If Obama thinks putting up charts like this is going to “rebut criticism from the right” he’s as stupid as his health care strategy of championing the Heritage Foundation Plan would suggest.

It’s pathetic that Obama could do such a horrendous job of standing for anything that people could remotely get behind a corporate raider like Mitt Romney as an agent for hope after the biggest failure of the free market in 80 years.

Remember when Obama stood up at a podium and railed against the Professional Left after Democrats got their asses kicked in 2010, for the PL being unsatisfiable whiners because they were mad that healthcare reform “didn’t have a public option that would only have affected a million or so people” and his “sweeping” financial reform POS “didn’t address some obscure derivative rule”?

Well, how did that work out? Now he’s going to get up for re-election to defend a healthcare bill that most of the country dislikes, wants repealed and may get struck down by the Supreme Court when even Scalia said during arguments that providing healthcare through taxes would be constitutionally acceptable. And he’s going to defend his inadequate financial reform as something that represents standing up to Wall Street when JPMorgan is on stage as Exhibit A of the fact that nothing has changed and the banks that were too big to fail in 2008 are even bigger today.

The Republicans should have been facing electoral extinction after 2008, and 98% of the US would have loved to see Wall Street put to the guillotine. All it took was Obama to suck up to the savvy businessmen to bring the Republicans back from the dead.

The 2012 DNC convention will take place in Charlotte, with President Obama set to accept the nomination at Bank of America Stadium

That seems kind of right when you think about it.

LOL! Exactly what I was thinking. This is exactly the kind of thing the Democrats love running up the flagpole right before an election. Bank of America really does not care whether their pawns say they support marriage equality or not, and same-sex people can still have their Social Security and Medicare cut by Bowles-Simpson just after the election.

Maybe Obama will evolve all the way back to where he was in 1996. Who knows.

Quote from Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock: ‘I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.’

Well, that’s what happens already. See 2010, when the Democrats passed the Republican health care bill for them. God knows why he is upset, but we understand for electoral purposes, the Republicans have to act like they are.

Oh dear, Russ Feingold has incurred the wrath of the CPC. They can be counted on to be as strident on opposing cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as they were in their insistence that they would never pass a health care bill without a public option.

This is basically why President Obama has adopted the incredibly weaselly position that he is still “evolving” on gay marriage. With the country so evenly divided the political thinking is that actively supporting marriage equality would hurt him with half the electorate that opposes it, but it won’t really gain him anything.

Well really, this approach summarizes his position about anything – economics (the Republicans are worse), holding Wall Street accountable (the Republicans are worse), health care (the Republicans are worse), free trade (the Republicans are worse) etc. etc. Absolutely no one respects someone who stands for nothing aside from not being the other guy, and it engenders no loyalty. Being evenly divided on whatever the issue is doesn’t even come into the political calculation – 95% of the US would have been delighted to put Wall Street to the guillotine after 2008, but Obama chose to throw his body on the grenade for them. “I’m all that stands between you and the pitchforks” comes to mind – he didn’t care what the people with the pitchforks thought and expected them to vote for Democrats on account of his being “less bad” anyway. Didn’t quite work out.

Having ridden that strategy to its predictable result in 2010, you would think at a certain point, the urge to try something different purely out of self-interest would kick in, because that strategy disgusts so many people that might have voted for you that they lump both parties together and don’t bother to vote.

And not to minimize the importance of gay marriage, but this is exactly the kind of issue the Democrats like to run up the flagpole around election time to distract liberals from how absolutely screwed they get from both D and R parties. The 1% really don’t give a shit if there is gay marriage or not, they just want the corporate welfare and free trade trains to keep on rolling, Wall Street wants the bipartisan bailout mechanism well-oiled, and the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson committee is remaining geared up to ‘fix’ entitlements.

It costs the Democratic Party nothing to throw this out there, because their paymasters really don’t care about it one way or the other.

Obama wouldn’t know a principle if one kicked him in the ass. And he’s a political idiot to boot – kind of like taking pains to pass a Republican health care bill to make them happy, then watch them run against a corporate handout as a socialist takeover anyway.

So just a few more Friedman Units and the “goal of Afghan forces taking the lead in over 50 percent of districts” will have been achieved. What does that goal even mean?

Agree on the stupidity of wanting bipartisanship, disagree with the impossibility of delivering change. If Obama had wanted to take a stand on anything and call out obstructionists and point out corrupt problems in the system, he had the popular support to get the population to buy into his claims and stand for things the public wanted. Even if the popular legislation in question didn’t pass, people would have known who to hold accountable in the next election for it.

Obviously he didn’t have any credibility on delivering Change afer green-lighting trillions to Wall Street and making transparently corrupt deals with special interests and corrupt members of Congress to force everyone to buy for-profit health insurance. But there was a time when he did, and he chose never to use it.

That is really clever.

The last raise in the minimum wage was under… (drumroll please) … George W. Bush. Sure, Obama campaigned on the concept of raising it, but he clearly had no intention of doing anything about it – it wouldn’t have been hard with historic Congressional majorities, but funneling money to Goldman Sachs took precedence.

Maybe raising the minimum wage will join his list of abandoned pledges that he will campaign on addressing in the first year of his second term, along with immigration reform, a public health insurance option, legislation facilitating union organization, being against free trade with the likes of Columbia…

If nothing else in this depressing election, it’ll be funny to hear Obama running around pledging to do in his second term what he pledged to do in his first… when he had huge Democratic majorities.

MR. CARNEY: Again, I think that the DADT repeal is instructive here in terms of the approach that we’re taking at this time.

Shit, eleven-dimensinal chess strikes again. Apparently the plan is to lose another 63 Democratic House seats, and re-extend the Bush tax cuts and estate tax in exchange for Republicans doing some “gay thing” like DADT rather than just repeal it with Democrats (or sign the executive order in this case) when they had the opportunity.

The mice can vote for either the white cats or the black cats. Either way, it’s cats…

So, as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember that the positions I’m taking now on the budget and a whole host of other issues … [20 years ago] would have been squarely centrist.” It’s Republicans that have shifted.

Actually, it means that 20 years ago, they’d be firmly on the right… since Republicans proposed these ideas. But I’m sure he knows that, he just doesn’t want to say it.

There’s a big difference between access to health care and access to (private, for-profit) health insurance.

“Half a loaf”? Maybe Obama’s Supreme Court judges should try a little harder to conceal their bias than quoting Democratic Party boilerplate verbatim.

Anyways, it’s not half a loaf – it’s a poisoned loaf, and it’s so God-awful that it should be thrown out. Mandating purchase of private for-profit insurance is a permanent barrier to the actual solution which is to get rid of private for-profit insurance (which is pretty fucking politically popular to boot). Obama has no one to blame but himself for this state of affairs. If he wanted universal health care, he should have proposed and gone to bat for universal health care, not force fealty and subsidies to a useless industry. But he didn’t really want universal health care, he just wanted something he could plausibly call a health care bill.

He went at it half-assed by choice, and here he is now – with a bill that’s hated by the public, that doesn’t work, that few people buy into, and that faces repeal and most people polled want repealed. How “pragmatic” was that? Even Scalia pointed out that the government providing health care directly through taxes was better and more constituionally acceptable.

Geez, I was floored by that too. Can’t believe I wanted to say “Right the fuck on” after Scalia said something.