Obama good ...

Nathan Newman points out an Obama Good:

"We have not had a President that so forthrightly identified the health of the nation with the health of the labor movement in many decades."

Now if we could get him to also internalize the critical nature of national health care to the health, both figuratively and literally, of the nation.

Only the poor have to work for the 'American Dream' ...

Well I suppose the middle class are expected to work also.

President Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders Friday that he said should "level the playing field" for labor unions in struggles with management.

After discussing something called a middle-class-task-force to be lead by Biden, Obama assured the poor that "his administration wants to make sure low-income people "get a piece" of the American pie "if they're willing to work for it.""

But the rich. They don't have to work at all. The worse they perform at any task whether in Insurance, Banking, or Investments the more our government hands over to them so that they can keep all their houses and yachts and jets and bonuses ...

NOTE: The above is not a complaint about Obama. In fact it's not about Obama other than that he represents the country and while taking positive steps for labor at the same time he feels he has to qualify his desire for the poor to share in the wealth of the country. Of course the rights of the already rich to be richer without qualification is unquestionable.

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Today's QUOTES:

It's like Democrats are negotiating with themselves. They give things up and get no votes in exchange. --Stimulus Bill Passes House With 0 Republican Votes by Ian Welsh, firedoglake.com

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Obama, remember you are the Commander and Chief of the US armed forces ...

... or are you going to try bi-partisanship on them too and let the military run you like the GOP is doing?

Sack Odierno

You ARE President. The country needs a President and you are IT. You are going to get criticized no matter what you do. You might as well do the good and right. You will not stay popular by doing nothing. This is not a game!

What digby says ...

This can't be repeated enough. Obama is wrong, period. He will not get the Thugs on board by trying to 'work' with them unless he chooses to govern the way the Thugs want. They do not negotiate. They demand and obstruct. George Warmonger Bush was the perfect president for them. The nation is not their interest. They don't care what happens to the majority of Americans. If all of America were slaves in reality, rather than just financial slaves, they would not care. In fact they might just like the idea.

digby: Obama is facing a weaker Republican Party but a much bigger set of problems, with the stakes being exponentially higher. We just don't have time for this nonsense again. At some point, the Democrats are going to have to confront their central political problem, which is that the conservatives are not appeasable and that political and media elites have either been brainwashed by conservative propaganda or are conservatives by choice and they have to convince the citizenry that their ideology is better for their personal well being and the well being of the country. Until that happens, the conservatives will remain in power even as an opposition force and their failed ideology will continue to destroy this country. This isn't a game anymore. They have to pass good policies.

What Obama is trying to do is not new. He is repeating past mistakes.

I agree with Steve Soto. Clinton would not have been such a wuss, but then, in all fairness to Obama, Clinton knows from experience what the GOP are. Here's hoping Obama chooses to work for the people of this country, soon ...

Re-stating the absurdity:

Steve Benen: I'm trying to wrap my head around Halperin's logic here. By his reasoning, the only appropriate thing for Obama to do was let Republicans -- who failed at governing, and who've been rejected by voters -- shape the bill, addressing the crisis they helped create. If the far-right House GOP caucus was unsatisfied, it was Obama's responsibility to make them happy. Why? Because Mark Halperin says so.

Actually, I'm not sure there's much that Jeff Flake does understand ...

EconoSpeak:

Do House Republicans Understand Tax Policy and Consumption Demand? --I submit that Congressman Jeff Flake does not:

It is difficult to tell what Jeff Flake is capable of understanding. Flake was the only one (as in solitary, uno) to vote no on the Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008. On November 8 of last year Flake wrote an editorial offering his vision for "A way out of the wilderness" in which he advised that 'we return to first principles' the most important of which, now that Republicans are not in the majority, is recommitting to 'limited government.' So is flake a genuine idiot or a sophisticated PR hack?

But then again Flake appears surprisingly straightforward at times, and I can't say I disagree with him, in stating that he believes bipartisanship “tends to produce the worst that Washington has to offer ” and that "Partisanship is underrated.” Whether these verbal assaults on 'bipartisanship' show his lack of understanding of how the GOP has used the bipartisanship lie against the Dems (and the Dems have let them do so, repeatedly and self-destructively) or whether Flake understands the Republican ruse and still chooses to speak truthfully is a difficult thing to judge in a Republican politician, or even a Democratic on for that matter.

More about the US Control, Sudden Death and Arbitrary Punishment System for the masses ...

Glenn Greenwald continues to puncture the idea (if it still exists) that the United States has a system of equal justice for all ...

• "Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100"
• "Under federal law, "the simple possession of just 5 grams of crack cocaine, the weight of about two sugar packets, subjects a defendant to a mandatory five-year prison term."
• Alabama, the average sentence for marijuana possession -- an offense for which most Western countries almost never imprison their citizens -- is 8.4 years."
• "The state of Florida "imposes mandatory-minimum sentences of 25 years for illegally carrying a pillbox-worth of drugs such as Oxycontin" and imposes shockingly Draconian mandatory sentences even for marijuana offenses."
• "mandatory minimum sentencing schemes [are] a way to eliminate mercy and sentencing flexibility for ordinary people who break the law"
• "Currently in the U.S., close to 7,000 people are serving sentences of 25 years to life under our merciless "three-strikes-and-out" laws ... including half for nonviolent offenses and many for petty theft."
• the United States accounts "for less than 5% of the world's population yet close to 25% of the world's prisoners are located in American prisons."
• "inhumane conditions ... characterize our highly profitable prison state."
• Two tier justice system: ""ignore-the-past-and-forget-retribution" rationale is invoked by our media elites only for a tiny, special class of people -- our political leaders -- while the exact opposite rationale ("ignore their lame excuses, lock them up and throw away the key") is applied to everyone else."

Bipartisan means ...

Bipartisan means:

• that Congress' stimulus bill will reduce the taxes paid by businesses and rich blood suckers in this country even more, at a time when we should be holding the rich to their fair share of running this country
• that Congress will delay reversing BushCo's tax gifts to this country's rich blood suckers giving the Republicans more time to manufacture support and blackmail for making this tax giveaway permanent
• that Obama and Dems in Congress will allow the Republicans to whittle away at legislation for the good of the people (as apposed to legislation for the rich only) such as mass transit and family planning
  
• that Congress will produce a defective stimulus bill in an attempt at 'bipartisan' appeasement of Republicans and that the Republicans, after they have managed to damage the bill as much as possible, will vote against the bill anyway.

Obama chooses bipartisanship over what's right and workable and he will lose on both counts.

Obama had a significant win. I think a little partisanship, for the people of this country, is in order.

My opinion, anyway ...

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Today's QUOTES:

Citi took $1.77 million of our dollars, and spent it on lobbyists. --Sunlight is to Lobbyists as Garlic is to Vampires by masaccio, firedoglake.com With only a week in office, Barack Obama has already fulfilled this Presidential initiation rite, as his body count -- of civilians -- already easily exceeds the number of days he's been President. ... --Continuing Bush policies in Israel and Afghanistan by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com ... characteristics of modern mainstream discourse - roughly speaking, they include journalistic incompetence, laziness, and the knowing distribution of unadulterated bullshit ... [...] But Lemann neglects to include a crucial qualifier, indeed the most important point of his anecdote: No one competent at reality testing or possessing a nanogram of integrity has ever compared Bush favorably to Lincoln, not even in the days following 9/11. Problem was, hardly anyone competent at reality testing or with a nanogram of integrity could get remotely near the mainstream media in those days. Problem was, the media were overrun by the kind of clowns who actually would shamelessly compare Bush to Lincoln. Problem was, that kind of preposterous comparison was acceptable mainstream opinion. The problems remain. ... --The Problem by tristero, Hullabaloo ... Obama has maintained this sugar plum fairy vision of bipartisanship, yet his bill manifestly does NOT value "what works" over ideology. Quite the opposite. It makes room for ideology, conservative ideology, and pre-empts provisions that would work much better in bringing back the economy. ... --Post-Partisan Pain by dday, Hullabaloo Instead -- with some important, isolated exceptions -- [the national media is] now more akin to defense lawyers and PR representatives for the government officials they serve. ... --Richard Cohen fulfills the role of the American journalist by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com

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The state of the United States of America ...

Digby frequently writes about the state of torture in our country.

I commend Digby for keeping a spotlight on the infiltration of the torturer's mentality into the very core of our 'justice' system. If we were not so attuned to Orwellian nomenclature we would not pretend we are still striving for a system of equal justice for all but instead call it what it has become: the US Control, Sudden Death and Arbitrary Punishment System for the masses.

Obameter: Promises kept so far ...

Promise Kept rulings on the Obameter

Promise No 125 (Direct military leaders to end war in Iraq) may have been kept but extricating the US from useless, destructive and immoral wars around the globe is does not appear to be part of Obama's mindset.

The Bankers are coming. The Bankers are coming. Run for your lives ...

The Banks Have Stolen Enough; It's Time to Take Them Over

It's too bad that the Republicans' anger over giving tax breaks to workers who did not pay income taxes does not extend to giving tax dollars to Wall Street banks who have wrecked our economy. Where are the anti-government conservatives when we need them?

The banks have stolen enough? Way beyond enough, I'd say. Anyone else as embarrassed as I am about the state of our society? Talk about values!

When one actually pays attention to what Republicans do, rather than what they say, it is obvious that greed, corruption, pettiness are the values that Republicans stand for. Go figure . . . and we know they are such very good Christians ... we know because they are always telling us so.

Liberals better get them some linguistic power ...

... because where the GOP has been subsumed by rabid extremists, the Dems are being (have been?) devoured by much of what was once Republican.

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The post the following quote comes from approaches linguistic reclamation from the feminist perspective, but there are parallels to how the Democrats --specially liberal or progressive Dems-- are treated by the media which, in the main, take their cues from Republican talking-points as they work to obscure that fact by repeatedly reporting that these same Republicans complain that the press is just oh so liberal which multiple talking heads prove by pointing to the few reporter/journalists endowed with working brains who are capable of gathering, investigating, probing, and interpreting information, data, and facts.

Linguistic reclamation is the re-appropriation of a term used by those in power to demean and disparage those in a less powerful group. One way in which women refuse the object position and reclaim their subjectivity is to take back control of pejorative terms such as “bitch”, “slut”, “chick”, “crone”, and “harridan”. Defused, a reclaimed word can become an in-group identifier, with a positive, powerful spin. It’s all about who gets to define “us” - “them” or “us”? Reclamation is about refusing to let others define your group, set the parameters, or establish the meanings. In some instances, reclamation is about reclaiming not just an arbitrarily-defined pejorative word, but about proudly reclaiming the pejorative meaning, when it is based in the fear of women speaking their minds, defending themselves, not letting their personal value be defined by their sexual worth to patriarchy.

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I suppose PIG was a linguistic reclamation? Anyone remember Pride-Integrity-Guts. I don't hear that anymore. I suppose because police forces have evolved into occupying armies --except for the LAPD which always behaved as an occupying army-- and no longer wish to be identified with the communities the used to 'serve' and now enjoy terrorizing.

All for show?

As Steve Soto writes:

How serious are all your bells-and-whistles about bringing ethics back to the Executive Branch when you immediately waive those rules just so Bob Gates can have a Raytheon lobbyist as his deputy?

What's so wonderful about William J. Lynn that he will get to represent his former employer, Raytheon. Could Obama be following Harry Reid's craven philosophy.

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Today's QUOTES:

Shorter WSJ II: The decline in the unemployment rate in the middle Bush years, after Bush cut taxes, proves that tax cuts work — and had nothing to do with the housing bubble. The much larger, much more sustained decline in unemployment through the whole Clinton administration, which followed a tax increase, proves that tax increases are a terrible thing. Honest! --Shorter Wall Street Journal by Paul Krugman, NY Times Well, what do you know, the people have it all figured out as to the degraded state of America and who is to blame; I wonder when the big media sources, their blathering heads and pin head pundits will catch on? --Colin Powell Tees Off A Parting Shot At Bush & Cheney by bmaz, firedoglake.com ... the arguments used against women's suffrage a hundred years ago are almost identical to the anti-feminist arguments of today: If women change at all the sky will fall! This odd power of women to bring down both Western civilization and god's wrath on his creation is a constant theme in the articles and familiar to anyone who follows anti-feminist arguments of today. What is also familiar is the way the power of women to wreck everything is combined with their uselessness in all other tasks except child-rearing within the home. ... --Read It If You Dare by echidne, ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

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For the southwest, it will continue to get worse.

---Update below---

Our region has already begun to heat up, Overpeck said.

"The warming has already been about 2 degrees Fahrenheit . . . That's kinda scary," he told the audience in an opening statement. "It's affecting the Southwest of the United States more than any other area outside of Alaska."
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We will have more fire and insect outbreaks, erosion from wind and water and competition among plants from non-native species, especially grasses, Breshears said.

One key problem is fire combined with non-native grasses, such as buffelgrass. When buffelgrass burns, it kills native plants, leaving more room for more grass. With each burn, more of the desert dies and more grass spreads.

"We're setting up a feedback that is very difficult to get out of," Breshears said.

Climate change even threatens to eradicate our "megaflora" of the Southwest, such as Joshua trees and saguaro cactuses. Buffelgrass kills young saguaros by blocking sun and sucking up the water the budding behemoths need.

"That's a pretty grim forecast for Tucson," Breshears said.

Despite thousands of scientists studying climate change, major questions about the Southwest remain unanswered, Overpeck said.

"One of the things we can't say is whether the monsoon will get stronger or weaker - the models are all over the place," he said.

Quotes from the Tucson Citizen -- UA prof: Global warming hitting Southwest via Arizona Geology -- Southwest to get more droughts, floods, & fires.
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By the way, the Border Reporter writes that The Tucson Citizen, Arizona’s oldest newspaper
will close unless they find a buyer. March 21 is the date given.
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Update
Not that Bush didn't speed it along with his special form of environmental abuse, Orwellian named Healthy Forests, but western forests are dying on their own as part of Global Warming's steady march across our planet.

Open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values ...

All those are liberals?

Any political term that supposedly encompasses Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, Bill Moyers and me (#18) [Glenn Greenwald] -- along with the likes of Maureen Dowd, Christopher Hitchens, Chris Matthews, Tom Friedman and Fred Hiatt -- is not a term that has any meaning.

I'll say!
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I'm particularly struck by the 'willing to discard traditional values' in the definition of liberal. That would be traditional values such as witch-burning, religious wars and crusades, encouraging and enforcing ignorance, lying, cheating, ignoring and denying crimes when committed by the rich and powerful, seeing poverty as a crime ...