should you take up the challenge,

and wish to have another stave in your arsenal,

there’s this from our democratic president’s acceptance speech to the democratic nat’l convention on the anniversary of martin luther king’s great “i have a dream” speech on the washington mall –

you know, that washington mall that is the real, the one-and-only, the true town hall meeting place in america.

well, our president-to-be did not seem to know, or more in character, was to politically fearful and scheming to acknowledge that fact, and so put it this way:

“…And it is that promise that 45 years ago today brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream…”

“on A mall in washington” wrote our english major prez?

and thus did a president-to-be ever so carefully and ever so skillfully diminish his public admiration for an event and a speech that both stand as one of this nation’s proudest moments.

i don’t know who will win virginia or north carolina.

i think equating those two to florida is wishful thinking, even given the arithmetic.

but i have to say, oldfatguy, that you are right in your injunction – there is no reason to vote for either.

but wait – and here is the challenge of intellectual honesty to “progressives” – president obama has berayed almost every promise he made you, and almost every promise he made to liberals like me.

so the obvious reaction should be retaliation against obama, possibly by not voting (which is entirely sensible and entirely permissable despite the hocus-pocus socially-correct contrary admonitions one hears when proposing this choice),

or by voting for romney, former governor of massachusetts – formerly (pre-romney) said to be the most liberal state in the u.s.

the repubs maintain control of their sheep by pointing to the “kenyan liberal muslim socialist”.

but guess what?

there are herds and herds and millions of democratic sheep (are you one of those, dear reader?)

how do democrats keep THEIR sheep in line?

why, the same way – scare the shit out of the sheep

with some boogey-message, e.g.,

- “think of the supreme court”,

- “think of women’s rights” ( not that democratic leaders, or for that matter, most female democratic voters, show any real passion for this issue)

- think of social security,

- think of jobs.

firedoglake really should retain you and this column.

there is way too much very relevant info missed that the standard fdl columnists simply are cannot cover.

in addition, this column, continued, would be a great resource for “diaries” or whatever name they go by here at fdl.

it would also be a great resource for regular fdl columnists.

in any event,

thanks, fatster, for your very informative, interesting, and competent postings.

fatster -

i hadn’t seen this column before. how long have you been writing it?

i think it’s great your talents are being widely shared thru this very useful column.

what crap you spew.

i have had several primary care physicians over the decades, in several cities, who clearly were most interested in their patients, not in their bottom line.

on the other hand, as a personal revelation about self, it’s nice to know you ski at veil – with ambulance chasers.

i think you are very right about sotomayor.

i cannot understand how commenters here can be so oblivious to what she is actually saying.

you badly misinterpret sotomayor’s point.

i believe this extraordinarily “eccentric” legal deal is the real achilles heel of the obama re-election campaign effort.

i find it hard to imagine (but not impossible) that the republican candidate would not go very hard on the obama admin on this isue, even though they certainly have done the same beginning in 2009.

imagine;

- the president has repeatedly let the banks get away with (_______) behavior without holding them accountable in any way.

- the prez’s sec of housing was authorized (and ordered) to assure completition of a long-languishing “states’ attny generals” deal, which was in fact a disguised white house deal to let banks and mortgage servicers off the criminal hook for previous criminal behavior

- the president has discouraged ag holder from pursuing likely criminal behavior against officials of major american banks.

- the prez’s ag and that ag’s chief of criminal prosecutions at doj, together, as corporate attorney’s, wrote a document legally justifying bank procedures with respect to cdo’s.

- the prez has left in place the head of sec’s criminal division despite the fact that he was an attorney for a bank which initiated the cdo’s scam.

- president obama appointed to head the securities and exchange commission mary schapiro, whose background guaranteed she would not be actively “anti-bank”

- the hamp program from dept of treasury became, effectively, a farce that helped few homeowner, but the prez put no pressure on treasury to make it work.

this is but a partial list of president obama’s thoroughly incompetent/corrupt handling of the american banking/credit/foreclosure crisis.

as i said to begin, this is the republican path to victory. all i can figure is that chess-player, poker-player, obama calculated that the republicans would never dare raise this issue to voters.

was that a smart bet?

stay tuned.

i would think that romney trailing in october would hammer away at this argument, but i’m not a republican.

don’t waste your time fretting about international scores; that’s comparing apples and oranges.

furthermore, if you are really worried about getting your money’s worth for your tax dollars spent on education,

ask yourself if you have met a competent professional in any of a large number of fields whose recruits would have had to come from our system of training children and young adults.

if so, by what “unmetricated” miracle did these students prove competent as adults?

you can’t!!

trust the teachers to do their jobs, and require only that each school develop its own evaluation regimen.

get the state and the federal government entirely out of education evaluation.

the bureaucrats at the top of local, state, and national educational bureaucracies are extremely child-unfriendly and teacher-unfriendly.

their concern, as a group, seems to be for their status and their paycheck.

the republican party is self-destructing over its intemperance and prudishness regarding one of the fundamental of adult biological imperatives, sex.

were these folks this stupid in high school?

or have they “grown” since then?

cromwellian puritans?

or american taliban?

here’s a case study in the damage value-added evaluation can do to a teacher and to a school and to a school system:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative–motivating-and-fired/2012/02/04/gIQAwzZpvR_story.html?hpid=z2

pay close attention to the evasive, legalistic responses of school system administrators to this young teaches pleas for a hearing.

if there is a group of professionals more meritorious of a guaranteed parking place in hell than our run-of-the-mill public school system administrators, college administrators, deans and provosts.

i’d like to know who they are.

occasionally, not nearly often enough, contemporary american society gets lucky. so it is with the early death of andrew bratbart – republican cutthroat, dishonest videographer, right-wing propagandist.

his family and friends may mourn his death. there is absolutely no reason for any other american to do so.

stay planted, dude; you’re a lot more useful to society growing grass.

at this point in the long-running euro saga, it seems likely to me that the dissolution of the euro is both desired and expected by leaders in europe, especially those in the german, french, and benelux countries.

apparently what is at issue is who will shoulder the blame.

greece or another of the PZE, (“peripheral zone euro”, which i consider preferable to the invidious “PIIGS”) are being squeezed to take the fall, leaving german, french, benelux politicians “blame-free” when all hell breaks loose.

consumers are the goose that lays the golden egg in modern economies.

it’s amazing to me how poorly received this axiom is among policy makers in modern economies.