@GenjiKilpatrick: You're conflating a dysfunctional democracy with the douchebags who're making it dysfunctional.

Obama is not Bush. Give me a fucking break.

Click through this giant list and tell me one thing that Bush would ever even consider:
http://obamaachievements.org/list

You can't.

The system we've tried to setup can work, if only evil douchebags would stop trying to get rich, kill people, take a dump on mother nature, and fuck over everyone else in the process. So no, I'm not giving up on it.

It's that old theory of Republicans claiming the system doesn't work, then once in office, they prove it.

So far, the 112th congress--which is GOP/Tea Party--is the least productive congress in history. Worse than the "do-nothing" congress of 1948. These assholes won't even debate an unbelievably important right fucking now jobs bill, but keep shoving horseshit bills about abortion, school lunches, PBS, obamas birth certificate, and combined with the stalling tactics, secret holds, massive fillibusters and so much nonsense it makes people want to throw a chair through their television.

Approval:
Obama: 48%
Congress: 13%

I wonder what that's all about? Could Obama's low numbers mean people are mad he isn't fixing this shit, and Congresses because they're a fucking corrupt, pathetic and evil bunch of grifters that everyone hates? Hmmmmmm....

Oh and check this out: The Republicans created Bin Laden, the Democrats took him out. Talk about cleaning up someone else's mess, sheesh!


@Quantummushroom is dead-on about Clinton and glass-steagal. I point my finger directly at that motherfucker for knowingly signing off the collapse of the international finance world.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'interview, first responders, senate, fillibuster, Jon Stewart' to 'interview, first responders, senate, filibuster, Jon Stewart' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

A fair representation, I suppose, of the 20% of the voting public that is still vainly clinging to the last, threadbare tatters of the fantasy they had in 2008 that everything was all the Republicans fault. Fact is Obama had 2 years of supermajorities in the house & senate and he did everything he wanted. The far left just can't accept that fact that what Obama wanted has driven up debt, reduced freedom, stifled business, created massive unemployment, left the U.S. foreign policy feebly twisting in the wind, and demonstrably shown the entire left wing economic & political platform to be a complete and utter failure. Also the fact is that the economic issues that happened under Bush were the result of him pursuing a LEFT leaning domestic spending policy. No - debt was not caused by War/Tax cuts. It was caused by profligate government spending at a time when they should have been cutting.


1. Unemployment is dropping and the economy is growing. The opposite was occurring so rapidly when bush left office, that it took a while to turn around. The president can't fix everything instantly, especially when republicans are fillibustering virtually everything regardless of whether they agree with it.

>> ^marinara:

deficit commission is actually bipartisan.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/62034
points 2-4 are actually democratic positions. Am I wrong?
if I am excuse the downvote


Yes, you're wrong. Dem's do NOT want to end Social Security, nor are they wanting to extend Bush's tax cut for top %1.

The deficit commission is "bipartisan", but it's a total joke. Obama put it together because of senate GOP fillibuster/stalemate, but GOP isn't doing shit even from within the "bipartisan" commission.


(ps: Linking to Jane Hamsher / Firedog is a bit, uggh. There's a reason they're called the "Firebaggers". They like Obama about as much as Michelle Bachmann's Teabagger party does.)

As a progressive, I don't care whether they force votes on the health bills taht people want, or upset the fillibuster with a procedural process. I have a third option... pass a bill before the republican is seated.

Actually I was drinking yesterday and this whole thing upset me beyond belief. Now I'm still sour and I don't think the Democrats will do any of the above, rather they will put the cart before the horse and screw the pooch yet again.

I don't think the Dems ever used their fillibuster.

They were constantly accused of being "obstructionists" anyway

Now that the cons are in the minority, all that they can do is be obstructionist.

Next on CSpan: Novelty Chattering Teeth Still Fillibustering

I'm still up in the air about the bailout. I'm well aware that this one is dividing down party lines, and that's always what makes me suspicious about things like this.

The bailout for the Financial industry was called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). It was intended to buy, well, Troubled Assets from financial institutions, and now Paulson and the Bushies are saying, $350 billion already spent, "oops, let's try buying stock instead"...which liberals like Paul Krugman had been saying from the beginning.

What pissed me off about that whole mess was that Democrats didn't even try to push Krugman's plan, they just acquiesced to the Bushian demands for $700bn, no strings attached.

What Paulson seems to have done is handed the cash over to his friends on Wall Street, and placed no conditions on the use of the money, or the management structure of the recipients.

It's the same old Bush strategy -- execute Big Govermnent intervention as poorly as possible to try to sour people on the very concept, in the hopes that it drives people into the waiting arms of the "conservative" Republican party, and their radical socialist agendas to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the top .5%. Joe the Plumber^TM is a poster-boy for what "success" looks like for these asshats.

So here's my deal. GM sucks, the Escalade wasn't really offensive to me, what was offensive was that GM's first foray into Hybrids was to add 2-3mpg to their SUV's, not to try up the mpg of their small cars into a Prius-like 45mpg. They had a working electric car, and they killed it, and now they want to make a hybrid for $40,000 called the Volt and say "see, we're modern".

That said, they employ 3 million people directly, and countless millions more via their suppliers. I don't want those people unemployed. I want GM to survive, even if it takes taxpayer support -- but I want Wagoner and Lutz's heads on lances. Failing that, I want them fired without benefit, and stocks & options confiscated. Same goes for anyone whose fingerprints are on the killing of the electric cars.

So here's what I want Democrats to do: force GM into Chapter 11-style restructuring, but use taxpayer money to make sure they keep operating throughout and don't let them slip into outright liquidation. No golden parachutes, no shareholder dividends, no bonuses and no retention at the executive level.

Then, we take the other $350 billion and do across-the-board single-payer universal healthcare, so GM, Ford and Chrysler don't have to worry about healthcare benefits for their employees anymore.

If the Republicans go into a froth, and fillibuster it, let 'em. We'll just pass it in January to the loving applause of the entire Great Lakes region, and Indiana and Ohio will both stay blue states for the forseeable future.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Getting both Florida and Michigan back was a stupid, stupid mistake. They broke the rules, Obama wasn't on the ticket, only Clinton was. There was no campaigning, and still for no fucking reason the votes were halved and spread among the candidates.
The Clinton campaign very easily changed the media dialog and pushed this through, no one stated the very clear facts.

I think the RBC outcome was about as amicable as could've been expected. If it weren't for Clinton throwing every ounce of her weight into this, the DNC would've stood by their earlier decision to strip all delegates.

As it was, the states still paid a price, and the results didn't significantly change the outcome of the race, while still playing nice to the state parties of two states the Democrats really want to compete in.

The fight was more a struggle between the DLC democrats, and the Dean/Obama Democrats, and the latter group won, without making things ugly.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Why is there such a failure of back bone and leadership in the Democratic party? Every fucking year they play by the rules of the Republican party dialog, always responding to or playing to the Republican tune.

I agree this is a problem. They're getting better, and Obama's done a better job of this than Gore or Kerry.

I think the main issue is with the media though. We now have Air America, Olbermann, and the blogs out there fighting the media dominance of the Republican party, but it won't be fixed until somehow we find a way to bring back a mostly objective media that investigates, and reports facts, without always filtering things through a political lens.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Hillary's inability to finally concede a loss and pledge support behind Obama shows an immense failure of character, and willingness to step aside and help bring change that is so badly needed after 8 years of Bush.

I totally agree. I had mild dislike for her before this contest, now she's just like a liberal version of Bush. She might ram universal healthcare through on a signing statement, and use the same veto/fillibuster BS to force a carbon cap, but making things like that happen that way won't work any more than Bush's policies did.

To quote kos's slogan, what we need are "More Democrats, better Democrats." It's gonna take a while to get a Democratic party to have a majority of vertebrates, but there's been a lot of progress in just the last couple years.

I did not think the MoveOn.org ad was a good intiative in the first place, it was unbecoming of a progressive organization to spend money on an attack ad like that, the money should have been spent on creating new forms of progressive media expansion.

But its striking to see how much fervor was generated over an ad that really has no bearing on the Iraq War. So much so that the Senate votes on it, while other amendaments to give troops the same leave time as combat duty, troop withdrawl and such get fillibustered.

Will Rush get the same treatment? Hell no. Because unlike MoveOn.org he is pushing forward a beneficial agenda for the GOP and the current administration, perpetual involvement in Iraq.