Jesse speaks for me.

Seriously, it's a great rant and you should check it out. Not that I wasn't already there for other reasons, but I'm very glad to see more and more people join us out here in the Wilderness. What happened in Maine could've been prevented, with just a modicum of effort on the part of national Dems. But they think gay people are icky, and couldn't be bothered to help us. Oh, and it's all John's fault for being mean to them, or something.

[I won't quote a private email discussion, but I'll summarize it by saying that the poster made a suicide request by stating that "any stick to beat a dog"-style argumentation is justified. That's a rule 5 violation, for which the penalty is banning. -- lambert]

* * *

A new fall guy is emerging from the health care reform ruins. Circus progressives, better know as pseudo progressives, such as BTD at Talk Left and Digby have started to blame president Emmanuel for caving in to industry without Republican buy in or aiding, the enemy, Snowe in her attempts to water down reform.

Don't remember voting for Emmanuel for president, consult your physician it may indicate for early Alzheimer.

No Blood for Hubris is the name:

PTSD's the game.

I see traumatized people everywhere:

They don't even know that they're traumatized. (Oh! Would that be: numbing and avoidance?)

But I am running ahead of myself (Oh! Would that be: dissociative de-personalization?).

So I stopped by Digby, who apparently had written a post in support of supporting this here Corrente here. And I was about to comment about supporting her post in support of supporting this here Corrente here.

Democratic members of the House of Representatives are hearing the people. Keep the pressure on! It started with the tenacious Anthony Weiner of New York.   Read more…

The Death Panel issued its verdict on the fate of the public option: too expensive to keep on life support. "We've sent out as many emails with big DONATE buttons as possible, but this public option is no longer paying its way, and so it must go," stated a key member of the Death Panel, a representative from Wall Street. "Our politicians will carry out the directive," he added.

Primary physician Conrad, Nurse Sebelius and Second Opinion Barack "there's always hope, that's very important" Obama will assist progressives with end-of-life counseling for the public option.

They advise five stages:

Denial: Barack Obama strongly supports a robust public option! He said so!

The same way you get any politician to fall in line. Primary their asses.

Of course, that assumes "you" want the Blue Dogs to fall in line...

I think CMike might be onto something:

Time for the Republic itself is running out. Single payer advocates have to take over the Democratic Party fast. We should band together as a bloc of voters and commit to voting for all pro-single payer Democrats and against all Democrats who do not support single payer. That means we should publicly commit ourselves to vote for the corporatist Republican in any general election if the Democrat on the ballot is not a supporter of single payer. At this point Job #1 for center-ists and leftists is to wreck the careers of the office seekers in the Democratic Party who hire themselves out to the corporatists.

And the last thing rank-and-file Democrats, who would commit to this one small step to make America a better place to live, need to listen to is some Democratic ditto-head telling us the savvy political move is to rededicate ourselves to supporting our party's sold-out leadership. Political realism, my ass. "Where do they teach you [ditto-heads] to talk like this?...Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here."

And before I get the "they're better than Republicans" talking point, let me just say maybe, but they're not better enough to be willing to do anything to stop 22,000 Americans from dying every year. Or put it another way, if it's a choice between your life and the Health Insurance Industry's profits, you lose.

These are the people who deserve your vote? Why? Because they'll pretend to care about you as they let you die.

So here's my thought* why not simply organize in your community a petition drive aimed at all Democrats running for elective office. See how many people you can get to take the following pledge:

Susie Madrak, an otherwise good liberal, as far as I know:

One of the things I’ve learned from my many years in journalism (and yes, even my short stint in politics) is that when legislation is first proposed, people throw a bunch of crap on the wall and duke it out over the details. You know why they say it’s like watching sausage being made? Because it’s stomach-churning.

Several other bloggers (Lambert, Avedon, Bruce Dixon) have linked to this [Kip Sullivan's essay on the public option] tonight. They’re taking the article in good faith and assume it’s accurate in its conclusions (that the public option has been gutted and the idea of “reform” amounts to a bait and switch), and I just don’t believe that.

Granholm will be at the White House tomorrow and the hopeful word in some feminist circles is that she might be there for the announcement that she is being nominated to the United States Supreme Court. If this is the case, I think Democrats have very good reasons to oppose her appointment.

And, apparently, those same selected victors are already writing it for 2012:

The Democratic Party is launching a review of the nominating process that served Barack Obama so well last year, and given that those leading the process are all Obama loyalists, any revisions for 2012 almost certainly won't stand in the way of his renomination.

“This commission will focus on reform that improves the presidential nominating process to put voters first and ensure that as many people as possible can participate,” Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, Obama's pick to lead the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

US Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla) is a not always well-spoken Congresswoman. Some racist joker on Youtube took one of her short House floor speeches and jazzed it up with loops and splices. A DU jagoff linked to it, and general hilarity
ensued. (I'd quote some of this shit, but then you'd have to ban me.)

But hey, it's a perfectly reasonable post for DU. Because, we all know blacks are stupid and don't know how to talk and we should ridicule them at any opportunity, because that's what Democrats do, right? Right?

So over at Talkleft, Big Tent Democrat finds issue with an insinuation at (where else) Kos that Chris Dodd carried AIG's water on the bonus issue due to his being the largest* recipient of their campaign contributions. It was true he was carrying water, but it was Obama and Geithner's.

"Lessig promulgates a false implication - that Senator Chris Dodd acted as he did because of AIG contributions. It is clear now that in fact Dodd acted as he did at the behest of the Obama administration. In fact, in last week's issue of The Economist (p. 29) (before the AIG bonus scandal broke), the following was written:

Now, Bob Somerby has an excellent post up about the obsession with earmarks:

Those high-profile spending measures total nearly $2 trillion. By way of contrast, the EARMARKS which have Sheneman frightened total $7.7 billion. (No one has made the slightest attempt to show how much of that is “wasteful.”) But guess what? Trillions are much larger than billions! In fact, those EARMARKS represent roughly one two hundred and fiftieth of the total spending in these high-profiles measures. That amounts to one quarter of one percent—one dollar of every 250.

But to Sheneman, these EARMARKS are larger than human life. They may swallow the White House itself.

plover at Three Bulls! has particularly interesting take in rê Somerby that I thought was worth quoting here.

He condemns people as “tribal”, because, from his standpoint, “tribal” is outside the realm of “rational”. The problem is, it’s not. Tribalism, in a generalized sense, one not limited to reflexive, herdlike behaviors, is one part of what our human brains use to reason about life as a social animal (most of our brains, anyway — the ones that more or less don’t we label things like “autistic”). Declaring oneself an adherent of reason does not mean that one is not using tribalistic modes of thinking. It’s not something a person can think their way out of as it is part of thinking.

...

For better or for worse, we live in a world in which most "democratic" political systems are constructed on a basis of hierarchical tiers of representation. The higher the tier one reaches, the more one can accomplish. This effectively means that being a politician is a career. We do not live in the world in which leadership and representation is a duty one takes reluctantly, for maybe a year or two in addition to one's other life activities. I wish we did, but we don't.

I suspect many didn't and won't believe me when I say that, as the primaries unfolded, I was hoping for Hillary Clinton. And I said it then too. I had various reasons, some of which were different from the usual ones. Now people will believe me even less, given that I'm writing a belated Personal Conversion Diary. Because, you see, I was wrong about quite a few things then.

Back then, and during the general, for instance, I remember discussions around here about whether Obama was 1% better than the alternative, or 0.0001% better, with a number of prominent Correnteans voting for 0.0001%. But at the moment, given everything, I would rate him at 5-10%. That there is a stimulus package alone is enough for me to say this.   Read more…

So I just found out that a lot of Senate Dems liked this language:

None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made
available by this Act may be used for any casino or other
gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swim-
ming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater,
art center, and highway beautification project.

Because, you know, "museum" is as pointless and unimportant to the health of our society as "casino." To riff off Atrios, this is clearly one of those "designed to piss off Liberals" types of legislative action. And it worked! I'm pissed! Not only is this a petty, stupid, blatantly polemical, destructive, childish piece of legislation, but wait till you see which of "our" fine Dems voted in favor of it:

Sigh. I guess it's "surprising" that the guy who spent most of his time as Leader caving, went and caved to Republican pressure. But the real question isn't about the morality or qualification (not) paying taxes confers. It's about whether or not the new administration willl ever figure out that there's a real good reason for truly having ideological diversity in the applicant pool. As has already been commented here, it's interesting to wonder if Obama would've had all these problems with appointees, if he'd gone for actual working people, non-Villagers, and real world experts instead of Beltway insiders and left-overs from Dem administrations past. I made the snarky remark to one person that progressives usually pay our taxes, and frequently, we're so poor we can't even afford things like limo drivers and housekeepers, with whom we later get into trouble for non-reporting and payment. Shocking, that.

But I have to say, even I am a little taken aback by the fumbling coming from the administration on these matters. They are really starting to look like amateurs.

David notes:

This super-durable bungee cord must have the force of law, meaning it will be woven by Democratic legislators now exerting as much pressure on President Obama's left as congressional Republicans focused on President Bush's right.

When, for instance, Obama hedged on his promise to revoke $226 billion worth of Bush's upper-income tax cuts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) pushed him to fulfill the pledge and put the money into programs that better guarantee job creation.

When Obama initially offered up a stimulus bill filled with discredited business tax breaks, Democratic senators forced him to back off. Reps. David Obey, D-Wisc., and Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., then argued that the president's proposed infrastructure investments were too small to boost the economy. That led House Democrats to increase Obama's spending targets.

As stimulus negotiations continued, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., tried to add provisions letting courts renegotiate banks' primary-residence mortgages so as to prevent more foreclosures. It's a commonsense proposal: Judges already have the power to renegotiate vacation-home mortgages, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank says existing bankruptcy laws are exacerbating the foreclosure crisis. While Obama opposed the initiative out of fear that banking industry opposition might slow the underlying stimulus bill, Conyers' effort ultimately made the president commit to supporting the reforms in future legislation.

Heh, I'd write "sittin in a tree..." but I don't think he'd go for that. Diss me all you want, but just try to take down the Mighty Glennzilla:

Those claiming that Obama has masterfully depicted the Republicans as arrogant obstructionists by extending the hand of compromise should review this latest Rasmussen Reports poll, which finds the public split almost evenly on whether they support the Obama/Democratic economic recovery package, with a clear trend towards increased opposition.
This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position and then get attacked anyway (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War in and then got attacked for being soft on Terror in 2002; they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy and the same thing happened, etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans and nothing is happening except full-scale GOP opposition accompanied by a constant barrage of GOP attacks against them as big-spending, reckless, wealth-transferring liberals.
Ultimately, the success of this program will be measured by whether it produces successful results, so why shouldn't Democrats use their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve that? That's true on this issue and in general.

H/T and hugs to Bo.

No, Really. I think this is worth more discussion:

Play dirty against the BlueDogs how? In what way?
By bringiton on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 2:21pm

Seriously, I'm asking.

Through what mechanism? By what means? What is it you would have the Dem Leadership do, keeping in mind that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, elected by the Caucus, is a BlueDog through and through?

Without the BlueDog-Republican stranglehold on Congress, this stimulus package would look very different. Without that alliance, many Progressive initiatives including UHC and equitable taxation and dismantling of the push for Empire and a swift replacement of fossil fuels with renewables would all be doable.

How do you propose to break that alliance, to bring the BlueDogs to heel?

I have my ideas; I'll reserve them for now. What do you think? I ask because I'm told by staffers and friends of staffers: they really don't have a strategy.

A friend of mine likes to joke that "all Republicans are socialists," meaning that when it comes to the government handing out free money to bankers, large off-shore HQ'd corporations, or Red Staters sucking the Federal tit, they just can't say "No." We've spent a lot of time mocking them for the hypocrisy in this, as it comes from those people who are at the same time, the most loudly against "welfare" and other entitlements and funding for the rest of us. I bring this obvious set of points up, because I think it's time to do some real pushback, and perhaps use this framing as a wedge, against the notion that "tax cuts are good," and "tax increases are bad." In fact, historically and economically speaking, the very opposite is true.

The chatter is that the new administration started out offering 1/3 or 25% of the stimulus package in tax cuts, and the Republicans came back with, and received, the ~40% that are found in the most current form of the stimulus bill. Talk about dumb "strategy." Hasn't anyone in the Administration ever bought a rug in the Middle East? Haggling rule #1: your first offer should be offensively too low.

So my job is the push the new administration "from the left," if my blogging can said to have a constructive purpose. It's always fun to read more popular bloggers when they get snarky and angry in the way I'm prone to be most of the time, as I review the proposals and behaviors of the new administration. No one here is shocked by the already numerous "disappointments" from the administration, but I do wonder how long the majority in this country is going to keep giving Obama high approval ratings. I also wonder if getting punked by Republicans is a successful strategy in the effort to keep them high.

To me, it's completely obvious: no Dem administration is ever going to get more than a handful of Republicans to go along with anything that Dems propose. Republicans oppose Democratic initiatives, always. And the rare times when they don't oppose something the Dems propose, it's because they better understand the deep strategies and gamesmanship, and how to play the 'fake' of temporary support followed by later opposition. But expecting widespread Republican support for any Democratic initiative is just plain stupid. And ignorant of recent history. And perhaps cowardly, and incompetent.

The only place that the new administration needs to focus its love of "bipartisanship" is in the Senate. And frankly, the whole "post-partisan/bi-partisan" strategy is a foolish one, even there. A smarter strategy would be to identify electorally weak Republican members of the Senate, and use executive authority to pressure them to go along with key Democratic initiatives when there is the need for the few extra votes. Really, it's quite simple.

If the new administration wants anyone intelligent to believe that they are truly members of the Democratic party, and not the "Unity" party, it's relatively straighforward, in terms of what they should do.

-ignore the media, (unless they want to bring back something like the Fairness Doctrine, which I'm all for) which at this point is a wholly-owned creature of entities completely hostile to Democratic Party platform goals and aims
-don't bother to grant all but a few of the least significant legislative compromises to Republicans in the House, perhaps a few more in the Senate
-rally and sustain liberal electoral support with progressive policies that aren't just politically smart, but good for the economy (which is true for most progressive policies)
-keep Republicans off-balance with much needed investigations and restructuring of Federal offices, which serves the health of the Constitution at the same time

I don't really expect any of this from new administration, and indeed I expect a lot of the opposite. But I just felt like expressing as simply as I can, that "it's not that hard" to be a real, liberal Democrat right now. The Administration is enjoying popularity at the polls, the party isn't doing to badly in terms of fundraising, and the nation as a whole is ready for real "change," in addition to the musical teevee kind.

One thing I'm very sure about: if the Obama administration continues to act like members of the Unity Party, it will be responsible for significant Dem losses in the House and Senate in 2010, and risk a very real chance of becoming a one-term failure by 2012. In the spirit of "it's the economy, stupid" the bi-partisan proposals that please Republicans (tax cuts, deregulation, endless military spending) are exactly what got us into the mess, and will only exacerbate our situation further if allowed to continue/be increased. Again, this isn't rocket science, it's a simple review of the recent history of economic policy and the results.

Because having her in the Senate would have been truly awful.

I have to say: it's been rough. I've not been a member of the Oborg since before most people even knew he was running for office. For personal and private reasons based on my experience with him, and that of some friends. At the same time, I've not been as...vocal in my disappointment with him, his appointments and stated policy goals, as some; here, elsewhere. I feel like a DS9 fan at a B5 vs. BSG Con, some days. But I'm curious about what your experience has been like, since, say, the convention. I don't have hard data for it, but my impression is that we've shed a lot of fair-weather politicos since the election, and interest in political blogging seems way down to me, in general. I've also noticed that various varieties of "trolls" have become less common, super-pro Obama as well as anti. In general, chatter seems less hectic, people seem more subdued, and arguments seem less heated, in terms of our new Leader and his upcoming coronation. Is that your impression? I can think of lots of reasons for that, but what I'm most interested in is how long you think the "honeymoon" period will be, and what form the opposition to him will take. Interestingly, I've been told that even as the Republicans are in "disarray," there is growing anger in the Dem ranks, for being stuck with such unpopular losers as the "bailout bill," and the suggestion that health care reform, meaningful reform, "must wait." Your thoughts?