American Extremists: "Word"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

US assassinates its own citizen without due process, Daily Kos community cheers

Glenn here.

Daily Kos diary here.

American Extremists: "Accountabull"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Sinkable"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Harris-Perry poll"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Don't speak"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

If that's not historically historic, I don't know what is

What a fantastic summation of the Age of Obama, found in comments at Salon:

Finally, we have some one who has mentioned global warming.

It's simply amazing what's considered amazing when Obama does it.

American Extremists: "Primary colors"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Dear Lefty, turns out you only thought you had principled objections to the Obama administration

Turns out, you're just a racist. Thanks, Melissa Harris-Perry, for clearing that up!

American Extremists: "A new hope"

American Extremists webcomic archive:

http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "This way to the egress"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

The rhythm of saints

Please check out this link, to a Raw Story post titled, "Scott Brown melts down over Warren poll gains: report."

And then answer me this: in what sense could Scott Brown be said to have "melted down"?

The Elizabeth Warren campaign, whatever her virtues may be, is the new object of progressive wish-fulfillment.

And it's going to be truthy and tribal and politically sacred as all hell out there, whether she wants it to or not.

Truthiness rots everything.

American Extremists: "Hope and chains"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Nobelievability

Help up-recommending my comment at Krugman's blog will be much appreciated.

The Professor wrote:

I was tearing my hair out, very much in public, over the missed opportunities early in the Obama administration in real time, as they happened; I don’t see much point in dwelling on them again, at least for now — maybe I’ll want to do postmortems after Rick Perry is sworn into office.

My response:

They're only "missed opportunities" if one imagines or pretends that Obama wanted to do right by average Americans.

Why, at this late date, would anyone imagine or pretend that?

American Extremists: "Passing interest"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Foiled"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Consensus"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Inconvenient"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Just read the #attackwatch tweets...

... if you want to see the truth in Ian Welsh's statement that:

The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down. If the left does not do this, left wing politics and policies will be discredited with Obama.

The mythology that Obama and his disastrous presidency represent leftism runs very deep, and virtually no one in American discourse will contradict this belief... which is reflected in nearly every one of the countless tweets mocking Obama's new drop-a-dime site.

Few on the left will accept (or admit) that he's a conservative, and even fewer on the right will.

So, conservatism wins again. And you lose. Thank you, Bipartisan Man!

Tired of looking into the abyss

My quest to see whether good / relatively good bloggers are doing a good thing by continuing to regularly link to Hullabaloo is over, at least for now. I've deleted that site from my RSS feed.

Short answer: they're not.

It's really depressing reading that site, with its disappointment-chic commitment to the Democratic shallow end and Digby's rude and cowardly comment-moderation policy.

American Extremists: "Fork in the road"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Digby confusion watch

Digby's in rare form here:

I think I just had an insight but I don't know what it means exactly.

That sentence may be hard to improve on as the quintessence of the great progressive blogger: she's simultaneously insightful and confused!

In reading over the tweets and posts from last night's GOP debate I realized that one distinctive difference between the two parties is how their base reacts to criticism.

Her post is titled "Offense vs Defense," and her thesis is that the GOP is aggressive in rationalizing its own, while Democrats use good, honest facts to defend their candidates and elected officials.

For instance, I see many people reacting to the right's dishonest attacks on Obama by saying "that's not true, he didn't really do that. Here are the facts, I'll prove it to you." Progressives are very concerned that the right isn't out there misinforming the rest of the public and go to great lengths to "set the record straight." By contrast, during the Bush years, when liberals criticized the president, the other side would say "Yeah. So what? He did the right thing."

Small matter that cutting taxes (notably the taxes that feed Social Security) during an economic downturn is ordinarily anathema to the Democratic base. But a good progressive says "Yeah. So what? He did the wrong thing, which you like, so you should support him, too."

Oh, and stealth-deleting postings, absent any statement of policy, written by commenters who disagree with you is surely the height of a fact-centered, set-the-record-straight culture.

They'd stage a symbolic hissy fit every once in a while to prove their moral/patriotic bonafides, usually over a perceived slight from a hippie somewhere, but they really didn't care if the left "understood" what they were doing or if they approved. In fact, they consciously try to offend them.

Digby, of course, coined the term "hissy fit," so we'd best assume she knows what she's talking about here.

I'll give you an example. Obama is being criticized as a tax hiker when he is, in fact, a tax cutter. I wrote a long thing about it yesterday, teeing off of Eleanor Clift's long essay on the same subject. Both of us, I suspect for different reasons, felt it necessary to correct the impression that Obama is a tax hiker. I don't think the right would do that. Assuming that they believed, as liberals ostensibly do, that taxation is necessary and that it isn't a crime to ask people to pay for the government services they receive, they'd say "So what? There should be even more of that and he did the right thing."

Apparently the confusion is contagious. I truly cannot fathom what point she's making in that section.

They wouldn't care that he didn't really raise taxes. They seek to validate their own instincts and/or principles above all.

Naturally, one has never seen such behavior on the part of tribal Democrats, other than every single day. Well, except for the principles part.

The best real life example is torture. When we accused the Bush administration of torture, and the Bush administration denied it saying "America doesn't torture", the right flat out said "we think torture of all kinds is a-ok, and anyone who disagrees with us is unAmerican. Thank God Bush protected us by torturing people." They just don't care if the left approves of what they do, and they'd rather have them upset over something that didn't happen than set the record straight and validate the left's beliefs in any way.

The so-called left, on the other hand, bites its tongue about Obama's continued renditions, military commissions, endless incarcerations, extra-judicial assassinations, and murders via robot planes. "Thank God it's our Peace Laureate doing it, and not Bush," is the order of the day.

Judging from the reaction to last night's cheering for the death of the uninsured, that holds up very well today. They truly believe that people who are "irresponsible" should die (assuming, of course, that decent people like themselves could never be considered "irresponsible.") And they are happy to own anything that upsets liberals.

Progressives, in contrast, shill for fake healthcare reform. We don't cheer about people dying, we just chalk it up to pragmatism.

I realize that this is a very broad observation and there are dozens of examples disproving what I just wrote. But I think it's generally descriptive of the two parties. And the implications of it are fairly clear. Conservatives are always offensive and progressives are always defensive. I guess both strategies are capable of winning, but the former is a lot more energizing and fun.

Perhaps "progressives are always defensive" because the best argument they have is that their preferred politicians, such as Tax Cutter Obama, aren't pursuing progressive policies.

When you ride with Digby, you ride with this

Commenters here have speculated on why Digby recently added David Atkins ("thereisnopoon") as a prolific co-blogger.

Some suggest that she was forced to (by whom and how and why, the theorists have yet to explain).

I'll go with the assumption that she finds Atkins's point of view simpatico with her own, until I'm persuaded otherwise.

Myiq2xu shared this thereisnospoon link in comments, and it may be the single most cynical blog post I've ever read.

Its depths go far below its standard shtik about the awesome manipulative power of Mad Men persuaders, the occupation that Atkins informs us is his own.

His post presents a view devoid of any moral component, where a president who—as Atkins points out in no uncertain terms—sells out Americans on matters as literally vital as their access to medical care is described thusly:

In fact, [Obama's] a great guy. I think he's doing pretty much the best job he can.

Atkins's suggested solution to today's corrupted politics is to "organize" and buy services such as his.

Even Digby seems to take the perennial "organize, organize" trope with a modicum of salt:

I hear a lot of chatter about how the left needs to forget about electoral politics, stop talking and start organizing, go local and all the other stuff I've been hearing off and on for as long as I can remember. And there's an element of truth in all of it.

A-list blogs have pushed all kinds of, oh, organizing for America, organizing for the fake "public option," organizing for the supposed more-and-better Democrats. It's all one big roach motel for progressive energies, where commitment to legitimately left, humane, and necessary policy is easily and reliably shunted aside or (in the case of the "public option" organizing) actively opposed.

That's not to say that political organizing is a bad or unnecessary thing. But the shut-up-and-do-X construction almost always translates into:

a) Shut up
b) Give your money to savvy insiders, who are better than you

Hardly a pathway to a more moral politics, in my view.

That doesn't matter, though, because even if you're The Most Powerful Person in the World, you can still be a great guy by selling out the needs of the populace. It's a fact!

American Extremists: "Pass this"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Nothing from nothing

Political analysis about the fictitious and completely meaningless "public option" (some undefined program available to some undefined number of people under some undefined terms to, hahahaha, "keep insurance companies honest") is like debating Obama's policies on unicorns and the lost continent of Atlantis.

And yet it continues.

American Extremists: "Schlock and awe"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

American Extremists: "Selective memory"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Opposing Obama = racism

This I know, because Balloon Juice tells me so.

The linked post features a 19th Century cartoon depicting a racist white man refusing life-saving help from a black man, followed by this:

This cartoon from 1862 could run in the papers tomorrow as an example of the typical Republican/Wingnut reaction to President Obama’s speech (it would also cover the reaction of more than a few firebaggers as well). This has been the reaction to everything President Obama has done so far, so I see no reason why it would stop tonight.

Cheers

"Firebaggers," as you may well be familiar with, is a term of art that conflates Obama-critical progressives (of the Firedoglake blog stripe) with Tea Party members, the latter (and evidently the former as well) commonly held in liberal circles to be brimming with bigots.

The grievances of "more than a few" of Obama's left-side critics, we are told in no uncertain terms, stem from race hate rather than, say, a principled (or even benighted) disagreement on policy. Good to know!

(via myiq2xu)

Memories

Remember how we got out of the Great Depression through deficit reduction?

No, I don't remember that either.

Digby confusion watch

Digby's take on the Greatest Speech on Jobs Ever begins with her trademark blend of expectation-lowering and praise for tiny Democratic graces:

The speech was long on proposals that are unlikely to pass and full of policies that are far too weighted to tax cuts to be entirely useful in the short run. We've been cutting taxes for years now and the rich just save it while everyone else pays down their debt. But the GOP don't want no stinking stimulus of any kind, so the best we can hope for is small bore and maybe some of this will sneak through, who knows?

But I liked some of President Obama's rhetoric tonight. It's campaign stuff really, and if he keeps it up there might even be a real debate between the two parties --- rhetorically at least:

This is followed by a swatch of Bush III's oh-so-soaring spiel, listing government programs initiated in the past, the likes of which he'd never support in a million years, and then she continues:

That's the liberal legacy. It's nice to hear it once in a while. And maybe if the people hear it, they might just like it too.

So, why in the world ...

... followed by the section where he makes deficit reduction the heart, as it were, of his plan.

Why? Because Obama's a conservative, Sherlock. The answer to near every one of Digby's little mysteries.

A bit further down, she asks:

Moreover, on what planet is it a good idea to take away the best argument the Democrats have in 2012 by proposing this? Candidates all over the country are being told to run on Medicare and hang the Ryan plan around the neck of every dumb Republicans who voted for it. I guess that's not going to be operative going forward.

It's bad politics and it's bad policy and for the life of me I cannot figure out why they would insist on doing it unless they truly believe the policy of raising the Medicare age is worth sacrificing a huge campaign advantage (much less the lives of many people.) I can only speculate about why that would be.

On the planet where America has a conservative Democratic president who's been avidly rebuilding the political viability of rightwing policy (and, not coincidentally, the once-moribund Republican brand itself) since he first hit the campaign trail, O great political analyst!

The weaseling reaches a crescendo:

Since the Republicans aren't likely to pass anything anyway, it would have been nice to have an argument for direct government stimulus, but since the president has been making the case for belt tightening for the last several months, I guess they figure it would be too confusing. But committing to more deficit reduction, singling out Medicare and Medicaid, was an unnecessary step backwards.

Obama's refusing the lessons of the New Deal, advocating austerity when we need massive deficit investment to invigorate the economy, not because he's another Hoover, but because—she guesses—he doesn't want to trouble our little heads with a different message and approach. So, oopsie, we end up with "an unnecessary step backwards" that punishes the most vulnerable, just like the "uniquely bad" Republicans would have done... but with less protest than they'd face, because only Obama can walk the third rail of "entitlement reform" and get cheered and/or excused for it.

American Extremists: "Standard ovation"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

This is your brain on the War on Drugs

(via Ed Brayton)

Defending Digby

Lambert takes Digby to task for her deployment of the ploy, vis-à-vis Rick Perry, that claims the Republicans are uniquely evil.

No doubt she'll use that trope close to infinity times on the road to November, 2012. But in this case, she said that Perry was "a uniquely vicious and ignorant piece of work."

Lambert provides examples of Obama's viciousness, but Digby's formulation re: Perry also includes ignorance.

Obama, as we all know, is a learned and brilliant man, so when he wantonly kills and starves people, it's done from a place of keen intellectual insight, a source of great pride to his Creative Class base. So, he's got that going for him, which is nice.

American Extremists: "The shallow end"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Digby confusion watch

The completely predictable barely-pretending-to-be-good-cop behavior of Obama and Catfood Commission II Democrats is confounding to Digby, who prefers to describe them as "morons" rather than the co-conspirators in shock-doctrine safety-net destruction they are.

This is becoming surreal. It's almost impossible to sort out what these people really want anymore or what they think they will accomplish... it's all a bizarre suicidal kabuki dance.

For some mysterious reason these well-meaning Democratic lugs keep steering us toward entitlement cuts. Don't they realize that might entail entitlement cuts? What ever could they have in mind?

Oh, and by the way, when the machinations of political elites push society's most vulnerable into deadly poverty, "suicide" doesn't seem like a particularly apt description, now does it?

We crashed the gates for this?

This from David "Thereisnospoon" Atkins says it all:

It doesn't really matter how disappointed with President Obama many of us may be.

Thereisnobottom to how disappointing Obama can be from a left perspective, apparently, because A-listers like Atkins tell us to suck it up and vote for more of it.

He continues, telling us to keep on hittin' that snooze button:

We every right to be angry and disappointed, and we have every obligation to make doubly sure that our presidential candidates are vetted for progressive values in 2016.

Disuse your illusion

The increasingly common view that Obama's presidency is a failure, says Hugh at Corrente, has roots in the commentary by us few, deeply unpopular heretics who never drank the Kool-Aid and who never bit our tongues about Obama's blatant and untimely conservatism.

I'm not sure about the causality, but I am sure we will get zero (or close to it) credit for trying—in the face of considerable abuse from our peers—to burst the hopenchange bubble while there was still time.

As Hugh puts it:

[T]he veal pen, Democrats, and MSM didn't recognize us then and they won't recognize us now.

The big bloggers who refused to disabuse their readers of their illusions about The One assuredly will not credit the dirtier hippies would tried.

Admittedly, this one's a layup, with no Nostradamus points to be awarded.

American Extremists: "Pure pony league"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Mr. Fish cartoon: "Spit or Swallow"

Page link here (embedded with permission).

American Extremists: "O zone emissions"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

To paraphrase Dan Froomkin...

Historians looking back on the 112th Congress may well wonder if the Presidency actually existed.

Jonathan Chait trots out Opologists' straw man du jour, the claim that lefties who critique Obama's conservative policies imagine that Federal government is a one-man band:

[T]he wave of criticism from the left over the stimulus is fundamentally flawed: it ignores the real choices Obama faced (and the progressive decisions he made) and wishes away any constraints upon his power.

The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s.

The hallmark of Chait's moribund thinking is a failure to recognize that Obama's goals do not differ from those of Congress.

(via myiq2xu)

American Extremists: "Nobody's a critic"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

Digby confusion watch

This just in from the Land of Confusion:

I don't know what to say about this strategy. It's so obviously born out of fear of Republican lunacy and the corrupt necessity to raise outrageous sums of money that it makes me feel depressed even thinking about it.

And frankly, I'm increasingly worried that it's going to end up in a bad result in November 2012. I wouldn't have thought that was possible considering the GOP offerings and the stakes, but it's hard to see a majority voting for this. It's mush.

So, Obama's latest explanation-defying (in Digby's world of tribally convenient cluelessness) conservative actions may lead to a "bad result" in the next election, with bad equalling not getting four more years of Obama's conservative actions. Oh, noes!

Digby confusion watch

Digby's Hullabaloo is the go-to site for learning that every predictable conservative move by the Obamacrats is an utterly confounding mystery. (Remember: If you don't find it all confusing and/or the acts of clueless dolts, you're a conspiracy nut).

I can't promise to log them all, but we'll commemorate at least a subset of The Blog of I Don't Know's use of this trope, starting now:

Back in the day I used to pose a question every once in while just to get a read on whether any consensus was emerging: Why did we go into Iraq? Inevitably, there would be at least a dozen different answers, all plausible, all probably held by some Very Serious Person or war hawk somewhere. I suspect we're going to see the inexplicable move to austerity the same way. There were different reasons, but all of them were wrong.

American Extremists: "Follow you, don't follow me"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/

The Augean stables in handy blog post form

Thereisnospoon outdoes himself.

I don't have time to do justice to this, but his explanation for his and Digby's preference for believing everyone in politics is an idiot—over the, to their view, nutty conspiracy theory that moneyed interests are what holds sway—is quite a piece of, um, work.

Update:

One virtue of TINS's post is that he quotes this telltale statement from Kos, about which there's really nothing to add:

Heck, if slapping my first-born in the face bumped [Obama's] numbers up with independents, I'd tolerate it

And to help out the good folks at Hullabaloo who have been beset with that vexing disappearing-comments problem, I'll back up a few comments here lest they meet with, like, an accident.

mm
I really don't care to read anything by that thug. Digby, can you kindly ask TINS not to shove any more of dkos shit on us.

Today, 21:52:28

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Bruce Miller
It's disturbing that Markos relegates the notion of a primary challenge to an "idiot fringe." The obstacles to a primary challenge are large. Jerry Brown is the only one I could see who might combine the inclination, the name recognition and the fundraising clout that such a challenge would require. But I'll be very surprised if he attempts it.

Still, the fact that there isn't already the credible threat and high liklihood of such a primary challenge against a Democratic President who proposes to cut Social Security and Medicare is a real sign of how far the current Democratic Party is from reflecting even the very strong wishes and desires of its constituents. Until the Dems get to the place where calling for cuts in Social Security and Medicare will mark a politician as part of an "idiot fringe," the Democratic Party will be seriously ailing as an instrument for protecting its constituents vital interests. Taking such a position should have guaranteed a serious primary challenge for a Democratic President.

Today, 21:50:12

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Alex Blaze
Unless putting incompetent people in charge is... wait for it... part of the conspiracy.

Not that I'm willing play spoon's straw man, but, seriously, the ability of these people to handle ScheduleGate is not the key to understanding American politics. It's a stupid fake controversy that the idiots in the media (another part of the conspiracy: put stupid people in corporate media) salivate over because they just plain don't get other, more important issues.

Anyway, there is lots of gray space between "completely organized conspiracy choreographed 50 years in advance by a small evil cohort and their cat" and "they're just incompetent and random and somehow we ended up here!" Arguing that the first statement is untrue does not make the second statement automatically true, which is the weird argument spoon's been advancing lately. There are levels of collusion, ways of influencing decisions that are less heavy-handed than a conspiracy, and not everything that we don't like is criminal (why is criminality on Wall Street even mentioned in a post about the political incompetence of the White House?).

I also disagree with the operational definition of "hard" in this post.

"Personally, I find the latter idea preposterous hogwash, a comforting opium for the sorts of people who want to believe that there are no solutions, or that the solutions are as as easy as grabbing pitchforks and guillotines and letting blood run in the streets. "

If it were easy, it would already have happened. Notice that it hasn't, even though there's plenty of reason for it to have happened. It's almost like informing the population at large about how they're getting screwed over, getting them to transcend their differences to unite against those doing the screwing, and organizing them into a violent mob (metaphorically), is really really really really hard, which is why the liberal blogosphere goes on and on about elections since they're fairly simple compared to the vast cultural changes that actually need to be accomplished.

And this:

"It's just really hard--and frankly terrifying--for a lot of people to believe that we're really governed by selfish, short-sighted, incompetent morons."

When the liberal blogosphere is founded on a single idea - that the financial and political elite of the country are stupid and incompetent - it's actually not that hard for people to beleive. Jeez, there are several thousand blog posts a day that go up with the idea that someone out there is smarter than the people running the country in some way. We aren't terrified by the idea that we're smarter than the people running this country, we revel in it.

Today, 21:47:28

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oh dear
Coming from a guy who can't distinguish between grand world conspiracy and simple corruption, this insider big-shot "take it from me" stuff is kind of socially awkward (unless you have a cruel sense of humor, then it's frickin hilarious.) Unlike Taibbi, whom you uncomprehendingly cite, or the IMF guys, whose role you purport to explain to us, you so blatantly just fell off the turnip truck, I cannot tell you. Zero international experience with transparency issues, Amiright? Utterly provincial secondhand American mind. Here we have the kind of Gomer who, seeing a bipartisan pay-to-play legislative hierarchy with quantified malversation targets, doesn't believe in trading in influence. Seeing false government claims and coercive censorship in a historic compromise of environmental hygiene in the Gulf of Mexico, he doesn't believe in abuse of function. It's... short-sightedness, that's what it is! And, naturally, something about it necessitates Obama's re-election (gee, never saw that coming.) It's gonna be funny as shit to watch your mounting hysteria as national disgust pukes your woeful champion into humiliating oblivion.

Today, 21:44:11

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Copeland
Atkins downplays a primary challenge against Obama; he looks askance at third party efforts against the prevailing carnival of sold out Obama policies. Anyone opposed to the fabulist account of Obama's presidency is a conspiracist or crazier than anyone you know. This after the historic betrayal around our social safety net and the debacle of the debt ceiling/default negotiations. If you can call those arrangements negotiations.

Obama promised, faithlessly, that if he were elected the earth would begin to heal. Watch what this environmental champ decides about about the Keystone XL pipeline. There is not a chance in hell that this bought-and-paid-for president will offer the slightest opposition to the oil oligarchy. He is their man.

Who do the political professionals in the Administration serve, after all? Who does Obama serve? Not Goldman Sachs surely?--not the big banks? The author of this piece believes this is too conspiratorial a view. But whose administration is trying to let the banksters off the hook for crimes that have brought the world economy to ruin?--whose adminitration wants to let this generation of vipers off the hook?--with a $20 billion slap on the wrist to cut off criminal prosecutions? This malignant oligarchy has been pampered by Obama, and its crimes which amount to thefts of trillions of dollars are left without any remedy of justice; and historic crimes are to be overlooked by the political professionals.

Matt Taiibi and Glen Greenwald have written at length about the outrageous complicty and failure of accountability of the Obama presidency. And Chris Hedges writes,

"A society is in serious trouble when its political pariahs have at the core of their demands a return to the rule of law. This inversion, with our political and cultural outcasts demanding a respect for law, highlights the awful fact that the most radical and retrograde forces within the body politic have seized control. These forces demand that we serve the dictates of the marketplace. They are destroying all legal impediments to corporate exploitation and profit, as well as dismantling the regulatory agencies that once protected the citizen."

What a country this has become where the so-call liberal or progessives are the ones who are calling for a return to law.

Today, 21:26:07

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You Norker
Thanks for this post. Many good points, especially Hedges'.

Today, 21:41:57

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Guest
"Which means that either they're utterly incompetent idiots as Digby and I have repeatedly argued, or they're paid-off corrupted tools of a grand global elitist conspiracy."

If you really think our rulers are not "paid off corrupted tools fo a grand golbal elitist conspiracy" then you need to go back and read "The Shock Doctine" again. Yes, I agree that the Obama administration and the Democratic Party as a whole are full of incompetent idoits -- and that has some impact. But the global (invisible) elites are calling these shots. It's a known known.

Today, 21:12:39

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Ranjit
Hey Spoon, can you drop the whole "I've worked with these guys, I know how government really works" routine? You may not realize it, but you're simply giving us a minor league version of the same establishment insider routine that we get from the Broder's and Friedman's of the world.

We get it, you think you've peeked behind the Wizard's curtain and you want to remind us of that fact, how you've seen the levers and pulleys of politics in motion and we haven't. We get it. We don't buy it for one second, but we get it.

Today, 20:00:24

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Evil you can believe in

Chris Floyd on the progressive advantages in the treatment of "bad guys":

All those who take part in the vast machinery of torment and state terror have been praised, rewarded and protected by the government, in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Indeed, the Nobel Peace Laureate has exceeded the Crawford Caligula in his zealous efforts to quash any and all attempts at legal redress by actual victims of the gulag.

He has also fought doggedly -- and successfully -- to prevent even the slightest nod toward even nominal punishment for anyone involved in the patent criminality of the gulag system. And why not? It's a matter of self-protection. After all, the gulag system has never been dismantled, only tweaked here and there -- and shuffled around to new secret sites. (Although it is true that Obama, being the great compassionate humanitarian that he is, seems slightly less interested in kidnapping and indefinite detention than his predecessor. No, he prefers simply assassinating people outright -- without charges, without representation, outside any legal process, even the 'laws of war' -- and often en masse, with drone missiles that take out whole families, whole neighborhoods. That's the progressive way!)

Digby persists the fiction that Obama has a good "program" that has been thwarted by the GOP

Dispatches from the Potemkin "progressive" world:

This battle has to be waged and if [Obama] won't call out the Republicans rhetorically, he needs to at least show in some way that they are obstructing his program.... So please, let the two parties show that they take different sides on these issues. It's not a bad thing. It's how we do it in America.

Director of "Barack Obama: People's President" acknowledges The One was a bill of goods

Danny Schechter ("The News Dissector") has joined the Class of 2011 of Obama disillusionment.

His post, "Barack's Betrayals Offer Lessons We Can't Deny," is a fairly complete rejection of Obama as a force for liberal reform.

However, it's not clear that Schechter is entirely ready to desupport the incumbent president:

[M]any of us who now know how we have been used will vote for him again, because, as he rightly calculates, there is no one else, and the alternative is even worse. Watch and weep as today's rebels become next year's rationalizers.

I've offered him a 2L4O shirt, if he's ready to go the full Monty on getting off the Obamawagon. I'll let you know if/how he responds.

American Extremists: "Distracted"

American Extremists webcomic archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/