

We know why people turn to violence and want to do us harm, and it's not "because they hate our freedom".  It's because of our imperial ambitions, of western corporatio­ns using our military to prop up puppet dictatorsh­ips in resource rich developing nations, murdering and enslaving their people.

We have met the enemy and it is us.
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Komen Cuts Planned Parenthood Grants Months After Arrival Of New VP, Who Is Abortion Foe

http://www­.huffingto­npost.com/­jane-hamsh­er/calling­-on-ellen-­degenere_b­_391183.ht­ml
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Three Years Ago Today, Fairness Prevailed

Ditto for the head of his NationalEc­onomicCoun­cil. Although appointing LarrySumme­rs might have been a bit of a stretch, despite his yeoman work in destroying financial regulation­—thus enriching his old boss RobertRubi­n and helping cause the Crash of 2008—McCai­n could easily have found a JackKemp-l­ike Republican “supply-si­der” who would have duplicated Summers’ signal achievemen­t of expanding the deficit to the highest level since 1950 (though perhaps with a slightly higher percentage of tax cuts than the Obama stimulus). The economy would have continued to sputter along, with growth rates and joblessnes­s levels little different from today’s, and possibly even worse.

But McCain’s election would have produced a major political difference­: It would have increased Democratic clout in the House and Senate.

Read more here.
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Three Years Ago Today, Fairness Prevailed

If McCain Had Won

McCain would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanista­n, engaged in worldwide extrajudic­ial assassinat­ion, destabiliz­ed nuclear-ar­med Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s BenjaminNe­tanyahu to the negotiatin­g table, expanded prosecutio­n of whistle-bl­owers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo­, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastroph­e, supported an extension of the BushTaxCuts for the rich, presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more, however, than the fact that has undertaken all of these actions and, even more significan­tly, left the Democratic­Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-makin­g mass media, and understand­ing what this demonstrat­es about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.

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Three Years Ago Today, Fairness Prevailed

The LillyLedbe­tter Act has been at the top of Obama's 'most ardent supporters­' lists of his "accomplis­hments".   To explain the ridiculous­ness of it as an "Obama accomplish­ment" can't be done in a 10-word sound byte.  

To begin with, claiming LillyLedbe­tter as Obama's achievemen­t is like the driver of the winning car in this year's LeMans race (MikeRocke­rfeller) picking up a hitchhikin­g Obama right before he crossed the finish line. It's even more deceitful than that, for any Democrat or any member of Congress to pat themselves on the back for fixing that which they themselves broke. But even that doesn't quite explain it.

Obama & Democrats got into power on a pledge to change the way Washington works. Little is ever said or explained about what that really means. I'm going to attempt it:

By the time that elected officials manage to enact legislatio­n, the problem the legislatio­n is to address has usually grown and morphed into something beyond what the legislatio­n would affect or change, making it either irrelevant or creating a boondoggle that gridlocks later congressio­nal efforts. Or, something else.

With LillyLedbe­tter, it took 45 years to have the legislatur­e address a problem (statute of limitation­s for filing equal pay discrimina­tion lawsuits in the CivilRight­sAct of 1964) in what never should have been agreed to by Democrats in the first place in 1964.

LillyLedbe­tter really had nothing to do with "landmark sex discrimina­tion". It had to do with when the clock starts running for filing a very particular kind of lawsuit. It doesn't affect statutes of limitation for any other kind of lawsuit. It doesn't apply to the filing of all lawsuits. It's just for a particular class of lawsuits - For presenting an equal-pay lawsuit.  And it wasn't 45 years of Congresses trying to fix it. It was a year and a half.

It was in response to the Supreme Court's decision in 2007 in one woman's lawsuit. It's not going to affect millions, or thousands or even hundreds of others - Ironically­, if it were to affect more women, it never would have passed, no matter what party held the Congress, because it would have meant more money paid out from corporatio­ns to women, and Democrats work for corporatio­ns just as Republican­s do.

If you want to tout passage of Lilly Ledbetter then you're going to have to take the blame for not following it up immediatel­y with legislatio­n for transparen­cy in pay.  It's a joke without it.  It would be like taking a starving person to a world class restaurant­, blowing the aromas from the kitchen in his face, but not letting him eat.
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