Morning News: Saturday morning cartoon/Labor Day weekend edition

Screencap from Felix Doubles for Darwin

Good morning, Conflucians. I’m writing you a quick Saturday roundup from Bastrop, Texas, just outside of Austin, where I’m spending this Labor day weekend. It’s cool and breezy out and I just want to grab a cup of coffee and curl up outside on a lazy lounge chair with a book, but before I do, here are a few headlines that caught my eye… the donkeys and elephants are up to no good as usual!

From WaPo, “Democrats add financial austerity as a campaign issue” :

The candidate was outraged – just outraged – at the country’s sorry fiscal state.

“We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet,” he fumed to a roomful of voters. “In my view, we have nothing to show for it.”

And that was a Democrat, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who voted “yes” on the stimulus, the health-care overhaul, increased education funding and other costly bills Congress approved under his party’s control.

Like I keep saying, no difference between Ds and Rs these days — it’s just one big DINO-RINO orgy, where they take turns drinking the most from the 300 teats of the corporate cash cow.

Also, if you remember Jeralyn at TalkLeft supported Bennet over Romanoff during the Colorado primary last month. Why? As far as I could tell from her post about it at the time, she didn’t think Romanoff’s voting record was “progressive enough” on issues like the death penalty and pot. She didn’t really have much to say in support of Bennet — I guess he’s the real progressive? Right. I don’t know much about Bennet, but from everything I’ve read about the coverage of this race, he sounds like another DC Dem corporocrat.

You say “Hillary Diehard” like it’s a bad thing

Ok, I am going to take the contrary opinion to Sandress’ last post about Hillary.

First, let me establish where I’m coming from.  My concern is for the economy and the direction America is heading in general.  Now that we’ve let a complete and utter, self absorbed novice set us back TWO additional years on top of the EIGHT disastrous years that preceeded him, this country is in pretty bad shape.  We are clinging to what is left of the New Deal with the fingernail of our left hand pinky.  When social security is compromised, by a Democratic president, no less, we will go straight back to the conditions we had during the Great Depression.

Second, the person who takes on the job in 2012, assuming he/she has any interest in fixing things,  will have an even greater task ahead than when it was merely incredibly broken in 2008.  (By the way, Ian Welsh had a very interesting perspective on Obama and what kind of president he really is in the latest edition of Virtually Speaking that aired on Sunday.  Highly recommended.)

So, I am not looking for a feminist savior.  I am not looking for a symbol to rescue me.  All I want, for heaven’s sakes, is someone who actually knows what they’re doing and cares about what happens to those 310 million people in this country who we call citizens who work hard everyday and play by the rules.

It doesn’t have to be Hillary.  It could be a player to be named later.  Can anyone think of a person other than Hillary who could actually, you know, do the job?  I mean, someone we actually have confidence in, who might not be everything you want but who would be fair, who has enough experience (finally) to run things and knows where all the mechanisms of government are and isn’t afraid to use them?

Oh, sure, the knives would come out.  In fact, I would expect them to get longer and meaner.  The more threatening the individual to the dominant paradigm, the sharper the daggers.  And it would be a thankless job.  It’s going to be much harder to put the country back together now than it would have been in 2008.  And if the Congress goes back to Republican hands, it will be that much tougher still.  No wonder Bill Clinton is stumping for Democrats as hard as he can.  But Democrats really need to step up their game and save themselves.

In the meantime, Hillary is our Secretary of State and she’s a very good one.  A dentist’s ad is not going to persuade her to resign.  It’s going to probably take a lot of soul searching and a ton of cash to get her to run.  But she’s the frontrunner, regardless of a dentist’s ad and whether or not she decides to run.  That is something we have to come to terms with.  She is the biggest threat on Obama’s horizon whether she likes it or not.

The Obot banshees can shriek from now until 2011, nothing is going to change that.  And we can count on her old Republican nemesis (what’s the plural of nemesis?) to step up their game as well.  I can’t imagine it could get worse than 2008.

We’ll still be here.  We don’t back down from a fight.  So, go ahead and call me a Hillary Diehard.  I can take it.

Bring it on.