The Democrat Thread

[Balta1701]

Bleeping bleep. I can't even find a reasonable old Iraq thread to stick this in.

U.S. officials on Wednesday welcomed Iraq’s decision to negotiate with Washington on keeping some U.S. troops in the country into next year, seeing it as a move toward ending the months-long political stalemate that has complicated U.S. plans for a December withdrawal.

 

Iraq’s top political leaders agreed late Tuesday that the Iraqi military needs to continue training programs with U.S. forces, marking the first step in a process that still could take months to resolve.

 

“There seems to be broad partnerships and political coalitions emerging that take tough decisions,” said a senior U.S. Embassy official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue frankly. “This is very good, because we don’t want to be the security partner to a dictatorship or to a one-party regime, but rather, we believe we should have acceptance by a broad range of political forces in this country.”

 

Iraqi and U.S. officials cautioned Wednesday that Iraq’s precarious political and security situation could yet derail efforts to resolve the issue before the roughly 46,000 U.S. troops in Iraq leave as scheduled by Dec. 31.

[BigSqwert]

I'm a big fan of the Citizen Radio podcast. Quite entertaining progressive talk.

[StrangeSox]

Democracy Now! is always good

[BigSqwert]

Now that's change we can believe in.

[StrangeSox]

LOL

 

 

Ties in nicely with the Salon piece mocking Bolton and his love of endless war forever, pretty sure that was posted here already.

[Rex Kickass]

OK, I don't know whether to laugh or slap my head at how silly this is, so I'll do both.

 

http://twitpic.com/61bygw

[Balta1701]

So, this NYT Piece has been making the rounds today.

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting a million immigrants in two years, breaking up families at a pace George W. Bush could never rival in all his years as president.

 

THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.

 

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.

 

The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians.

 

...

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.

 

...

Or perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars — in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

...

A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue.

[BigSqwert]

Tea Partiers Cheer the Downgrade of America's Credit Rating

[BigSqwert]

At least right-wingers in the UK/Europe don't hide their racism.

 

This guy is the British National Party Chairman and Member of the European Parliament for the North West region.

[StrangeSox]

Three things have happened to destroy representative democracy in this country.

 

First, there has been a huge and ongoing transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in America. Twenty-five years ago, when this process was already starting, the richest 1 percent of us took in one-eighth of the nation's total income.

 

Today, that figure has more than doubled. That golden 1 percent gets a quarter of the income, and own 40 percent of the nation's net worth. That's not surprising, given that virtually all of what income growth there's been in recent times has gone to them.

 

Second: Political campaigns at all levels are entirely controlled by money of a sort unimaginable only a few years ago. Vast sums are spent on even low-level races. Millions are routinely spent to win (or lose) a two-year seat in Congress; hundreds of thousands for state legislative posts that pay a tiny fraction of that in salary.

 

Worse, the U.S. Supreme Court has said any limit to corporate spending is unconstitutional.

 

Finally, these critical facts are little-known because of the decline of an independent, investigative, analytical news media. What we have instead is an endless profusion of "talk" channels that largely feature shills shrieking lies or dwelling on irrelevancies.

 

http://metrotimes.com/columns/what-we-should-fear-1.1186598

[The Sir]

At least right-wingers in the UK/Europe don't hide their racism.

 

This guy is the British National Party Chairman and Member of the European Parliament for the North West region.

 

Yeah, you caught us. We ignorant rightwingers hate Obama because he's black. Totally. <_>

[StrangeSox]

The Empathy Ceiling: The Rich Are Different — And Not In a Good Way, Studies Suggest

 

"We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.”

 

In an academic version of a Depression-era Frank Capra movie, Keltner and co-authors of an article called “Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm,” published this week in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, argue that “upper-class rank perceptions trigger a focus away from the context toward the self….”

 

In other words, rich people are more likely to think about themselves. “They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic,” said Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

As behavioral economist Mark Wilhelm of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis pointed out, most people could quickly tell you how much they paid in taxes last year but few could put a dollar amount on how they benefited from government by, say, driving on interstate highways, taking drugs gleaned from federally funded medical research, or using inventions created by people educated in public schools.

 

There is one interesting piece of evidence showing that many rich people may not be selfish as much as willfully clueless, and therefore unable to make the cognitive link between need and resources. Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal.

 

The problem? Rich people wrongly believed it already was.

[StrangeSox]

Yeah and money=speech, what a stupid system.

[Balta1701]

Fun gay sex scandal breaking today in the Indiana State Legislature

[StrangeSox]

"Michele Bachmann's first answer, Mark Halperin, was "I wish the federal government had defaulted." Had defaulted, a week after Americans had lost--some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401(k)s, when trillions of dollars went down the drain [pounds the table] with Americans suffering, she said that and got applause, and if anybody thinks that guys like my dad are going to be voting that way when this rolls out of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, in the early stages, and really gets going, they are out of their mind and they are too stupid not only to prognosticate, they are too stupid to run Slurpee machines in Des Moines. I'll let you go now. I got it off my chest.

 

Michele Bachmann is a joke. She is a joke. And now I will pass it on to you. Her answer is a joke, her candidacy is a joke, and anybody that sits here and says she has any chance of winning anything is out of their mind. Take your straw poll, take your caucus, but Iowa, if you let her win, you prove your irrelevance once again," - Joe Scarborough.

[BigSqwert]

Scarborough obviously hates America.

[southsider2k5]

"Michele Bachmann's first answer, Mark Halperin, was "I wish the federal government had defaulted." Had defaulted, a week after Americans had lost--some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401(k)s, when trillions of dollars went down the drain [pounds the table] with Americans suffering, she said that and got applause, and if anybody thinks that guys like my dad are going to be voting that way when this rolls out of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, in the early stages, and really gets going, they are out of their mind and they are too stupid not only to prognosticate, they are too stupid to run Slurpee machines in Des Moines. I'll let you go now. I got it off my chest.

 

Michele Bachmann is a joke. She is a joke. And now I will pass it on to you. Her answer is a joke, her candidacy is a joke, and anybody that sits here and says she has any chance of winning anything is out of their mind. Take your straw poll, take your caucus, but Iowa, if you let her win, you prove your irrelevance once again," - Joe Scarborough.

 

some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401(k)s,

 

Half? Uh, ok. The broaders were down 10%ish. You can make that point, without making s*** up.

[StrangeSox]

Half? Uh, ok. The broaders were down 10%ish. You can make that point, without making s*** up.

 

Little bit of hyperbole there but economic extremism (reject 10:1 cuts/revenue offer) seems to be the popular thing in the GOP.

[southsider2k5]

Little bit of hyperbole there but economic extremism (reject 10:1 cuts/revenue offer) seems to be the popular thing in the GOP.

 

If it had been said on FoxNews, it would be all over the place with how out of touch with reality the reporter was to not understand the market was only down about 10% instead of 50%. Instead no one pays attention to the complete lie in the story.

[StrangeSox]

Well he qualifies it with "some" and "perhaps" and it's really irrelevant to the point he's making which is also one you've agree with here lately.

[southsider2k5]

Well he qualifies it with "some" and "perhaps" and it's really irrelevant to the point he's making which is also one you've agree with here lately.

 

Like I said originally, you can make that point without making s*** up.

 

I really doubt if Fox had said Obama has perhaps kicked something like 50 puppies, it would have been let slide, because it had the little qualifiers in it.

[Rex Kickass]

Like I said originally, you can make that point without making s*** up.

 

I really doubt if Fox had said Obama has perhaps kicked something like 50 puppies, it would have been let slide, because it had the little qualifiers in it.

 

You do realize that Joe Scarborough is a Republican, right?

[StrangeSox]

Like I said originally, you can make that point without making s*** up.

 

I really doubt if Fox had said Obama has perhaps kicked something like 50 puppies, it would have been let slide, because it had the little qualifiers in it.

 

If Obama had instead kicked 15 puppies, this comparison would make sense.

 

He exaggerated the numbers in a larger point. He made a mistake, no doubt. That's not comparable to making things up or distorted numbers/facts being crucial to your argument, which is what Fox routinely gets called out on.

[southsider2k5]

You do realize that Joe Scarborough is a Republican, right?

 

He's also on CNN, which means he is immune.

[Rex Kickass]

He's also on CNN, which means he is immune.

 

Actually, he's on MSNBC.