Bait and Switch

Chris Floyd:

A Saturday rally in Washington by unions and other groups did turn out several thousand people, calling for more jobs, tax hikes on the rich, immigration reform and defending public services. This, as they say, is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, although it falls far short of the angry, obstreperous crowds in Europe, who are not wanly supplicating their leaders for a few crumbs but demanding action to preserve their quality of life.

However, one’s heart sinks to see the event’s organizers, and some of the participants, describing it as a get-out-the-vote effort for the Democrats, and a show of support for Obama.

Go back and check out Digby’s post about yesterday’s One Nation rally. Then go to the One Nation website. Do you see anything at either place about Democratic GOTV or showing support for Obama?

Somebody got used, and it weren’t us.

(h/t Susie Madrak)

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BTW – Which crowd is larger?:

One Nation Rally

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Beckfest

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Pre-existing failure

ObamaCare

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From FAUX News:

It’s a centerpiece of President Obama’s health care remake, a lifeline available right now to vulnerable people whose medical problems have made them uninsurable.

But the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan started this summer isn’t living up to expectations. Enrollment lags in many parts of the country. People who could benefit may not be able to afford the premiums. Some state officials who run their own “high-risk pools” have pointed out potential problems.

“The federal risk pool has definitely provided critical access, in some cases lifesaving access, to health insurance,” said Amie Goldman, chair of a national association of state high-risk insurance pools. “That said, enrollment so far is lower than we would have expected.”

California, which has money for about 20,000 people, has received fewer than 450 applications, according to a state official. The program in Texas had enrolled about 200 by early September, an official in that state said. Goldman, who runs the pool in Wisconsin, said they’ve received fewer than 300 applications so far, with room for about 8,000 people in the program.

That’s not how it was supposed to work.

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Ayup. As Wonk the Vote would say, “Nobody could have foreseen.”

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Why do the Obots pile on Clinton?

It happens all of the time.  Obama does something feeble in terms of domestic policy or extends the unitary executive theory to assassinating Americans who should be tried first and while the comment threads fill up with anger some idiot steps in and says something like, “Yeah, but Bill Clinton was a Republican and a DLC leader and he was a Baaaaaad Dude and we don’t like him.”

And I think, where the Hell did THAT come from?

No president is perfect.  I don’t expect perfection.  And the DLC has been made out to be the equivalent of some Democratic Volturi, complete with glowing red eyes.  Ya’ know, I just don’t buy that.  The DLC has always seemed to me to be some kind of Rotary Club or other organization that you have to check off the list of memberships you need to be successful in Democratic politics.

But, Ok, maybe I’m missing something.  I wrack my brains over what it is exactly that is pissing so many Democrats off about Clinton.  And I come up with… nothing.  Or nothing that makes any damn sense.  I have to admit I didn’t like the results of the deregulation of financials with the termination of Glass-Steagall act. But as I understand it, that deregulation was going to pass with or without Clinton’s support.  And I’m not fond of his former economic advisors like Rubin and Summers.  But somehow, I can’t see the Big Dawg giving into the bankers in a crisis like this one.

In cases such as these,  I do a gut check.  I don’t look at the details.  I look at results.  Did the economy prosper?  Yep.  Did we get into any unnecessary wars?  No.  Were we hit by terrorism?  Yes.  But we also headed off a plot or two.  Richard Clark says by contrast, the Clinton administration was on top of things where the Bush administration was, er, lax.  Were his Supreme Court appointments reasonable?  Yes, he appointed the last liberal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,  to the Supreme Court according to recently retired Justice Stevens (and what does that mean regarding Elena Kagan?)  Did he raise taxes?  Yes, on the wealthy.  That probably resulted in the surplus.  Did he solve the health care debacle?  No, but his wife was instrumental in getting the popular and efficient SCHIP legislation passed.

So, what is pissing off progressives?  I’ve heard a lot of nasty noises about Welfare Reform.  It makes no sense to me.  Nobody wants to be on welfare.  It needed to be reformed and getting people back to work is important.  Yes, the Republicans were shooting for a retributive and mean sprited bill and they voted it in.  But Clinton managed to get it softened.  The other thing that gets progressives’ dander up is NAFTA.  This puzzles me.  What exactly is the problem with free trade between your two closest neighbors?  The problem wasn’t the trade.  It was the labor laws.  From what I recall, the labor protections were stripped out of the bill- by Republicans.  And if you were paying attention back then, something progressives apparently were not doing, you would have known that the biggest threat was from India and China, not Mexico. How many refrigerators do you buy that have “Made in Guadalajara” on them?  Heck, I could see it 15 years ago when I watched a flood of Chinese scientists into the R&D industry.  If China could afford to let their best and brightest go to America, how many more must they have at home?  Millions, as it turns out.  It’s one of the reasons I ran for the school board in my town.  Our standards were abysmally low in math and science compared to China.  But the truth is, if you don’t support labor, the race to the bottom is steep and cruel, regardless of how well you do in calculus.

Now, let’s revisit Obama’s “accomplishments”, shall we?  Um, he doesn’t really have any.  You can pass all the legislation you want but if it doesn’t help people in the end, or worse, makes their economic situations more precarious by making it easier for employers to pass on the costs of health care to their employees and making that insurance more expensive, then the total number of bills passed means squat. If you’re going to get on Clinton’s case regarding welfare reform, shouldn’t you be doubly incensed that in a Mother of all Recessions, you have his administration cutting food stamps to pay for some Race to the Top education plan that very few people want or endorse?  Starve families while you starve their schools.  That’s progressive? Better than Clinton?  Or consider that in spite of the recommendations of some of his economic advisors, his stimulus plan failed to deliver a buzz because it was half the size it needed to be.  And don’t even get me started on Obama’s unitary executive theory stuff where it is OK to keep Guantanemo open, assassinate Americans and announce that you’re ending combat operations in Iraq while you keep 50,000 troops there.

It makes no sense to keep harping on Clinton when Obama isn’t in his league.  I remember the night Clinton won.  The Clintons and Gores stood on the steps of the Governor’s mansion in Little Rock and we were all so happy.  Ding, dong!, the nasty Republican presidents were gone.  Mean spirited Reagan, hiding behind his sunny disposition and sour faced Bush who didn’t bother to hide at all, twelve years of stingy, dispiriting, soul crushing conservative nastiness, to be replaced by a young president and his working woman wife.  The Clintons were who we aspired to be.  Successful, hard working, dedicated public servants.  And for the most part, they delivered.  They gave us 8 years towards the restoration of the American Dream in spite of the screaming banshees of the Movement Conservatives.

If that success invites comparisons between Obama and Clinton and it makes the people who service Obama a tad uncomfortable, that’s not surprising.  What is surprising is that so many people who should know better and know how the Republicans dogged Clinton for 8 years for no legitimate reason, would give in to the propaganda that Clinton is no better than a Republican president and a DLC mastermind.  These little gems, carelessly tossed off by the likes of Big Tent Democrat and cluttering up the comment threads of progressive blogs everywhere are distractions from the fact that Obama’s performance is horrendous in terms of liberal and progressive values.  He is not a friend of the working guy.  Instead of giving him a pass because “Clinton was a Republican president”, why aren’t these people holding Obama to a higher standard of performance?  I mean, compared to Clinton, isn’t Obama a LOT more Republican?

Unless the only point of the comments is propaganda and distraction. Yeah, that’s what I’m going for.  Forget the fact that Clinton is busting his ass for the party that stupidly rejected his more qualified wife for Obama.  Make sure those sheeplike progressives who are leaderless right now don’t start pining for a Clinton.

I got their number.  Do you?

Put down the Kool-aid and step away from the punchbowl

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Eleanor Clift at Newsweak:

Obama’s background as a community organizer may be hampering him as president. While his supporters still like him, they’re not so sure he has what it takes to bring about the hope and change he promised and excited the base. A community organizer empowers people to do things for themselves, and in government, you have to lead and order and direct, and that’s not Obama’s style, even though Republicans call him autocratic and Rush Limbaugh calls him “Ayatollah Obama.” Obama has had a lot of success in politics and academia, and on the mean streets of Chicago, by reaching consensus, and he expected to apply that life lesson now that he’s at the pinnacle of power, and it didn’t work.

Name one instance where Obama had success by reaching consensus. One. (Getting himself elected doesn’t count)

{{crickets}}

Barack Obama’s job as a community organizer was to get African Americans in Chicago’s South Side registered to vote and to the polls to help Mayor Harold Washington in his battle with the Daley Machine. Now that’s not a bad thing, but it was just a political hack job, not some higher calling.

When Washington died, Obama packed up and left for law school. When he came back he immediately started getting cozy with the Daley Machine.

BTW – Does this mean that being a community organizer is NOT a qualification to be POTUS?

Aren’t you glad we’re all post-racial now?

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If you google “post-racial Obama” you’ll get 3,240,000 hits. When I did it the first one was a 2008 column by Shelby Steele:

Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.

[…]

Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long — that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a “post-racial” America? And shouldn’t those of us — white and black — who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?

Here’s what “post-racial” America looks like to some lefties:

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars:

Enthusiasm gap, schmenthusiasm gap. Without the benefit of months and months of advertising and promotion on Fox News Channel (in fact, I’m only aware of Ed Schultz on MSNBC doing any kind of TV promotion), the One Nation Working Together rally in Washington DC has gathered more supporters than Glenn Beck’s much ballyhooed rally, which I will lovingly refer to as “Whitestock”.

Baba O’Brien:

In other news — The “One Nation” progressive rally in Washington today is claiming a bigger crowd than Beckapalooza. I can’t tell from the photographs if it really was bigger, but it does appear to be less monochromatic, if you catch my drift.

Paul Rosenberg:

Restoring Honor” Beck said he was about, but to could offer no coherent explanaiton what he was talking about. It was simple, really: A black President and a female Speaker of the House, as a white male substance abuser, he was doubly dishonored by the fact that he could no longer assume everyone saw him as superior, just because of his race and gender.

Only a fool would claim that racism in America is dead and gone. But this obsession with labeling any and all opposition to Obama and the Democrats as racist is disgusting, misguided and wrong.

Do you really think the Tea Partiers would be cool with taxes and big government if everybody was white?

Lefties love this quote by the late Lee Atwater:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”

They use it to explain “dogwhistles” or appeals to racism that only racists can hear, but for some reason lefties seem to be the only people hearing them. However if you take off the Kool-aid goggles and look at that Atwater quote again you might see something different – progress.

BTW – Didja know that the last riots over desegregation took place in “bluest of the blue” Massachusetts?

A blast from the past (the money quote starts around the 2:00 minute mark):

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