Left Wing

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I think it sounds like Arkansas Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln. The Democratic Senate Conference met with President Obama and she came up with this weak ass narrative;

I visited with a constituent yesterday, good Democrat, small business owner, who was extremely frustrated — extremely frustrated because there was a lack of certainty and predictability from his government for him to be able to run his businesses. He’s — he and his father have worked hard, they’ve built three or four different small businesses, and he fears that there’s no one in your administration that understands what it means to go to work on Monday and have to make a payroll on Friday. He wants results. He wants predictability.

And are we willing as Democrats not only to reach out to Republicans but to push back in our own party for people who want extremes, and look for the common ground that’s going to get us the success that we need not only for our constituents but for our country in this global community, in this global economy? Are we willing as Democrats to also push back on our own party and look for that common ground that we need to work with Republicans and to get the answers?

Blanche Lincoln thinks that totally screwing over the President’s agenda is a good political move. Must be why she is at 33% in the polls for re-election versus 56% for her opponent. Lincoln’s approval rating has sunk to just 27%, with 62% of voters in the state disapproving of her, and she only has the support of half of the states Democrats. When the Democrats are in power and you want to keep them in power then you need to keep them popular. Which means you need to ACTUALLY PASS GOOD LEGISLATION that benefits your constituents. Otherwise, voters will see you as part of the problem, not part of the solution, and every punch that you and your fellow conservadems land on Obama that same punch ricochets right back onto your poll numbers and approval rating. They are self-immolating and don’t know why. They think it’s the liberal left hurting them, when in fact they are hurting themselves. If these people studied 1994 they would know this, it’s elementary politics.

Personally I don’t give two shits whether our politicians know what it’s like to go to work on Monday and meet a payroll on Friday. I do give two shits whether they know what it’s like to go to work on Monday and get a paycheck on Friday that doesn’t allow for you to save for your kids education, or allow you to purchase affordable health care insurance, let alone let you save for your future retirement.

Does she and her fellow conservadems think Democrats just lucked out winning blowouts in 2006 and 2008? Could Bush’s low approval ratings have had anything to do with it, ya think? The economy was doing okay in 2006. But Dems swept the election because the Republican president was despised by the antiwar left, and independents had seen enough of their neocon incompetence as well. If the Dems want to avoid the same thing, their best shot is to get Obama’s approval rating above 60%. You do that by passing health care reform, passing real job creation bills, and do something to regulate banks and go after these credit card companies who seem to enjoy raping the American consumer ever month with 22% interest rates.

Perhaps Blanche Lincoln’s current and future bosses at corporate giant Wal-Mart are telling her how to make payroll, because she doesn’t have the experience to comment for herself.

Though she does have the experience of being a backstabber.

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On at lot of things Obama has disappointed me, but I still support him, all things considered. He HAS done a lot of good and is a decided improvement over his predecessor (and we all know he’s ten times better than McCain/Palin ever would have been.)

How have the left wing Democrats responded to some of Obama’s actions… or inactions so far?

I read tons of nonsense about Barack Obama being some kind of “failed president” because he hasn’t done everything that the left wants him to do. The left wing is getting kind of ridiculous, and threatening to stay home from the polls in 2010 which is beyond childish. Even little kids act more reasonably than these people are behaving. You know when I was a kid most years I made a list all of the things I wanted for Christmas. It never occurred to me I would get every single thing on the list. Hell, if I got one or two things that were on the list I was cool with that.

These people on the Democratic left are like kids who didn’t get everything on their list so they are throwing away all of the toys that they did get and declaring that they want nothing to do with Christmas.

Barack Obama has not done everything that I want him to do, but I’m actually quite pleased that he has done some of the things that I wanted him to do, because his predecessor certainly didn’t do a DAMN thing at all but screw up this country for the last 8 years. As to the things he hasn’t done; some have been thwarted by Congress or other issues, for some he hasn’t yet had time, and some he doesn’t intend to do at all. So he doesn’t agree with all of my priorities. Fancy that.

I will be critical of Obama and his administration when I disagree with their actions, but I’m certainly not going to dissolve into some massive snit and become the Democratic version of a teabagger.

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Cokie Roberts didn’t hold back on those health care protests headlined by actor Jon Voight, who in a speech Thursday said Obama “has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Rev. Wright to damn America.”

Calling Voight’s performance “cringemaking,” Cokie added “exceptionalism isn’t optimism…It makes you feel just very uncomfortable. And that is not where the future of any party is.”

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Cokie seems to have cottoned to the fact that conservative fear mongering should have no place in the Republican party, at least to some extent, but she is a charter member of the inside-the-beltway crowd and her ilk are in the process of discovering that the Tea-bagging creature they helped  spawn has grown up and out of their control.

Sorry, Cokie, the time for the Beltway gang to be cringing was way before Sarah Palin became a household name, maybe back when you all clucked about stains on a blue dress.

There is no Republican leader who will stand up against this movement and survive politically.  They were all in attendance at the event..lined up like obedient schoolboys behind the podium waiting their turn to speak to the throngs of tea-baggers who carried signs about the “Kenyan in the White House”.

Who attended?  Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican Whip Eric Cantor and Conference Chairman Mike Pence all spoke.  Conservative Rep (and party right-wing howler monkey) Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) all were in attendance as were Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

I wonder if they approve of the signs in the crowd.  I crowd they support…a movement they have embraced.

Holocaust

This tells me that lowering the cost of health insurance so people can afford to buy health insurance coverage is like sending them to the gas chamber.

What the hell does that even mean?

“But..but the Democrats did it toooo!!!”

Conservatives point out that the anti-war left and Democrats did the same thing when Bush was in the White House, but this is not true.  The looney Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia.) was the only one I could find that attended and supported any anti-war rally’s.  None of the Democratic party’s congressional leadership attended the 100,000 + anti war rally in September of 2005.  When Code Pink wackos barged into and interrupted Congressional hearings into AG Alberto Gonzales, Democratic Chairman Conyers had them thrown out of the chamber.  Something these wingnut tea-baggers don’t understand is that Democrats in Congress funded the troops, at the levels President Bush sought and sometimes with more money than he even requested for Afghanistan and for veterans. In this sense, Democratic congressional leaders didn’t listen to either MoveOn.org or Code Pink, nor did not align themselves to embrace their movement in the way that the GOP has embraced the tea-baggers. If they did, funding for military operations in Iraq would have been cut off long ago (2006).  The anti-war crowd has been almost as critical and practiced its unnerving, in-your-face protests towards all of the Democratic leaders in the House including picketing and camping out at Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home.

I think Democrats realize that when you become too shrill (i.e. Sheehan) or too offensive (i.e. Code Pink), you wind up doing more harm to a cause than good, and that rule applies on either the left or the right.  The thing is the conservatives in the GOP, in supporting this anti-government movement, has yet to learn this lesson, and their support of the tea bagger movement is evident of this.

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Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Won’t Get Fooled Again
The Who -1977

By Sherwood Ross

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency(C.I.A.) drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to reliable reports. The drone is a remotely controlled, unmanned aircraft.

“Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the October 26th The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.”

Yet CIA director Leon Panetta says. Not only are the spy agency’s unmanned aircraft “very effective” in taking out suspected militants in Pakistan, he told the Pacific Council on International Policy . “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.”

Where is the left anti-war blogoshere and why aren’t they attacking President Obama on these drone attacks?  Weren’t they accusing Bush of killing Afghan civilians by U.S. drones.   Obama is on record as saying that he will fight Al Qaeda by whatever means necessary, but this smacks of hypocrisy.

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