Paradox at The Left Coaster:The truly irritating thing about recent DC Democratic Party peevish, immature pettiness—the odious Feinstein complaining she wasn’t consulted, the pathetic quisling Reid suddenly discovering bravery in obstructing a Democrat, the scurrilous, furtively blue Hoyer spitting out he doesn’t work for Obama—isn’t the disgusting spectacle of human souls who cannot mature beyond high school-level social posturing, it’s the utter predictability of it all, how retrograde of past failure it all is. Change is here, yeah.
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Hope is a great thing, perhaps the greatest of things, so wrote Stephen King in the short story Shawsank Redemption. The people of America worked extremely hard to bring change about in this last election but apparently Congress hasn’t got the message. Please publish a legislative priority calendar and don’t ever talk about our issues as triage again, our people and their problems aren’t going to undergo a slow death of neglect.
Congress doesn't believe there could be a message from voters that they should consider. Their main concerns are
- their salaries and perks
- keeping regular citizens from benefiting from living in what was once the richest and most powerful country in the world
- what the corporate media says about them
- how groveling they will have to be to that same media
- how rich or richer they can become
- how to imply what's expected and say nothing
- how to avoid responsibility and blame.
Their lives, lived in this craven manner, must be as stressful as if they actually worked at doing their jobs. One wonders why they insist on living this way ...
... and why we put up with it?
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That's all part-and-parcel of the broader trend whereby we now believe that the U.S. President is empowered to do anything and order anything -- from declaring someone an "enemy combatant" to proclaiming torture techniques to be legal -- and that the mere fact that he does so makes it legal. It's the classic Nuremberg defense -- though now (at least for ourselves) we expressly embrace it rather than emphatically reject it.
--America then and now by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com
I'm sure it hasn't escaped anyone's notice that the deficit scolds are coming out of the woodwork now that the Republicans brought us to the brink, slashing taxes for the wealthy, larding their own contributors with earmarks, solidifying the notion that military industrial complex spending is a sacred, untouchable icon, and fetishing and deregulating the market until they finally brought the whole system to its knees. They certainly didn't say much about the debt while it was adding up these last eight years.
They did the same thing during the 80s, which is why Cheney uttered "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. (What was left out was "for Republicans." Democrats are endlessly and relentlessly harassed about deficits --- as they clean up the big mess the deficit spending Republicans leave behind.)
--Fiscal Madness by digby, Hullabaloo
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