Let me address a couple of points on your list…

You say that Romney will gut Social Security faster than Obama. I believe that is wrong. With Romney, Dems will fight for the program. With Obama, they will support “their” president.

You say that nominees to the Supreme Court will be worse with Romney. I’ll grant that is possible, but the fact is that no nominee will be seated on the high court with the acquiescence of Senate Democrats. — advice and consent of the senate — unless you think that Republicans will control more than 60 seats (which I just don’t see.) Needing to get a nominee through the Senate means that Romney would have to be moderate…unless Dems just roll over, in which case the problem is the Dems.

Banksters and finance? You say that Romney is a disaster whereas Obama is merely “craven.” Disagree totally. No one is more subservient to the banksters than Obama. It isn’t possible to be more subservient to these groups than Obama. Obama has worked to actively protect and prop up these groups and any appearance of effective regulation by the Obama admin is pure illusion.

Obama is a better Republican than the Republicans. Between him and Romney, I think we might actually get a more progressive result with Romney. Dems may fight Romney. For Obama, they roll over. (That said, I am not voting for either of these men. I’m voting my conscience, and my conscience will not allow it.)

So why is he beating on the base?

Because Obama wants his base to be Republican.

there is no left or progressive party in the US

I’m not so sure about that.

This money would actually go towards non-DoD stuff for a change.

Yup. The TSA. The Department of Homeland Security. Banks. Wall Street. Outfitting your local law enforcement with more paramilitary gear. Domestic drones. Increased surveillance. And other good stuff!

…the point is that Pelosi’s action has really damaged the ability to come to a decent resolution on the revenue side at the end of the year.

The point I think you know but don’t really address here is that Pelosi is not saying anything that wasn’t coordinated with and approved by the Obama White House on the Bushbama tax cuts. Pelosi is a consummate Democratic pol, and what she’s doing here is carrying water for the administration. She most certainly is not speaking out of turn. If she had been, she’d have had to walk those comments on the tax cuts back almost immediately. And she hasn’t.

This is where Obama intends to go. And Pelosi’s job is to put it out there and make it the new “centrist” Dem baseline. I’d bet on it…and I am not a betting man.

I think what must be confronted here is that Pelosi knows better than to speak out of turn with Obama in the White House. If you want to find the source of bumping up to 1 million as the baseline, you need to look at a different house. The White House.

Booker’s problem was that he let everyone behind the curtain see who was holding his puppet strings.

Ah yup. That’s what I said from day one. People are upset because Booker pulled back the curtain. Apparently what “progressives” and “Democrats” are wanting is for their politicians to soothe them with sweet little lies. It’s “Pay no attention to what the Dems do, pay attention — but not too much or too closely — to what they say.”

Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Look…pretend it’s a fraction. Spending is the numerator. GDP is the denominator. What happens to the value of the fraction when the numerator remains essentially unchanged and the denominator is reduced?

Spending increases, in the cases where there were actual increases, came largely from automatic stabilizers like food stamps, unemployment assistance/extensions and so on. But the issue that drove up spending as a percentage of GDP is the fact that GDP shrank. (The economic meltdown and recession that began in 2008 when the banks nearly blew up the place…maybe you’ve heard of it?)

So…spending (the numerator) may have grown a bit. But the reason it was so much higher in terms of percentages of GDP was because GDP (the denominator) went down massively. Do you not get this?

I’m always amazed that people forget this. No matter how many times this subject comes up, the myth that Boehner was “unrelenting” on renewing all the Bush tax cuts and would not settle for a “middle class” extension for those with incomes below 250k if that was all he could get lives on. Good thing for Boehner that Obama saw to it he could get essentially everything he wanted, plus more. (Obama’s the one that piled on the estate tax cut. Republicans didn’t even have to ask.)

Someone correct me here if I’m wrong, but those 230,000 people, once they drop off the unemployment rolls, if they get discouraged and stop looking for work, don’t they magically not even count as unemployed any more? In fact, has a significant fraction of the drop in the reported U3 unemployment rate been people giving up and no longer even being counted?

If you check the U6 rate (which counts anyone who has looked for work in the last 12 months even if they have given up), the rate is still more than 14 (!) percent. Back during the depression, the U6 rate would have been the basis for jobless reports. U3 came into being because it was useful politically to be able to show a lower rate. It’s sort of the same thing they’ve done with the way inflation is measured. And this smoke and mirrors numbers massage has been fully bi-partisan, with the Clinton admin responsible for the current methodology.

Suggested reading/viewing: Fuzzy Numbers

Not sure why Clinton is in the headline. Clinton works at the pleasure of the president. It’s the Obama administration, yes? So it’s the Obama administration that resumed arms sales. I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton was opposed to this, nor am I saying she wasn’t. What I am saying is that even she was opposed, she couldn’t have done anything more than express her opposition to the president in private.

(Know what they call a Secretary of State that publicly opposes the president who appointed them on matters of foreign policy? Former Secretary of State.)

One nit to pick. You wrote “David Walker, former Comptroller General, who failed to do his bank regulatory job…”, and the problem is this: The Comptroller General doesn’t have anything to do with the regulation of the banks.

Who are you asking?

On a related side note John Brennan has finally gone from saying that Obama hasn’t killed any civilians to now saying that civilian deaths are inevitable.

And on another related note, Glenn Greenwald today writes about Peter Bergen’s op/ed in the NYT glorifying our “warrior president.” From the opening of Greenwald’s article:

Peter Bergen, the Director of National Security Studies at the Democratic-Party-supportive New America Foundation, has a long Op-Ed in The New York Times today glorifying President Obama as a valiant and steadfast “warrior President”; it begins this way:

THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Just ponder that: not only the Democratic Party, but also its progressive faction, is wildly enamored of “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” That’s quite revealing on multiple levels. Bergen does note that irony: he recalls that Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to defend the justifications for war and points out: “if those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care.” He adds that “the left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.”

Someone explain to me again what it was about Bush that Dems hated? We seem to be headed into the abyss, and very few seem to care so long as it’s their guy in charge of getting us there.

Similar to the elder Bush doing NAFTA? GHW Bush negotiated NAFTA, but he couldn’t get it through Congress. Getting NAFTA through Congress and signed into law was the work of a Democrat, one William Jefferson Clinton. That seems to be the model these days: Republicans push for right wing policies and fail to get them implemented. Democrats come behind the Republicans and get those same policies passed and signed into law. For this we are to cheer the Dems for their “competence” in “getting something done”…or some other horseshit like that.

You don’t know much about Social Security, what it actually is or its history, do you? Social Security is not a retirement account. Social Security is social insurance. That insurance is there even for young workers (should they become disabled), not to mention for the children of workers that die young. What private retirement accounts may yield is not relevant to the discussion, but even if it were, in a time where ratings agencies rate junk securities like CDOs to be AAA investment grade and when safe investments like government bonds and insured bank deposits are yielding less than the rate of inflation, your claim still doesn’t hold up. But as I said, even if it did hold up, it’s not relevant in a discussion of social insurance.

The thing about the “you have nowhere else to go” strategy is that when I have nowhere to go, I tend to stay home.

That is just another version of an excuse for Obama. Obama is not afraid. Obama is a conservative. You and some others apparently still hold onto the idea that Obama really is a liberal and wants to do liberal things, but that Obama is just the Obama of your dreams, not the Obama that is.

IMO, it is the Democrats who are now adopting the GOP-Conservative position of bashing “unelected activist judges” and such other claptrap. Obama did it himself today and I’m sure that is where this originates. Count me out.

Exactly right. I made more or less the same argument over at Taylor Marsh’s place just a bit earlier:

What we have here is Obama (and I guess Obama supporters) arguing in favor of the conservative (Republican) position on the courts.

The Supreme Court adjudicates the constituionality of laws all the time, and there have been any number of times through our history where the Court has indeed thrown out laws that were “duly constituted and passed” by a strong majority in congress. There’s nothing unprecedented about that.

I do not cheer the President here. The President is echoing Republican arguments about the courts which I found loathsome and meritless when Republicans made them. Those arguments remain loathsome and meritless now.

Up is down. Down is up. Democrats are fighting for what amounts to a fundamentally flawed health insurance (insurance, not care) plan that was considered to be full-on right wing Republican and so unacceptable that Bill Clinton rejected it as an alternative when it was offered in the early 90′s. And Democrats are making a solidly right-wing argument when they start talking about judicial activism overturning a “duly passed and constituted” law.

This administration has managed to take progressives who support Obama and make them unrecognizable to me.

Two things…

First, Medicare for All is exactly what I want. Second, there is no such thing as a progressive VAT. The term “progressive VAT” is an oxymoron.