State Of The Union Analysis

No SOTU analysis this year. If you want, you can google it up and you will come up with hundreds of analyses by hundreds of pundits who will spew inanities on President Obama's vision for the future of America. I am not playing that game. Fool me once, shame on you...

The reality is this: The address was a campaign speech, designed to mobilize the base of the Democratic Party, and to lure independents to the polls come November. Mission accomplished? Time will tell.

Don't get me wrong, the President knows how to give a good speech, and last night's address was no exception. The problem has never been the President's ability to deliver a rousing speech; it's been his inability, or unwillingness, to follow through. We have had plenty of examples in the President's first three years in office. Do we need yet another State of The Union address to prove that there is a chasm between the President's talking the talk and his walking the walk?

Actions speak louder than words, as they saying goes, and this is an example of President's Obama's actions, as illustrated on (Bill) Moyers and Company last Friday night.

I have no faith in President Obama to do the right thing, not 3 years into his presidency. Like any politician, he will say anything he thinks he needs to say to get elected and do anything he thinks will keep him in power after he is elected. Still, the alternative being President Romney or President Gingrich, with the possible impact their election might have on the composition of the Supreme Court, we are stuck with the lesser of two evils.

Life sucks, at least in political terms.

And a Happy New Year!

Wherein Wendell Potter Takes Politifact to Task

Wendell Potter, former insurance company executive turned whistleblower, has written a post in which he takes Politifact to task for choosing a "Lie of the Year" that is actually true.

Merry Christmas!

Sad, True, and Maddening

Hunter produced another quasi-perfect post at the Daily Kos. (The "quasi-" refers to a couple of typos.)

The post, titled The failure of Austerity, is a must-read for everyone, but in particular for those who subscribe to economic theories that far-right conservatives promote (far-right conservatives being 95% of conservatives around) and dim-witted supporters espouse and repeat mindlessly, regardless of any contrary evidence.

It is sad that about half of the U.S. population, give and take a few percentage points, has been manipulated into believing that the government can do no good when it comes to changing the course of the economy, and it is maddening that too many in government act as if that were a true statement.

In an excellent book titled Perfectly Legal, tax policy expert David Cay Johnston writes, and I paraphrase only slightly, that the organic pursuit of self-interest is what makes democracy work, and that for too long a vast number of Americans have subscribed to and supported economic policies that go in the opposite direction of their self-interest, which is a failure of democracy of the highest level.

That the ideologues and hacks should continue to promote economic theories that have as much connection to reality as alchemy does is understandable; after that's how they make a living and prosper. But the fact that a sufficient number of people believe their fantastic claims is sad and maddening, because they make life much worse than it needs to be for those who know that the idiots are buying from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of snake oil. And that is what Hunter articulates so well in his post.

The only thing that I have yet to resolve in my mind if most of the blame lies with the ideologues and the hacks, or if it should fall squarely on the shoulders of their dim-witted supporters. And the more I think about it, the more I believe the latter is the case.

Too Little, Too Late, If You Ask Me

Tom Foreman reports on cnn.com:

Among the chief complaints of many voters: Obama has been too quick to compromise, too weak in taking on opponents and too much like just another politician intent on triangulating re-election, rather than being the transformative, bold leader they thought they were electing. 
[...] The White House is now clearly launching an offensive aimed at shifting voter disappointment from their man to the opposition.

If you ask me, too little, too late. If he gets re-elected it will be because the G.O.P. candidates are weak and ridiculous beyond belief. And yes, Obama would be a slightly better president than any Republican who might get elected. For the millions of Americans who are hurting and were looking for a "transformative, bold leader", it will be small comfort. 

A president who could not achieve anything he could have achieved, had he wanted to, in the two years when he could count on a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a clear majority in the House will achieve nothing noteworthy after both houses of Congress will have switched to the opposition, something very likely to happen in 2012. 

Sigh.

If It's Good For Bill Kristol, Well, It's Not Very Good

Hunter did it again at the Daily Kos.

In 6 brilliant, cutting paragraphs (plus two perfectly appropriate quotes) he destroys the mythical wisdom of serious Republicans such as that of the unfortunately very real Bill Kristol.

My favorite passage is this:

In any event, the sort of people that intellectual giant William Kristol praises as fellow intellectual giants should, at the least, give a person pause. The fellow who is currently pining for Paul Ryan to come save conservatism from the wreck of the current campaign season was previously pining for Sarah Palin to fill the same role. 

The rest of Hunter's post is here.

Stop The Presses

Here's an interesting statement for my (10) Republican/Libertarian friends to ponder:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

The statement was made in Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators, a Bloomberg op-ed by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, who "founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion [and] was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)."

Go read, and ponder.

The Virus of Republican Ignorance

Eric Alterman has a pointed post on Alternet about the virus of GOP ignorance and the role that the mainstream media plays in spreading it.

Happy Thanksgiving, Unless You're a Far-Right Islamophobe

Happy Thanksgiving to all men and women of good disposition.

And to all far-Right Islamophobes, may you choke on halal turkey. :-) Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney: That includes especially you.

News Flash from the Republican Debate on National Security

What national security issue do you worry about that nobody is asking about, either here or in any of the debates so far?

Rick Santorum: The spread of Socialism.
Ron Paul: Overreacting to non-existent threats and starting new wars.
Hermann Cain: Cyber-attacks
Mitt Romney: Latin America (and Socialism)
Rick Perry: Communist China
Newt Gingrich: Electromagnetic pulse attacks, WMDs in American cities, cyber-attacks.
Michele Bachmann: Who the fuck knows? Al Shabaab?
John Huntsmann: Joblessness and lack of opportunity, debt, lack of faith in our institutions

News flash for Republican presidential aspirants: Neglect the growing fury of jobless Americans at your peril. You are going to have to deal with them on a national security level long before a terrorist with a briefcase nuke plants it up your ass. It seems Huntsman and Perry are the only ones who are even remotely attuned to the gravity of the situation.

News Flash for Republican Candidates

Michele Bachmann: It's the UniTED States, not the UniNED States. Hermann Cain: It's killed not keeled. Rick Perry: It's nuke-lear not new-cool-ar. I'm sure I missed a few, but if I have to live through another ten debates, I'm not saying you need to master your language, just pronounce it properly. Thank you. Oh, yes! It's pundit, not pundint, pundant, or pendant. Again, thank you.

Paul Krugman's Perfect Take Down of Newt Gingrich

Krugman, on ABC's This Week With Christiane Amanpour: "Newt [...] is the stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like." Classic.

No Persons In Their Right Mind

While my "love" for Democrats (with a few notable exceptions) is close to hitting the nadir, no middle-class Americans in their right mind can vote for a Republican. Period. I repeat. No middle-class Americans can vote for a Republican. I say this after watching all but one of the presidential Republican debates.

But I don't just mean the Republicans running for president, the sanest and most principled of whom is Ron Paul (and that's all anyone needs to know). I mean any Republican, for any office. Including Blue Dog Democrats. Period.

Why? Because Republicans stand in antithesis to everything that is in the interest of the 99% of Americans (even if, apparently, about 50% of voting Americans don't know it). Read the previous post, David Michael Green Is At His Very Angriest Best

David Michael Green Is At His Very Angriest Best

Read We Are Not Your Human Resources, David Michael Green's latest rant on The Regressive Antidote blog.

Here's a taste of it:

Our solutions no longer reside, if they ever did, in the ballot box. The Republicans are a sheer criminal enterprise, whose entire function is to redistribute wealth from the rest of us to already wealthy elites. But the Democrats are actually worse, because they do exactly the same thing, while trading on the party’s past reputation for representing the public interest. For my money (which, along with yours, is precisely what is at stake), Obama and Clinton and their ilk in Congress have betrayed me and the country more than, say, any of the Dicks – Cheney, Armey or Nixon. You expect the asshole kid on the playground to live up to his reputation. It hurts a lot more when your best friend is the one sticking in the knife.

On The NBA Lockout

Though I have nothing intelligent to say about the NBA lockout, I can still recognize an intelligent article about it by someone else. Enter Bill Simmons's Business Vs. Personal.

Writes Simmons: "We were coming off of one of the top-five NBA seasons ever, now it's November, the league isn't playing … and nobody really cared. Imagine the outrage if pro football disappeared for an entire month. Where's the clamoring for regular season pro basketball?"

Though I like basketball, I'm really in the "and nobody really cared" camp. After reading Simmons's take on the whole debacle, I'll admit my interest has been aroused..

I Don't Know How To Do It

I don't know how to do it, and I don't think anyone knows how to either, but until money is out of politics for good we are going to get the Congress that money wants us to get (it's a must read).

Another Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama:

If the Super Committee on Deficit Reduction fails to do the work that it was assigned to do, will you finally become convinced that Congress has reached a complete stalemate, because the two parties (one in particular) are unable or unwilling to cede any ground to their opponents? And, more importantly, will you then make a stand on behalf of the American people and veto any bill which does not include an increase in revenues financed by tax increases on the wealthy individuals and entities, those who make it their daily business to look for new ways to lower their own taxes, and evade their responsibilities as good citizens of this nation? Or will you continue to be an accomplice, willing or unwilling it does not matter, of a system which is designed to stick it to hard-working middle-class and poor Americans?

I am still looking forward to the day when your uplifting speeches actually translate into comparable policies, a la FDR.

You can still become what you promised you would be for the hundreds of millions of suffering Americans, in spite of all the pressures that you are subjected to to maintain an indefensible status quo.

Respectfully,

Watch This (UPDATED)

UPDATE: So I was wrong. For now.
----------------------------------------------------
Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reports that there may be a deal in the making to exclude the Pentagon from the automatic sequestration that would be triggered if the so-called Super Committee (on deficit reduction) fails to reach an agreement by the coming Wednesday. If a deal is reached to exclude the Pentagon, you can bet your first-born's life that it will be yet another cave-in by Democrats. In other words, Democrats will get nothing in return, but they will accept to save the Pentagon from cuts because they are afraid to lose a huge constituency, the military, in the 2012 elections.

Democrats will publicly reason that there can be no partisan disagreement that the Pentagon's budget should not be sacrificed, without granting the same grace to the lives of the many hard-working, retired, or unemployed Americans who will suffer because of the cuts that will be made to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

And, in the ultimate mockery of the intelligence of thinking Americans, they will also reason, publicly or secretly, that by caving in they are protecting the interests of America because taking a principle stand might make them the minority party in both branches of Congress and contribute to losing the White House to a Republican. All of this while never asking the question: What good can come of a party that never takes a principled stand for its core constituencies in the name of self-preservation? Who needs it? I am increasingly convinced that the Democratic party is inching closer and closer to the apex of total uselessness.

Watch what happens on Wednesday, if you don't believe me.

Hope, After All

As an uplifting companion to my previous post, titled Sad and Outrageous, I offer this clip from last week's Countdown with Keith Olbermann.


Please spread the words of this wise, clear-minded 84 year-old.