what are barack obama's flaws?

mornin' max

would have loved to have stayed onthread yellin and hollerin last night but miraculously my plane left o'hare only 2 hours late

i wasnt on this thread

as much as i admire deej's perseverance i cant say im in the "leave joe lieberman alone" camp

stfu max joe's gonna vote with me on the "does J0hn D. get extra stuffing w/his xmas dinner" bill, if this bill gets stalled on the floor I'm comin after the guilty w/guns

Lieberman said that he might be able to give me a ride home after work next Tuesday, so ixnay on the ippingstray iebermanlay of his airmanshipchay until after that plz

fwiw i dont think deejs point is really all that silly--there should be some kind of tangible political benefit to sacking lieberman instead of just doing it as revenge, and the thought that he might be a strong voice on an issue like climate change would be enough to say fuck it lets keep him...

its just that i think the political benefits of kicking the guy out of the club (i.e. placating the left wing to some extent, making it clear to the blue dogs that they cant be bossy) probably outweigh whatever "help" he might give to the senate in the future.

and the fact is kicking him out could bite dems in the ass if the GOP continues to filibuster every. single. goddamn. thing. in the senate and JL is so mad about losing his pozish that he refuses to help out by voting for cloture

would have loved to have stayed onthread yellin and hollerin last night but miraculously my plane left o'hare only 2 hours late

― Herodcare for the Unborn (J0hn D.), Monday, December 21, 2009 9:48 AM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh man when were you there? what a zoo.

i took a little vacation this weekend so i've been out of it. apparently we got a health care deal? that seems pretty good. shame about ben nelson being a pro-lifer tho.

Personally, I certainly wasn't irritated at Deej's point that it shouldn't be about revenge, but about political benefits.

I was irritated that he kept ignoring the pool of people that were repeatedly explaining the political benefits to doing it while simultaneously expressing exasperation that no one would explain the political benefits!

isnt it weird that people would so vehemently disagree about the possible outcomes of a risky hypothetical situation

i really think the way to deal with JL would have been am mix of threats and bribery, in private, like way back last year right around the time they decided not to strip him/censure him etc. maybe they did, who knows.

oh man when were you there? what a zoo.

between 4-9. my mood stayed chipper though, there were so many people trying to make the best of the delays that there was kind of a positive vibe to it in a weird cool way.

isnt it weird that people would so vehemently disagree about the possible outcomes of a risky hypothetical situation

We're a practical sort.

would have loved to have stayed onthread yellin and hollerin last night but miraculously my plane left o'hare only 2 hours late

― Herodcare for the Unborn (J0hn D.), Monday, December 21, 2009 9:48 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol @ us arguing about a mile away from each other

lol I know right

meanwhile in Yemen...

fucking

All of this is being done pursuant to this:

America’s commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge was codified directly into U.S. law via 2008 legislation backed by AIPAC. This legislation requires the president to report to Congress periodically on actions taken by the administration to ensure Israel’s advantage.

I have to confess that I didn't realize that a law was enacted last year making it a legal requirement for America to maintain "Israel’s qualitative military edge," and -- even more amazingly -- that the President of the U.S. is required to report regularly to the U.S. Congress on the steps he's taking to ensure Israel's superiority. That's a rather extraordinary law, and the administration seems to be fulfilling its requirements faithfully.

wow how depressing

They hate us for our legislated commitment to Israeli military superiority ie freedom

AIPIC is thee (?) largest foreign lobby in DC. we've insourced (?) our military and contractors to Israel and guess what, it's funded by our taxes!!! yay!

http://ideafix7.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/palestinian_land_loss_map.jpg

ever so slightly misleading map there steve!

meaning of "palestinian land" shifts quite a lot. in the first panel it means -- im not sure. british? in the third, jordanian and egyptian.

ilikewherethisisgoing.jpg

history mayne OTM

An interesting dissection of the Afghanistan situation by Rory Stewart is in the NY Review of Books this week. He finds grounds for hope in Obama's announcement of the troop increase:

I felt as though I had come to hear a fifteenth-century scholastic and found myself suddenly encountering Erasmus: someone not quite free of the peculiarities of the old way, and therefore haunted by its elisions, omissions, and contradictions; but already anticipating a reformation. Obama's central—and revolutionary—claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars." Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons - doing "whatever it takes" and "whatever it costs" — we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don't have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23562

Offered without comment.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-12/columns/george-w-obama/

Dr Morbius could not be reached for comment

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31378.html

(we're running on two threads here, but)

look i don't take politico when it runs cheney copy and i don't buy that shit either

"Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters and U.S. PIRG"

none of these are civil liberties-oriented groups, really

sorry that link was totally unrelated to Morbs, in case that wasn't obvious by the fact that those are not civil liberties groups

here's a much better takedown of one of obama's recurring rhetorical tropes:

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/01/one-of-these-things-just-doesnt-belong.html

"better" as in "makes sense as an argument" not "is true" necessarily

william greider:
Obama's style became an inadvertent formula for sapping the life out of the political majority that elected him, deflating the reach of reform and turning off the electoral base that came together in 2008. Democrats are being told (and telling themselves) that they over-reached, but what became clear as the months dragged on is the Democratic party under-achieved, and so did its president.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/greider

As I posted on a friend's fb status a little while ago: "Seriously, shoot everyone in the Senate in the face and make BO do a nationwide tour in the nude in a popemobile just to prove that he's actually got a pair of testicles, because I don't believe it."

Obama's style became an inadvertent formula for sapping the life out of the political majority that elected him, deflating the reach of reform and turning off the electoral base that came together in 2008.

This sentence is a very special mix of disingenuousness, hysteria, and ugly bitterness. Sorry, but cry me a fuckin' river. And stop blaming Obama. Even his nastiest critics will admit that the whole party is to blame. Which is how our government is set up. We don't elect kings, ppl.

I tend to fall on Morbs' side lately re:what he's not getting done. Oddly, none of those things are what motivated the voters of the creamy white rural center of Massachusetts to vote for a man who, the more I know about him, the more I consider him beneath contempt. He's about as far to the right as you can be without crossing the International Date Line, really. He's a Southern Baptist Cracker Asshole Republican, all the way home. Did Massachusetts know that? Did they care? One answer is as disturbing as the next. There's no good news on this front.

But that is no reflection on what I expected Obama to be doing in the past or future. I still think the Onion had a better point with "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job".

hendrik hertzberg:
That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/01/one-year-beware-of-sudden-downdrafts.html

He's about as far to the right as you can be without crossing the International Date Line, really. He's a Southern Baptist Cracker Asshole Republican, all the way home. Did Massachusetts know that? Did they care? One answer is as disturbing as the next. There's no good news on this front.

...but he's pretty indifferent about abortion.

Adolph Reed Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania:

In January 1996 I wrote the following about Barack Obama in my Village Voice column: "In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics."

...The only surprise about his presidency is how many ersatz leftists cling to the fiction that he's anything other than a superficially articulate neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton mold and that his administration would act in any other way.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/forum/2

that paragraph is pretty vague huh. 'form' vs. 'substance' -- MEANINGFUL

http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed0508

similar claims about obama. and some really bad calls.

oh, "calls" as in 'predictions.' BAD political sportswiter.

Fuck us all.

Morbs can I get you a T-shirt that says that

for a political science prof, he totally misread the underlying situation. that was the whole story of 08, it didn't matter, really, whether HRC of BHO won, either of them was going to be president. it's not calls about the future, but about the then-present that he got wrong. about BHO's status as an ambitious black bourgeois liberal, of course!

this is an interesting claim:

2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency

i don't know what to make of it, or how to evaluate it now. has the debate about racial injustice been polluted by obama's rhetoric? not trying to be snide here, it really is a possibility, but i can't tell exactly what reed means. which debate, for instance?

but this?

3) he can’t beat McCain in November... there’s no way that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he’s won in the primaries and caucuses... Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican... Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

this is channeled right from mark penn

i don't know if he is a vacuous neoliberal or not but i'd like to see him run some more offense against supply-side economics. the sotu the other night could have used more of it

otm

also more owl city references

TH, my "Fucked" t shirt isnt worn out yet

times was you just notched your bedpost

neoliberal

Not quite sure what this means. Unless it is 'convenient political boogeyman for neocons that under pressure doesn't really pose the threat of promoting truly progressive legislation'.