The president made a proposal. That’s great. Except David Sirota says the proposal is just another example of Obama looking out for the Big Guy, and John Cole says it won’t even merit a debate. You want to know what the problem is? No one on the left is fighting for the president’s agenda. Half the progressives are spending all their time bitching and the other half are spending all their time in utter despondency.
I don’t call myself a progressive. I don’t even think of myself as part of the left anymore, which I did for nigh on fifty years, until now. Since five minutes after the President was elected, it’s been an unproductive, destructive whine fest, while the right organized itself into the 2010 elections. It’s like nobody can figure out how to have a Democratic president. The only thing I will call myself anymore is a Democrat and I will let anybody else interested figure out the rest.
Really, what a waste of time and energy this whole argument has been. You can’t support the President because you’re not getting what you want; he can’t give you what you want unless you strengthen his hand, instead of weakening it. It’s that simple and that crazy-making.
But while there is a part of the left who couldn’t care less that there is a Democratic President or Congress, don’t care that they are collaborating with the right wing to damage the Obama administration–they’re just as happy damaging Democrats as Republicans–I do understand those on the left who mostly just want to see the guy we elected now and again. The guy who gave this speech on Monday.
You see that picture there? That’s the bad ass motherfucker we elected, not the milquetoast pussy that gave the worthless Oval Office speech on Iraq last week. You see who’s behind him there? Those are mostly white workers. If you saw them at a gathering of teabaggers, you wouldn’t be surprised. It was as if President Obama let out his inner Barack, unencumbered by chimeric bipartisanship and briefly let loose by Rahm “Fucking” Emanuel. And Barack enjoyed coming out to play. We last had a play date with Barack sometime around June 30.
This was Obama’s Labor Day speech, where he genuinely brought the old time noise, going after Republicans with a surprising streak of viciousness and anger. “Even on things we usually agree on, they say no. If I said the sky was blue, they say no,” he mocked, to laughter in the large crowd “If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no.” He said that the “special interests” in DC “talk about me like I’m a dog.” And he proposed a near-certainly dead-on-arrival $50 billion infrastructure rebuilding plan and tax cuts for business investments in new equipment. If he’s up to what the Rude Pundit think he might be, its failure could be the rallying point for Democrats (assuming Democrats understand this).
Remember (and sometimes the Rude Pundit has to remember this, too): Obama’s game has always been rope-a-dope. Lull the opposition into a sense of security. Play turtle to their hare. And then rip off the shell at the last minute to sprint to the end. …
In its report this morning, NPR interviewed some guy who didn’t like the speech. Obama promised bipartisanship, the man said. All he heard was more of the same old politics.
“And it’s about time,” the Rude Pundit wanted to tell the man.
I understand the Rude One. I feel that way sometimes, too. The Rude One is right. And BooMan’s got it exactly right: “You want to know what the problem is? No one on the left is fighting for the president’s agenda.” When we have both of these things, together at the same time, is when we get ours, and not before.
The BP oil spill has largely been treated as the latest plot twist in the Obama epic. The plume of crude rising from the seabed is not only the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, darkening the gulf and thousands of lives and pervading the nation with a sense of helplessness, it is a metaphor for Obama’s loss of control, a revealing moment to study our protagonist. Will he feel the seafarer’s pain? Will he shake with fury? Will he weep tears into the salty sea? Sing to me, Muse, of the wrath of Washington’s Achilles.
The initial government response did not provide enough dramatic juice to slake the chorus. So Obama visited the Gulf Coast again and again and again. With cameras rolling, he got into character and knelt to the ground and sifted sand through his fingertips. He grimaced on morning show interviews and pondered whose “ass to kick.”
Then, on Tuesday night, in his first Oval Office address, speaking in martial terms of a “battle,” he sought to move the story line off of him. Onward toward energy legislation! “Now,” Obama thundered, “is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.”
But much of the reaction to the speech, rather than focusing on the plight of shrimpers or the legislative agenda, critiqued the address as a new panel in the ongoing Obama storyboard. On CNN, for example, White House correspondent Ed Henry complained that Obama had not discussed how much oil is leaking into the gulf, “perhaps because it doesn’t fit into his narrative that the government is all over this.”
In this particularly meta moment, the overarching Obama story line hovers a level above events, distracting from the disaster in the gulf, glossing over the question of whether the government’s concrete actions are sufficient, removing readers and viewers and listeners from reality. The narrative has been constantly updated — Obama’s a hero one day, a goat the next — as ravenous news cycles and impatient audiences demand conclusions, and attention-starved media outlets can no longer subsist on the modest first drafts of history.
I voted for his calm, cool manner and level head, pragmatic and cerebral, the way he is, and his belief that a government can be managed for the good of its people. Sorry he can’t be the angry black man of your dreams, but the candidate we had is the president we got, and he is not there to stepin fetchit for you or go all over Al Sharpton. So enough already. Get out of his way with this sorry-ass lameness. The man’s got work to do. Let his wife and children worry about his passion.
The Richmond Police Department released the following statement Thursday, along with this incident report:
Richmond Police Investigate Cantor Building Vandalism
March 25, 2010
The Richmond Police Department is investigating an act of vandalism at the Reagan Building, 25 E. Main St., Richmond, Virginia. A first floor window was struck by a bullet at approximately 1 a.m. on Tuesday, March 23. The building, which has several tenants including an office used by Congressman Eric Cantor, was unoccupied at the time.
A Richmond Police detective was assigned to the case. A preliminary investigation shows that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window. The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds. There was no other damage to the room, which is used occasionally for meetings by the congressman.
The Richmond Police Department is sharing information about the incident with appropriate law enforcement agencies.
In an interview with TPM, a Richmond Police Department spokesman said the bullet that penetrated a window in a building that includes a campaign office of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) was “an act of random gunfire.”
“What we were describing yesterday in fact describes an act of random gunfire,” said Public Information Manager Gene Lepley.
A story in the Hill this morning lets us know that Obama is very much aware of Pete DeFazio’s votes against his legislation:
Obama himself has taken notice.
“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother,” Obama told DeFazio during a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, according to members afterward.
That’s pretty powerful. The President of the United States calling you out for disloyalty in front of your peers.
That’s politics is what it is. What a bunch of crybabies, and I don’t mean DeFazio. No wonder so many of us are leaving the left, not to go right, but just to go somewhere effing else.
Prior to October 20, just a week ago, the “conventional wisdom” among Washington DC-centric pundits and bloggers was that the so-called “public option” on the upcoming national health care bill was dead in the water.
Since October 20, the same voices have shifted to a presumption that the public option – in which the US government would create its own health program (much like it already has for members of Congress) to compete with private insurance companies, bring their prices down, and offer another option to citizens – is now a done deal and the remaining question is what kind of public option will be approved by Congress.
What changed on October 20 to so radically shift the beltway CW?
315,023 phone calls – deployed by Organizing for America, President Obama’s grassroots political arm – that flooded the US Capitol switchboard in a single day: that, and that alone, is what shifted the ground beneath the health care debate. Those that participated in organizing that warning shot know it even while many who did not lift a finger for it look for other explanations for this positive shift in the discourse. …
The “opt out” clause, on a policy level, is a distasteful compromise, but on the level of electoral politics it is pure political gold, especially for pro-public health care Democrats. It could lead Republican legislatures and governors in key states to be replaced by Democratic majorities. It would become the battle cry to register millions of non-voters from the most marginalized sectors of society – those without any health insurance at all, first and foremost – to inundate the polling places in years to come.
In sum, as the various compromise options on getting a public health care option through the US Senate go, the “opt out” public option is the one that most sets a trap for opponents for years to come. It is a dare, really: Go ahead and try to deny your own state’s citizens what millions of Americans have now won for their families and themselves. You’ll be sorry if you do.
The President congratulates Senator Reid and Chairmen Baucus and Dodd for their hard work on health insurance reform. Thanks to their efforts, we’re closer than we’ve ever been to solving this decades-old problem. And while much work remains, the President is pleased with the progress that Congress has made. He’s also pleased that the Senate has decided to include a public option for health coverage, in this case with an allowance for states to opt out. As he said to Congress and the nation in September, he supports the public option because it has the potential to play an essential role in holding insurance companies accountable through choice and competition.
This is more ado than (unemployment + pig AIDS)^(two lost wars) combined. More ladies, on more golf trips, or Obama will be forced to show… his birth certificate? Is that what the controversy was here? It’s all a jumble.
For real, my first marriage ended, in part, because I didn’t want to do things like play golf and related boring things, like watching football games on television on Sunday. If I had to do it at my work, I’d have quit that, too. But then, my sister has been golfing for decades and I didn’t disown her for it. Am I sexist for that? Maybe, but if I have to start caring about crap like who the President of the United States golfs with, I may have to hang myself. Wonkette is right: It’s a jumble, not an outrage.
If women in government want to be on the golf course, get out there and golf, instead of whining to the New York Times:
“There is a sense that Obama has a certain jocular familiarity with the men that he doesn’t have with the women,” said Tracy Sefl, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign who speaks regularly to some female aides in the administration.
Oh, the humanity. What man doesn’t?
Presidential golfing is a long-standing tradition and I have no idea if they did it with women or without women. Just like about their birth certificates, did anybody ever ask if these guys golfed with women? Do we have to care?
Play golf with whomever you want, Mr. President. Get some fresh air and exercise. You’ve got a lot on your mind.
Very well said. I gave up on the “progressive” blogosphere months ago after it turned into the Debbie Downer Poutrage Lobby and showed they don’t have the first idea of how to function productively without a Republican president. Feh.
If you supported Obama during the primaries, you know who you are and this does not necessarily apply to you. For the rest of you, you spent the primaries either shilling for Clinton and telling us our guy was all talk and no show, or you spent them bitching that David Plouffe wouldn’t respond to and obey your emailed wisdom. As soon as he won the presidency, you started bitching about his appointments. As soon as he became president, you started bitching about his messaging, his framing, his agenda, and his lack of deference to your opinion. I want to know where the point was in this process when Obama was supposed to conclude that you were his allies and that you were responsible for his victory. When was he supposed to conclude that he owed you something, or that you had any respect for him, or that you credited his good intentions, or that you understood the myriad responsibilities of the job might mean that your pet issues might have to wait six months, a year, or two years to get to the top of his agenda.
You call him a warmonger, but he gets the Nobel Peace Prize. He ends torture and allows his Attorney General to investigate it, and you call him a torturer. He tries to enact health care reform with a robust public option and you accuse him of seeking every opportunity to sell-out to the insurance industry. He bails out the cratering financial services industry and prevents a second Great Depression, and you accuse him of selling his soul to corporate CEO’s. I’m not saying that all of these criticisms lack validity. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t advocate for the things they care about passionately. I just want to know where you get the fucking idea that an anonymous White House staffer who gets asked about all this criticism would feel obligated to show you deference and respect.
What’s he supposed to say? That all the criticism is right on the mark?
The truth of the matter is, right or wrong, the progressive blogosphere has been a more severe and on point critic of the Obama administration than any teabagger. And, in many ways, that is to the community’s credit. We don’t embrace the cheerleader’s role and that gives us more credibility. When the president screws up, we’re willing to call him on it. But, Jesus Christ, do you expect the administration to lie down and say, ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another’?
You bunch of weenies, stop the bitching and moaning and support your goddamned President.
An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “misspoke” when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option “is not an essential part” of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President. The official said that the White House did not intend to change its messaging and that Sebelius simply meant to echo the president, who has acknowledged that the public option is a tough sell in the Senate and is, at the same time, a must-pass for House Democrats, and is not, in the president’s view, the most important element of the reform package.
A second official, Linda Douglass, director of health reform communications for the administration, said that President Obama believed that a public option was the best way to reduce costs and promote competition among insurance companies, that he had not backed away from that belief, and that he still wanted to see a public option in the final bill.
“Nothing has changed,” she said. “The President has always said that what is essential that health insurance reform lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes that the public option is the best way to achieve these goals.”
A third White House official, via e-mail, said that Sebelius didn’t misspeak. “The media misplayed it,” the third official said.
“Every time we are in sight of health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they’ve got,” the President said outside Bozeman. “They use their influence and run their ads. They use their political allies to scare the American people.”
He is right about that. But the special interests aren’t fighting the reform, in a system that cries out for reform, as much as they are fighting him. They see their first real good opening and they go for it.
They don’t just want to hijack this debate, they want to hijack his presidency. The rest of it, about your coverage and everything else, is just the cover story.
Please, do not give the right wing a helping hand.
Once again, she advocates an uprising or military coup to remove the President.
Continuing the Birther War on Court Clerks, Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq. publishes on her website the name and phone number of a Supreme Court clerk who gave her an answer she didn’t like.
Going from there, Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq. gets herself all riled up and unleashes a stream of vitriol against the United States:
There is a wall of silence and fear and apathy coming from every level of the government. It provides such a resembles to what I have seen in the communist Soviet Union.
Our sold out puppet main stream media is silent. I remember how in the SovietUnion my parents and their friends were huddled around transistor radios, trying to get any info, any glimpse of truth, any real news from BBC or Radio Free Europe . With their broken English, they could catch only every other word, but it was better then the Communist brainwashing. That was the reason, why they sent me for testing, to get into a special school with advanced academics, advanced English and math and science, so one day I would be able to escape this dreaded existence or at least, so I will have the the tools to fight for my rights.
Never in my life did I think that I will have to fight for my rights on American soil, it is such a dejavu, such a recurrent nightmare. Read more »
Even an Israeli hoosegow can’t hold cop-batting nut job, Cynthia McKinney.
“We were in international waters on a boat delivering humanitarian aid to people in Gaza when the Israeli Navy ships surrounded us and illegally threatened us, dismantled our navigation equipment, boarded and confiscated the ship,” she said in a statement, adding that they were immediately taken into custody.
“Immigration officials in Israel said they did not want to keep us, but we remain imprisoned,” she said.
“State Department and White House officials have not effected our release or taken a strong public stance to condemn the illegal actions of the Israeli Navy of enforcing a blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians of Gaza, a blockade that has been condemned by President Obama.”
The Israeli military issued a statement Tuesday saying that the boat had attempted to break a blockade of Gaza and was forced to sail to an Israeli port after ignoring a radio message to stay out of waters around Gaza.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor has said Israel was planning to free the crew and passengers.
“Nobody wants to keep them here,” he said earlier this week…
Elected in 2000 and reelected in 2006, Ensign has been a leading conservative among Senate Republicans, playing a key role in demanding the resignation of Larry Craig in September 2007. Ensign called Craig a “disgrace” after he was arrested in June 2007 in an airport men’s restroom on disorderly conduct charges. Craig resisted the calls from Ensign to resign but retired from the Senate last November.
NBC News has confirmed that Ensign told other senators earlier today that the reason he decided to go public about the affair is that his ex-mistress was indeed trying to extort money out of him.
But current and former aides to the Nevada Republican say the woman was 46-year-old Cynthia Hampton, a campaign staffer whose husband was a top aide in Ensign’s Senate office.
“It was known in [Ensign’s] inner circle that they were involved,” a former aide told POLITICO.
Hampton served as the treasurer for Ensign’s reelection campaign and for his leadership fund, Battle Born PAC. According to people familiar with the matter, Ensign’s affair with Hampton took place between December 2007 and August 2008. FEC records show that she ended her affiliation with the two committees in early 2008.
Hampton is married to Douglas Hampton, who, according to Senate records, served as Ensign’s administrative assistant in his personal office from November 2006 to May 2008 — around the same time Cynthia Hampton left Ensign’s committees.
We may be getting somewhere: In addition to serving as Ensign’s campaign and Battle Born PAC treasurer, Cynthia Hampton, it’s been said, though unconfirmed, was Chris Ward the embezzler’s assistant treasurer at the NRCC. Chris Ward, treasurer of the NRCC, had been treasurer of Battle Born PAC before Hampton.
Sen. John Ensign had to correct a campaign finance report after auditors turned up several lapses that are being blamed on Christopher Ward, his former treasurer who is at the center of a Republican embezzlement scandal.
Like a number of other Republicans, Ensign hurriedly commissioned an audit of his Battle Born Political Action Committee earlier this year when Ward emerged as a suspect in an accounting fraud involving the National Republican Congressional Committee, one of the party’s chief fundraising arms.
Besides working for the committee, Ward also handled the books for Ensign’s PAC and more than 80 GOP campaign organizations in recent years.
Battle Born PAC raised $423,932 last year and spent $474,365. Ward became treasurer March 29, 2006, and filed a year-end report on Jan. 23, 2008. After Cynthia Hampton became the new treasurer Feb. 12, she filed an amended year-end report eight days later.
A spokeswoman described the amendment as fixing routine bookkeeping errors unrelated to Ward.
Ward also was treasurer for Senate Majority Committee, a joint fundraising committee for six senators who are up for re-election this year.
Senate Majority Committee raised $214,500 last year. Ward was listed as treasurer from April 2006 to January 2008. The committee registered Hampton as its treasurer Feb. 12.
I don’t actually care what consenting adults do behind closed doors, although one wonders why the “Defense of Marriage Act” could not protect this marriage—but a new sex scandal mixed with a revived financial scandal, that can play.
Obama needs to find some brush to beat back to keep the poutragers quiet about how he spends his time.
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 6 — By the time President Bush returns to Washington on Labor Day after the longest presidential vacation in 32 years, he will have spent all or part of 54 days since the inauguration at his parched but beloved ranch. That’s almost a quarter of his presidency.
Throw in four days last month at his parents’ seaside estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, and 38 full or partial days at the presidential retreat at Camp David, and Bush will have spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route.
GOP shows it’s still stuck on stupid with a fear-mongering video.
The strikingly dark and ominous video starts by asking; “What are Democrats doing to keep America safe?” It then launches into a series of video clips highlighting what the GOP charges are dangerous decisions by the Obama administration, including the decision to close the suspected terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and the more recent decision to release previously classified Bush administration legal memos detailing enhanced interrogation techniques – techniques that Democrats have said are torture.
“The real question we now face is what is President Obama’s strategy to confront this threat from radical jihadists?” Hoekstra asks in a news clip.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden is shown in the next clip telling Fox News: “I think that teaching our enemies our outer limits, by taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation.”
Toward the end of the video, a silent question asks, “After 100 days… Do you feel safer?,” between which a flurry of images flash across the screen – some for a few moments longer than the others.
One of those images is of President Obama meeting with the Hispanic Caucus at the White House. The other images include Obama bowing before the King of Saudi Arabia, speaking before the entire House Democratic Caucus, laughing at a podium with Vice President Joe Biden, slapping hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a group of apparent jihadists burning an American flag, an explosion, a hooded man with a rocket launcher, and an image of the Pentagon from Sept. 11.
Gov. Rick Perry today in a precautionary measure requested the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide 37,430 courses of antiviral medications from the Strategic National Stockpile to Texas to prevent the spread of swine flu. Currently, three cases of swine flu have been confirmed in Texas.
