Elizabeth Warren hasn’t been on the campaign trail long, but she’s already on fire. Why can’t all Democrats be this articulate? There would be no Tea party!
If you want to donate to Elizabeth’s Warren’s Senate campaign, you can do so here. Like what she’s saying? Give her $5!
After mulling over Obama’s (surprising? uncharacteristic?) plan to raise taxes on millionaires—and his threat to veto any “Super Congress” budget cuts to entitlements—he can’t really go back on that, can he? He’d be crucified on the right and left, and justifiably so—I must say I feel greatly relieved…
At last the guy is punching back—and hard: The so-called “Buffett Tax” is a well thought out way to drive a wedge between the class alliance strange bedfellows that comprises today’s Republican party. America’s GOP blue-collar workers are about to see EXACTLY what they have in common with the rich.
Well played! (Hint: It’s not money or political influence, but you knew that)
Personally, I’d soak the rich (during the Eisenhower administration, the top tax rate was nearly 90%) and this won’t go nearly far enough for my particular Bolshie tastes, but for a President who has proven himself time and again to be a shitty negotiator, THE WORST, like a bad joke, this was still an impressive move, I thought. A veto threat is the definitive presidential line in the sand. He actually HAS decided to take on the Republicans in the class war (which frankly was his sole option anyway).
In the words of Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post:
At last, the president hasn’t conceded the race before the starter’s gun, hasn’t opened the bidding with his bottom line, hasn’t begun a game of strip poker in his boxer shorts.
Sums it up so far, doesn’t it? For now let’s just hope that Obama isn’t proven by events to have some sort of “bad negotiator” Tourette’s syndrome where he shoots himself in the foot again, nervously blurting out pre-compromises and ceding ground he wasn’t even asked to cede…
For the past three years, it felt like Obama had almost completely abandoned the Americans who had happily voted for him (union members, progressives, greens, African-Americans, Latinos, middle-class Democrats, etc, etc) in favor of some Quixotic effort to woo the most ideologically rigid bunch of Reich wingers to come along in several generations. He could have done so much in his first 100 days and he, I think, fucked it up royally. The Democrats controlled the White House, the House and the Senate. The held all the keys cards, but mostly folded. If there was a strategy, I was unable to discern it and I’m not alone.
It was his own damned fault, not the Republicans. They TOLD Obama that they wanted to see his presidency fail. They told him this straight up and he refused to take that boldly declared statement—as they most assuredly meant it—at face value. What was subtle about the GOP position? It can be summed up in two letters, N and O. How would it have benefited their goals in any way to do or to be seen doing anything bipartisan by their constituency? That would have only served to make Obama more popular and yet nearly every move he made was to cater to them. It’s been maddening to watch. Are his advisers so lame that they can’t parse a statement as simple as “Fuck you, asshole” and take it to its logical conclusion vis-à-vis national politics, then James Carville was most certainly right, they all should be fired. Bill Maher said that Obama could personally save Republicans from drowning and they still wouldn’t vote for him! As Maher repeatedly exhorted the President, it was high time for Obama to “flip the script.”
It was as if over the summer, Obama (finally!) had an epiphany about the Republicans, at long last realizing that they fucking hate his fucking guts. It’s as if he’s been reading Daily Kos, AlterNet and MoveOn, taking to heart what Maher, Carville, Paul Krugman and just about every lefty talking head and blogger has been shouting at him at the top of their lungs and finally decided to DO SOMETHING LIBERAL. For a change.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great start and if Obama sticks to his guns this time, it’ll be more than that: nothing less than the return of a truly progressive President Obama, the one we voted for and thought showed up for work on Inauguration Day. That man has been curiously absent for much of Obama’s first term, it’s nice to have him back. He made that veto threat and now it’s up to progressives to make sure he lives up to his words, without compromise this time. If Obama lets the base down again, he’s fucking toast, but I think he finally realizes that.
Below, Bill O’Reilly says he might QUIT if Obama raises taxes on millionaires like him. CALL HIS BLUFF, MR. PRESIDENT!
David Lewis, a (primarily) Washington DC-based anti-abortion lobbyist, is challenging Speaker John Boehner in the Republican primary of Ohio’s 8th Congressional District.
“What made me want to run against Speaker Bohener, was that I found out that his words were empty rhetoric,” the evangelical Christian activist said. “I want to let the voters have an alternate choice, because it was completely in Speaker Boehner’s power to de-fund ‘Obamacare’ and Planned Parenthood.”
Lewis called Planned Parenthood “the largest killer of unborn babies in America.”
“I’m not delusional. I don’t know if I have a chance at beating the Speaker of the House,” Lewis said Friday. “But what I can do is show the Ohio voters that Boehner has a box full of empty rhetoric. He doesn’t really vote for his convictions. He’s an establishment Republican. He doesn’t believe in the tea party. He doesn’t really believe in the pro-life issues.”
He also told the Cincinnati Enquirer: “There is a saying that people will not reject abortion until people see abortion” and now RightWing Watch is reporting that Lewis is a “plant” in cahoots with Randall “Look at Me!” Terry, founder of the Operation Rescue organization. Terry, whose 15 minutes were up in 1991, is a man so desperate to have the media’s attention on him again that he’s planning to run against Obama in order to show aborted fetuses on television:
Back in 2010, anti-choice zealot Randall Terry discovered that he could get graphic anti-abortion ads to air on television by exploiting a loophole that prohibits broadcasters from refusing to run or censor campaign ads. As such, he has been recruiting other anti-choice candidates to run for office, not because they have a chance to win, but simply as a means to air graphic ads on television. In fact, Terry himself is running his own primary challenge against President Obama for the same purpose.
Lewis quit his job last year to become a full-time anti-choice activist and admits that he has no chance of actually beating Boehner ... in fact, he doesn’t even live in the correct district.
Confusing isn’t it? So far most of the reporting has focused on Lewis being a Tea party candidate, but it seems that’s not quite accurate (although who could have told the difference???). Is this an act of far Reich political cannibalism… or what? You can see one of his goofy, yet disturbing, ads below:
Some controversial remarks made by Andrew Breibart at a Boston Tea party meeting recently are getting a lot of attention, on blogs both right and left. In the clips below, Breitbart (inadvertently?) lays bare his psyche, specifically his liberal killing daydreams, when asked about the “Days of Rage” protests on Wall Street:
“I must say, in my non-strategic… ‘cuz I’m under attack all the time, if you see it on Twitter. The (unclear) call me gay, it’s just, they’re vicious, there are death threats, and everything. And so, there are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’
Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. (laughter) I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.
And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’
They understand that. These are the unspoken things we know, they know. They know who’s on their side, they’ve got Janeane Garofalo. We are freaked out by that. When push comes to shove, they know who’s on our side. They are the bullies on the playground, and they’re starting to realize, what if we were to fight back, what if we were to slap back?
Well…. to look at Breitbart, even if he DID have a gun in his hand, a rich well-fed Republican lardass like him could probably do very little harm. At the rate his waistline seems to be expanding, he’ll have to be fork-lifted out of his La-Z-Boy chair when the Liberals vs Tea party war breaks out, like most of the other “patriots” who um, “have his back” but can’t tie their own shoes or see their dick when they piss…
As for the military supporting the Tea party in the event of a civil war, whereas I do believe that most soldiers probably skew to the right of the ideological spectrum, the notion of Navy SEALS and special forces divisions coming to the aid of the likes of Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Scott Walker, Michele Bachmann and a bunch of cranky, confused senior citizens seems rather far-fetched to me…
Breitbart doesn’t seem concerned in the least here that he himself lives in the liberal stronghold of Westwood in Los Angeles, a place where there is probably one Republican to every five thousand Democrats. In the event of a new American civil war, it could be reasonably predicted that his fat, arrogant, shit-filled head would be one of the very first to end up on a pole.
Breitbart continues telling the Tea party activists about his “dreams” after the jump…
This beautiful silent excerpt from Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film on Mexico, ¡Que viva México!, is an exquisite example of avant-garde film making and a fragment of what Eisenstein described as his “greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy.”
Eisenstein went to Mexico in 1931 with assistant director Eduard Tisse and producer Grigory Alexandrov to shoot a film about the country’s mythic landscape with the financial help of writer Upton Sinclair, the muck-racking genius behind 1905’s controversial slaughterhouse exposé The Jungle, and his wife Mary Craig. Shooting stopped in 1932 after a series of financial mishaps with most of the work completed, though one of the film’s segments couldn’t be filmed. The Stalinist regime prevented Eisenstein from ever seeing Que viva México! as he had intended it.
Of the over 50 hours of film that Eisenstein shot, various versions of Eisenstein’s Mexican epic have been constructed, none are definitive. Ultimately, no one knows what the director’s final version might have been like, but even unfinished the results are quite magnificent.
Happy Mexican Independence Day.
Glad to see that Senator Bernie Sanders isn’t out on a limb by himself this time. The new legislation he’s introduced to shore up Social Security by making the wealthy pay their fair share has co-sponsors Dan Akaka (D-HI), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Al Franken (D-MN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Surprise, surprise, Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is also on board. No surprise, of course, that no Senate Republicans have signed on in support. Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon’s 4th district, will be introducing the same bill in the House
Via Down With Tyranny:
The gist of Bernie’s legislation is to strengthen Social Security by applying the payroll tax that most Americans already pay to those with annual incomes above $250,000. Right now the payroll tax cuts off at $106,800. This simple, painless change by itself would keep Social Security solvent for another 75 years, about as long as Social Security has already existed. and although right-wing crackpots and extremists like Rick Perry may call it a Ponzi Scheme and predatory Wall Street shills like Mitt Romney may want to privatize it and turn it over to Wall Street, the vast majority of Americans see it as the most successful government program in our nation’s history and understand, despite Republican lies—that started 76 years ago—that it hasn’t contributed one dime to the federal deficit. It has a $2.5 trillion surplus, and it can pay out every nickel owed to every eligible American for at least the next 25 years, according to the Social Security Administration. Before Social Security came into being something like half the senior citizens in the country lived in poverty. Now they have a much better chance of ending their lives in dignity and without eating cat food. In fact, less than 10% of the elderly live in poverty and more than 53 million Americans receive retirement or disability benefits.
“Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation’s history. For 76 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American,” Sanders said. “The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the next 75 years is to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax on income above $250,000. Right now, someone who earns $106,800 pays the same amount of money into Social Security as a billionaire. That makes no sense. The Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act will ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security without cutting benefits or raising taxes on the middle class.”
Last night Ralph Nader appeared on Fox News to discuss a democratic primary challenge he’s helping to organize against Barack Obama to “hold his feet to the fire.” I think what Nader means by this is that Obama needs to start doing some liberal stuff.
“The important thing here is if he’s not challenged from the progressive-liberal wing of his party, that elected him, it’ll be a very dull campaign, people will not be very enthusiastic, more and more people will stay home, it’s not good for him,. If he’s a good debater, if he knows his facts, he’ll want to be challenged because he’ll come out much sharper.”
It’s surprising how little Neil Cavuto challenged Nader in this segment. To his credit, he hardly even tried and let Nader say some things you wouldn’t normally hear on Fox News without someone else trying to shout over it.
Or maybe it’s just that Nader isn’t exactly saying anything too positive about Obama… Either way, I’m glad Cavuto’s audience got to hear this.
Via Mox News
Wednesday on MSNBC, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report on poverty as “a horror show.”
The report found that 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty, the highest amount since the Census began recording the statistic 52 years ago.
“The middle class is collapsing and we have now by far the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth,” Sanders said.
“We need aggressive action on the part of the president and the Congress, and if the Republicans continue to say ‘no, no, no to jobs,’ the president has got to continue going around the country,” he added, “because I think the overwhelming majority of the people want a jobs program, they want to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, they do not want to give any more tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations.”
Via Raw Story
