__
Yes, yes, of course: Reasonable people differ… shrill… not helpful to attack natural allies… coalition of one… changing government is haaaard, etc. But I’m glad there’s still one brave person standing up and yelling at the clouds floating between his fellow Congresscritters’ ears:
As the debate over deficits ramped up in Washington on Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders laid out the compelling case not to slash programs for working families. Any deficit reduction package must rely on new revenue for at least half the reduction in red ink, he added in a major address in the Senate. Sanders spoke at length about what caused deficits (wars, Wall Street bailouts, tax breaks for the rich) and how to shrink them (more revenue from the wealthiest Americans to match spending cuts). He urged fellow senators not to yield to Republican congressional leaders who “acted like schoolyard bullies” when they walked out of budget negotiations. He summed up the situation in a letter to the president that had been signed by more than 16,000 people by the time he completed his speech.
__
Sign the letter »
Transcript of Sanders’ full 90-minute speech is up at his website. (I’m imagining John Quincy Adams, another Congressional pest with a penchant for unpopular opinions, applauding from his seat in Valhalla.) Signature count stands at 60,508 as I type this, and there are Facebook / Tweet link buttons, too.
BGinCHI
I wish Bernie would bite out Ron Johnson’s throat for a finale (like a Senate Ozzie Osborne).
Bernie is the most courageous man in the Senate. Yes, that’s a compliment.
jane from hell
What’s not to love about Bernie?
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
I didn’t think it was possible, but “Hangover II” is a lot funnier than the first installment.
Linda Featheringill
60862 people have signed the letter at 10:01 p.m.
Caz
Bernie Sanders is an admitted communist, so it says a lot when you hold him out to be some sort of hero of yours. Doesn’t it bother you that you hold a communist in such high regard?? What is wrong with you? Are Stalin and Hitler heroes of yours too?
Yutsano
60936 when I just signed it. And I hope Bernie is mentorting a good sociallist to take over for him when he retires.
Fail. Sanders is a sociallist. Totally different political philosophy.
JPL
I can hear neighbors say who is he. Has he ever been on the morning shows or Sunday shows?
Edit.. My own opinion is that he should be cloned and run for office all over America, but most people do not know who he is.
Jeffro
Imagine if someone – anyone – stood up and said, “If we’re really all in this together, then it’s 50% spending cuts and 50% tax increases” until we get the deficit eliminated. Heck, I did it on the NYT’s deficit calculator and it ended up paying down the national debt in 20 years, due to my awesome yearly/deficit surpluses.
I also sometimes imagine rainbow unicorns that pee Miller Lite.
arguingwithsignposts
@Caz – when has sanders admitted he is a communist. back up your bullshit.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Caz
Could you please give me your address so that I can have the cops save your children or pets from you dangerous level of ignorance?
kdaug
@Caz
Democratic Soc1alist. Get it straight, jackass.
gbear
I signed on. Over 61,000 now.
Ash Can
I don’t care what you guys say; Caz cracks my shit up.
kdaug
Anyone ever listen to “Fridays with Bernie” on Hartmann’s show? Used to get it on the ride home when we had AA.
kindness
Signed.
Bernie gives socialists a really good name. Wish my DiFi wasn’t such a DINO.
Yutsano
I will admit it does take a ton of effort to be that dumb.
OzoneR
The thing is, he does what the left blogsphere criticizes every Democrat for doing, conceding the point on the deficit.
Agreed, a lot of Democrats agree, but they don’t have the majority, if they did, we’d probably not see the cuts we’re seeing. We certainly didn’t see them in 2009 and 2010.
But Sanders doesn’t say “Fuck the deficit, lets create jobs,” he says “Deficit reduction, fine, but we should do it this way.”
When Obama does that, he gets slammed.
MikeJ
Yutsy at 6: I love asking people to define what communism and soçialism actually mean. Especially in a town so dependent on government handouts to Boeing.
Oddly, the people who throw the terms around the most have the hardest time answering the question.
Dennis SGMM
@Anne Laurie
Thanks for the link! Signed and forwarded the text along with a link to all of my commie-lover friends.
OzoneR
No, he’s a socialist
Hitler was a COMMUNIST?!?! LMFAO. You should probably shut up now, you just completely embarrassed yourself.
OzoneR
The problem there is liberals will want to spend those surpluses and not use them to pay down the debt.
Not that they’re wrong for wanting to spend it, on jobs programs, healthcare, education, etc., but liberals will never pay down the debt with a surplus…ever.
shano
Have seen Bernie on the plane to Burlington a couple times, He flies coach. He is really a nice man. Met him a few times at cook outs, parades etc.
I asked him about corporate influence in DC..his reply: “however bad you think it is, it is much, much worse”.
Germany did a 60% spending cut, 40% revenue increase. It seems to be working for them.
Cliff in NH
61255 signed the letter
Thank you for signing.
Oh hell yea.
I’m among those demanding that cap gains should be taxed as ordinary income.
rikyrah
Bernie rocks
shano
Ozone: liberals have a much better record-through the whole of American history- of having balanced budgets and surpluses.
Too bad the GOP gets in and wrecks the place, then the Dems have to clean up again. teh suck.
Marc
Don’t feed the troll.
Loved it, co-signed it. This is precisely the sort of thing that folks on the left should be doing.
shano
I want a tax on high speed computer stock trading and a tax on ALL speculative derivatives trading.
AnotherBruce
Not really, it takes a ton of laziness. It’s obvious that Caz is too damn lazy to think for himself, or too lazy to know the difference between a communist and a soshialist. So he just parrots crap he’s heard before. It’s totally effortless and bottomless stupidity.
(Edited for accidental dick pill reference)
Percysowner
On the other hand, Republicans take a surplus, don’t spend it to improve the country and squander it away leaving a gaping deficit. God forbid we have jobs, education and healthcare!
Jim C.
Fantastic speech. Made my day. Thanks Anne.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Oh my. No wonder President Obama hates this old white dude’s guts. But that’s OK, Bernie – I approve.
.
.
TaMara (BHF)
We need a better quality of trolls here.
Edit: Oh, and signed.
Cliff in NH
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=aa0f5904-c400-415e-aaff-86ca62fa2b3b
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
61,506.
.
.
Linda Featheringill
OzoneR #20
Hitler was to capitalism what Stalin was to Marxism, total perversions.
[Why yes, I am.]
ETA: Forgot to say that I agree with ozone.
gbear
Don’t republicans ever think about getting permission to use songs? Seems like every campaign some musician is getting a cease and desist order against the use of his/her music.
Jim C.
Signed as well. I totally understand that sometimes folks expect and ask to much of Obama and want him to work miracles, but I also do think there are “line in the sand” moments where Obama’s compromising instincts worry the heck out of me and I don’t think he gets the max of what he could get.
This is one of those moments.
I hate to throw out the word, but sometimes I think he’s a bit of an appeaser to Republicans instead of smacking them in the mouth and calling them onto the carpet.
I know you can’t do that all the time. I know there are times he has to be the grown up in the room, stay above the fray, etc. But I also know that every once in a while he DOES need to really commit and throw the full weight behind the right thing and do so publicly.
Jeffro
Ozone R @ 21: they did it for a couple of magical years at the end of the Clinton presidency…the economy was booming despite higher tax rates on most (especially the wealthy) and the national debt started inching down, at long last.
Higher taxes on the rich = the only way to get this country back on track. They’re the ones who take and take and take, unable to understand that they are the most privileged of people, in the most privileged of nations, at any time in history. Yet they keep proving George Carlin right (somebody find me the YouTube link for this rant).
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Percysowner
Seems I remember the 42 president doing exactly what you said Democrats don’t do. What Democrats won’t do, is choose absolutes. We’re not going to choose not to eat for a month just to pay off the credit card.
Cliff in NH
The latest FreeDumWorks:
Jeffro
Never mind, found it:
http://youtu.be/sJeFrqBJF6E
Linda Featheringill
ot arlene in gulf of mex
[typed under cat]
Frankensteinbeck
OzoneR @17:
Sounds like what Obama said in his deficit speech. Raise taxes on the rich, control medical costs, not cut Medicare, cut the military budget, and throw in some infrastructure investments. But he WAS really polite about explaining why the GOP plan was useless. We need more confrontative voices too, in roles other than ‘lead negotiator’, so I welcome Sanders’ vehemence on this topic!
Elizabelle
61852
Loneoak
A Bernie Sanders bumpersticker was the only one my dad ever put on his car. And we’re from Michigan, not Vermont. So happy to have a father I didn’t need to battle about politics.
James E. Powell
Anyone know how we can get the half-million or so “Obama is betraying us!” people from the GOS to sign the letter?
I’m not convinced that one speech by Senator Soshulist can do much to affect the debate. Love the guy, love the speech, I’m a democratic soshulist myself. But he, like we, are voices crying in the blogosphere.
cat48
Dennis SGMM
@Cliff in NH
I could have sworn that Paul and Lee ran as Republicans. I’d love to see anyone with a party affiliation of “Tea Party” try to get on a ballot.
OzoneR
absolutely, not denying that. Liberals will prevent the debt from increasing, but they’ll never pay it off
OzoneR
And liberals blasted him for it.
aliasofwestgate
62199.
I’ve signed as well. I’m now fighting my former employer in order to get unemployment right now. I’m not happy about this because i have medical bills to pay off, among other things glaring over my shoulder and that’s not counting living costs. Basically i was approved overall, but i can’t get any until i find work and pay them 3500$. (after i earned them probably 30 times that much money over 7 years.) So yeah, i may have a few bones to pick and Sanders has the right idea.
Anne Laurie
If you have an account, you could post a diary (have I got the terminology right) linking to Sanders’ website. And the clip is on YouTube, so it’s easily embeddable, if DailyKos permits embedding by account holders.
SteveinSC
I signed. Bernie is my hero. And by the way Hitler was the embodiment of the ultimate development of capitalism, its sort of apotheosis–the dictator of a warmongering corporatist state, complete with the hollow trappings of a democracy. A big business creation brought to the Germans by Krupp, I.G. Farben, etc. I.e., sort of where we are going.
YellowJournalism
You know, after all the yeast infection talk in the previous thread, putting this under the tag C.R.E.A.M seems icky and all kinds of wrong.
Yutsano
Clarified. Let’s not forget history here. And never forget where the Bush money actually came from.
Neil
I was 62400! And then I refreshed and it was 62457…
Proud voter and donator to Senator Sanders.
jl
62525 at 11 PM Balloon Juice comment time.
MaximusNYC
@cat48:
You mean John Wayne Quincy Gacy Adams?
cat48
Loneoak
This would be a top notch handle if anyone is currently looking.
ABL
62956 when I signed.
amk
@ 46 James E. Powell – It’s not half a million or so at gos that are braying for Obama’s blood. More like a few hundreds self-proclaimed keyboard ‘activists’ and most of the FP’ers.
pat
Just signed, 10:10 central, it’s up to 65,400 or so. Forgot to note the exact count.
Not that it will do any good.
Sigh.
cat48
Maximus
ABL
@Cliff #40-
What the hell is that pledge supposed to accomplish?
I really hate these people. I had to turn Colbert off last night because I wanted to do violence to Grover Norquist’s smug ass.
cbear
Signed. And, yes, Senator Sanders is a hero, but more than that–he just always seems to be such a genuinely decent, kind, and honorable man.
Dare I say, I would love to have a beer with the gentleman.
General Stuck
Looks to me at this stage, the wingers are not so much playing chicken, but forcing Obama to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling his self, by fiat, declaring the law unconstitutional, as some legal eagles already believe.
Then trying to label the Obama administration a tyranny, and Obama a tyrant acting like a king. Obama can fuck around with these idiots only so long, before he has to act to stop the dominoes that will start falling on each other with world finance and the panic that will surely set in if he lets this play out to the last minute.
I have no idea if the gooper strategy, playing ideological Russian Roulette, will bear the political fruits they hope for. It seems highly desperate with a cornered rat feel to me. But what do I know.
Goddamn Republicans. I hate your fish eating guts to no ends. You are seditious and not fit to govern an outhouse, let alone a country.
General Stuck
would someone please release my comment at 67. I used the roolette word, and am sorry.
Grover Gardner
Signed. 63360.
TenguPhule
Give the man a cane and let him beat Bohner bloody with it.
Yutsano
What you have done there, it has been seen. And I am now going to indulge in my chocolate Top Pot and contemplate the universe.
boss bitch
I gave my junk e-mail because I know these things are always followed by pleas for money.
Linda Featheringill
Freedomworks has 12,119 signatures on their petition.
Tom Q
amk @ 46:
To your point: The other day someone at GOS posted a diary asking if just one person on the main page could back the administration. The usual assortment of Obama-betrayed-us gang popped in and ridiculed the idea, but the attached poll showed 70% of readers thought the site had veered off into PUMA land.
Bruce S
boss bitch
So when are we going to send a letter to the New Democrats and The Three Stooges from the Republican side?
Judas Escargot
Even if he were… so what?
This isnt D&D. It’s not like you just uttered the Truename and dispelled whatever demon bothers you.
Bruce S
Krugman was shrill on this…
http://titanicsailsatdawn.blogspot.com/2011/06/dire-stakes.html
Meanwhile OFA is asking me to make phone calls for Janice Hahn. All well and good, but Jesus the movement we had in 2008 dropped the goddam ball (by design of it’s leadership IMHO) …
boss bitch
the problem is what?
vheidi
63,552
General Stuck
Looks to me at this stage, the wingers are not so much playing chicken, but forcing Obama to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling his self, by fiat, declaring the law unconstitutional, as some legal eagles already believe.
Then trying to label the Obama administration a tyranny, and Obama a tyrant acting like a king. Obama can fuck around with these idiots only so long, before he has to act to stop the dominoes that will start falling on each other with world finance and the panic that will surely set in if he lets this play out to the last minute.
I have no idea if the gooper strategy, playing ideological Russian Roolette, will bear the political fruits they hope for. It seems highly desperate with a cornered rat feel to me. But what do I know.
Goddamn Republicans. I hate your fish eating guts to no ends. You are seditious and not fit to govern an outhouse, let alone a country.
amk
@ 73 Tom Q – Yup. Their nos. are heading south. Gone are the days of 1 mil visitors. Now it’s about 600 k and falling.
cg
This is what I’ve been seeing for the past 15 minutes:
Yutsano
@ cg: it opened right up for me. Any other Safari users having issues?
(FF 5.0)
PeakVT
Donât republicans ever think about getting permission to use songs?
Probably, but they don’t try to because they would find that they could only use songs by sucky artists. And it gives them a chance to show the base that those are-teests are all mean-spirited libruls look at how they made us stop using the song well we don’t need it anyway so nah. Or something along those lines.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
isn’t she the women who had an affair with Tammy Faye Bakker’s husband?
Anne Laurie
For the record, JQ really did work hard ‘to free the slaves’:
Bachmann is an idiot with an agenda, and JQA explicitly did not consider himself a “Founding Father” — that was his parents’ generation. While he honored their heroic achievements, he worked for the rest of his life to improve the Constitution, not to freeze it in amber as a mindless totem or a bludgeon to play ‘We’re right, they’re wrong’ against his opponents.
Linda Featheringill
General #80
Don’t be shy, Honey. Tell us how you really feel. :-)
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
no one will take the blogosphere seriously until it attains a political accomplishment.
cg
@ Yutsano Still busy. Rural user with a satellite connection. Maybe that’s the problem. Or I should try Firefox. Thanks.
amk
@ 89 Mike Kay – Yup. When they elect a dog catcher is the day they’ll be taken seriously by pols. Teabaggers, all said & done, were more effective politically.
cg
Firefox also says “busy.” Let’s hope it goes on all night. So: In the early morning hours, when the dew is on the flowers. . .
Three-nineteen
I signed, but I wonder why this petition is aimed at the President and not the FUCKING REPUBLICANS THAT ARE BLOCKING ACTUAL PROGRESS IN THIS COUNTRY. Isn’t that the block of votes we have to convince? Send this to Cantor, to Boehner, to McConell.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
I think the teabaggers are similarly impotent, after all, glenn beck’s Aryan woodstock only had a third of the attendance of jon Stewart’s rally, even though it was promoted 24/7 by fixxed news and hate radio, but they get disproportionate coverage because of the bias of the corporate media.
amk
@ 94. But they were able to return the rethugs to congress and governors to major states. They fucking turned up to vote.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
sadly these “petitions” are simply data mining schemes used to build mailing lists. Everyone who signs will receive a fundraising solicitation by Bernie. That’s a lot of dead trees. That would be fine if Bernie needed the money, but he’s has a rock solid safe seat.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think the teabaggers are similarly impotent
I’d say the Teabaggers are the carefully arranged public and MSM-friendly (“real America”, as they like to say) of Karl Rove type groups that blanket the airwaves with pretty run-of-the-mill ads paid for by untraceable Citizens United dollars. The money for the ads and the astroturf rallies all come from the same pockets. At least at the Senate level, was there a Tea-Bagger candidate who won besides Rand Paul? Ken Buck, Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Grifter-Quitter’s cat’s-paw up in Alaska… all lost. LePage and Christie IIRC both won three-way races by a hair. So Rand Paul and Rick Scott are the only Teabagger candidates to win above the Cong District level, no? I miss anybody?
Yutsano
Walker and Johnson in Wisconsin, Kasich in Ohio, Deal in Georgia, and I suspect even that list is incomplete.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was trying to draw a distinction between establishment Republicans and Tea Bagger “insurgents”. I don’t know about Deal or Johnson, but weren’t Kasich and Walker the party favorites?
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
rand paul wouldn’t have won without his father’s notoriety. Rick Scott spent $85 million to buy his seat. can’t call it insurgency if victory is based on nepotism and unlimited cash.
Laertes
The first eleven presidents
all slaveowners but two:
those Massachusetts liberals
John Adams and John Q
(I don’t know who wrote this. It wasn’t me. I just remember it.)
Cliff in NH
Everyone who complains about political email has only themselves to blame.
Get a g-mail acct.
with gmail you can modify your address with dots and +’s so you know where things came from.
Just sign petitions and mailinglists with [email protected] and filter everything with that +address to a folder named politics.
Also, .’s (dots) are invisible to gmail, so you can also mod your address that way.
Filter your email with personalized email addresses.
Suffern ACE
@Jim, Foolish Literalist-Marco Rubio, or was Christ some no name third party nut before the primary. Lee in Utah as well.
pete
Over 65000. That’s not bad without promotion, but it’s not enuf.
Bruce S
As I said, “All well and good, but Jesus the movement we had in 2008 dropped the goddam ball (by design of itâs leadership IMHO) …”
We’re playing defense. OFA – which is supposed to be “Organizing for America” – hasn’t done shit until it came time to “organize” again for Obama. “We stand with the President” – which is plastered across my local OFA office – isn’t an agenda. It’s a faith-based politics and a cult of personality.
Two years ago there were hundreds of folks locally ready to work on issue-oriented agendas. There were a couple of meetings and then the “leadership” abandoned the notion of organizing based on a grass-roots movement, OFA was folded into the DNC and we ended up with the Tea Parties dominating “grass-roots” discourse and putting Obama and the Democrats into a defensive crouch.
Even on health care reform, I had an OFA “organizer” tell me that there was confusion about what to do because “they didn’t know what would be in the bill.” WTF? This was sheer idiocy. Political malpractice of the worst sort.
Part of the reason Obama’s hands are so tied is because he stopped believing what he told us back in ’07 and even ’08 about “making him do it.” I blame myself for believing too much and doing too little. But the responsiblity has to at least be shared by the folks who are now sending me emails asking me for money or to do some conventional GOTV – when I was prepared to do a lot more. As were many thousands of others. Many of whom are dispirited and won’t respond at all.
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
This particular petition requires your home mailing address. You can make up a false snail mail address, but they’re still gonna kill a tree and stick a mailing label on it.
Cliff in NH
Caz
Bernie Sanders stands for everything that the Constitution does not stand for. He’s an admitted socialist, or communist, or marxist…what’s the difference – he pretty much disagrees with everything in the Constitution and would like to see this nation turn into a socialist one.
Hitler was a socialist. Stalin was a communist.
I’m not the dumbass that supports this jackass socialist/communist/marxist. Whatever you want to call him, he is an enemy of the state, and the fact that you idiots support him is truly terrifying.
Cliff in NH
mike, thats not cloggin up your email box is it now?
use a deliberate mispelling to see where it gets shared if thats all you are complaining about.
Geez.
-ps I’ve not gotten physical spam from Bernies petitions, I think you are full of shit. The Nation is the biggest source of my physical spam, followed by opt in mailing lists. (not spam)
Cliff in NH
It’s not like Bush where I sign petitions for impeachment and war crimes and got the 4 s’s on all my boarding passes for a few years.
Yutsano
Such as?
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
No, I eat a lot of fiber.
Cliff in NH
I see caz still doesn’t know what socialist means.
How can the government promote the general welfare of its people without caring about the humans who make up the country?
Cliff in NH
FYWP Get rid of that fucking filter on the word S0cialist already! WTF?!
Cliff in NH
FYWP WTF Was that for?!?! Grrr…
I see caz still doesnât know what s ist means.
How can the government promote the general welfare of its people without caring about the humans who make up the country?
edit: moderator delete whatever you want of duplicates
Comrade Kevin
65323
ETA: Why bother trying to talk to Caz? It isn’t even trying to make any sense.
Dennis SGMM
@Caz
Then why don’t you run away? It was good enough for George W. Bush, it should be good enough for you.
Mnemosyne
I have to admit, it amuses me every time that Caz freely admits he’s completely ignorant about a subject but he’s totally sure that his blissful ignorance means we’re wrong.
Comrade Kevin
I get more crap emails from Major League Baseball, The Nation, and “Democracy for America” (Howard Dean’s org? Not sure how they got my address) than anyone else.
Suffern ACE
Hmmmm. All that’s needed to keep Caz living in fear is a tape of Senator Sanders talking about raising revenue in addition to cutting spending. The boring bits.
Let’s get to the heart of the speech. The better part of social1sm that’s in there, but obviously edited out. Should the reactionary counterrevolutionary elements of the capitalist system be reformed through labor, exiled or purged?
Cliff in NH
Kevin, that’s why you use a +tag identifying what you are signing on emails when you give a email to Anyone, it’s so you can track the spam, and have a trail to trace…
Use gmail for all random web interactions, use gmail manager to track multiple gmail accts if you want one for politics and one for realife and one for fakelife
bryanD
Sanders’ failure to consider the scourge of inflation, the key symptom of deficit spending—which pick-pockets the poor and allows the underwriting of corporate adventurism via liquidation of bad debt at pennies on the dollar at the taxpayers’ expense—-is evidence that Bernie isn’t guarding his chess pieces very well.
He’s left himself wayyy open. Perhaps he’s just too used to being ignored and has gotten rhetorically rusty, ie “the children”? (Simpsons Did It!)
Yutsano
But he KNOWS he’s right! His Tribe tells him so! Bernie Sanders is teh Enemy! WOLVERINES!!
Cliff in NH
Would that be JPM stockpiling oil in tankers all around the world at 30-50$/bbl hmmm?
Mike Kay (Democrat of the Century)
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” ~ Dick Cheney
Yutsano
There would be this little thing called hyperinflation if there is a debt default. So much so that it would make the Weimar Republic look like a cakewalk. The rest of your comment is pure word salad.
Mnemosyne
Given that interest rates have been essentially 0% for a decade, I think we could use a little inflation. Can you believe that I used to have a checking account that made 3.25% interest? Now you can’t even get a 5-year CD that yields more than 1% APR.
Grover Gardner
No, you’re just a dumbass–or a spoof.
Grover Gardner
Can you wait till I pay down my mortgage a little–please?
Cliff in NH
yusanto: a debt default won’t be good, but it will be nowhere near hyperinflation, weimer had other thing going on, that should be obvious.
Mnemosyne
@ Grover Gardner
Did you get an adjustable rate mortgage or something? If it’s a fixed rate, then it doesn’t matter to your mortgage if overall interest rates go up, because your rate is fixed. If you got an adjustable rate, well, may God have mercy on your soul, because your bank sure won’t.
Cliff in NH
grover, a unemployed small business owner I know in the process of moving their shop out of state got a insane sub 3% fixed rate refinance on their mortgage, it can’t hurt to talk to your bank.
Cliff in NH
@yutsano also, in this country if they can stay deadlocked and do Nothing at all for a while more the deficit will nearly disappear.
Hence the low interest rates on us bonds.
unf there are other stupid things being discussed instead of just locking it up.
Yutsano
A debt default will most likely cost me my job. As a new hire, when the inevitable layoffs come, I’m first on the block.
Cliff in NH
well, that sure sucks.
gov worker? thanks for your service, I hope you can hold out cause I expect teabaggers to hold us hostage for a few weeks before the country wakes up and kicks them in the ass Hard.
Yutsano
IRS. And I’m a collector to boot. Won’t matter if we don’t get enough coming in to meet payroll.
Adjusted. Only their paymasters will hold any sway here.
shano
Excuse me, BryanD. but Bernie was on that committee to audit the fed with Ron Paul and Alan Greyson.
You all do not even know what Bernie does! Its astonishing!
BERNIE AUDITED THE FED
harlana
Thank you, Bernie, no we did not cause this deficit so why are we being asked to make sacrifices when we have nothing left to sacrifice? (Just read this thread, yes it’s a yahoo thread so there will be some ignorant racist comments, just skip those and read the desperate stories of the unemployed, one after the other, this thread has been running for a couple of days now)
Btw, I wanna have your babies. Call me, don’t Twitter. :)
harlana
to this Caz person: Stalin wasn’t even a true communist, not by a longshot! Pick up a frickin history book and read.
Btw, what are these rumors about Obama caving?
Yevgraf
Ted Nugent would be totally down with allowing her to use his poignant tribute to heartland women, “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”. Its sort of on the same theme, and he’s a heartland conservative.
Its a win-win!
Ash Can
@ Bruce S #105: This makes very little sense. Right now, the 2012 campaign is just beginning to gear up, so money is needed. And campaigning for your local Dems is at least as important as campaigning for the president, who at this point faces running for re-election against a cartoon character. How much good will Obama do in a second term if either the House or the Senate, or, God forbid, both, are under GOP control? As for the health care issue, the bill really was in serious flux well into the process — that’s how legislation works, after all — so it’s obvious that the OFA people wouldn’t know what would be in the bill, at least until it was being finalized. In the meantime, it would have been incumbent upon all of us to badger our own elected representatives about it — hardly OFA’s bailiwick.
A Mom Anon
(I haven’t commented here in a year because my life fell apart,but wanted to chime in with something hopefully helpful)
You can sign petitions and blog forever,but the only way to make a dent with your reps and senators is to be a pest and call them, OFTEN. Get your friends to call them,get family on board if you can. Email works too,get people to help you,have weekly writing parties or something. Don’t be an ass beret either,you can voice your anger without being a jerk. If your elected officials are conservatives,the first nasty thing you write shuts down anyone reading or hearing you.
The Tea Party has such a sway because they have a couple dozen people in various districts who spend hours on the phone,writing emails,calling local tv stations,doing letters to newspapers and comments on their websites,etc. For some reason,we don’t do that with nearly the volume. The puff themselves up to look bigger than they are like one of those little spiny fish.
I live in a decidedly red part of the South(NW metro Atlanta exburbia),my rep is a tea party ass kisser and my senators are selfish assholes. But,I call them anyway. If more liberals raised hell in places like this it might change things at least a little. Screaming over the internet on blogs means nothing to these guys,when their staff gets a shit ton of calls,it means alot more. Especially when they’re up for re-election. Sure,some people can never be reached,but consider those practice calls. Many(not all) liberals are under the illusion that online”activism”(oxymoron anyone?) means something and it really has little if any effect besides being a tool to help organize people in real life for concrete and tangible action.
OzoneR
They were pretty active in the HCR debate, financial reform, getting SCOTUS justices confirmed and are very involved in the Wisconsin recall elections.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
OzoneR
How is phonebanking for a Democratic candidate for Congress part of an Obama-only movement?
Your bitter is showing.
OzoneR
Did it ever occur to anyone of you that maybe there wasn’t enough people “making him do it.”
It’s not your fault, it’s not OFA’s fault. There just aren’t the numbers of the ground. To give you an idea, if you saw the amount of people who pressured the New York legislature on marriage equality vs. the millionaire’s tax, it would make complete sense. It was like night and day.
Chris
I suspect Caz called Bernie a Red for the sole reason of having us all answer “no, he’s a soshalist!” without thinking, and then being infuriated as WP places dozens of our messages in moderation for the use of the S word.
Going back up to read the rest of the thread…
Valdivia
@OzoneR–I was going to pipe in and say pretty much what you said but you beat me to it. I have been actually harrased the past couple of years by OFA for all sorts of campaigns and to help on the legislative end by calls and letters and many more things but for some it’s as if it did not happens.
OzoneR
A Mom Anon @ 142
I don’t really think a lot of these “online activists” really want to win.
Jane Hamsher just wants to sell ads.
OzoneR
The problem is that OFA wasn’t involved, the problem was the issues weren’t to the satisfaction of people around here. OFA made a push for the HCR bill, it wasn’t good enough for people, they made a push for Wall Street reform, not good enough, Elena Kagen, not good enough, and so on and so forth.
I find it really funny, also not surprising, that OFA is being blamed.
Chris
@ SteveinSC –
For my money, he was the apotheosis of Southern Strategy style politics. He was the product of decades of antisemetic rhetoric put into overdrive all over the continent, with the support of conservative elites who hoped to redirect popular anger onto someone other than themselves (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, were made up by the Czar’s secret police).
Hitler and his peeps were the voters who rallied to the rhetoric and believed in it heart and soul, then went into politics for themselves in the 1930s after WW1 and the Depression completely ruined the credibility of the ruling classes. When all you know about politics involves Jewish conspiracies and liberal stabs in the back, it’s easy to predict that something like Auschwitz come out of it.
Capitalism was irrelevant except insofar as big business helped Hitler get into and stay in power; he and his supporters didn’t really care about economics one way or another.
Gravie
Signed, posted on my FB page, whereupon a friend of my husband’s came on and wrote a six-post anti-Obama diatribe. So I reposted for a clean start.
Chris
Thank you for making our point.
Really? Hitler supported state control of the means of production? That’s odd, because I could swear that a shit ton of large corporations existed in Nazi Germany that remained under private ownership throughout the regime. Go on. Hitler was a socialist because…?
Interesting choice of words, Caz. In this country, people who disagree with the ruling ideology are called “dissenters,” “the minority vote,” or just “people with opinions.” Only regimes like Hitler’s or Stalin’s consider people “enemies of the state” simply because they have the wrong ideas.
Are Hitler and Stalin your heroes, Caz? Are you now a soshulist/communist/marxist/what’s-the-difference?
Chris
Oh, fuck you, WP. Seriously. See what I mean about the S word…?
Going twice;
Thank you for making our point.
Really? Hitler supported state control of the means of production? Thatâs odd, because I could swear that a shit ton of large corporations existed in Nazi Germany that remained under private ownership throughout the regime. Go on. Hitler was a soshalist becauseâŠ?
Interesting choice of words, Caz. In this country, people who disagree with the ruling ideology are called âdissenters,â âthe minority vote,â or just âpeople with opinions.â Only regimes like Hitlerâs or Stalinâs consider people âenemies of the stateâ simply because they have the wrong ideas.
Are Hitler and Stalin your heroes, Caz? Are you now a soshulist/communist/marxist/whatâs-the-difference?
scav
I had this sudden sweet vision of Caz every morning, trying to figure our which end of the socks to use.
Bulworth
Signed!
Bruce S
” itâs obvious that the OFA people wouldnât know what would be in the bill, at least until it was being finalized. In the meantime, it would have been incumbent upon all of us to badger our own elected representatives about itâhardly OFAâs bailiwick”
That’s the problem defined – OFA neutered itself as a movement, waiting for “the bill” rather than pushing a broader health care reform agenda, educating, organizing.
The Tea Party didn’t sit around and wait for what the GOP would put in a bill.
The notion that OFA could only become what it has become is bogus. There were large meetings in the Bay Area with hundreds of potential activists and no structure, leadership or follow-up emerged. The decision to fold OFA into the DNC was political malpractice. There’s nothing wrong with making phone calls for candidates or contacting congressional representatives about bills, but we hardly needed OFA to devolve back into that tired play book. The potential for a broader more activist movement existed. That’s a fact. They passed…
And I do blame myself for watching it happen and not getting more involved to try to turn that political malpractice around. If you talk anything but happy talk to the local OFA “organizers”, they treat you like you smell bad. It’s “all in” or STFU. No interest in anything other than what’s coming from the top down. If that’s “organizing”, it’s a joke.
OzoneR
you can’t push a vague concept. What people wanted in HCR differs, some wanted single payer, others wanted a completely private system, some people wanted a hybrid. You can only push for tangible things.
Stuff like marriage equality is different because its black and white. Not all of us here can agree on what we want to see in HCR bill. Some may not want a single payer system, some may want that, some may want Medicare to be extended to 55, others may say 50. Until you have a bill, you can’t lobby for anything except vague concepts.
This reminds me of what I see at GOS all the time, this idea that we need “Democrats to fight for people” and when you ask them what that means, they saw “politicans who
what bill? The Tea Party doesn’t want ANY bills on anything.
Wait, you’re complaining there’s no leadership and then complaining there’s only orders coming down from the top? You’re contradicting yourself here.
Bruce S
Good lord, Ozone. You blow it with the line about universal health care as a “vague concept.”
I can’t take your whining defense seriously. Sorry. And “orders from the top” = “leadership” in an organization that proposes “grassroots organizing.”
Enjoy the kool-aid.
Bruce S
Should have added an exasperated question mark to that line. Meant the opposite of how it reads.
OzoneR
You blow it by trying to say it isn’t. universal health care is a vague concept, there’s a number of ways to achieve it.
So then why are you complaining about the lack of leadership? You’re looking for someone to tell you what to do, but then you’re complaining they’re telling you what to do.
You stopped making sense three posts ago.
artem1s
70K+ when I signed
Bruce S
ozone – read the addendum to my comment.
“There are a number of ways to achieve it” – but some clear markers could have been set out. You DON’T achieve it by sending it to Max Baucus to toy with. You don’t need a bill to build support for the larger goal. This is elementary and one reason why the bill ended up so weak and needs so much more work.
OFA hasn’t shown a bit of balls. And my guess is they weren’t supposed to.
What is the agenda they are putting forward in opposition to Ryan? There are a number of possible approaches. But we’ll see nothing in terms of coherent response or organizing against the GOPers – because Obama has already shown his weak hand on the issue by giving Alan Simpson a platform, and nobody knows where the President will end up standing – so “we stand with the President” means doing nothing until it’s time to defend a fait accompli – and my guess is it won’t be pretty.
This isn’t a grassroots movement with anything that resembles a core liberal agenda that could rally the people who worked hard to put Obama in office to give him more political space as President. It’s a campaign vehicle for re-election. Not even remotely the same things. And it’s sad. A tremendous opportunity was wasted. If you can’t see this and don’t feel at least some sense that there were greater possibilities, I wonder where the hell you were in ’07 when we started the work that made this Presidency possible.