Category Archives: Democratic Party

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The Enablers

I’m hearing Democrats making a lot of hay about the Republicans’ “war on women.”  As outraged as I am at Rush Limbaugh, the Catholic Bishops, and pretty much any right-winger who tells me I have no right to look in his gun cabinet while he has every right to stick his nose between my legs, I can’t help but think that the fact that we are arguing over birth control has as much to do with alleged liberals and progressives as it does with those who would like to take us back 100 years.

Hillary Clinton had it right when she spoke to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995:

It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and for the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.

These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. But the voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loudly and clearly:

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed — and the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own relatives.

It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely — and the right to be heard.

“Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights . . . “

Then why are our rights always used as bargaining chips?  Why are our private health care decisions “carved out” as something outside of normal health care? You think they haven’t been? Explain the Hyde Amendment to me. Explain President Obama’s Executive Order that enshrined the Hyde Amendment and now will never again have to come up for an annual vote in Congress. Explain all the “conscience clauses” for doctors, nurses and other “health” practitioners that allows them to deny women legal medical procedures that provider finds personally “immoral.”  Explain why pharmacists have been given permission to refuse to fill a woman’s legal prescription from a licensed M.D. because he objects on “religious” grounds.

All of this has been done on the Democrats’ watch or with their acquiescence.

You might not realize it but a lot of us of the female persuasion have been warning about this for years. We were told to not rock the boat. Can’t you see we’ve got really, really important stuff to do FIRST? Your turn will come, we were told. In the meantime, can you come help out with the phone bank or walk a precinct? Yes, we LOVE women! We VALUE women! Really, really, really! But, you know . . .  the Republicans!!! 

In order to pass President Obama’s “signature” Health Care bill, women’s rights regarding their right to choose was sold down the river. Abortion was singled out for special treatment. No other medical procedure was given this carve out. This was done by Democrats who, instead of drawing a line in the sand, caved.

Another example: The Lily Ledbetter Act passed both houses of Congress early in 2009, but the more important Paycheck Fairness Act, the bill that would actually put some teeth into Lily Ledbetter, and after having passed the House in 2009 by a greater margin than Lily Ledbetter, languished for two years in a Democrat-controlled Senate until just before the 2010 election when it was becoming clear that Democrats were probably going to get their asses handed to them, so they’d better throw the wimmenz a bone.  The vote didn’t happen until after the “shellacking” and failed pretty much on a straight party vote. Hmmm. Do you think that this bill might have stood a better chance if it had been voted on at the same time as its sister legislation? Why wasn’t it? Because, women’s priorities always take a back seat. Always. Until it is an election year and the Dems need to get us stirred up again so we’ll walk those precincts and staff those phone banks.

There may be a huge backlash now because of the overreach of the conservatives, but what is happening now is not an event in isolation. All along the way Democrats and “progressives” gave them the green light to take an inch, and then another inch and then a yard, then half mile until, well,  here we are. As Dr. Violet Socks writes:

Women’s contraception is the only medication associated with normal human activity that is described as some kind of weird off-the-wall thing that shouldn’t be covered by insurance. The only one.

We told you they wouldn’t be happy until they put all women under their thumbs. Those of us who embrace a secular government and the separation of church and state also warned you about the dangers of letting other people’s religions interfere in our government.

You didn’t listen.

Maybe now you will.

(By the way, I was quite pleased to hear that the Democratic women walked out of Darryl Issa’s hearing the other day. Let me know when the all Democratic men do the same. Seriously, when are all of you going to have our backs?)

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Starving Social Security

Harkin is absolutely right.

Harkin (D-Iowa), who has long been a staunch defender of Social Security, hammered it as the beginning of the end for the program.

“This Congress will be making a grave mistake — a grave mistake — and reinforcing a dangerous precedent,” Harkin said in a dramatic Senate floor speech late Thursday. “And I’m dismayed that Democrats, including a Democratic president and a Democratic vice president, have proposed this, and are willing to sign off on a deal that could begin the unraveling of Social Security.”

Harkin argued that Social Security had always been strong and protected because it was funded by its own dedicated tax stream that ensured every American would be guaranteed a basic income in their retirements, and that the program added not “even one dime to the deficits or the national debt.”

But he said now that Congress was going to pay for this cut with borrowed money from the general treasury funds, the best argument of the program’s defenders was gone.

I’ve said this from the beginning.

On that Payroll Tax “Holiday” - December 7, 2010

The piper will have to be paid.

Or killed.

All those times when we’ve said that SS doesn’t add one dime to the deficit? Well, Obama fixed that yesterday with his “deal.”  According to the conference call that ”senior administrative officials” held with press and bloggers, the $120 billion that the tax holiday will cost the Social Security Trust Fund will be paid back with monies from the general fund.

See also this and this.

And don’t Democrats remember when a Social Security “Payroll Tax Holiday” was a Republican idea and one that they recognized as a back door way to defund Social Security? Now all we hear is how we Must Pass This Bill because suddenly $20 less a week is going to send the average American to the poor house. Hogwash.   Understand that for the vast majority of Americans this “tax holiday” amounts to far less for them individually, but what it is doing to take down Social Security as a whole is catastrophic.  And Congressional Dems are going right along with it.

Unbelievable.

See what I mean by “the crazy?”  It isn’t just limited to the other side.

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Caucus (Updated)

I didn’t decide to do this until about a day or so ago.

I’ll be attending the Lyon County Democratic caucus later this morning.  Part of me is wondering why I am bothering, but since I didn’t go in 2010, AND this is the year that the DNC will issue a new platform (not that they’ll follow what will surely be a watered-down bowl of mush), I thought I’d add my two cents. I might add more than that, and in fact, that’s a pretty good bet.

Make no mistake, the only people who will be getting out in the wet weather and attending a Democratic caucus in a year where there is no contest for the nomination will be the hard-core Dems.  I’m going because I want to see what is on the mind of these people. Have they had it? Are they willing to rattle the cage? If I like what I hear, I might stick around.  If I hear the same old, we can’t rock the boat bullshit, I’ll be heading for the door.

This isn’t to say I’ll be neutral. In recent days I’ve also come to the conclusion that come November 2012, given the current field of candidates, I’m going to have to put on my big girl panties hold my nose and vote for Obama. I’ll not be leaving the top of the ticket blank this time.  Not that I think he’s any great prize (as regular readers will know), but he beats bat-shit crazy any day.

Just don’t ask me to canvass for him. That would be a bridge too far.

Update: Some photos from today

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This pretty much sums it up for me as well

As a recovering partisan these days and after watching Pres. Obama’s compromising conservatism, I no longer feel the urgency to support a political party who has threatened dire consequences if I don’t vote for them. Beyond foreign policy, economic, and civil rights issues mentioned above, Pres. Obama has also chosen to short-change women again and again on our freedoms, starting in the health care bill, then by executive order that empowered conservatives of both parties, and finally by making the decision on Plan B that would have come from Mitt Romney, too.

via NEW YEAR SPOTLIGHT: The Party’s Over | TaylorMarsh.com.

This also why I no longer give money to NARAL, NOW, or the Democratic Party. Toothless. All of them.

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Indeed, the problem is two-fold

Michael Brenner lays the blame squarely where it belongs: Obama himself, and those who did not, do not, hold him accountable. 

Obama has unmoored the Democratic Party from its foundations — philosophical and electoral. No longer is it an expression of the persons, programs and ideas that crystallized with the New Deal and which dominated the country’s politics for sixty years. Its future is that of ad hoc assemblage of hustlers and special interests whose sole claim to govern will be that it is not the amalgamated Tea/Republican Party. Obama, by this Oedipus-like act of patricide, has also betrayed the country that voted for an enlightened leader with a social conscience — a country in desperate need of the opposite to the fate he has laid on us.

[ . . . ]

Most striking is a behavior pattern that resembles closely the narcissistic syndrome — even if he is not a clinical narcissist. A narcissist has no convictions other than a total dedication to his own gratification. That gives him the freedom to maneuver without inhibition or conscience with the revered self as the only reference point. All expressions of ideals, of opinions, of intentions are implicitly so qualified. A complementary narcissistic trait is an ease with blurring the line between virtual reality and actual reality. Narcissists believe everything they say — at the moment they say it. Their declarations are sterile acts that have no pride of parentage nor can they expect honor from offspring. Witness Obama’s momentarily rousing support of a labor movement that he has scorned for thirty months. This is the same President who has launched an all-out campaign against public school teachers whose unions serve as the whipping-boy for all that ails American education.

[ . . . ]

The instinct to protect Obama was so powerful that it stilled the voices of those who should have been both bolstering and cajoling him to remain true to his avowed commitments. To this day, the hesitation about calling out Obama is manifest — witness the minimal reaction to his brazen reversal on clean air standards that is required by legal stipulation to promulgate. Pressuring Obama early on also would have been the line of political realism since opinion surveys have made clear that it was the Republicans who were out of step with prevailing attitudes on issue after issue. That remains true today despite the White House and the Democratic Congressional leadership jettisoning them wholesale. It cannot last for very long, of course, with the mass defections that have left American politics with only one narrative, the legitimizing of a Darwinian social philosophy, the ensconcing of moneyed interests on the throne of power, and the deference now shown the Tea Party outrages.

The vow by so many not to hold to account a President (the first person of color to occupy the White House) who engaged in one unseemly sellout after another emboldened Obama to go further and further down that road. Only now that the disaster has occurred are a few tentative, mild voices of serious criticism raised about the man, his methods and his politics. They have little practical meaning since the damage is done, the game is lost, the Democratic Party is denatured, and the great progressive wave of the 20th century that reconciled Americanism with the social ethics of the modern world reversed. Free of any mea culpas and lacking a sense of urgency, these mild chastisements fall into the ignoble category of “grandpa reassurances.”

I recommend you read it all.

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Matt Stoller’s Must Read

If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.

So why isn’t there a legitimate primary challenger to Obama to make this case? Forty years ago, primaries were instituted in the Democratic Party as a response to party insiders having too much influence over nominations. These reforms were implemented before the prevalence of money in politics was as extreme as it is now. At this point, primary challenges are so expensive that a serious 2012 campaign would ironically require support of party insiders for viability. The party, inflexible as it was in 1968, is perhaps even more rigid today. As a result, no candidate has stepped up to challenge Obama in a primary, even though 32 percent of Democratic voters want one.

This is an institutional crisis for Democrats. The groups that fund and organize the party — an uneasy alliance of financiers, conservative technology interests, the telecommunications industry, healthcare industries, labor unions, feminists, elite foundations, African-American church networks, academic elites, liberals at groups like MoveOn, the ACLU and the blogosphere — are frustrated, but not one of them has broken from the pack. In remaining silent, they give their assent to the right-wing policy framework that first George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama, cemented in place. It will be nearly impossible to dislodge such a framework without starting within the Democratic Party itself.

Read it all here.

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Just SAY it!

I. Love. This.

This is precisely what infuriates me. We have a functional moron running for the presidency, and a small crop of presumably pro-science people are busily trying to shush the opposition up so they can work their clever psycho-mojo and gently enlighten Perry by…I don’t know, wiggling their fingers, thinking happy thoughts, or maybe they’re going to use The Force.

Perry is a disastrously bad candidate (as is Bachmann). Call me a radical, but maybe it’s a good idea for the opposition to oppose them, openly, and with thorough, rational explanations? And if the candidate is an ignoramus, as Perry clearly is, SAY IT.

[ . . . ]

What Dawkins does, as do many of us on the side the accommodationists hate, is provide sharp, clear, strong positions. What Dawkins does in that op-ed is play the role of Joseph Welch, confronting wicked folly and stating his position lucidly and with acid contempt for the forces of ignorance and deception.

You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

If Jamie Vernon had been writing in 1954, he would no doubt have castigated Welch for his harshness, and suggested some compromise…perhaps a few more hearings, helpfully exposing a few more Communists, perhaps asking for a little more respect for the distinguished senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy.

This accommodationist view could also accurately describe just about everything about today’s Democratic Party.

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We “can’t win” but we must fight?

Russ… You know I like you. But hooboy, you are confusing the hell out of me. You just sent me an email from Progressives United with the subject line “Let’s Fight.”

Carissa,

Part of the reason I founded Progressives United is that we badly need to break the limits of our debate.

Nowhere is that need exposed more clearly than with the congressional super committee that will soon be debating whether we should dismantle our society and protections substantially — or all but eliminate them.

That’s an argument we can’t win. Years of corporate money in politics have gone toward ensuring that debates like this will end up heads they win, tails we lose. 

To stop this backsliding and start having debates we can actually win, we need the super committee to deal a decisive defeat to the corporate agenda. And to do it, we need to stand united.

Stand with me today: Petition Democratic members of the super committee to deal a defeat to corporate interests.

Members of Progressives United are petitioning Democratic super committee members to follow these priorities:

  1. Ensure millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations pay their fair share of debt reduction,
  2. No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits,
  3. No giveaways to corporate interests,
  4. Or no deal.

Numbers one through three are important policy priorities, but number four is equally important.

If we don’t get our policy priorities, Democrats need to be ready to walk away from the deal. You can guarantee extremists on the other side will continue to push relentlessly to give even more to corporations and put even more of the burden on the middle class. We have to fight harder than they will.

We can have leverage with the Democrats on the super committee, but we need to build it.

Stand with me and sign Progressives United’s petition today.

Huh?  I am so confused by your email. On the one hand, you say we have to “break the limits of our debate.”  Then you go on to infer that the “super committee” is already operating from the assumption that the safety net must be diminished and will only be debating how much they will shred the social safety net. As I see it, they aren’t having a debating each other. They are in agreement. So how is this “our” debate? But I digress. You were speaking of a debate and that usually means one side or the other will win the debate.

That’s an argument we can’t win. . . . heads they win, tails we lose.

Wait. What? We can’t win the argument? So the point of your email is . . . what, exactly?

To stop this backsliding and start having debates we can actually win, we need the super committee to deal a decisive defeat to the corporate agenda.

Ooooh! I get it! We have to get the committee to see the error of their reasoning.  But just half of them.

But, wait,  you already said that the committee has already made up its collective mind, and it’s not in our favor, and . . . but . . .

But okay, I’ll bite. I’m ready! What are we to do?

Wait. What? You want us to sign an online petition that has absolutely no teeth or “do this or else” threats? Really???

Oh Russ, Russ, Russ.

You said, “Let’s fight.”

I was really hoping you were writing me to say you’d given up on the Democratic Party and that you were going to make a move and encourage us to come with you. I thought maybe you were going to say you were going to step up and either challenge Obama in the primaries, or make an independent run for the Presidency.

You want me to sign another petition. Seriously?  Years of these, years of trying to get “better” Democrats elected, years of begging and pleading with our Democratic leaders to Please, not again! Please don’t sell us out! has taught me that this shit isn’t going to do squat.

And frankly, where is the “fight” in this?  I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that this organization that I thought maybe, just maybe was going to be a genuinely liberal/progressive counterpoint to the corporate Democratic leadership.  Nah. Just another veal pen as far as I can see. 

You want to get their attention, Russ?  We lib/prpgs need to go Lysistrata on the Democratic Party. And we need enough of you big names to make the leap with us.

Democrats need to be ready to walk away from the deal . . .

No. We need to be ready to walk away from the party. And so do you.

That will get their attention.  Nothing less.