Who?

I stumbled across this WaPo article that tells me something and yet, nothing at all.  Okay, there’s this group that has formed called One Nation. And it’s supposed to have, get this, “170 liberal and civil rights groups” who have joined together to forge a coalition to . . .  do . . . um . . . I’m not sure.

The large-scale attempt at liberal unity, dubbed “One Nation,” will try to revive themes that energized the progressive grassroots two years ago. In a repurposing of Barack Obama‘s old campaign slogan, organizers are demanding “all the change” they voted for — a poke at the White House.

So, they are mad at Obama? Or not? I can’t tell. What do they want to do?

Leaders of the groups have been meeting for about three months in a planning process that some participants called arduous, debating everything from the name of the coalition to what the branding and logo should look like.

Omigod…I’ve been in these sorts of meetings. 

The coalition’s first goal is to plan a march to “demonstrate to Congress that these agenda items have support across multiple demographics,” Jealous said. The demonstration, to be held Oct. 2, will center on pressing for more government spending on job creation.

In October???  And what agenda items? I don’t know. I can’t find them anywhere on the web. But methinks they should have given consideration to another name. There are a lot of “One Nations” out there.

There’s this One Nation all about the American Muslim Community.

And this one whose mission is to end bi-lingual education.

Or this one that is so anti-Native American that I don’t know where to begin.

ONU represents more than 300,000 American citizens who have joined together to defend our private property rights, protect the free enterprise system, and reform seriously flawed federal Indian policy for the benefit of Indians and non-Indians alike.

There’s this one in Australia.

Believing the other parties to be out of touch with mainstream Australia, One Nation ran on a broadly populist and protectionist platform. It promised to drastically reduce immigration and to abolish “divisive and discriminatory policies… attached to Aboriginal and multicultural affairs.” Condemning multiculturalism as a “threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values”, One Nation rallied against government immigration and multicultural policies which, it argued, were leading to “the Asianisation of Australia.”

The WaPo article only lists a few of the groups in the coalition, so I really have no idea who they are. No link to a web site, nada. I’ve googled, but can’t find.

This little bit makes me wonder if they will really be willing to hold the Democratic Party’s feet to the fire. Somehow I doubt it.

Their aha moment happened after the health-care overhaul passed this spring. Liberal groups, who focused their collective strength to push the bill against heavy resistance, felt relevant and effective for the first time in a long while. That health-care coalition — composed of civil rights groups, student activists and labor leaders — liked the winning feeling.

“In many ways, the bitter fight for health-care reform has painfully highlighted that we must go back to the grassroots organizing that won us the election in the first place,” said George Gresham, president of 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. “We must reassert our strength as the social movement that ushered Obama into office.”

Lessons

Peter Daou:

It took more than half a decade, countless American and Iraqi deaths in a war based on lies, a sinking economy and the drowning of an American city to finally kill Bush-Cheney-Rove’s dream of a conservative realignment.

Democrats, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, have managed to kill their own dream of dominance in 12 months.

Democrats were sent to Washington to make a difference for the people. And they squandered the people’s  mandate. From Nancy Pelosi’s “impeachment is off the table” to Obama’s Republican ass-kissing, and throwing every core value of the Democratic Party and its members under the bus, the Democratic leadership have proven that they stand for NOTHING except staying in power.  Daou concludes:

Progressive bloggers have been jumping up and down, yelling at their Democratic leaders that the path of compromise and pragmatism only goes so far. The limit is when you start compromising away your core values.

I sincerely hope that’s the lesson learned today.

No lessons will be learned by the Democratic Leadership tonight. At least not the correct ones. Martha will be blamed, the Dems will continue to bow down to the moneyed power-brokers, and the people will continue to get screwed. 

More later.

I hear an echo

Funny.  How this… (H/T The Widdershins)

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

…sounds an awful lot like what I’ve been saying all along.

Obama may be smart, but he’s no progressive. Nor is he a liberal. Many “progressive” Democrats assumed that because Obama had D after his name, and because he could give a good speech, that he was FDR, JFK , and MLK rolled up into one.  I never operated under that misconception. Why? Because I, like many others, looked past his rhetoric and looked at his record.  We listened to what he actually said, and didn’t WORM* his clear and unambiguous statements to fit some faith-based notion of Obama’s almighty progressiveness. We took his words at face value.  What’s happening right now, with health care reform going down in flames,  is a direct consequence of electing someone with no experience and no core convictions and who, like many of his generation, has internalized the Right Wing Noise Machine’s bullshit as having some essence of truth.

Why won’t the New York Times name “those?”

In today’s editorial, the NYT editors deservedly call out the Bush administration regarding their illegal actions, but they leave out One Important Player in the lack of torture prosecutions.

There are those who oppose trying to punish Bush-era lawlessness — some who argue that America should not look backward and some who excuse that lawlessness. But the rule of law rests on scrutinizing evidence of past behavior to establish accountability, confer justice and deter bad behavior in the future.

“There are those?”  And who would that be?

The editorial goes on to act as though Obama is acting under duress and blames the lack of prosecutions not on Obama himself, but on his DoJ:

President Obama, much to his credit, has forsworn the use of torture, but politics and policy makers change and democracy cannot rely merely on the good will of one president and his aides. Such good will did not exist in the last administration. And the inhumane and illegal treatment of detainees could make a return in a future administration unless the Supreme Court sends a firm message that ordering torture is a grievous violation of fundamental rights.

Anyone who doubts the degree of executive branch pliability in this realm needs to consider this: The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims’ appeal because the illegality of torture was not “clearly established” was the Obama Justice Department.

Things are not always as they appear

Amazing story of what happened when a National Geographic photographer met up with an Antarctic predator.

And along the same line of things not being what they appear, go read Violet’s latest.

But seriously (and yes, I’m kidding about Lady Gaga), let me circle back now to this business of Obama’s alleged incompetence. Incompetent at what? At good government? At enacting progressive policies? Yes, if such a thing was ever his intention. But I don’t think it was. I’ve been saying since March 2008 that he’s a Republican in everything but name. Obama’s great gift is his ability to pretend he’s on the side of the progressive angels. And in our sound-bite culture, pretending is apparently enough.

A-yep.

And can we please put to rest the meme that Rahm Emmanuel is running the show and Obama is merely a poor innocent lamb being led to the slaughter by the eeeevil Rahm?  Last time I checked, Obama is still the President and Rahm serves at the pleasure of the President. Got that? 

Why I’ll never be a Republican, #532

But also why I have lost faith in the Democratic Party. The base is passionate, its leaders are not. And the Republicans? They don’t want to solve any problems. They just want to be the opposition, no matter what.

It appears the Right Wing Noise Machine has really cranked it up this summer, beginning with the birthers, death panels, moving on to the Health Care tea partiers, and now this. It appears they have caught their breath and fully hit their stride.

myiq2xu at The Confluence weighs in, beginning by quoting Gawker:

The story of how the President’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs became the biggest, scariest villain of the right wing (this week, anyway) is also the story of how the right wing information delivery process works now.

Here’s the biography of Van Jones: he was a bookish black kid from Tennessee who went to Yale Law and moved to San Francisco and became a radical. Then he decided to use his law degree and smarts to clean up and make things better from inside the establishment.

He was, he openly acknowledges, a “full-on Marxist” in early ’90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality. Then he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which combats over-incarceration, police brutality, and urban poverty and violence.

Running a civil rights group dedicated to producing real and immediate improvements in urban life will make a revolutionary Marxist a bit more pragmatic. Jones began focusing on job creation, and, with a bit of prognostic intuition that ought to put Thomas Friedman to shame, he decided, in the late-’90s, to focus on “Green Jobs.” This is, you know, capitalism—he wants to create wealth, and use market forces to make the world and black communities better places!

And in 2008 he wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, and it made the Times best-seller list, making him as much of a figure of the mainstream as Sean Hannity or Malcolm Gladwell.

So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself “a huge fan of Van Jones.”

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he’s a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he’s beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

myiq2xu writes and I heartily concur:

I am no fan of Barack Obama. I rate him as somewhat better than George W. Bush only because he hasn’t launched an unprovoked war on false pretenses. But I have said before and I’ll say again that I would love to be proven wrong about him.  If he fails we all suffer.

I am not going to oppose people and/or policies just because of their connection to Obama, nor am I going to think less of anyone (like Hillary Clinton) because they choose to serve our nation by working for him.  I want Obama to appoint good liberals and progressives to positions in the federal bureaucracy and judiciary.

Van Jones seems to have been a good pick for the position he held. None of the crap thrown at him by the wingnuts had anything to do with his qualifications or job performance.  Obama should have given Jones his full support.

Yes he should have. But here’s another question, where was the RWNM during the 2008 election? Crickets. You’d almost think they decided to let Obama win so they could have a strawman to attack.  Because for the power elite of the Republican Party, Obama is no threat and more often than not, an ally.  Obama’s betrayal of the Democratic base goes far and deep (here, here, here, here) and the GOP is smelling blood in the water, so it’s time for  to start playing rallying the troops. And it’s working. And every time Obama doesn’t stand up to these creeps, every time they get a slice off of him, he looks weak and ineffectual. Or as is being whispered now, looks like a wuss.

No longer are we talking policy, but rather, Obama’s inability to fight for what he believes in has now turned the debate to a discussion of whether our president is a “wuss.” People don’t like having discussions about whether their leader is a wuss. The very fact of having the discussion is trouble in and of itself.

Poor John, he’s still operating under the misapprehension that Obama actually “believes in” something. And when you’ve got Bill Moyers telling you to stand up and fight, hoo boy, you are in deep doo.

Lessons, Losing, and Learning Curves

Don’t let the water lily fool you.  Tranquility is the last word I would use to describe my mental state these days. Aside from the goings on in my life, which has some disheartening twists of its own, watching what passes for political debate in this country makes me just want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. 

Peter Daou lists lessons Democrats should learn from the health care debacle of this summer. Unfortunately, much of what he says is what we unSerious folks been talking about for some time, and I don’t think the Democrats are ever going to get it.

Maven posits that Barack Obama is on a learning curve that none of us would want to be on. Fair enough.

I wouldn’t take on his ‘learning curve’ for all the tea – or money – in China.

Yet, learn he will. This man is a man for the job and the ages. After eight years of a criminal half-wit, that we should be so lucky to have found not only somebody who would take the damn job, not to mention have the chops to excel at it is simply amazing.

We differ on our opinion of Obama’s ability to excel, but the problem as I see it is that we shouldn’t be electing anyone who needs to be on a learning curve. George W. Bush anyone? The job is too big and too vital to allow time for OJT. I wanted someone who had experience (0n day one) and plans and solid internal convictions.  Coulda, shoulda, woulda won’t get me much of anything I know, but it’s all just so damned discouraging.  

I went into Obama’s presidency with my eyes wide open, but I tried to hold out hope. 

I want be wrong about Obama. In my judgement he is an Opportunist with no central core and no burning passion for any issue. But, maybe I’m wrong. I “hope” I am. I sincerely do. The American people have lived through eight years of George W. Bush and the radical neo-con agenda. We are desperate to have “normal’ lives again where words actually mean something. Where “Clear Skies” really are free of pollution, instead of having pollutants no longer considered such, where a “Healthy Forest” does not mean uncontrolled logging, and where Patriot Acts really do protect the patriots rather than subvert western jurisprudence and give untold secret powers to the government to spy on its own citizens and make them afraid to speak in protest.

[...]

I have not seen anything in Obama’s record that would lead me to believe that he will be the transformational and transcendent leader that so many proclaim him to be. Heck, he doesn’t need to be transcendent for me to be happy. He just needs to be a real Democrat.

Obama may be smart, but he’s no progressive. Nor is he a liberal. Many “progressive” Democrats assumed that because Obama had D after his name, and because he could give a good speech, that he was FDR, JFK , and MLK rolled up into one.  I never operated under that misconception. Why? Because I, like many others, looked past his rhetoric and looked at his record.  We listened to what he actually said, and didn’t WORM* his clear and unambiguous statements to fit some faith-based notion of Obama’s almighty progressiveness. We took his words at face value.  What’s happening right now, with health care reform going down in flames,  is a direct consequence of electing someone with no experience and no core convictions and who, like many of his generation, has internalized the Right Wing Noise Machine’s bullshit as having some essence of truth.

By the way, have I mentioned that I really hate the label “progressive?”  From the very beginning of its modern usage amongst the Democratic faithful I understood what that word meant: capitulation to the right wing meme that all things “liberal” were evil. I’ll never run from the Liberal label. Please, don’t ever call me a Progressive. But I digress.

Regardless of the label, be it ”liberal” or “progressive,” when it comes to Obama, there is no there there. When you’ve got White House spokesmen calling people like Maven and me who are calling for Single Payer Health Care or at the very least, a robust public option, the “left of the left” as though we are some kind radical Che Guevara types, determined to take down western democracy, well, I’d say it’s time for all Obama apologists to answer the clue phone.

Greg Sargent parses the WaPo poll on Obama’s declining poll numbers.

Much talk today has focused on Obama’s difficulties with independents. But the drop among Dems and liberals is also a key driving factor in the President’s skid, according to WaPo polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta, who graciously provided the additional data.

This suggests Obama’s conciliatory approach to the GOP, and his lack of clarity around the public option — both of which are presumably alienating Dems and liberals — could be key factors driving his dip.

The more Obama panders to the right and ignores his own party, the worse the chances of turning back the conservative damage of the last 30+ years.  Worse, it may set up a resurgence of the very ideology the voters so soundly renounced in the last two elections.  Harry Truman had it right when he said:

Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.

Ian Welsh:

…I warned that Republicans could use their skill at being in the opposition and Obama’s manifest failings  could lead to a Republican rebound in 2010 and 2012.  His failings were clearly visible back then and indeed in the primary campaign. He didn’t turn into a compromising milquetoast when he got to the White House, he was always one.  He didn’t turn into a conservative Democrat in the White House, he was always one. Likewise, we knew the Repubicans weren’t going to play ball with Obama’s delusional ideas of bipartisanship and the stimulus package told us he wasn’t interesting in passing effective policy.

[...]

He later made his fundamentally (sic) agreement with basic [B]ush principles of civil rights by voting for warrantless wiretapping after promising to vote against it, then made clear that he’d serve financial interests before ordinary Americans when he forced through TARP.

And yet people believed he was going to be some sort of progressive president?  Granted, even I have been shocked at just how much his administration has violated progressive and liberal principles, but I was only surprised in degree, not kind, because I knew he didn’t believe in them.  This isn’t because I’m brilliant, I’m not.  It’s because I looked at the evidence and didn’t let “hope” and soaring rhetoric distract me from his actions and, to a large extent, what he was actually saying.  Certainly he lied about some things, but he was very honest about his fundamental governing philosophy.  Likewise, who his key advisers were, the fact that he had the right-most policy prescriptions of the late Democratic primary field, the way he fetishized tax cuts and so on, told anyone who was listening without “hope” clogging their ears who he was.

Violet Socks:

Back in May I did a quick rundown of Obama’s major betrayals up to that point, and I really need to do an update. There’s so much, I lose track. Afghanistan, Blackwater contracts, the Justice Department-DOMA clusterfuck, anti-contraception godbags appointed to Health and Human Services, the appalling Cairo speech (which bravely asserted women’s fundamental right to wear the headscarves that they have to wear so men don’t throw acid on them), and on and on. Just this past week, Obama played footsie with the “faith community” and vowed that public health wouldn’t pay for abortions. I’m surprised he doesn’t just buy a pig farm in Crawford and start clearing brush.

The only people who still believe are the believers, that hard-core 20% or so who never give up. Remember how there was always a rump group of Republican voters who continued to believe that Bush was President Jesus, no matter what? We have those on the left, too; they’re the hardcore Obamabots. The two groups actually have a lot in common: pseudo-religious fervor, resistance to what the rest of us call “reality,” . . .

For a trip down memory lane, who recalls this bit of tripe from Mark Morford?

Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Hmmm. I wonder what Mark is writing these days?

Update: from the comments in Ian’s post, Lambert links to a little something he wrote in December 2007. Take the time to click and read.

*What Obama Really Meant

Shorter Pfaff: “Leave Barack alone! It’s not his fault!”

“He can’t help it that the doody-heads he picked as his advisors are a bunch of losers! And don’t forget those meanie Republicans!”

What a piece of condescending pap. Obama is “too decent?”  Give me a break.  William Pfaff, by inferring that Obama’s advisors are mediocre and mainstream, completely ignores who actually picked these advisors. Hint: It wasn’t the tooth fairy. Pfaff makes one concession … sort of:

. . . I would say that if his economic counselors are mediocre, then it is a judgment on the American economic profession as a whole. There are distinguished dissident economists whose advice Obama seems to have ignored, such as Joseph Stiglitz and James K. Galbraith, but the people he has used in Washington are mainstream leaders of the profession.

However, the economy aside, I would make the same criticism of the president’s foreign policy. He is doing what the mainstream analysts and the Pentagon are telling him to do about his war—the top people. Regrettably they are wrong, as will eventually be discovered.

Um, William, they’re his advisors, not his parents. He can stay out after midnight, if he wishes. He is, after all, the President of the United States.

After putting the blame everywhere but squarely on Obama’s shoulders, Pfaff throws up his hands and ends with this little nugget:

Can anything be done about this? I doubt it. The combination of prejudices concerning socialism and the supremacy of the American system that Americans seem to acquire in the womb, with Republican electoral nihilism, is probably impossible to overcome. Thank you, Barack Obama, for trying.

Wow, I must’ve missed something, because all I’ve seen Barack do is make speeches and cave to the corporate powers-that-be at every turn. I’ve seen him carry on Bush’s wars, and escalate them, defend and expand Bush’s shredding of the Constitution. He has broken campaign promise after campaign promise. That’s what Plaff calls trying?

Puh-leeze.

“Draconian” Single Payer, not now. Not ever.

Forget that other speech he made eons ago.  There is no 11-dimensional chess going on here. He’s bought and paid for.

“This is not a trick. This is not single-payer,” Sebelius told Steve Inskeep. She added: “That’s not what anyone is talking about — mostly because the president feels strongly, as I do, that dismantling private health coverage for the 180 million Americans that have it, discouraging more employers from coming into the marketplace, is really the bad, you know, is a bad direction to go.”

[...]

Republicans have also raised the specter that a public option could evolve into a single-payer health care system where funding comes from one source — usually the government. The GOP says that such a system would lead to health care rationing and long delays in treatment.

Asked if the administration’s program will be drafted specifically to prevent it from evolving into a single-payer plan, Sebelius says: “I think that’s very much the case, and again, if you want anybody to convince people of that, talk to the single-payer proponents who are furious that the single-payer idea is not part of the discussion.”

Sebelius says such concerns are unfounded because a single-payer plan is not under consideration, and these “draconian” scenarios have muddled the conversation over the president’s proposal for a public option.

So to repeat, just in case you didn’t know which side your Democratic  administration is on, those “concerns” that Sebelius is talking about are not that single-payer is not part of the discussion, it’s that the Republicans are afraid that the “public option could evolve into a single-payer health care system.” 

Joe Cannon asks: Whose Side Is He On?

And read DCBlogger at Corrente. From the comments:

He told us this last year

It’s what he told us he was all along: a consensus builder, non-ideological, incrementalist, who would get everyone in the room and let them hash it out among themselves, who would not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Where did people think that would lead?

The kind of change we need doesn’t happen by consensus. It happens when there is leadership with passion and an iron will fighting for it. The President has never shown me that he cares that much about anything besides promoting himself.

He’ll settle for the least change (requiring the least risk on his part) that can allow him to say he accomplished something major. And he’ll try to remove himself from all the details if he can, leaving Congress to take the blame if it’s inadequate.

Every day my jaw drops as I read comments by people who feel betrayed and people who still think we’re getting universal coverage. We’re supposed to be the reality-based ones.

Bill Maher: “Hoping for a little more audacity.”

Yep, I’m posting Bill Maher again.    Maher is still giving Obama more credit than he deserves for his “good ideas,” but it looks like he is starting to wake up, or at least, isn’t making excuses for Obama any more.