Message to Democrats: Don’t mess with us

I’m not sure that Democrats are getting the message.  They still think there is no place for us to go.  It’s either them or Republicans and we know that the Republicans are morally bankrupt.  Lately, we’ve seen that moral bankruptcy extends to the other party as well.  Two recent communiques stand out for me in this respect.

First, take this post, Does the Obama Administration Even Want to Win in November? , from Simon Johnson as proof that the Democrats just don’t give a f^&*.  Simon says:

There’s no story in the culture about what the big banks did and why. There is no attempt from the top to push through the key message for the day — financial reform — and to explain what this can do and how. The administration, in effect, is not even trying.

The inner team apparently thinks that 2012 will go just fine — as long as unemployment is down around 6 percent. And, they reason, the people who lose their seats this November won’t be around to complain.

Really?

If the administration fights hard and loses in November, that is one thing. If it fights on clear issues — forcing the other side to support Too Big To Fail structures — they may still lose, but such a loss will clearly communicate that the political strength of the big banks is now out of control. That is an issue to run on — and win big – -in 2012.

And if the administration doesn’t even care and hardly tries now, who will come out for them (or send a check) in two years?

The Obama team — both political and economic wings — seems to feel that their base has nowhere else to go, and all they need to do is drift towards the right in a moderately confused fashion to assure re-election for the president.

In short, the Obama administration is betting that you will be too desperate to salvage what little safety net is left after the GOP retakes control of Congress in 2010 that you will vote for Obama in 2012.  That’s what they’re betting on.  You will be so strapped, penniless and depleted of your retirement savings that you will automatically vote for Obama as a defense mechanism.  Who knows?  Maybe in September of 2012, we can expect the stock market to take another dizzying plunge, just to rattle everyones’ cages a bit.  Won’t that be fun?

Is that the Hope and Change that Obots voted for or does that sound like the machinations the oligarchy of some third world nation?

The second message is more disturbing considering its source.  I love Al Franken.  Everyone knows I do.  And I would walk over hot coals to vote for him if I were a Minnesotan.  But I really did not like the email I got from him on the Health Care Reform bill.  He is urging us to put pressure on House members to vote for the Senate bill with reassurances that it will be fixed later in reconciliation.  Al, there’s only one thing that Reagan ever said that I took to heart: “Trust, but verify”.  Any smart progressive or liberal would have to be nuts to believe that there will be a successful reconciliation *AFTER* the Senate bill passes in its present form.  I don’t want to know about secret deals or 11 dimensional chess or any other supposed secret plan to scuttle the Republicans.  I want you guys to act like Democrats.  If the House members vote for the Senate bill as is, they’re signing their political death warrants with the base.  The Senate bill violates core Democratic principles and so does many elements of the House for that matter.

So, let me deliver a message from the base to the Democrats.  Here are the things we want to see you guys get your asses in gear to do before November 2010.  And remember, there are just enough of us marginal voters out there to really harsh your electoral mellow going forward.  Just keep Corzine and Martha Coakley in mind.  We don’t have to vote.  If you want to stay in power, you need to start kissing up to us and fast.  And just forget about our support for Obama in 2012.  Nothing could make us vote for him now that he’s proven to be the empty suit, opportunist that we predicted he’d be.  If you don’t want a Republican in the White House, you’d better start working on the Obama problem now.

Here’s the CHANGE we want in very simple, straightfoward terms:

• NO MANDATES WITHOUT REAL COMPETITION in the health care insurance market.  For EVERYONE.  That means strengthening antitrust legislation and allowing everyone who has a policy to go shopping for a better one with a standard benefits package. We’ll know it when we see it.  So far, we haven’t seen it.  Don’t expect support until this requirement is met.  You may have to piss off Max Baucus.  That is fine with us.
• We want you to SOAK THE RICH.  This is what you were elected to do.  You may have thought you were just riding the coattails of the first black president phenomenon but that’s not true.  The CHANGE we wanted was protection of the middle class against the rape and pillagers who had Bush’s ear for 8 years.  Go back to the Clinton tax levels for everyone.  Claim a national emergency.  Put in a sunset provision for 2020. Dump the excise tax or pay for it with your seats.
• We want you to SOAK THE RICH when it comes to the financial industry.  Get the bonus money back.
• We want you to SUPPORT GENDER EQUALITY.  No more deals with Stupak.  Draw a line in the sand with him and then dare him to cross it.  Don’t give him money to run in November.  Make HIM the poster child of bad behavior.  If you don’t, your party can never again use protecting reproductive rights as an incentive for any woman to vote for you.  Your credibility will be permanently shot.  No, this is not negotiable.  No one will ever believe you again.  It’s up to you.  There are a lot of American female voters out there.  You gotta ask yourself, “Do I feel lucky today?”
• We want you to SAVE AMERICAN JOBS.  Figure out a way to keep the TARP money from going overseas to speculate in emerging markets.  That’s our money and we shouldn’t be betting against ourselves.
• DON’T TOUCH SOCIAL SECURITY.  Some of us have been paying the extra payroll tax all of our working lives.  That’s our insurance policy, we’ve paid for it and we have every expectation that it will be paid to us as advertised.  No, don’t even go there.  We aren’t buying it.  You depleted the trust fund?  You figure out how to get that money back.  See SOAK THE RICH above.

If you don’t start playing the game by our rules, you’ll be out on your asses before you know what hit you.  This is the age of mass communications and viral memes and social networking.  Your ability to fool enough of the people most of the time is going to lose it’s mojo pretty soon.  Cable news audiences are going away.  More and more people are looking at the wreckage of their middle class lives and they’re not buying the propaganda you’re catapulting anymore.  They’re starting to trust their lying eyes.  All you need is one good movement to catch fire.  It ain’t the Tea Party movement.

You will be surprised what people can do from the comfort of their own homes.  A protest doesn’t require hordes of people marching in the streets carrying banners and shouting slogans.  Self organizing is remarkably easy to do without the sting of tear gas or police batons.  It can be quick and painless.  Just because it’s quiet out there now doesn’t mean that the atmosphere isn’t charged.  Depending on the energy behind the movement, the pendulum may swing a lot farther than you anticipate.

If you have any sense of political self-preservation, you won’t test us.

Lazy Saturday News and Views

Feeling Under the Weather Today

Good Morning, Conflucians!! My cold or flu or whatever it is has gotten worse than it was yesterday, so this will be a short post. And if it’s full of typos, I apologize for that too. I plan to spend today like I did yesterday, reading a trashy mystery novel, and dozing off from time to time.

So, let’s see, what’s happening in the news this morning? Not a whole lot, I guess. The Pentagon shooter is still the top story in the Washington Post.

Parents warned police of Pentagon shooter’s bizarre mental state

Experts: Pentagon shooter, others strike symbols of ‘power for the powerless’

On the health care reform front, Bart Stupak is once again flexing his anti-woman muscles. Raw story reports that Rachel Maddow is asking questions about Stupak’s connections with “The Family.”

Did secretive religious group subsidize Congressman’s rent?

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow believes that Stupak is just looking for publicity with “this antiabortion stunt” and that “it is not rational to think that the Democratic-led House and the Democratic-led Senate are going to let him use health reform as a way to effectively ban abortion.”

Oh really? I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one, Rachel.

She points out, however, that Stupak’s new notoriety means that he may “end up having to answer for some of the unexplained things that no one cared to have [him] explain before.”

“For example,” Maddow noted on Thursday, “Bart Stupak famously was one of the conservative politicians who lived at C Street — a $1.8 million town house on Capitol Hill that featured in the Mark Sanford sex scandal and the John Ensign sex scandal and the Chip Pickering sex scandal. The house is home to a number of members of Congress. It has been reported to be run by the secretive religious group known as the Family.”

The series of scandals involving the Family and its high-level network of political connections has been growing since last summer, when it was learned that the three conservative lawmakers involved in allegations of infidelity all had ties to the C Street house. The Family has since been linked to a proposed law in Uganda which would mandate the death penalty for cases of “aggravated homosexuality.”

Good luck to Maddow on exposing this, although I don’t expect the Obama administration to help her out.

Oh, and get this, Obama is promising “progressives” that he’ll “revisit” the public option after the Dems force the crappy insurance bill down our throats.

It is to laugh. How many times can he get away with these transparent lies? I’m afraid to check the Cheeto to see if this one is working.

ABC news’s Ben Feller asks a good question: A Furious Health Care Push _ but What About Jobs? There’s more detail and a more liberal point of view in this article from The Socialist Worker’s Party site: A recovery that leaves workers behind

CNN’s idiotic anchor Wolf Blitzer has apologized for putting up a news chryon that called the Department of Justice the ‘Dept. Of Jihad’

“CNN had no intention of suggesting that the Justice Department supports terrorism,” he said. “Lawyers at the Justice Department are patriotic Americans, and we certainly regret any confusion that may have been caused by our graphic.”

The graphic came before a segment yesterday on the ad by Liz Cheney’s group that attacks DOJ officials who previously represented Guantanamo detainees.

A chyron during the segment asked, “Are Justice Department Lawyers Disloyal?”

Blitzer referenced the storm of criticism the segment set off on Twitter, which was initiated by Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald.

Today, Greenwald has a column about New Republic editor Martin Peretz and his anti-Arab bigotry.

And here’s some more bigotry news: Virginia AG orders colleges to stop protecting gays

At Antiwar.com, Scott Horton interviews Nat Hentoff on the death of the Bill of Rights, and James Lucas writes about how the U.S. destroyed Afghanistan.

That’s about all I have the strength for right now. Add your own links in the comments, and I hope you all have a very nice day.

BB