The assault has been brutal.

Insurance industry flacks, raving RePugs, craven Blue Dogs and K Street hacks have been beating the hell out of health care reform for weeks.  Senator Jim DeMint (Orc) South Carolina is blasting it as National Socialism.  The Mighty Wurlitzer up there in the organ loft of the Bipartisan Church of Beltway Believers has been cranked up to full volume, the choir is piously singing Onward Centrist Soldiers, the congregation is rolling in the aisles, speaking in tongues, the holy saints of Blue Cross and CIGNA must be defended, the trumpets have sounded, the heathens are at the gates, the Capitalists of Christ are no longer going to tolerate the unjust slandering of his Good Samaritan health insurance providers.  Verily, the Prince of Profits has said unto them: those evil unhinged godless Leftists bent upon destroying the best health care system in the world must be slain and cast into the Lake of Fire.              

As Armageddon approaches, the immaculately centrist Gang of Six is offering some friendly advice to Obama. They’re saying what reciters of the Catechism of Centrism always say when a Democratic President needs to be reminded that elections only have consequences when RePugs win them . . .  

Bipartisanship is a temple,

It’s a higher law,

Bipartisanship is a temple,

It’s the higher law.

We’ve all heard their sermons, we’ve all heard them singing the praises of bipartisanship, we’ve all seen them telling Obama to sing along, telling him to join them in moderate fellowship, telling him to enter that Cathedral of Centrism and worship beside them.

Yeah.  We’ve all seen it.

They ask Obama to enter,

But then they make him crawl.

So American soldiers are still dying, the NSA is still spying, CIA drones are still flying, Big Pharma, the Lords of Drugs, Blue Cross hacks and CIGNA thugs are still lying.  We’re told we have to be patient while our wise and caring leaders decide what’s best for us, we’re told there must be compromise, we’re told we have to hold onto the healthcare we’ve got until a few drops of reform finally trickle down from on high later this year or maybe next year or the year after that.    

Well we can’t be holding on,

To what we’ve got,

When all we’ve got is hurt . . .

On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, after hearing his brother had died at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Bobby Kennedy phoned CIA headquarters.  According to David Talbot in Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years . . .  

Bobby’s phone call to Langley on the afternoon of Nov. 22 was a stunning outburst.  Getting a ranking official on the phone–whose identity is still unknown–Kennedy confronted him in a voice vibrating with fury and pain. “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” Kennedy erupted.

RFK summoned the CIA director himself, John McCone, to ask him the same question. McCone, who had replaced the legendary Allen Dulles after the old spymaster had walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs, swore that his agency was not involved.

Despite this denial, Bobby Kennedy knew McCone was just a figurehead, he knew what the CIA was capable of, he knew all too well how many coups and assassinations the CIA had been involved in, and continued to suspect that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.    

In The Mother of All Coverups, David Talbot explains that Bobby Kennedy’s supportive public statements about the Warren Report “were obviously freighted with political and emotional, and perhaps even security concerns. But we have no doubt what his private opinion of the report was–as his biographer Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy ‘regarded the Warren Commission as a public relations exercise to reassure the public.'”

RFK confided to close friends and advisers that as President, he would order a full investigation into his brother’s assassination.  His own death in a hail of assassin’s bullets prevented that, he was silenced, the truth was silenced.

It’s been said that the past is prologue.

It’s been said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Maybe someday, Barack Obama will figure that out, maybe someday he’ll STFU about “looking forward” and enforce the rule of law so America won’t keep getting hit by one rightwing shitstorm after another.        

Forty years ago, during the darkest days of the Vietnam War, seekers of peace and love gathered at Woodstock. They came because they shared a common belief in the power of love, a common hope that music could heal America’s wounds and show it the way.

I came upon a child of God,

He was walking along the road,

I asked him, where are you going,

And this he told me.

I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm,

I’m going to join in a rock and roll band,

I’m going to camp out on the land,

And get my soul free.

Then can I walk beside you,

I have come here to lose the smog,

And I feel like a cog in something turning.

Well maybe it’s just the time of year,

Or maybe it’s the time of man,

I don’t know who l am,

But life is for learning.

By the time they got to Woodstock,

They were half a million strong.

And everywhere there was song and celebration,

And they dreamed they saw the bombers,

Riding shotgun in the sky,

Turning into butterflies,

Above our nation.

The dream of Woodstock didn’t come true.  40 years later, NSA surveillance satellites are riding shotgun in the sky, song and celebration are hard to find, the specter of war crimes and corruption and economic disintegration hangs above our nation.  America cynically rejected everything the Woodstock generation believed in.  Joni Mitchell’s song of peace and love could have been the anthem of a nation seeking redemption, but it survives only as a nostalgic reminder of what might have been.  

The New York Stock Exchange let it be known last week that it would no longer require companies to report all of their program trading–an outrage that enables large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, to shield themselves from public scrutiny.  

Matt Tiabbi  . . .

This is quiet obviously a move designed to make it even more impossible to track what’s going on in the NYSE and shield, in particular, Goldman Sachs.  The move is designed to protect investment banks from bloggers who are exposing the companies’ stock market manipulations.  Goldman Sachs is singled out because the investment bank’s share of principal NYSE trading has gone from 27 percent at the end of 2008 to fully 50 percent of trades in recent months.

For some bizarre reason, Danps at FDL seems to think that Goldman Sachs taking over the Obama Administration and Wall Street and God only knows what else might not be a good development.  He’s asking Is the Left Being Too Easy on the President? . . .

Maybe some of the president’s supporters prefer to turn a blind eye towards a scathing indictment of a company whose employees have lavishly funded the president and with whom he appears to enjoy a warm relationship.  If so it is troubling.

This is far beyond troubling.  But the response of far too many progressives is typical.  The same progressives who opposed Impeachment are blindly supporting Obama and ignoring the reeking stench of Goldman Sachs that’s hanging over Obama’s White House.  They like to call themselves “realists.”  They’ve had plenty of practice at that, it’s been their standard response every time other progressives take a stand for progressive principles and ask them why they won’t.      

Many’s the time we’ve been mistaken, and many times confused.

Yes, and we’ve often felt forsaken, and certainly misused.

Obama says it’s all right, it’s all right, but I’m weary to my bones.

On this Independence Day, on this 4th of July 2009,

America’s so far away from home,

So far away from home.

Our government tortured people to death, our government spies on us, our government hands trillions of tax dollars to Wall Street criminals.  As a professor, Barack Obama taught Constitutional law.  As President, he betrays the Constitution and calls it looking forward.  He consults with RePug lunatics and calls it bipartisanship.  He takes one step towards change, two steps back, and calls it progress.              

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered,

Don’t have a friend who feels at ease,

Don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered,

Or driven to its knees.

One change makes you larger,

And one change makes you small,

And the ones Obama gives you, don’t do anything at all.

Go ask Geithner, when he’s ten feet tall.

Bring a shovel with you, he’s WAY down in that 10 trillion dollar rabbit hole no Obamabots want to talk about, he’s down there with the Mad Hatters of Wall Street and the Cheshire Cats of the Fed, he’s down there high-fiving his Goldman Sachs pals, they’re on a roll, they’ve been raking in market bubble billions and cashing in when those bubbles have exploded ever since the 1920’s.                

Mad Hatters, Cheshire Cats, whacko wingnuts and Goldman Sachs.

Are we having fun yet?

TMZ . . .

Michael Jackson suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon at his Holmby Hills home and paramedics were unable to revive him. We’re told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.

Michael Jackson had problems, we all know about the scandals, but he was a gentle soul and an immensely talented artist.  Thank you, Michael, for giving the world this song . . .

Generating fear is the only way criminal governments can stay in power.  Dick Cheney knows that, Supreme Leader Khamenei knows that, every reactionary thug from the Guardian Council in Qom to the Republican National Committee in Washington knows that.  Fear is the foundation of conservative power, it always has been.  Fear compels people to submit to oppression, fear perpetuates their oppression, fear prevents most of them from ever taking a stand.  

The Uprising in Iran is a confrontation between the forces of oppression and the forces of reform. It’s a struggle for power between fundamentalists and moderates, a high stakes contest with the future of an entire nation hanging in the balance.  The world is watching the confrontations in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, but the confrontation that will determine the outcome and decide the future of Iran cannot be seen, it’s an inner confrontation, it’s a confrontation as old as human civilization, it’s a confrontation of the soul, it’s the confrontation within the hearts and minds of millions of Iranians between fear and moral courage.  

Each of them must make a choice–no one else can make it for them.  Will they give in to their fear? Or will they find the moral courage to overcome their fear?    

Millions of Iranians are struggling to overcome their fear of being arrested and imprisoned, they’re struggling to overcome their fear of Basij savagery, struggling to overcome their fear of being killed. That inner battle has ended for many of them.  Fear has won.  They will not join the Uprising, they will not support it.  There are too many police in the streets, too many Basij.

So here we are, still confined in the Netroots Ward of this Nationwide Nuthouse of Centrism, owned and operated by the Wall Street Foundation for Permanent Fiscal Fuckery, staffed and supervised by the best Centralizing Centralizers of Centrism money can buy, and presided over by the Head Nurse of Centrism, your friend and mine, Nurse Ratched  . . .

Look into those eyes, you’ll see Centrism personified, Centrism epitomized, Centrism symbolized, manifested, and defined.

She knows what’s best for us.  Centrism.  She monitors the behavior of her patients very closely, especially our behavior here in the Netroots Ward.  Her patience with us is wearing thin, we just won’t get with the program, we won’t take our medication, we won’t submit to her control.  She’s not going to tolerate that, she never tolerates that.

I’ve watched her get more and more skillful over the years.  Practice has steadied and strengthened her until now she wields a sure power that extends in all directions, I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants.

Her orderlies in the corporate media are all wired to that current, her orderlies in Congress are all wired to that current, her orderly in the White House is wired to that current.  They’re doing her bidding, the Centrists have made their diagnoses, health care reform will get lobotomized, the EFCA will get lobotomized, real change itself will get lobotomized, she’ll double everyone’s daily dosage of Centrism medication, whoever won’t take it orally will get it anally.

In Put Up Or Shut Up, Sara Robinson asks conservatives if they are deliberately trying to start a civil war . . .

Just answer the question.  Yes or no.  Don’t insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers.  We need to know what your intentions are and we need to know NOW.  People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now.  You may not want responsibility for this–but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.

You did.

The assassins themselves are ratting you out.  They’re telling us, straight up, that they were inspired to act by the hate radio talkers that you empowered–one of whom is now the de facto head of the Republican party.  They got it from media outlets owned by your biggest donors.  They got it from bloggers who receive daily talking points faxed in from the GOP.

Conservatives are playing with fire.  It’s what they do.  It’s all they do.  They played with fire by invading and occupying Iraq, and we all got burned.  They played with fire by deregulating Wall Street and the banking industry, and we all got burned.  They played with fire by torching the Bill of Rights, and we all got burned.  If you disagree with them, prepare to be blowtorched.