Gail Huff's Husband: Wins!

[slomo]

Yes, and of course now the Corporate News Media is telling us that this is all because the Democrats weren't "bipartisan" enough.

Well that was predictable.

When the Dems fail, it's because they weren't enough like Republicans. And so, we move ever rightward.

[MinM]

American Chronicle | Internet Abuzz that "Family Values" Candidate Scott Brown Posed Nude

"There´s no way that any man in 1982 would pose nude in a magazine and not be homosexual. I bet Scott Brown is a classic closeted gay Republican, which would put him among the ranks of Mark Foley and Larry Craig...

Glenn Beck Destroys Scott Brown: “This One Could End With A Dead Intern” | Online | Mediaite


aangirfan: Scott

[Jeff]

President Obama warned Democrats in Congress today not to "jam" a health care reform bill through now that they've lost their commanding majority in the Senate, and said they must wait for newly elected Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to be sworn into office.

link


Commanding majority. That's funny stuff.

It must be a relief to have lost it, so Republicans instead of Democrats can be on the hook again for governing like Republicans.

[MacCruiskeen]

Chris Floyd (blogpost quoted in full):

The Reason for the Anger and Intractability of the Debate Over Health Care Reform in the United States:
Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 12:58

One side is lying; the other side is not telling the truth.

*

Or to put it another way: One side is pretending that a wildly reactionary plan to further enrich rapacious corporations is really hardcore, gutbucket socialism from the Bolshevik trenches, while the other side is pretending that its "reform" is not really a wildly reactionary plan to further enrich rapacious corporations but something that will somehow, in some way, be good for some people at some point way down the line.

*

One often finds that dealing in such utter unreality makes it somewhat difficult to achieve workable solutions to real-life problems.

http://tinyurl.com/y9k3hzs

[Jeff]

Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010 08:21 EST
Blame the all-powerful left!
By Glenn Greenwald

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I'll post the link to it once it's up. But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human "Left" for the Democrats' woes -- one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats' problems on "the furthest left elements," which he claims dominates the Democratic Party -- seriously. And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal: "Blame the Left for Massachusetts" (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the "liberal" public option and mandate; he apparently doesn't know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the "mandate" is there to please the insurance industry, not "the Left," which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis' claim that "candidate Obama's health-care proposal did not include a public option" is nothing short of an outright lie).

...

more

[RocketMan]

But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human "Left" for the Democrats' woes -- one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

It's quotes like these that really make me appreciate Greenwald. Now if he'd only adopt even a frisson of deep political analysis... Although, to his credit, he has already trodden on some pretty risky ground covering the anthrax attacks of '01.

[crikkett]

Commanding majority. That's funny stuff.

It must be a relief to have lost it, so Republicans instead of Democrats can be on the hook again for governing like Republicans.

Fantastic! It's not like the Democrats were using their supermajority anyway.

I'm also grateful to MinM, who saved me the trouble of googling the Cosmo spread. I speculate that we'll be hearing more about Brown's closets soon.

[Nordic]

Commanding majority. That's funny stuff.

It must be a relief to have lost it, so Republicans instead of Democrats can be on the hook again for governing like Republicans.

Fantastic! It's not like the Democrats were using their supermajority anyway.

I'm also grateful to MinM, who saved me the trouble of googling the Cosmo spread. I speculate that we'll be hearing more about Brown's closets soon.

Brown simply does not make my "Gaydar" even twitch.

My Gaydar isn't always 100% accurate, but it's not bad.

I think he's just in love with himself.

[Gouda]

Slavoj Zizek on how liberal, centrist technocrats are handing the energy of popular outrage to liberal policies over to right wing reactionaries on a silver platter...



"I think Berlusconi is one of the options for our future."

"I mean, Berlusconi we know is a living obscenity, but I don’t think this is just a joke. There is something very strange going on where it’s as if the state, or political powers, are discovering it can function in a totally cynical way..."

“Look at Italy if you want to see how our future authoritarianism will look.”

"It’s not the old style authoritarianism. It is…to call it by its name, Groucho Marx Authoritarianism. This is our future, I claim."

“My message to liberals is, are you aware that…your own dynamic of your own system is generating this nationalist, populist, potentially racist reaction?!”

[norton ash]

Wow, Gouda, thanks for that. Zizek really nails it. Sexy, dreamy Nuremburg rallies for Berlusconi... "Hope" rallies for Obama... pretty colours and leaders who are soooo in on the the corporatist-clampdown joke, and the cannon-fodder who wave the banners.

I bet this lecture aired prime-time in the Netherlands.

I'm a proud lib'rul, and I'm outside the system. (Wastin' time on your intertoobz.)

[Gouda]

Dennis Kucinich says:

In what may come as a surprise to some of his supporters, Kucinich declined to blame Republicans for what he believes have been economic policies gone awry.

"We have to be looking at ourselves," he claimed. "We have to be looking at what we need to do to govern... It's really simple: the people don't like what we're doing."

"Democrats have to look at our own responsibilities, not the Republicans' responsibilities," he said. "If we want to give the mantle of leadership to Republicans, they're the minority, they're willing to take it."

"This isn't about the Republicans, this is about the Democrats."

[MinM]

[Gouda]

Operation Elect Sarah Proceeding According to Plan

My sources in the Obama administration tell me their secret plan to make Sarah Palin president in 2012 has taken a huge step forward with the election of [Some First Name] Brown to the senate from Massachusetts. As I mentioned six months ago, Operation Elect Sarah has three key elements:

1. Fail to pass meaningful healthcare reform.

2. Fail to pass a second stimulus bill and thus doom the economy.

3. Collect giant wads of campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs.

Getting Sarah into the White House seemed like an impossible dream back in November, 2008. But these people are professionals. There's nothing they can't do.

—Jonathan Schwarz

[IanEye]

Operation Elect Sarah Proceeding According to Plan

My sources in the Obama administration tell me their secret plan to make Sarah Palin president in 2012 has taken a huge step forward with the election of [Some First Name] Brown to the senate from Massachusetts.

nope.
Scott Brown is 100% owned by Mitt Romney.

[Gouda]

Commanding majority. That's funny stuff.

It must be a relief to have lost it, so Republicans instead of Democrats can be on the hook again for governing like Republicans.

...

There are indications that Obama would welcome a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and a reduced Democratic majority in the Senate. He has conspicuously campaigned in the run-up to the vote exclusively for Democrats locked in tight Senate and gubernatorial races, not for threatened Democrats in the House. A divided Congress with greater Republican strength would provide a pretext for dropping even small-scale stimulus measures, and give the administration political cover for ending extended benefits for the long-term unemployed.

...

Midterm elections to usher in further shift by Obama to the right

By Barry Grey
27 October 2010

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/oct20 ... -o27.shtml

...

In a lengthy interview with Peter Baker published earlier this month in the New York Times Sunday magazine, Obama seemed to accept loss of the House as inevitable. He suggested that a Republican victory would make Republicans more willing to collaborate with his agenda. The article quoted a “senior White House official” giving an unambiguous signal of the rightward trajectory of the administration after the election.

“You’ll hear more about exports and less about public spending,” the official said. “You’ll hear more about initiative and private sector and less about the Department of Energy. You’ll hear more about government as a financier and less about government as a hirer.”

On Monday, the Times published an article on the post-election plans of the administration citing officials with the same message. “After two years of operating at loggerheads with Republicans,” the Times wrote, “Mr. Obama and his aides are planning a post-election agenda for a very different political climate. They see potential for bipartisan cooperation on reducing the deficit, passing stalled free trade pacts and revamping the education bill known as No Child Left Behind…”

The article quoted Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan saying that bipartisan agreement on the administration’s school “reform” agenda could help repair “the current state of anger and animosity.” Duncan is among the most right-wing figures in the Obama cabinet. He has spearheaded an unprecedented assault on public education, promoting for-profit charter schools, the closure of public schools, and mass layoffs and other attacks on teachers.

The article also noted that Obama’s new chief of staff, Peter Rouse, “had good relations with Republicans when he worked on Capitol Hill.”

The article’s premise, backed up by comments from Democratic officials, that Obama has to this point failed to “reach out” to the Republicans is farcical. Ever since his election, he has labored to rehabilitate the Republican Party and rebuild its credibility. He took the unprecedented step of retaining Robert Gates, Bush’s defense secretary and the architect of the military surge in Iraq. He even made an unsuccessful attempt to appoint right-wing Republican Senator Judd Gregg, a deficit “hawk” and favorite of Wall Street, as his commerce secretary.

The reality is that the Republicans decided to stonewall and oppose every Obama initiative, except his expansion of the war in Afghanistan, having calculated correctly that Obama’s pro-corporate, pro-war agenda would rapidly alienate those who had voted for him.

Obama set the stage for a pivot to austerity measures when he announced last February the establishment of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The body, tasked with drawing up a plan to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015, is scheduled to issue its recommendations on December 1. It is expected to call for the phasing in of major cuts in Social Security and Medicare as well as regressive taxes on consumption. Its report is intended to set the tone for discussions on sharper attacks on working class living standards during the second half of Obama’s term.

(...)