"Olbermann calls out Obama as a sell-out" <-- the money title.
*quality

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ei2ka/olbermann_still_has_it_calls_obama_sellout/c18aby5

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by gwiz665.

He knows who he works for, and it's not us.

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Funny .
It looks like had enough Obama juice.
Is it leaving a bad taste in you throat?
I bet he will be back for more.

Not much of an Olbermann fan these days, but he nailed this one.

Here's an article at The American Prospect, Why Democrats Are Deserting Obama. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Dorothy: You’re a very bad man for pretending to be a wizard. Wizard: No, I’m a good man, just a very bad wizard.

Barack Obama, you might say, is a very good man who is just not turning out to be a very effective president. And he makes a serious misjudgment if he thinks that it is just the liberal base of the party that is disillusioned both with the deal that he cut and with his leadership skills. Centrists like House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are every bit as dismayed at the agreement Obama made -- a deal that increases the deficit by some $900 billion in a fashion that is both inequitable (too much to the top) and not very efficient as economic stimulus.

It was nothing short of astonishing to see Obama, at his surprise press conference Tuesday, with harsher words for members of his own party than for Republicans. It is the Republicans, after all, who have been blocking his efforts, wall-to-wall, while the liberal Democrats who have been his staunchest if often exasperated supporters.

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What honks me off is that this deal is being called a compromise.

Sounds to me Republicans are getting everything they want regarding the tax cuts. How exactly is that a compromise? Silly me, I thought compromises were when neither side got everything they wanted but enough to move forward.

I'd be behind the tax cuts if there were some sort of stipulation to them. We've had these tax cuts since 2001...where the hell is that massive growth that trickle down economics is supposed to provide? The answer is that there was none. Trickle down is Simply....Not...Efficient. The vast majority of those tax cuts don't go toward economic growth, they go right into the wealthy's already obscenely large hoard.

If these tax cuts for the wealthy were somehow conditional, as in you only get them if you can document that you've put money into your company and hired more employees, then I would be willing to support tax cuts more. But we all know that will never happen.

Im just patiently waiting for the day that America collectively realizes that growth doesn't start at the top and trickle down, it starts at the bottom and grows upwards. Anything less is just a scam to make rich people even more rich.

Seriously, what the fuck are you people doing over there? This is economic madness.

>> ^kymbos:

Seriously, what the fuck are you people doing over there? This is economic madness.


The 'people' haven't been driving this Titanic for a long time.

"In short, the first amendment — free speech for persons — which went into affect in 1791, applies to corporations, which were not recognized as the equivalents of persons until 1886. In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections.

None. They can spend all the money they want. And if they can spend all the money they want — sooner, rather than later — they will implant the legislators of their choice in every office from President to head of the Visiting Nurse Service." -Keith Olbermann on the recent Supreme Court decision for unlimited campaign finance options.

So here's my take on this whole thing. Basically, Obama is being shortsighted.

During the primary in 2008, Democrats had a choice between a hard-nosed centrist who was an experienced inside the beltway deal maker, and a passionate, idealistic newcomer who had little patience for the kinds of backroom dealings that tend to dominate our political process.

It's true that in terms of specific platforms, Clinton and Obama were almost indistinguishable. The difference was that Clinton presented that moderate, centrist platform as though it was some utopian dream, whereas Obama presented it as just what was possible now, while painting a picture of what more could be possible if we could change the political landscape by electing such an inspiring visionary.

Long story short, that's what we did.

Thing is, that person who had become the inspiring leader of a renewed progressive movement disappeared November 5th, 2008.

After that day, what we got was a not very hard-nosed centrist who was hoping to quickly become an experienced inside the beltway deal maker. He stopped trying to present his inspiring progressive vision to the American people. Instead, he basically spent all his time saying to liberals "no no, conservatives have a valid point of view." Frankly, that's insane for anyone to think anymore, and completely wrong for the leader of the primary political opposition to conservatism to say out loud, much less say in front of cameras.

He has, ever since he was inaugurated, acted like he doesn't need to reach out to the American people at all. What started as a reasonable strategy of ignoring the uglier, crazier things said about him in the media quickly became a refusal to fight for any news cycle. It seemed he had this naive idea that if he ignored politics, and focused on the mundane aspects of governance, the politics would take care of itself.

The problem with that is that the way you acquire the power to govern is by playing and winning the political game. Winning a term of office isn't the end of your political campaign, it's just another chapter. That's doubly true if you're aiming to do big things. By focusing on the inside the beltway deal making, he's ignoring the bigger picture. If he spent more time trying to rally the public to his cause, and making sure the Democratic positions on issues were being clearly expressed to the public, he'd find that when it came time to negotiate legislation, he'd be starting from a much stronger position.

This tax cut thing seems to be the ultimate culmination of this trend. He's not said one damn thing about it for almost 2 years, until the Republicans made a stink about it in the run up to the election, and rather than reiterate his position from 2008, and make that the clear, unambiguous party line that he'd veto anything but his tax plan, he and the rest of the Democrats kinda just ran away from the issue and hid, and then finally said they'd "address" the issue in the lame duck session after the election.

Democrats have a strong position on this: they still have their large majorities in both chambers of Congress, the majority of the people say they prefer Obama's tax plan, and the best part is that if nothing passes, all the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone, so if the Republican block Obama's tax cut, they'll be doubly responsible for the tax increases. Plus, with all the deficit bullshit we've been hearing, it seems like it'd be worth reminding people that the tax cuts are responsible for most of our debt, and that the more we extend them, the worse the budget picture looks.

But instead of having the fight, Obama just goes ahead and says "I'll do anything to just make sure the taxes on the middle class don't go up, what do you want in exchange for a couple votes?" to the Republicans, and they amazingly extract a huge list of concessions from Obama.

Obama justifies this thusly:

I've said before that I felt that the middle class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high end tax cuts. I think it's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed. Then, people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case the hostage was the American people and I was not willing to see them get harmed.

I strongly agree. My prediction is that Obama just lost the next election.

>> ^vaporlock:

I strongly agree. My prediction is that Obama just lost the next election.


I reserve the right to recant when I see what shitmouthing wharrgarbler the Republicans pick for their candidate, but I'm wanting to vote against him right now.

I think this is so politically simple... as Keith says:

-Hold firm on taxing the rich and extending unemployment in a meaningful way. Explain sharply how the economics work. (spent $$=jobs)
-Take the Republicans to the wall and communicate your strategy

and, if need be:
-Let them take the blame for increased taxes on 99% of the populous and termination of unemployment benefits. The people will RIOT, and will know exactly who to blame.

He would win politically AND it would be the right thing to do. The only explanation I see here other than Obama's incompetence\over-compromise is that the ultra-rich have threatened to purposefully re-sink the economy unless they get their way. It wouldn't be the first time.

This was my first reaction as well. I started thinking about it differently recently however.

I've started thinking that Obama wants one thing as his legacy. He wants to knock China off the peg, and that's about it. He thinks doing so will matter more to the US economy long term than a trillion here, or a trillion there. The best way to do it is to follow a highly inflationary fiscal policy over the short term which, frankly, China can't afford to follow right now. Once I started thinking about his policies that way, more and more of them started making sense.

>> ^direpickle:

>> ^vaporlock:
I strongly agree. My prediction is that Obama just lost the next election.

I reserve the right to recant when I see what shitmouthing wharrgarbler the Republicans pick for their candidate, but I'm wanting to vote against him right now.


I'm pretty much resigned to the idea that Obama is going to be about as good an occupant of the White House for the next 6 years as I can reasonably expect.

For all my frustration with him, he's still my ally. Who in the Democratic party would be better, who could also beat Obama in a primary, and then defeat a Republican challenger? I can't think of anyone.

That said, now that we know he'll cave to anyone who takes hostages, it seems like a fine time for the progressive base to tell Obama that we'll vote for fucking Sarah Palin over him in 2012. If he's going to use the Democratic party to enable the Republican agenda -- if we're going to get Republican policies no matter who we vote for -- I'd much rather have R's in office when the country completely comes apart, so at least people blame the right party for the shit we're in.

Maybe then he'll start listening to the left as closely as he listens to the right.

Agree with mostly everything except the estate tax. The estate tax is double taxation and completely unfair. There should be no estate tax, period.

Ironic... Hillary Clinton got so much crap during the campaign for being a Washington insider; it seems like that might have helped.

>> ^kurtdh:

Agree with mostly everything except the estate tax. The estate tax is double taxation and completely unfair. There should be no estate tax, period.


While I agree in principle that the estate tax does involve double taxation, I don't agree that it is a bad thing. First of all, double taxation happens all the time. I am taxed on my income, then I am taxed when I spend it. Still, I am not opposed to all sales taxes.

As I understand it, the estate tax was created by the founding fathers for a specific reason. They saw that in England too much of the power ended up in, 'old money.' Families that, over the centuries, enshrined more and more wealth and power into their own blood. Much like the Revolution rejected the power of royal blood, it rejected the power of wealthy blood. By creating the estate tax, the founding fathers meant to reduce the power and influence of previous generations and to keep the focus on the current and the now. Not the long dead who were successful generations ago, but the people who are now relevant and successful should gain the lion's share of the power. I will not benefit from the loss of the estate tax, I admit. But the founding fathers were all very wealthy men in their time and created this policy that was directly opposed to their personal interest because they thought it was best for the long term of the nation. I would like to think that in the same position, I would support the same idea.

*money

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