This is the main reason that 2016 seriously needs to be a street fight for control of the Democratic Party. In 2016, the conservative wing of the party will have been in the driver’s seat of the DNC for 24 years. We’ve not had anything resembling an actual progressive Democratic administration since LBJ. If we let the rank-and-file fall in behind Hillary or some other DLC or OFA leftover without a bloody, grueling fight of historical proportions in the streets and on the convention floor, we really deserve the party we’ve had since 1992.

Your claim that you respect the rule of law is kind of laughable. You’re aware that assassinations and killing civilians without due process are against both the laws of the United States and international law, right?

Watch any documentary of Clinton’s re-election campaign. He was routinely caught on camera discussing strategies for how to bypass campaign finance law with advisors and contributors during the 1996 campaign. In light of that, it is really hard to argue that he only “seems” corrupt because he had a Republican Congress for much of his term. (Which, surprise, surprise, is the same argument O-bots used.)

The Democrats lost Congress for the first time in a generation because of the DLC takeover of the Democratic Party, not because Clinton was “too liberal.” An actually liberal Democratic Party held both houses of Congress for most of the post-war period just fine. The DLC just chose to prove once and for all that the public will, in fact, always vote for the actual Republican when given the choice between a Republican and a right-wing Democrat.

“If that were true, Clinton wouldn’t have raised taxes on the rich.”
He raised taxes on the rich merely by a few percentage points during his presidency. That is a drop in the bucket compared to what he did for the super-rich, such as signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

“downsized the military”
Nobody in the post-war period has ever “downsized” the military. At the very most, they have just not contributed to its monstrous growth. At no point during the Clinton presidency did the United States ever not, say, maintain a force equal to the combined armed forces of every other industrialized Western nation on Earth.

“passed meaningful gun control”
The only moneyed interest this pissed off was the NRA/the gun manufacturer’s lobby. Those people were never going to vote for Clinton or cut him big checks after he left office. The risk-reward ratio here clearly benefited Clinton.

“taken meaningful steps to preserve the environment”
Um, outside of setting aside land for monuments, Clinton’s environmental record is not great. The amount of “energy produced on public lands”–code for “public lands raped by the energy industry for private gain”–either kept pace with or exceeded his immediate GOP predecessors.

“and begun paying off the deficit.”
First, “paying of the deficit” actually means “austerity,” which is the last thing our economy needed after the Reagan-Bush fiasco. Second, he did no such thing. Most of the “budget surplus” he left behind was comprised of fictional revenue gains from deregulating Wall St and the tech bubble that speculation in the wake of that created. The last few market contractions–including the one we are currently in–can be directly attributed, in part, to Clinton’s actions.

“Unless he forgot he was bought and sold.”
He never forgot, he was just better at hiding his true colors than Obama. Namely, because he always made sure to at least have a progressive veneer covering his Thatcherite raping of the public sector.

The main problem with the Democratic Party can be broken down like this:

1) The “Team Blue” mentality. For the few months every other year in which there is no major election on the immediate horizon, you do have organized “progressives” in the Party. However, most of them come in just two flavors: Faux Prog and Spineless Simpering Fool. Both flavors have this in common: an al-encompassing fear of the Republican Party.

The Faux Progs are really smug, entitled establishment assholes who don’t want to admit that’s what they are until they are at least 40. You can tell them apart from other kinds of activists because they are, at heart, bullies. They talk all about “respect” and “inclusion,” until you start to question Party hierarchy . . . then they start to call you names, claim you just sit at home on your computer all day while they do ‘actual work’ and regurgitate Party talking points until you either agree or just give up hope of a rational dialogue and go away.

The Spineless Simpering Fools are the people who actually do have progressive values but cave to the bullies every single fucking time in the hope that, someday, a movement will emerge like magic where nobody in the group says anything mean to the other people in the group. Generation after generation goes by with them never taking time to realize the Faux Progs become the fucking Party leadership every fucking time because they never actual stand up and fight.

Both of them are basically motivated by an all encompassing fear of the GOP. The Faux Progs use it as a pretext for putting aside their silly liberal ideas to ‘get things done’ and the SSFs buy that line of reasoning.

2) OFA now has an iron grip on the national Party infrastructure. Meaning that they will be the one choosing the next nominee, unless the base actually stands up and demands that they leave. Good luck to you if you think that’s going to happen.

Honestly, I think the best way to pressure the Democratic Party to change is not from within due to those two things–notice how groups like DFA ALWAYS back the Party elite, even though their stated mission is to challenge those people?–the way to change them is to do what third party activists do and create places for them to go. It’s not useless. If it were, the establishment wouldn’t have spent Bush’s entire first term crucifying Nader. Nader frightened them because progs actually broke with the Party in small yet statistically significant numbers. You have to nip that shit in the bud. (A ‘weed can become a tree’ and all that.)

Given that, yes, this election shows the demographics are irreversibly on the side of a progressive movement, I think it would be worthwhile to go and help the Green party build infrastructure that isn’t laughable–which they are actually now starting to do, Stein actually had ballot access in most states and was denied matching funds she qualified for in violation of law.

The other thing I’d do is join the Republican Party. In states in which they are dead, like California, I don’t think that’s a laughable proposition. You can let the crazy teabaggers have the handful of rural counties that are still reliably Republican. If you think a local Party in a major city is going to turn away activists that aren’t on Medicare yet, I think you’re wrong.

Romney was the only guy in the race rich enough to self-fund, that is why he was always the favorite to win, even before it was apparent how comically weak the rest of the field was. If we go with the conventional narrative (that the people who would have been actually respectable Republican presidential contenders sat this one out because they didn’t realize just how weak the president is–he’s running against freaking Mitt Romney and barely winning in the polling) I have to imagine that a lot of these people are kicking themselves.

However, if that were the case, I have to imagine that the GOP PTB wouldn’t have worked to crush Paul’s influence over the convention. If there were that kind of buyer’s remorse over letting Romney run away with the nomination when the Democratic incumbent turned out to be weaker than anyone anticipated, I think they would have probably let his little stunt play out to appease him and then worked with him to get someone they actually liked in the top slot during a brokered convention. I think Romney being a self-funder, the field being as weak as it was, and the GOP just going along with a disaster of this magnitude all point to the idea that Wall St. knows they already have their guy in office and the actual contenders knew that there would be no funding of a serious challenger from without.

Mayor Emanuel basically pushed through laws that make negotiations related to compensation the only legal grounds for a strike by CTU. That is why the frame CTU is using to capture their concerns is based on compensation. If they went on strike explicitly to improve conditions in the schools they would have little to no legal ground to stand on.

Thanks for the kind words. I do, however, have to disagree that the “independent” nature of the school boards in Texas make it harder for the boards to steal money. I worked in San Antonio for two years. Conflicts of interest and graft connected to the local political operatives are rampant in ISDs. The only reason it isn’t a bigger issue is that the major political contributors in Texas state and municipal politics happen to also own controlling interests in the television stations and newspapers or have friends who do.

If most people knew just how corrupt the local political parties, school boards, and local governments are, I think they would be shocked. Putting any public service under direct control of the mayor’s office in any city is a huge mistake, it’s begging someone without any morals–like Rahm Fucking Emanuel–to make money off the back end of said service by awarding appointments and contracts to contributors who happen to have stakes or business associates or interests with stakes in said service. If the aims and message of the strike spread awareness of how these things work, I will count it a great success.

It’s Kaplan. Kaplan is the major Emanuel/Democratic funder who profits directly from standardized testing.

The point of the block grant program is to force the burden of funding of the program onto the states and eventually the patients themselves. I’m not sure you noticed, but 99% of us have been living through a demand crisis and several banking scandals that have left municipal and state governments completely strapped for cash. If you force the state to completely shoulder the burden of a former federal program in those conditions, you’re basically demanding to lower the overall quality of the program, including care. (If a state is broke due to lower revenues due to historic unemployment and less and less money coming from the federal government by choice, do you think adding liabilities is going to yeild good results?)

Also, on this and other threads, I keep seeing people refer to Julian Castro as someone who restores their hope in the Democratic Party. This is extremely worrying–it seems like 2008 playing all over again. The Castro brothers are corrupt as the day is long. Neither San Antonio City Council, nor the position of Mayor, nor the Texas State Legislature pay salaries to its officeholders. The Castros have only been out of school for a little over a decade and have been career politicians and non-practicing attorneys holding non-paying elective office for much of that time. Yet they live in nice houses, dress well, and live well. That should raise red flags for people paying attention. (Hint: The man who manages their political affairs runs his business out of the Mayor’s office, has most of his staff on the city payroll, and is really, really good friends with developers, lobbyists, and an energy industry representative in the state.)

Outside of the corruption of the brothers themselves, Joaquin was outed in testimony in the redistricting trial as one of the two Democrats who cut deals with the Texas GOP to gut Gonzalez’s district and get rid of Dogget’s in return for getting a Democratic vote dump for a Hispanic running in San Antonio. Then, of course, all of their associates in politics are even more corrupt than they are… mark my words, if the Castros prove to be viable national figures, the future of the Party is pretty fucking bleak.

I will never get why so many people harp on the importance of Supreme Court nominations in this election. Obama inherited two liberal Republican appointees who basically stayed on the Court as long as they did to deny Bush more nominations. He replaced one with someone who had been on a Republican short list for the same position and the other with a person whose career at Harvard Law School was characterized by a worrying lack of diversity in staffing, i.e. he replaced two people who were left-wing by modern standards with “New Democrat” types. Given that, on top of that history, people like Cass Sunstein are rumored to be on queue for the next nominations should he win reelection, I really just do not get why people hold onto the hope that an Obama win means a better SCOTUS lineup than Romney would give us.

Now, the lie that the Obama Administration wants to gut Medicare benefits is no more believable than the lie that Obama wants to take the word “God” from our coins.

“The lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.” ~ Tennyson

Is the GOP claim that the PPACA’s restructuring of Medicare cut spending on the patient side of the program a lie? Yes. Is the claim that Obama wants to gut Medicare outside of that a lie? No. Obama, like all corporate whores in the Party and the stupid, stupid well-meaning people who happen to work for them, claims we should raise the eligibility age for Medicare because “people are living longer.” This sounds reasonable… until you look at the data and realize that only the rich are really seeing significant gains in life expectancy. Obama, simply put, wants to raise the bar on Medicare until most working people will die before they are eligible. That’s arguably as bad as what Ryan and Romney want to do, just using a different approach.

I also live in Texas. Vote for Stein. The Texas Democratic Party is fucking retarded, and I’d argue deliberately so at this point. Their big plan to mobilize Latinos is the “Promesa Project,” which is basically the National Party’s GOTV program from 2010 with Spanish subtitles. It’s not going to be competitive. At all. (Also despite both Texas-based national co-chairs being from San Antonio and one of them being the keynote speaker at the DNCC, they’re going to lose Bexar County in the general. Democratic primary turnout was literally half that of the Republican turnout.)

I’m not betraying my values, I’m voting for Jill Stein. I believe that a vote has to be earned and “I’m not as shitty as the other guy on the social issues that do not matter to our mutual funders” isn’t a winning argument to me. Neither is the Supreme Court argument. Obama replaced two liberal GOP appointees with DLCers/Right-wing Democrats. The choice on that score isn’t if the Court will lurch further to the right, it’s a choice of what flavor of right-wing we get.

I am one of those people. I was an Edwards supporter, but I genuinely believed in the Obama 2008 campaign. It seemed like every educated kid in the country with his or her heart in the right place was on the campaign and health care was my main issue. (The Party ran on single-payer for two cycles straight and Obama openly mocked the Heritage Foundation’s policy template on the campaign trail.)

However, the minute Obama got into office it was: “Hey, you know what would be FUCKING AWESOME? Cutting Social Security, raising the eligibility of Medicare so that most working people will be in the ground or on their deathbeds before they qualify, and spending two years pretending to fight over a backdoor bailout of the health insurance industry that their own lobbyists wrote! Also, lets do everything in our power to alienate the base by governing exactly like Republicans and openly insulting them in public at EVERY opportunity.”

Condescend to people who have actual values much? People like you are the standardbearers for the current Democratic Party. “We don’t actually care what he the candidate does, or if it resembles–in any way–something that is legal or a recognizably Democratic policy, we just want to win. (Bankers; smug, entitled white children of privilege; and Yellow Dogs, queue here.)”

They treated the Paulites worse in 2008 and McCain barely lost the election in terms of the popular vote, despite Palin imploding almost immediately after the convention and having no money. Romney is going to have an insane amount of money and most MSM pundits are either stupid enough to think Ryan is as smart as he thinks he is or is paid enough to pretend to think that. I think it won’t have an effect.

However, on a side note, my personal experience is that most “libertarians” (I prefer to call them what they are, fantastically delusional market anarchists) are both gun nuts and racists. (This seems to be Paul’s experience as well, given the content of the newsletters he used to recruit followers.) You generally have to go to a major city to find people who self-describe that way out of actual thought–or as close to it as these people come–the rest are generally the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.