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Thursday’s developments perfectly sum up the completely ineffective nature of Obama and the Democrats: the Patriot Act was extended and there were hours of staged histrionics on health care reform that will go nowhere.
Here is Reuters describing the Patriot Act extension:
Legislation to extend expiring provisions of the anti-terror USA Patriot Act won final congressional approval on Thursday, with Democrats unable to add additional civil liberties protections.
On vote of 315-97, the House of Representatives approved the bill, a day after it cleared the Senate. It now heads to President Barack Obama to sign into law.
Pity the poor Democrats. They control the White House and huge majorities in both chambers, but they just can’t manage to restore civil liberties taken away by the Republicans under Bush. Those mean Republicans will just say no.
Also on Thursday there were over seven hours of highly staged "debate" on health care reform. Even though the Olympics are in Vancouver, the Republicans put on a gold medal performance in foot stomping in the Washington Nolympics. I’ve included the exclusive footage I found.
And again, the Democrats are left muttering to themselves about just how hard it’s going to be to get reform all on their own. They’ve only been trying for a year, and now they don’t even "control" sixty votes in the Senate, so what do we expect from them anyway?
69 Comments
thanks for a realistic diary. the big orange is filled with odes to dim-o-shit spine-du-moment.
it is difficult for me to NOT use f bombs when describing these craven pathetic sell outs.
at least with the fascists you get straight up lies so the powerful can steal.
rmm.
depressing. nice pairing, Jim.
A great juxtaposition, Jim! One quibble, though… it seems to me that too many women were represented in the exclusive footage. I rarely see so many women controlling the debate in congress. ;~)
Nolympics! I hope that word goes viral.
Off to twitter now.
I didn’t coin the word, but I do really like it.
democracts got just wanted.
Oh absolutely. They pretend they want good things, but we just can’t have them because of the mean ol’ Republicans.
Keep in mind that a good portion of the “Democrats” are Republicans who could not get through the GOP primaries.
And the Big Plus is that Rahm likes them.
Another Olympics, another opportunity to spy on Americans:
“United States military intelligence spied on Planned Parenthood and other domestic groups as part of US security preparations for the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, according to a recently declassified military document obtained by a civil liberties group Thursday.”
LINK.
Actual “watercooler” moment this morning:
Generic RW co-worker: “The Republicans did their best at the summit, but Obama will just do a socialist insurance takeover by decree.”
If only.
But if Obama just acts conciliatory enough, he can get bipartisanship and win over the love of the right wingers and be the most beloved president of all the united people of the postpartisan and postracial era, right? Good thing he doesn’t have to waste any energy on those f’ing r’s who have nowhere else to go.
If only he had the balls to do it
Betcha we could muster a million signatures of “NO– Obama don’t sign the Patriot Act re-up as-is” just like here: http://pol.moveon.org/virtualmarch10/action.html . MoveOn.org could just clone their web campaign and just update some text. Who is willing to ask for them that help and help put out the word?
MoveOn doesn’t have the balls. Start a Facebook group for it.
Obama’s backdoor deals with the insurance industry and Big PhRMA before negotiations started,
1. to take single-payer “off the table” and to consistently exclude single payer advocates from submitting written materials or participating in the debate over health care reform;
2. to guarantee that a mandate enforceable by the IRS would be in the final bill without a public option to control costs; and
3. to grant Big PhRMA a license for $80 billion to
stealraise prices without limitation for 10 years and to prohibit us from importing or buying Big PhRMA drugs in Canada for substantially cheaper prices;is an outrageous, abusive, financially irresponsible, indefensible, and cynical sellout to corporate America that all Americans should condemn. This bill enriches greedy profit driven insurance companies, Big PhRMA, and their shareholders at the expense of taxpayers and the sick in the name of reforming health care without substantively reforming health care.
Any democratic senator or representative who votes for Obama’s Health Care Reform bill should be targeted for defeat when he or she seeks reelection and the president must be primarried and defeated, if he seeks a second term.
Well between HCR wankery, dead celebs and killer Killer Whales there is not too much room to ponder deeply sad quotes like this one (from the cited article):
To speak to the career corruptees of Congress about concepts like guilty, innocent, proof, suspect, law, Constitution, Bill of Rights; you might as well be schooling a poodle on the differences between genitive and accusative grammar cases in Dutch.
They just want the $bone, and damn the daisies.
good post. not the kind of thing any frontpager is going to write about, unfortunately.
Doing the action mentioned in Comment 11 in concert with Dennis Kucinich would be a natural. What do you think, FDL?
Jim, allow me to point out that the Obama Admin was against such changes; as I was writing back in early 2008 after FISA went down with Obama’s vote helping: ”
‘No President is going to give up Executive privileges his predecessor obtained’.
Quite often House Dems are skewered over policies the Obama Admin doesn’t want enacted.
Good post. Totally agree. Have nothing more to add, except to say that I agree w/ubetchaiam. Once Cheney enacted those Exec Priv, no POTUS is ever gonna give ‘em up, esp not the corporatist POTUS BHO.
I think I saw maybe 60 sec of the HCR reconcilliation kabuki show, and it was more than I could tolerate. Tonight I caught another 30 seconds of John Walnuts! McCain blabbing about something in his concern-troll voice.
Puh-leese spare me the painful reminders of your pathetic existences. Can’t believe that we hired you wankers to do this job. Wish I had the power to fire ‘em all.
Regarding the hilariously named Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans agree that the police state is needed to keep the serfs in poverty and ignorance while pretending to protect them from the boogyman. This facilitates the transfer of what few assets remain among the serfs to the truly deserving rich fuckers. There are serfs on this very thread who still vote for Democrats. Hahahahahaha
Spineless pathetic fuck-ups. And one brain-damaged baseball player pissed off because he missed his basketball game stymies them all.
Absolutely fucking incredible…
one brain-damaged baseball player pissed off because he missed his basketball game stymies them all.
that game was today, and just ended.
Kentucky lost.
doG hates Jim Bunning.
Actually, it was Thursday night when Kentucky threw a beat down on South Carolina.
But yes, the ‘Cats also lost this afternoon to Tennessee in Knoxville.
oh.
thanks.
So what game was Bunning bitching about missing? Or was he just complaining that he might not be able to TRAVEL in time to see the game?
Or was he confused?
Thursday night’s South Carolina at Kentucky was on ESPN at 9PM eastern.
Although honestly, I’d figure Bunning as more of the early to bed type (but I guess he makes the exception to stay up when the ‘Cats are on)
Confused??? Shit ya have to have something up there to be confused with in the first place… It is obvious that the Gentleman from Kentucky left the game long ago.
Kentucky vs. South Carolina, basketball, on the teevee
silly old bastard hasn’t heard of DVR’s?
Spork was right in pointing out the need to front-page this issue, which flew under most of our radar screens this past week. And we should keep up the drumbeat; there should be (unfortunately, post hoc) hell to pay for this.
Well, the potential bright side is that this extension is “only” for another year. Maybe next year we can get some attention focused on it before the vote. Hearings would be good…
Y’all do know this is ON the FDL front-page, right?
I mean, really.
So much for obscure…
Yes, I wrote my comment in celebration of the front-paging, along with a corresponding comment on spork’s thread. I disagreed with the premise and tone of spork’s post but not his/her view of the importance of the issue.
Hey Ralphbon, I can now go to The Seminal just like old times!!!
Have you tried latetly? (You know, without going into InPrivate Browsing)
Dude, you beat me to it! I noticed this morning and was actually searching the site for a while, trying to find a way to contact you. At least we know what to do now if darkness descends again.
lol, yeah, I noticed a couple of days ago, and did the same thing. Searched thread after thread looking for a Ralphbon post to respond too.
I’m guessing this proves the problem was here then, doesn’t it? I mean I didn’t do anything to my machine to make it not work in the first place, or to make it work again now. Nothing.
You???
(I mean other than using InPrivateBrowsing I mean.)
Yeah, it was either some minor change to coding on the site or possibly some aspect of an automatic overnight Windows XP update. I doubt we’ll ever know, since this seems to have been an orphan disease confined to your system and mine.
Great post, Jim. Simply wonderful: where does the focus belong, people?
I guess we don’t have to focus on Reid and Lincoln. Was reading yesterday that no one has ever been reelected when their numbers are as low as these two. It apparently is just impossible to regain any momentum. So we can focus on getting rid of some other Dems – which makes more sense to me than putting all our attention on Rs. Would be nice to show the Dems that we can do it.
Reid’s drawn a teabagger independent in the general, sure to pull votes from the GOP. And the leading GOP has problems of her own, having paid a $200,000 bonus to her husband while laying off a quarter of their casino staff.
Don’t count Harry out yet. As much as I’d like to move on to other races, Harry has a history of bouncing back. He won reelection in 1998 by something like 98 votes (against Ensign, who then went on to win his own seat in 2000).
What is interesting is that only 9 Democrats voted no.
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll073.xml
Costello
Filner
Herseth Sandlin
Kucinich
Lee (CA)
McDermott
Payne
Space
Woolsey
234 Democrats voted for. Only one Republican Cao did.
Thanks for that. I should have looked that up. Wow, so now Republicans are against the Patriot Act? Or did they want a longer extension? We have truly entered bizarro world.
That video ought to be entertaining to replay over and over for their voters. Heh.
That was the Intelligence Appropriations Act, not THE PATRIOT ACT. There were a number of Democrats who voted No on THE PATRIOT ACT (it is an acronym) who voted Yes on the Intelligence Appropriations Act. One of them was NC New Democrat Rep. David Price.
You are correct. I thought it was part of the Intelligence Authorization bill. How naive of me.
The real story is that Harry Reid took the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act from the House HR 3961 and as far as I can tell stripped out its content and substituted via the amendment SA 3331 the Patriot Act extensions in its place. The House then passed it (roll call 67)
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll067.xml
What confused me was that the House list of roll call votes still calls this the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act.
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/ROLL_000.asp
(see roll call 67)
This bill had bipartisan backing: 162 Democrats and 153 Republicans voting for; 87 Democrats and 10 Republicans voting against.
Sorry for my previous error.
Wow, that’s some major trojan horse-style legislative engineering.
If only they would create a shell bill called “The Cute Puppies are Too Cute Act” and fill it with Single Payer.
I see a lot of “ain’t it awful” and not much idea of how to move the progressive agenda forward. And why are there so few progressive primary candidates against Republicans, Blue Dogs, New Democrats, and Conservadems?
If you look at the growth of the conservative movement, it marched from the precincts up through the party, slowly knocking out first liberal Republican, then moderate Republican, then sane conservative Republicans, building a farm team, and taking national office. They have reached the apotheosis of conservatism, which means they are all vulnerable given the right issues, message, and candidate. And their very lockstep behavior, which made them vulnerable in 2006 and 2008 has not gone away in 2010.
But we keep carping about what the guys inside the Beltway are doing. Change the politics, change the Congress, and you will change what they will be able to do.
To think that I have been standing in line at the polls to vote for these spineless losers. No more. Maybe these country needs to reach the depths that we know the Republicans will take it and then as a consequence of the social unrest we will finally get a government that represents our interests.
We’ve been there. Done that. Bottoming out doesn’t get anything but tighter corporate feudalism in a police state that will take 50 years to undo. See: Soviet Union 1917-1993. Spain 1936-1975.
You’ll get Xe patrolling your streets. The U.S. will not have a revolution. Too fat, lazy, fearful, overworked and ignorant. No, the United States will have to eventually be liberated from without. Change is unlikely from within.
“…so what do we expect from them anyway?”
How about: more sellouts?
All the way to them getting their asses kicked up around their shoulders, this November. :o(
Wondering when the rest of the progressives are going to realize what took me a long, long, long time to realize too (and still don’t much like it). But this Democratic Party is NOT at all interested in our point of view, but they’ll gladly take our votes.
It’s long past time we stopped giving them those. But too many here are just as afraid of those mean ‘ol Republicans as the Democratic politicians mentioned in the post.
If we part from the idea that Obama’s broad belief about HCR closely resembles that of the Rep right then several things become apparent. This belief being that monopolized private insurers guided by the profit motive are entitled to manage the financing of health care and that the public should divert more of its wealth to them in order that these insurers receive even greater profits while leaving the health needs of the public unmet.
We know that this is his belief because that is what he has proposed.
Given this shared approach with the Rs it makes sense for Obama to openly bid the Rs to share in this enterprise because after all it is pretty much what they and the health lobby want. And further by openly seeking their cooperation he makes the R’s look incalcitrant if they refuse to join in and wins some favor with the public by his attempt of seeking bipartisanship.
At the same time it makes sense for the Rs to dig their heels in because at worst their recalcitrance ends in the passage of HCR they can believe in or at best leaves the staus quo remains in place which does not markedly differ from Obama’s proposed HCR in any case.
Left out of this rosy scenario by design of course is the public’s unmet health needs and the fact that they are mandated to divert their wealth to privat insurers through forced purchases of insurance and through subsidy payments to people that can’t afford the policies but have to buy them any way.
We can not put up with this, for the left and the country the bottom line is that private health insurer’s profits have to be challenged by the inclusion of public financed not for profit plans, because for profit health insurers are the main cause of the problems that plague our health system. Anything short of this is not acceptable.
Exactly spot on, and that’s why I insist to those that say pass it anyway and improve it later that when this passes, it will end any and all hope of EVER getting rid of the for profit insurance industry in our health care system. They will have grown to become “too big to fail” and the only way real health care reform is ever going to occur is if we get rid of that totally unnecessary (and wasteful) middleman and profit. If the Senate bill passes, that day will never come.
So those who insist passing this thing is right, know that they are also insisting that single payer will NEVER occur. Make them own it.
In no other advanced industrialized country in the world is health insurance for profit legal. In the U.S. the people are no longer citizens but rather customers. Each individual is a revenue stream for the corporations.
The diferring approaches to HCR proposed by the left including the country at large and the right including Obama, allows for the testing of the cucial distintion of which method of financing health care costs works best: monopolized for profit insurance or not for profit publicly financed insurance. It is important to frame the situation in this way and to commit to one way or the other.
It is fair to say that the outcome of this test has already been amply determined by other rational countries and they have rendered their preference for a single not for profit insurance payer of health care long ago. So we on the left have a little advantage in this wager as to which method works best.
The point is to maintain clearly that the left finds the root cause of the US health system to be the private for profit insurance scheme, not to mention a monopolized one. That is why if we tolerate the exclusion of a not for profit publicly financed health insurance scheme as a part of HCR the left stands for nothing at all.
Here is the list of the “progressives” who voted for the unreformed Patriot Act, continuuing the nullification of the Fourth Amendment:
Marcy Kaptur of Ohio
Bennie Thompson of Mississippi
Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas
Alan Grayson of Florida
Corrine Brown of Florida
Charles Rangel of New York
Louise Slaughter of New York
Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of Michigan
John Hall of New York
Luis Gutierrez of Texas
Robert Brady of Pennsylvania
Bobby Rush of Illinois
Lucille Roybal-Allard of California
Eric Massa of New York
Chakka Fattah of Pennsylvania
Danny Davis of Illinois
Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas
John Conyers of Michigan
William Lacy Clay of Missouri
Jesse Jackson, Jr of Illinois
Andre Carson of Indiana
Diane Watson of California
Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut
James Moran of Virginia
CPC member Pete Stark did not take part in the vote yesterday. All other members of the caucus voted against the Patriot Act
http://irregulartimes.com/inde...
This list sickens me. The only possible consolation, and it still stinks but may be pragmatically correct, is that to vote otherwise would hand Rethug opponents a major talking point this November. At least I hope these guys, at least Grayson and Massa fer chrissakes, would vote otherwise when the one year extension runs out. But, maybe I’m just dreamin’ . . .
whoa? what the hell has worrying about fascist lies accomplished? dukakis and kerry and gore were all supposed to be electable cuz they weren’t DFH’s, and the fascists found something else to lie about –
they lied about Max Cleland!
their attacks never have any basis in any reality but ONE –
the reality of the completely incompetent dim-o-shit messaging against lying fascists.
rmm.
i’m writing grayson. and hinojosa. wtf?
Thanks for getting the info for us.
Wow. Just wow.
That’s got to be the most depressing list I’ve ever seen.
When are we going to realize there really aren’t any progressives in the D party? They’re all just talking the talk but none, or very nearly none, are walking the walk.
Damned. John Conyers. Damned.
Is there maybe some financial benefit for some corporations that I’m not aware of to this Patriot act thing?? Do teh telecoms get paid everytime the govt snoops??
This is the only reason I can think of that some of these so-called progressives are voting yes. They’re getting campaign dollars from someone benefitting from the Patriot Act.
telecoms do get paid, alot, for the hundreds of thousands of files they turn over to the government.
they have large departments devoted to servicing the various requests, and no doubt they are profit centers.
but that doesn’t explain why all those faux ‘progressive’ (D)’s voted for Patriot renewal.
another question is, why would they not?
Congresscritters have no principles, and the activist ‘base’ of their party has taken vows to continue to vote (D), no matter what, forever.
so what have they got to lose?
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Lewis Maltby’s Can They Do That?: Retaking Our Fundamental Rights in the Workplace hosted by Tula Connell
OT but important.
A merger between Election Systems and Diebold is near completion, giving Election Systems, which has a terrible record, full responsibility for controlling the collection and counting of 70% of all votes nationwide.
In some ways, this story dwarfs each and all of the other issues we are discussing. Which probably explains why none of the MSM are reporting on it. Heads up, Firepups.
i am so glad you wrote this post jim and that it got put where i’d see it although i often scan through the seminal posts to see what you’ve written.
Thanks.