Obama's main issue is trying to be "bipartisan" with a minority party that'll do whatever it takes to see him and his party fail.
The problem is this bipartisanship only goes in one direction: towards the right wing. Obama will leave Gitmo open and oppose a renewed Glass-Steagall, but the conservative wing of the Democratic party is never asked to take one for the team on anything. Case in point again: the public option.
And Obama can't act surprised at GOP obstruction in the Senate....when that's the very place he came from before running for the presidency. He was there when Mitch McConnell was Majority Leader. He was there when Harry Reid was already a weak Majority Leader. He was there when Republicans broke all records for use of the filibuster.
Which either means that Obama is phenomenally stupid, that his entire campaign was a lie, or that Bill Hicks theory on new presidents is true. None of which bodes well for us.
I wish he would have let Health Care reform die on the vine rather than accept the compromise he was able to get in the legislature. A few more years of double digit cost increases, and people losing insurance with their job loss, might have given Congress the incentive it needed to go single-payer.
Exactly. Truman did this when he ran for re-election: he deliberately sent legislation over to Congress that he knew would be shot down by Republicans, then ran against the do-nothing Congress. Obama has a blueprint to follow here, just as he had a blueprint for massive action on unemployment and banking reform. But he's chosen to ignore it in favor of playing Charlie Brown to the Republican Lucy in a game of football.
Except the latter cartoonist needs to do a follow-up cartoon, where Obama decides to see just how much shit he can get away with (assassinations of American citizens, gutting Social Security) before he loses the fanboys.
How about we put this wingnut urban legend to bed. Even if those documents were forgeries (which has never been proven), they forged the truth, as CBS did verify them for accuracy.
LOL. Nevermind that it was Moulitas who fired the pollster after they produced crappy results, and then sued Research 2000 when notified of fraud. But if conservatives let facts get in the way of the storyline, they'd have their wingnut merit badge revoked.
Whereas Fox labels any Republican that's unpopular or in trouble as a "D", and uses year old footage while pretending that it's from a current protest.
Sort of like Bush saying "we don't torture" when they were actually using an old Chinese torture manual on how to waterboard false confessions out of captured American troops during the Korean War. Only now, it's the Obama administration speaking out of both sides of it's mouth. On one hand, they're promising open access to the press, but with they other they're acting as hired goons for BP.
NewsBusters.org:
Have they recovered the sudden rash of exploding heads around their office? Must trash Obama...but must suck corporate cock! Must trash Obama...but must suck corporate cock!
Uh, you know a reason for that is more efficient use of retail space, right? Why stock a full tower and monitor for $600 when you can use the same amount of space to hold $6000 in laptops?
You should have said why it's weak. Take the G37 line of cars from Infiniti - you can easily tell the difference between the sedan and the coup and the convertible just by looking at them. Unless you're a circuit board engineer for a video card manufacturer, there's no way to look at a Geforce 9800 GT and a Geforce 9700 GTX and have any idea which card does what better.
No, the problem is that it's become impossible to tell the difference between someone being sarcastic and someone being serious. No matter what batshit crazy thing you say now, some wignut will try and surpass it in a few years, if they haven't already. Or as some blogger noted, 'their reality has lapped our satire'.
If you think Nice Polite Republicans doesn't lean well to the right, then I suggest you see a nice proctologist in North Korea for that "little problem" of yours. Once he's done extracting your head from your ass, you can take a good look around and see what "left" really looks like.
So the obvious thing to do, for those disappointed in how the Democrats have accomplished their agenda, is to vote Republican.
Obvious? I suppose if you think the "obvious" solution to being hit in the face with a BB-gun is to change to being hit in the face with a bullet from a '45.
I have nothing against someone being homosexual, and I think homosexuals should not be harassed. However, what usually goes into "gay rights" legislation is not limited to protecting them from harassment. The proposals generally include giving to gay couples benefits that were meant for families with children.
Well, that's because you're rationalizing your bigoted views, that's all. Because your argument of convenience is never applied to straight people who remarry in their 70's after the death of their first spouse, or denying tax benefits to couples where one partner is infertile.
And hello, adoption?
And hello, in vitro fertilisation?
And hello, surrogate mother?
There are plenty of ways for gay couples to have children, just as there are plenty of straight marriages that will never result in children. But those facts interfere with your bigoted storyline, so they aren't mentioned.
By all means, just pull shit out of your ass. The black vote on Prop 8, while obviously disappointing, was not the deciding factor in the passage of that law. You don't have a point, you have misdirection.
The guy is dealing with a plate fuller than any president who's been in office during my lifetime.
Then he needs to get a bigger fucking plate, as Jon Stewart pointed out. FDR passed the New Deal in his first 100 days in office, and he had a five vote gap between the number of Dems in the Senate and the number to overcome a filibuster. FDR signed Glass-Steagall which gave us 70 years of economic stability, and put 4 million Americans back to work in 4 months through programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps. By this point in FDR's presidency, he was getting ready to sign the Social Security Act.
And Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed and signed in half the time that Obama spent fiddle farting around chasing Snowe and Grassley for their votes on health insurance reform.
Personally, I'd prefer he stay concentrating on the economy and financial reform for now.
Except he's doing a piss poor job of that. With Obama, we still have the foxes in charge of the economic henhouse (Gietner and Summers), still have Too Big To Fail, and is lazily watching while Republicans and deficit peakock Dems kill the extension of unemployment benefits.
Did you really think he was liberal?
Do you really think he didn't run on liberal policies? Ending DADT and DOMA: check. Getting us out of dumb foreign wars: check. Curbing lobbyist power: check. Supporting a public option on health care: check. Supporting the EFCA: check.
Instead, Obama now strongly supports everything he ran against (buck passing commissions, backroom deals with the very lobbyists he ran campaign ads against in 2008, escalating Afghanistan when his own CIA says there's less than 400 Al Queda left in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mandates to buy health insurance, taxes on health insurance plans). And he strongly opposes everything he ran on (public option, curbing lobbyist power, transparency, rule of law).
If you honestly think there weren't opposing groups as violent and idiotic fighting against racial integration in the 40s as there are now fighting against equal rights for gays, you're deluding yourself (or just ignorant of history).
Speaking of not knowing history, how many gay churches have been firebombed by the KKK? How many Southern families have gathered around in a park on a nice weekend to watch gay people being strung up by their necks? How many gay rights marches have been attacked with dogs and firehoses?
It would be a lot easier if the right-wing wackos weren't screaming "OMG, COMMUNISM, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" everytime Obama scratches his nose.
Not at all, then corporatist Dems like Obama would lose their excuse for inaction. He came into office with a filibuster proof majority, the largest seen since the 70's. In contrast, the Republicans haven't had that many seats since the 1920's. Good thing the Republicans haven't accomplished anything in the last 80 years, isn't it?
A quick ball size comparison, starring Dick Cheney:
"As President-elect Bush has made very clear, he ran on a particular platform that was very carefully developed. It's his program, it's his agenda, and we have no intention at all of backing off of it. It's why we got elected.
So we're going to aggressively pursue tax changes, tax reform, tax cuts, because it's important to do so. [...] The suggestion that somehow, because this was a close election, we should fundamentally change our beliefs, I just think is silly."
Cheney said that in December 2000 - his ticket had just lost by 500,000 votes, stolen the electoral vote, and faced a 1 seat majority in the Senate. And yet Cheney had already bought a fucking wheelbarrow to carry his balls around D.C. Over the course of eight years, Bush and Cheney got ALL their major policy initiatives through Congress, even after the Dems took it back in 2006 and Bush's poll numbers had their permanent post-Katrina collapse. The only exceptions being Justice Meyers, immigration reform, and the privatization of Social Security (which Obama is now having a crack at with his cat food commission).
Whereas Obama came into office with a landslide election with a mandate for change, and the largest Democratic majority since the 70's, and enormous popular support for initiatives like the public option - yet he tip toes around like he's a mouse in a room full of sleeping foxes.
Obama can't repeal don't ask, don't tell with an executive order. It was codified into federal law in 1993.
But he can halt it with a stroke of a pen, for as long as he is president, under that same federal law from 1993. Yes, Virginia, DADT itself allows the suspension of DADT.
Whether you like it or not, Don't ask don't tell is the LAW and the President has, at least in this case, taken the position that he's not going to violate the law.
Slight problem with the "he's not a dictator" excuse: there are actually two laws allowing Obama to halt DADT with the stroke of a pen, for as long as he is president:
With a stop loss order
Or under DADT itself, which allows the Secretary of Defense to classify gay servicemen as needed personnel, and stop the discharges
Of course, this order could simply be reversed by the next president, but that's no excuse for inaction, because:
Obama reversed the abortion gag rule via executive order when the next Republican president will just re-reverse it
Years of open, honorable gay service would debunk homophobic arguments and Concern Trolling from politicians
It would give activists a rallying point in the future - "look, we had 3 years of exmplary gay service when Obama was president, let's repeal this damn law already"
Ok, so you're comparing what Obama has accomplished in a year and a half to a similar occurrence that took 6 years, and you're complaining that he's moving too slowly?
No, he's not. With segregation, you had entirely separate units, logistics, facilities, and command structures, which did take a long time to integrate. How much of that applies to gay servicemen? None, nada, zip, because they're serving in the same units, usin gthe same logistics and facilities and operating under the same commands. All you have to do is stop kicking them out of the military. Easiest thing in the world to do.
Except your logic sucks. Dr. Dre wasn't the person who started referring to black people as "niggers". Whereas the teabaggers decided on the term teabagging of their own free will.
the apathy of the middle is why the extremists have taken over the airwaves
False equivalency sense is tingling...
and we've got crazy utopianists on the other side saying we've got to close all the banks and give the money to the people who pissed their money away in the first place
Fantasy with no basis in reality. Wow, that was easy.
I don't know, but liberals are just as self-contradictory.
Hardly.
liberals are anti-death penalty
Because they view it as barbaric, or because of all the people released from death row because DNA testing proved so many prosecutions either malicious or incompetent, or because the level of justice depends on how much the defendant can spend on attorneys. None of which has anything whatsoever to do with...
but pro-abortion
...aborting a blob of cells with as much brainpower as your average garden worm. And of course, conservatives should be all for protecting abortion rights, since they are supposedly all about protecting the individual from the state. Huh, it's almost like they were were partisan hacks, using situational reasoning for arguments of convenience....
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you could see it that way, if you're a fascist. You could try and fix that, of course...start by looking up NPR's stance on torture.
The problem is this bipartisanship only goes in one direction: towards the right wing. Obama will leave Gitmo open and oppose a renewed Glass-Steagall, but the conservative wing of the Democratic party is never asked to take one for the team on anything. Case in point again: the public option.
And Obama can't act surprised at GOP obstruction in the Senate....when that's the very place he came from before running for the presidency. He was there when Mitch McConnell was Majority Leader. He was there when Harry Reid was already a weak Majority Leader. He was there when Republicans broke all records for use of the filibuster.
Which either means that Obama is phenomenally stupid, that his entire campaign was a lie, or that Bill Hicks theory on new presidents is true. None of which bodes well for us.
Exactly. Truman did this when he ran for re-election: he deliberately sent legislation over to Congress that he knew would be shot down by Republicans, then ran against the do-nothing Congress. Obama has a blueprint to follow here, just as he had a blueprint for massive action on unemployment and banking reform. But he's chosen to ignore it in favor of playing Charlie Brown to the Republican Lucy in a game of football.
These three political cartoons just about sum up the situation for me:
Obama's "moderation".
Pissing away the largest majority since the 70's, then trying to blame inaction on Republicans.
WTF is Obama doing, anyway?
Except the latter cartoonist needs to do a follow-up cartoon, where Obama decides to see just how much shit he can get away with (assassinations of American citizens, gutting Social Security) before he loses the fanboys.
How about we put this wingnut urban legend to bed. Even if those documents were forgeries (which has never been proven), they forged the truth, as CBS did verify them for accuracy.
LOL. Nevermind that it was Moulitas who fired the pollster after they produced crappy results, and then sued Research 2000 when notified of fraud. But if conservatives let facts get in the way of the storyline, they'd have their wingnut merit badge revoked.
Whereas Fox labels any Republican that's unpopular or in trouble as a "D", and uses year old footage while pretending that it's from a current protest.
Sort of like Bush saying "we don't torture" when they were actually using an old Chinese torture manual on how to waterboard false confessions out of captured American troops during the Korean War. Only now, it's the Obama administration speaking out of both sides of it's mouth. On one hand, they're promising open access to the press, but with they other they're acting as hired goons for BP.
Have they recovered the sudden rash of exploding heads around their office? Must trash Obama...but must suck corporate cock! Must trash Obama...but must suck corporate cock!
Uh, you know a reason for that is more efficient use of retail space, right? Why stock a full tower and monitor for $600 when you can use the same amount of space to hold $6000 in laptops?
You should have said why it's weak. Take the G37 line of cars from Infiniti - you can easily tell the difference between the sedan and the coup and the convertible just by looking at them. Unless you're a circuit board engineer for a video card manufacturer, there's no way to look at a Geforce 9800 GT and a Geforce 9700 GTX and have any idea which card does what better.
No, the problem is that it's become impossible to tell the difference between someone being sarcastic and someone being serious. No matter what batshit crazy thing you say now, some wignut will try and surpass it in a few years, if they haven't already. Or as some blogger noted, 'their reality has lapped our satire'.
Example.
Now, that said, I will try and remember your UID and adjust my sarcasm detector. :)
If you think Nice Polite Republicans doesn't lean well to the right, then I suggest you see a nice proctologist in North Korea for that "little problem" of yours. Once he's done extracting your head from your ass, you can take a good look around and see what "left" really looks like.
Obvious? I suppose if you think the "obvious" solution to being hit in the face with a BB-gun is to change to being hit in the face with a bullet from a '45.
Well, that's because you're rationalizing your bigoted views, that's all. Because your argument of convenience is never applied to straight people who remarry in their 70's after the death of their first spouse, or denying tax benefits to couples where one partner is infertile.
And hello, adoption?
And hello, in vitro fertilisation?
And hello, surrogate mother?
There are plenty of ways for gay couples to have children, just as there are plenty of straight marriages that will never result in children. But those facts interfere with your bigoted storyline, so they aren't mentioned.
By all means, just pull shit out of your ass. The black vote on Prop 8, while obviously disappointing, was not the deciding factor in the passage of that law. You don't have a point, you have misdirection.
I just don't get the hand waiving.
Then he needs to get a bigger fucking plate, as Jon Stewart pointed out. FDR passed the New Deal in his first 100 days in office, and he had a five vote gap between the number of Dems in the Senate and the number to overcome a filibuster. FDR signed Glass-Steagall which gave us 70 years of economic stability, and put 4 million Americans back to work in 4 months through programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps. By this point in FDR's presidency, he was getting ready to sign the Social Security Act.
And Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed and signed in half the time that Obama spent fiddle farting around chasing Snowe and Grassley for their votes on health insurance reform.
Except he's doing a piss poor job of that. With Obama, we still have the foxes in charge of the economic henhouse (Gietner and Summers), still have Too Big To Fail, and is lazily watching while Republicans and deficit peakock Dems kill the extension of unemployment benefits.
Do you really think he didn't run on liberal policies? Ending DADT and DOMA: check. Getting us out of dumb foreign wars: check. Curbing lobbyist power: check. Supporting a public option on health care: check. Supporting the EFCA: check.
Instead, Obama now strongly supports everything he ran against (buck passing commissions, backroom deals with the very lobbyists he ran campaign ads against in 2008, escalating Afghanistan when his own CIA says there's less than 400 Al Queda left in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mandates to buy health insurance, taxes on health insurance plans). And he strongly opposes everything he ran on (public option, curbing lobbyist power, transparency, rule of law).
Speaking of not knowing history, how many gay churches have been firebombed by the KKK? How many Southern families have gathered around in a park on a nice weekend to watch gay people being strung up by their necks? How many gay rights marches have been attacked with dogs and firehoses?
Not at all, then corporatist Dems like Obama would lose their excuse for inaction. He came into office with a filibuster proof majority, the largest seen since the 70's. In contrast, the Republicans haven't had that many seats since the 1920's. Good thing the Republicans haven't accomplished anything in the last 80 years, isn't it?
A quick ball size comparison, starring Dick Cheney:
Cheney said that in December 2000 - his ticket had just lost by 500,000 votes, stolen the electoral vote, and faced a 1 seat majority in the Senate. And yet Cheney had already bought a fucking wheelbarrow to carry his balls around D.C. Over the course of eight years, Bush and Cheney got ALL their major policy initiatives through Congress, even after the Dems took it back in 2006 and Bush's poll numbers had their permanent post-Katrina collapse. The only exceptions being Justice Meyers, immigration reform, and the privatization of Social Security (which Obama is now having a crack at with his cat food commission).
Whereas Obama came into office with a landslide election with a mandate for change, and the largest Democratic majority since the 70's, and enormous popular support for initiatives like the public option - yet he tip toes around like he's a mouse in a room full of sleeping foxes.
Weak assed weak sause.
But he can halt it with a stroke of a pen, for as long as he is president, under that same federal law from 1993. Yes, Virginia, DADT itself allows the suspension of DADT.
Slight problem with the "he's not a dictator" excuse: there are actually two laws allowing Obama to halt DADT with the stroke of a pen, for as long as he is president:
Of course, this order could simply be reversed by the next president, but that's no excuse for inaction, because:
No, he's not. With segregation, you had entirely separate units, logistics, facilities, and command structures, which did take a long time to integrate. How much of that applies to gay servicemen? None, nada, zip, because they're serving in the same units, usin gthe same logistics and facilities and operating under the same commands. All you have to do is stop kicking them out of the military. Easiest thing in the world to do.
Whine to the teabaggers that started using the term "teabagging".
Thats all "legal" marriage is. A tax break.
It's a lot more than just that. Like inheritance. And hospital visitation. And making medical decisions for your s/o if they are incapacitated.
Except all those tax benefits apply to heterosexual couples who marry in their 80's. Or for couples that are infertile.
Nice try.
Except your logic sucks. Dr. Dre wasn't the person who started referring to black people as "niggers". Whereas the teabaggers decided on the term teabagging of their own free will.
Nice try.
the apathy of the middle is why the extremists have taken over the airwaves
False equivalency sense is tingling...
and we've got crazy utopianists on the other side saying we've got to close all the banks and give the money to the people who pissed their money away in the first place
Fantasy with no basis in reality. Wow, that was easy.
I don't know, but liberals are just as self-contradictory.
Hardly.
liberals are anti-death penalty
Because they view it as barbaric, or because of all the people released from death row because DNA testing proved so many prosecutions either malicious or incompetent, or because the level of justice depends on how much the defendant can spend on attorneys. None of which has anything whatsoever to do with...
but pro-abortion
...aborting a blob of cells with as much brainpower as your average garden worm. And of course, conservatives should be all for protecting abortion rights, since they are supposedly all about protecting the individual from the state. Huh, it's almost like they were were partisan hacks, using situational reasoning for arguments of convenience....