Author's posts
Dec 16 2009
The Professor of Constitutional Fuckface.
Obama’s effort on the signature issue of healthcare has been truly pathetic. More generally, he seems to have no problem with US citizens paying tithes and bailouts directly to US corporations as government policy, despite what he says publicly.
Populist Rhetoric and Symbolic Actions
Barack Obama is so mad at Wall Street! Here, just look at what he told 60 Minutes last night:
BARACK OBAMA: I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street…Nothing has been more frustrating to me this year than having to salvage a financial system at great expense to taxpayers that was precipitated, that was caused, in part by completely irresponsible actions on Wall Street…the people on Wall Street still don’t get it. They don’t get it…you guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that’s it’s gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem.
But he’s not just all talk. He’s also taking action! He’s so furious he’s going to have an hour-long meeting with Wall Street executives. Dear god in heaven!
Meanwhile, the banksters continue pissing on Barack Obama’s shoes, even after he put on a public show to berate them for their financial malpractice.
… Said one CEO who attended: “I expected to be taken to the woodshed, but the tone was quite the opposite.”Said another senior exec with knowledge of the meeting: “The whole thing was so telegraphed that not much was accomplished, other than giving Obama a PR stunt … He might have sounded mean on ’60 Minutes,’ but during the meeting he was a hell of a lot nicer.”
So far, the dude’s been painfully, strikingly ineffectual, with resulting outcomes always favoring corporations and screwing the public, even though health care and job prospects suggest a fucking blowout for Democrats in 2010. Worst, his actions, as distinct from his “word-itude,” suggest he is a total corporate sell-out willing to alter the Constitutional fabric of our nation. Never mind the ineptitude and ineffectualness of Mr. Constitutional Law. And never mind 2010. What a total fuck-face.
Dec 16 2009
Ineffectual
To say that Barack Obama has more hat and less cattle than George Bush is…saying a lot, but I’m really beginning to wonder if I’m going to start feeling sorry for the guy, involuntarily and against my better judgment, long, long before his term is up. This health care reform effort has been…disastrous, a train wreck of unforced errors, utterly incompetent, yet Obama remains “cautiously optimistic” even still. I guess Turkana was right: Just pass a sense of the Congress that “Health Care is Good” and call it a fucking day. Are Barack and Rahm really bumping dickheads over this–I can’t call it a complete failure, because there was so little effort to accomplish anything-but seriously professor, you’re handing this in as homework?
aimai runs it down at nomoremister.blogspot.com:
The problem the Democrats are having with this bill is that they oversold what they would do, and underfought the bill–very, very, very, publicly. Obama came in with a huge reservoir of good will and a big rolodex of names and friends to push for the policies he said he wanted. Health Care Reform was one of his signature issues and he immiediately set about talking, in very vague terms, about getting it done. For pretty good policy reasons he nominally turned it over to the House and Senate to “get it done” while setting out, broadly, some guidelines about what he thought should be in the bill. Those guidelines, of course, ought to have been the most comprehensive, well thought, out, clearly stated set of bullet points he could have come up with. Because those guidelines were what Obama and the Democrats were going to be campaigning on. Those would be “the bill” as far as the public was concerned.
From the get go they refused to aggressively market a single set of bullet points that were clear, cogent, and defensible. Then they refused to activate their own activist network. They refused to demonize a subset of their opposition to force another subset to compromise. They didn’t drum up enough support in the country as a whole–for instance, they didn’t back and organize the free health clinics that we later saw emerge. They allowed Baucus to move from a supporter to an enemy of reform and to drag the entire process out of whack in August. They didn’t organize and orchestrate the August Town Halls and they let them be taken over by the Tea Partiers. Because of their own refusal to activate Obama’s network–which came about because they didn’t want to back actually popular reforms and were wedded to the most insurance friendly set of minor tinkers–they lost the August recess. They didn’t send the Democratic Senators and House members out with a single set of talking points. They didn’t strong arm the weak or conservative members of their own caucus.
Worse, they undercut and undersold the most progressive members of both the Senate and the House while cozening up to, and bargaining with, Pharma, the Insurance Companies, the Hospitals, the Blue Dogs, Baucus, Lieberman, Snowe, Collins, and all the rest of them. When progressives warned them not to let Baucus push the Senate bill farther and farther out that was ignored. In the House the blue dogs were given benefits and attention that the progressive caucus never was, and the progressives found themselves outgunned and outmaneuvered on Stupak. Then we were all promised that, somehow, things would be fixed in the conference report. Now, of course, we are being told that there won’t be any conference report, or at any rate that to placate the worst elements of the Senate and the House there is no chance of ameliorating the worst bits of either bill.
And now Obama goes hat in hand to the progressives and begs them to back the bill right now?
Obama’s effort on a signature issue has been truly pathetic.
Meanwhile, the banksters continue pissing on Barack Obama’s shoes, even after he put on a public show to berate them for their financial malpractice.
… Said one CEO who attended: “I expected to be taken to the woodshed, but the tone was quite the opposite.”Said another senior exec with knowledge of the meeting: “The whole thing was so telegraphed that not much was accomplished, other than giving Obama a PR stunt … He might have sounded mean on ’60 Minutes,’ but during the meeting he was a hell of a lot nicer.”
So far, the dude’s been painfully ineffectual. Health care and job prospects suggest a fucking blowout in 2010.
Dec 15 2009
Enuff ‘z Enuff: We’re gonna rein in our damnable lobbyists!
This is IT, man! The bankers’s lobbyists pissed on the bankers’s rugs, man, and a line in the sand has been drawn.
Right before their very noses, and in the midst of the worst political and financial regulatory crisis since at least the Great Depression, the banks’ lobbyists have been over-aggressively trying to quash real financial reform, totally unbeknownst to the bankers. And this has infuriated bankers.
An angry and victimized Goldman Sachs investment banker, Jeff Lebowski, read the news aghast, still dressed in his paisley bathrobe and drinking his morning Ovaltine, angrily sputtered,
This will not stand, man!
CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon delivered a more inflected and innuendoed response to the news of failed financial reform, first quoting the great American poet, Wallace Stevens:
From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
(update: here, both Stevens and Dimon fix upon you a sidewards pomegranate eye!)
Some read this as a vague middle finger to President Barack Obama’s tongue-lashing of the banks on network television on the previous evening. When queried for clarification, Dimon said he was obviously chiding Stevens for failing to notice that “The jay is the fucking populist, man!” And with that, it seems, financial reform is all but guaranteed.
Dec 14 2009
Sadly, well, yeah, it sort of is! (Updated by some Greek bastard)
The wily liberals finally come clean on Obama and their own damn selves:
You didn’t really expect hope and change, did you?
Shorter Brad “Ich bin der Prozess” @Sadly, No!:
Barack Obama’s failings are OUR fault!
As the realizations begin sinking in, the excuses for Barack Obama’s loathsome and herculean efforts to prop up the status quo of the ruling class at all costs-and I do mean ALL COSTS, human and financial–are variegated and mind-numbing. Not to mention schtupid and counterproductive.
Taibbi’s spanking the President on his massively corrupt Wall Street bail-out should cause the man to resign in disgrace. Immediately. Taxpayers could be on the hook for $24 trillion in gambling losses? With no percentage in any upside, strong anti-reform measures, and potentially on the hook for further, ongoing, crippling gambling losses? While we lose our livelihoods, homes, pensions, public services, AND get shafted on mandated private health insurance? Maybe Brad fundamentally disagrees with Taibbi’s painfully accurate assessment of the President:
I basically agree with everything the guy says
Leider, nein. Like many others, Brad is just relieved that Obama is not the second coming of Dick Cheney or Anton Chigur. And that’s good enough for him. I guess he’s still got his job. And his home. And his health insurance. Your expecting anything more than not expanding torture to a mall near you is not really Obama’s fault. It’s our fault. For reading the man’s signals wrong.
At the end of his Rolling Stone article, Taibbi asks
What’s most troubling is that we don’t know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe it’s our fault, for thinking he was different.
To which Brad aka Joseph K “I am one who is on trial here!” responds:
Well, yeah, it sort of is.
Now I get what Obama really meant by “The Audacity of Hope,” subtitled, “The Recklessness.”
I suppose the evisceration of Nuremberg is my fault too. And torture. And lying about Afghanistan. While accepting a peace prize. Well, yeah, maybe I should go to jail for abetting war crimes. Can anyone tell me what is the procedure for prosecuting myself? The rules are kind of opaque around here anymore. A little help? Anyone? Please?
You didn’t really expect hope and change, did you?
Sadly, yes.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
Franz Kafka
Dec 13 2009
Obama’s method of consensus building
He watched her, his chin in his hand. All right, he said. This is the best I can do.
He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and he flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.
She looked at him, at his outheld wrist. What? She said.
Call it.
I wont do it.
Yes you will. Call it
God would not want me to do that.
Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.
Heads, she said.
He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.
I’m sorry.
She didnt answer.
Maybe it’s for the best.
She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you’re the one.
It could have gone either way.
The coin didnt have no say. It was just you.
Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.
She sat sobbing softly. She didnt answer.
For things at a common destination there is a common path. Not always easy to see. But there.
Everything I ever thought has turned out different, she said. There aint the least part of my life I could of guessed. Not this, not none of it.
I know.
You wouldnt of let me off noway.
I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.
She sat sobbing. She shook her head.
Yet even though I could have told you how all of this would end I thought it not too much to ask that you have a final glimpse of hope in the world to lift your heart before the shroud drops, the darkness. Do you see?
Oh God, she said. Oh God.
I’m sorry.
She looked at him a final time. You dont have to, she said. You dont. You dont.
He shook his head. You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world. Do you see?
Yes, she said, sobbing. I do. I truly do.
Good, he said. That’s good. Then he shot her.
To be fair to Anton Chigur, he actually flipped the coin, but I couldn’t otherwise resist the parallel.
Dec 12 2009
Read some Stirling Newberry; Call me in the morning
Obama’s Nobel speech was horrendous to progessives, unless you embrace what Stirling Newberry called “the facts,” (my emphasis) some time ago. It’s not easy reading. Try to digest it. I’m still trying.
There is nothing facile about our work ahead.
And forget about Obamabots. They don’t matter. Only Your Understanding and Your Conscience still count. Understanding first, conscience second. That’s logical, no?
It’s probably too late to even try, due to the excesses of Wall Street (see Ilargi and Stoneleigh, whom you’ll find at theautomaticearth.com).
As so-called progessives, can we please vet Monsieur Stirling? He sounds like the staightest arrow in the quiver. Well? Any takers?
Thomas Freidman was exultant about an unmanned drone getting in Europe’s face to accept the peace prize on Obama’s behalf.
You tell me, what’s that about.
hugs and kisses, meant truly, mon ami.
CF
Dec 10 2009
These fuck-ups on CNN have walked all over the Nobel Prize.
The bloviators walked all over the ceremony, the king’s speech, world class entertainent, etc.
Christiane Amapour, David Gergen, and Craphole Crowley’s opinions exceed world opinion.
Regardless, Obama is going balls to the wall “War is Peace!”
Fuck you, Bro’.
Dec 09 2009
Sunny
the first “45” I bought was “Yesterday” by Paul McCartney. I was age seven, or so, and had a phonograph, and that song ripped me apart. It must have been the rapid descent from major to relative minor, because I had no idea what “yesterday” and “troubles” and “far away” meant. Frankly, I doubt Paul, as a young adult, knew either. Perhaps there are musical emoticon archetypes to which every human responds.
Here’s another that ripped me up (and still does). Unlike Yesterday (either straighforwad major/minor stuff), “Sunny,” with its G9s and James Bond intermezzoes was a whole other realm of ambiguity, somehow mixing sincere gratitude and loss in one idea, and then amplifying that idea via consecutive transpositions.
All I know for sure is that the song always got to me. I didn’t need to learn how to appreciate it.
Dec 08 2009
Obama clinches Armando on Afghanistan
Armando “believes:”
This is the highlight of the speech. And it clinches my support for the President’s policy. Some believe that an effective strategy can be carried out without the military commitment. I do not share that view. Like the President, I belive the military component is critical. But it is important that the Obama Administration understand that it is not enough. And it is imperative that the PAKISTAN situation be addressed adequately. Indeed, the Afghanistan situation can never be successfully addressed without the adequate implementation of a Pakistan strategy that can work.
Nowhere does he address the basis for his beliefs about Pakistan. Loose nukes? One might guess, based on Armando’s innuendoes about the border region. seriously, second-hand innuendoes are worse than first-hand innuendoes.
Your arguments pro-Obama-re-Afghanistan are so sloppy as to not elicit serious refutation. Let me send your portrait to sadlyno.com, and maybe they could photoshop you into some appropriate period costume.
Your current argument is quite beneath you, I hope you realize. Go Gators!
Oh, here’s his argument, such as it is:
Sep 10 2009
300 million pitchforks.
“You are evil thieving bastards, you have reaped ungodly profits in your behemoth casino scams, then lost, only to turn around and usurp the wealth of this great nation by the outright rape and pillage of middle class Americans’ whose sweat and toil built it. The biggest ripoff in the history of the world is padding your bonus checks with the Federal Government as your co-conspirators. Every last one of you should be rotting in prison.” – American Middle Class Representative
Sep 05 2009
Double Dactyl
Christopher Parkening
Heard angels hearkening,
Strumming his feminine
Wooden guitar.
Practicing schmaticing
Lingering fingerings,
Forced by his father, he
Loved through the bars.
Sep 02 2009
Tool use in Wingnuts (Wingnut dingbattus)
According to the eminent phrenologist Ayn Rand, phylogeny is best represented as a ladder, not as a tree or bush, as some have understood it. Standing athwart geological time at the top of the “ladder of life” is “Mankind,” in particular, white capitalists. Rand’s objective reality indicates that in the “clades as rungs” variation of phylogeny, there are grades within clades, or more aptly, rungs between rungs, due to more or less successful versions of Mankind’s singular adaptive advantage: volitional consciousness. To be fair, at the time of her writing, it was not then known that some percentage of squirrel monkeys would also volitionally drink themselves into a stupor if liquor were freely provided, and that these same monkeys would also learn instrumental behaviors to earn drinks, thus becoming classic functional drunks. Nevertheless, the a priori assumptions that Man is an infinitely rational tabula rasa operating solely on a pleasure/pain continuum, is obviously indisputable.