Election: 2010. Today it starts. The door will open for one. The other’s health care policy gets flushed.
Election: 2010. Today it starts. The door will open for one. The other’s health care policy gets flushed.
I can’t wait for the results. Now don’t anyone here get pissed off, but I am hoping for a Brown win.
[I’ll wait here until you finish screaming at me, and then I will tell you why]
Did you get it out of your system? Good.
Democrats have been taking us for granted. They don’t understand that because they won an election in 2008 that they can stop acting like Democrats. We put them there for a reason, and that wasn’t to start acting like or caving into Republicans.
The media has us thinking that this election spells the end for the Democrats — that somehow we’ve lost our majority in the Senate.
Wake up.
If you take away Nelson, Liebermann, and a couple of others who are only pretending to be Democrats, we still have a majority in the Senate. The thing is, they need to start acting like they are the majority party. The Republicans didn’t enjoy this wide of a margin during their reign, and yet they got a lot of crap shoved through.
So what, we lose a magical “sixtieth vote”. I hate to break it to people, but we never had that to begin with. We just had sixty hapless fools sitting on the Left side of the aisle, that’s all.
So we can’t overcome the threat of a filibuster? Well, get rid of it. If WE don’t do it now, you can bet your butts that the Republicans will do it when they return to power. There is no way in hell they are going to let the Democrats use the filibuster against them like they have against us. So we might as well “go nuclear” now and get it over with.
But the only way that is going to happen is for Brown to win this election. The Dems need to be shaken awake, and this is probably the only thing that is going to do it.
Forget the idea that this is somehow “Kennedy’s Seat”, or the “Democrat’s Seat”. It isn’t. If the Democratic Party loses it, they only have themselves to blame. They took us for granted, and this is the price they pay.
The Senate version of the HRC bill is garbage. The Right knows it and most of us on the Left know it as well. We just dislike it for a completely different reason. It was hobbled together to appease certain Conservative Dems who weren’t going to give their vote to a super majority. Without a filibuster, we don’t need to defer to them. THIS is why people are pissed off — it isn’t so much WHAT the bill is, but HOW it got that way. It isn’t what it was originally advertised.
So I hope Brown wins, and gives his “forty-first vote”. THEN maybe the Dems can get their asses in gear.
I would agree, David, if I thought they actually would “get their asses in gear.” But if 8 years of being servile while beaten by fascistic Bush bullshit, and then finally getting the presidency and both houses doesn’t do that, what will? I suspect DLC types will simply use this to make Dem leaders act more servile and lean further right.
We may be looking at the end of the party and hopefully the start of a new one and, these days, I’m starting to believe, “About damn time.”
But… I do hope I’m wrong, you’re right.
Well, it appears the White House must have “heard” the people in MA wrong when Brown was elected, because instead of just clamping down and being the progressive Democrat most of us voted for, Obama has decided to work even harder to find that mythical “common ground” with the Right wing.
This is why Obama will be a one-term president. It is also why the Republicans will most likely regain seats in the mid-term elections.
Meanwhile, the corporate media would have us believe that this is a HUGE loss for progressives because Obama has pushed the country too far towards “socialism”.
If only.
That is the real problem, Obama hasn’t pushed for anything, he’s let Congress (and their owners) have their way with everything and have come up with a bunch of truly awful products.
If I wanted another Clinton, I would have voted for Hillary. Instead we got Obama trying to pretend he is Clinton. We have all of Clinton’s former advisers, and even some of GW Bush’s playmates. I am not really seeing the change.
We are now officially 25 percent into Obama’s presidency. It is time to give out grades, and in my opinion, he gets a D, and Congress gets an F.
We need a grass roots change ourselves. We need to target every incumbent up for election this fall and position candidates that will go to Washington with one purpose in mind:
Drain the Swamp.
That should be our tag line. Forget health care. Forget all of that crap — it can and should be put on hold until we take care of Congress.
I’d like to see a NEW contract for America with just a few small items on it:
1. Term limits.
2. Public Campaign Finance (no more raising money from corporations)
3. Cut out the need for “Lobbyists”. If Congress needs to talk to any of these people, then they can subpoena them to testify in a committee hearing.
I am sure I can think of a few more things, but until all of that is taken care of, everything else should just be put on hold.
What you said, DJ. The Harry Reid-Rahm Emanuel Beltway Dems, as usual, took a ‘teaching moment’ and failed to learn the lesson, either accidentally or on purpose. (And I’m leaning to ‘on purpose’ to preserve that influx of corporate money.) It appears that the Obama presidency and the Dem majoirty were just populist Punch and Judy shows designed to keep the Great Unwashed, AKA ‘The Citizenry,’ temporarily at bay and give the entrenched DeeCee government another excuse to funnel our tax dollars to the wealthy.
Now the media types and Conservadems (see my cartoon this ayem) are trotting out the ‘I told you so’ line that Americans don’t really want progressive reform — as if they want to return to the Bush disaster.
The only encouraging sign is that some mebmebrs of the House want to vote on individual sections of the health care bill on a straight up-and-down vote. This means the GOP would have to vote against such popular items as not letting the insurance company cut you off for a pre-existing condition, or capping the amount per dollar the company can keep in profits. (I think they should also include a cap on health insurance exes salaries and get rid of increasing taxes on union members with so-called ‘Cadillac Plans’ but that probably won’t happen.) Someone on TV also suggested having and up-or-down vote on cutting payroll taxes. I’d love to see the GOP vote against that!
But it’s likely none of this will happen: Reid will ‘bipartisanly’ cave in, say he can’t pass health care, nor anything else, without 60-votes because he refuses to go to reconciliation as the GOP did to pass the worst of Bush’s crap, and that’s it — we’ll be saying hello to President Palin and the new GOP majority in Congress come 2012, and they’ll finish the wrecking crew job on America Reagan started in 1980.
Like Ken, I hope I’m dead wrong, but the Dem leadership and the White House seem to be in no mood to fight the GOP even for popular bills, so there it is.