Obama and Progressives

President Obama was elected as an agent of change with the energetic support of the peace-and-justice, civil-liberties-loving, Constitution-following, reality-based community.

So it comes as a disappointment to see Obama bow to those who are opposed to change and hostile to civil liberties.

What's going on?

Mike Madden in Salon says, "Obama's just not that into you," asking if progressives and the president are really meant for each other.

Paul Krugman says, "So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. ... So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back."

Obama needs to make a decision: Cater to Sarah Palin and her off-the-wall, white GOP or make good on the shiny, progressive promises of the last campaign that saw Americans break all manner of new ground in their thirst for real change.

Weeds

And not pot.

The online Salon magazine is publishing the most insightful work on these seemingly crazed protesters upset that health care reform might work.

This is not the work of a grassroots uprising; it's AstroTurf and corporate weeds.

See also Adele Stan at Alternet.

Bush Used Torture to Support Iraq Lies

Update: Mark Benjamin: Bush officials said they only tortured terrorists after they wouldn't talk. New evidence shows they planned torture soon after 9/11 -- and used it to find links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Mike Madden: Rumsfeld: Architect of torture The secretary of defense began laying the groundwork for detainee abuse years before Abu Ghraib.

Bush and Cheney approved torture to get false information to support their lies to the American people to invade Iraq.

From Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist

Obama Scores

Why broadcast reporters do not comment on the erudition of Barack Obama v. the stammering ignorance of George W. Bush remains a mystery.

One thing is clear: Obama has made leveling with the American people an urgent priority.

Still, one wonders if the hollowed-out economy that Bush and his nihilists loosed onto Americans can be saved by Obama.

Obama is trying.

See Obama shoots back and scores - With a sharp retort about AIG, the president was on his game with the press, weaving through questions and driving home his economic plan. (Madden)

Earmarks No Good? Tell That to Janesville

Update: Mike Madden in Salon - "President Obama urges pork reform and signs a bill with earmarks in it on the same day. Republicans make an unconvincing show of outrage."

From today's State Journal: "U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl D-Wis., added $951,000 to the federal Omnibus Appropriations Bill for Black hawk Technical College to provide job training and placement services for former employees of General Motors in Janesville and it supplier companies."

The horror ... because the job training and placement services are an earmark, according to Wisconsin's Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Middleton) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) and of-course the ever-foolish John McCain.

Reads Feingold's statement:

By passing the omnibus spending bill today, which included more than 8500 pet projects costing taxpayers $7.7 billion, Congress failed to show the American people that it is committed to spending their money wisely. When Congress passed the economic recovery bill to create or save millions of American jobs, it did so without including a single earmark. Congress should have done the same thing with this omnibus spending bill and it should do so with all future bills. The president should veto the omnibus, send it back to Congress to be cleaned up and make it clear to Congress that pork-laden bills like this are no longer welcome.

And from Paul Ryan's op-ed in Racine Journal Times: "If we can’t get this issue right, how are we ever going to tackle the more pressing challenges we now face? "

More "pressing" than helping autoworkers get a new job? Mere "pet projects"? Earmarks are less than one percent of the spending bill, and the projects are needed.

You would think that Wisconsin's Feingold and Ryan would know better than to throw more barriers in the way of helping these workers who lost their jobs at GM. Both Ryan and Feingold have intimate links to the community.

But they choose to join McCain and spout this nonsense that dedicated, federally-funded projects are the main problems facing Americans. Ridiculous.

And thank you Herb Kohl for your common sense on the issue!

- See also McCain's Nuts, Feingold and Ryan Following.

via mal contends

Sarah Palin in '12

Update: Welcome to the Republican National Committee's winter meeting -- and the GOP's alternate reality, where happy days are nearly here again. (Madden, Salon)

From Charlie Cook:

" ... From a list of 10 possible GOP contenders, respondents [in a Gallup Poll conducted post-election November 5 to 16] were asked which ones they would like to see run for president in 2012."

Running first was the party's 2008 vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, with 67 percent wanting her to run."

I say go, Sarah, go. 2012, is not 2004, nor even 1980.

More Americans than ever are disinclined to vote for ignoramuses with no idea what public policy is or why it's important. The reality-based community is thriving.

Hating unions, loving foreign cars

Update: LA Times - E-mail circulated Wednesday among Senate Republicans reads: "Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it."

Nice piece in Salon about southern senators.

"The fiercest opposition to the loan proposal -- and nearly a third of the 35 votes against ending debate on the deal -- came from Southern Republicans, and the ringleaders of the opposition all come from states with a major foreign auto presence. Not coincidentally, nearly all of those states -- except Kentucky -- are also ‘right-to-work’ states, which means no union contracts for most of the employees at the foreign plants. The Detroit bailout fell victim to a nasty confluence of home-state economic interests and anti-union sentiment among Republicans."

MSNBC's Chuck Todd: Wisconsin Was Turning Point

Chuck Todd, top media politico, just said on MSNBC's Hardball that Wisconsin was the turning point in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Todd said that after Obama clobbered Hillary in Wisconsin on February 19, Hillary had only a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination, and not the 50 percent chance that Hillary's people and the media proclaimed.

Obama's Wisconsin victory, gained on the heels of his sweep in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. the week before, left many objective observers looking to Ohio and Pennsylvania (where Hillary won solid victories) as merely prolonging the inevitable Obama nomination.

Salon had a piece by Mike Madden in early May explaining the importance of Wisconsin's primary and probing why this perfectly composed demographic state for Hillary handed her a 17-point thrashing.

See also Wisconsin More Important than Pennsylvania Machine-State.

Wisconsin and the White Working Class

via MAL Contends

Madison, Wisconsin - Salon has a piece by Mike Madden explaining the importance of Wisconsin's primary and probing why this perfectly composed demographic state for Hillary handed her a 17-point thrashing on Feb. 19.

Why did Obama do so well with Wisconsin's white working class, but not with Ohio and Pennsylvania's?

So well-received was Obama's victory here that many secular progressives were smitten with whimsical rumination of metaphysics. But Madden reasonably attributes the win to Wisconsin's progressive history.

Writes Madden:

... 'I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not [Obama] is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November," Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson reiterated on CBS's 'Face the Nation' on Sunday.

But that's not what Wolfson was saying back in February, when Obama clobbered Clinton by 17 points in Wisconsin, another state whose largely white, working-class demographics should have made it Clinton country. Census figures show the state is only 6 percent black, barely a quarter of residents have college degrees, and the median income hovers around the national average. But Obama won Wisconsin across the board, according to exit polls, taking almost every demographic group and subgroup. ...

... 'You could put the same demographics together and the same kind of community together, and I guarantee you that a liberal or African-American candidate will do about 5 to 10 points better' in Wisconsin than in other Rust Belt states, said (Paul Maslin, a neutral Democratic pollster based in Madison, Wisc., who helped run Howard Dean's 2004 campaign).

See also Wisconsin More Important than Pennsylvania Machine-State.