If you saw President Obama's press conference yesterday, you may have noticed the simple brilliance of this great communicator: with ease, he set up the real, simple choice in the debt limit and deficit reduction dialog: we can keep tax breaks for the super rich, or we can pay for services that the government provides that everyone else uses, but we cannot do both.

If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship. That means we’ve got to stop funding certain grants for medical research. That means that food safety may be compromised. That means that Medicare has to bear a greater part of the burden. Those are the choices we have to make.

Barack Obama does two things here: first, he makes the choice clear. This is almost a reiteration of the theme that President Obama created back when the House Republicans voted to end Medicare - that the Republican plan was to make 33 seniors each pay $6000 extra per year so they can write a big fat $200,000 check to the average millionaire. The President knows - and the Republicans know, and the Republicans know that the President knows - that when given the choice, the American people will choose to close corporate and ultra-wealthy tax loopholes and keep these services they use. Americans have said so resoundingly - 64% support raising taxes on the rich to balance the budget, and 67% think corporations pay too little in taxes.

There is a saying that Republicans fall in line, and Democrats fall in love. Democrats fell hard in love with Senator Barack Obama. For many, like me, it was love at first sight. I was switching channels one day and saw this interesting man on the Oprah Winfrey show, so I stopped to listen and was transfixed. Before the television segment was complete, I was already saying out loud, “This man needs to be Presidentnow.” It was one of those ‘remember where you were when it happened’ experiences.

In Senator Obama I recognized someone who understood complex problems and had common sense solutions. Here was a man who knew how to get things done. Right then I dedicated myself to helping him get elected and marveled at his capability throughout the campaign, was dazzled by the cleverness of his transition (there needs to be a book written just about that time in history) and am in complete awe of his competence as Commander In Chief.

A gay person who has not come out even if you know they are gay should never be forced to come out of the closet for many personal and individual reasons. We know certain constraints does not allow some to come out in the open be it right or wrong but one thing for sure is, it is not because they are ashamed of who they are. It is because of the lack of privilege/inconvenience/unequal treatments that makes life harder than it should that contributes to staying in the closet. I also think that I don't believe President Obama has to be forced to come out of the closet for me to know that he is for marriage equality. Circumstances I will discuss below would more likely won't allow him to come out in the open yet. That does not mean he is ashamed or does not respect that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as heterosexual couples. When the President last Thursday at the fundraising in NY said, "I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country", it could not be any clearer what he meant by it -- He supports Marriage Equality in Principle. He just has not said it out loud publicly yet for a reason I will discuss further below but I don't believe he has to be forced to come out of the closet nor would it make him a homophobe for not explicitly stating it as some advocates prefer to hear it. The President has demonstrated through his actions that he is paving the way for the States to implement marriage equality and implementing policies that will give same-sex couples federal protection. For the nay sayers and opportunists like Ms. Dowd, who chastised the President for falling short of saying, "I believe in same sex marriage", let me repeat it for you that the President is not against any States legalizing Marriage equality. Let me repeat that again -- The President is not against any States legalizing Marriage equality.

Most of the people who are the "front page" authors at Daily Kos are simply ignorant and destructive. Joy Gray's boorish performance at Network Nation and jejune effort to excuse it is a good example - although "good" is not really the word to describe such nonsense. But Sunday night, when the DailyKos front page featured Gray's article and a number of other efforts to make the Democratic party weaker, DailyKos carried a strange conversation which illuminates the grip that the dysfunctional "progressive narrative" has on even the better writers there. Here's what happened.

One of the few remaining African-American participants at Daily Kos proposed that some writer who generally agrees with the Obama administration should be added to the front page roster. That such a request needs to be made on a forum that bills itself as a "Democratic blog, supporting Democrats" is remarkable in itself. DailyKos's featured writers may disagree on whether the President is just inept and naive or a coward, a traitor, stupid, or corrupt, but the notion that the President is a smart, strong, and generally adept advocate of the well-being of the American people is expressed as often on the DailyKos front page as it is on Fox News. So here's DailyKos author Dante Atkins, who appears to be a genuinely decent committed Democrat, responding in a condescending, narrative blinded, and politically confused way - I'm sure without even having the faintest clue of how offensive he was being.

I support the president

And most of what you see from the front page is a lot of pleading to please, do more.
[...]
And it's hard for people who are committed activists and believers in progressive ideals to provide what it seems that you're asking for (unequivocal support), because that belies what we're here for.
A frontpager who supported people over principle probably wouldn't want to write here anyway, because it's the ideals we're committed to and not the person.

Folks, we're getting out there. We're starting to be a real soar spot for the whiny, puritan Professional Left, whose primary goal is tearing down the President. We have taken on the destructive nature of their Obama-hatred, and sometimes the truth stings for them. Most regulars at this site are familiar with Glenn Greenwald throwing a tantrum for being called out on this site. Well, today, as it turns out, it's David Sirota's turn



Now, since David Sirota's got his panties in a bunch about this, if you missed the target of Sirota's whining, you should really read Tien's awesome piece that apparently made it too hot in the kitchen for David Sirota, Narcissism: The Extreme Lefty Edition.

We have been in the sights of the whiners claiming to be on the Left for some time now, of course. We do after all keep exposing their hypocrisy, art of fake scandals, and plain creepy nuttiness. Hell, I have been accused of being a teabagger, Nazi and a communist, all at once!

On Friday, New York became the country's most populous state to legalize same sex marriage, and only the second to do so legislatively after Vermont. After the New York state senate, controlled by Republicans, seemed to hit a logjam, news broke unexpectedly on Friday of this great stride of equality in New York. What wasn't very well publicized though is the roll of Wall Street in support of same sex marriages. The new York Times has the kicker:

But as The New York Times reported over the weekend, a crucial fount of support came from a seemingly unusual source: Wall Street donors known in large part for conservative leanings.

According to The Times, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sought the backing of three financiers: Paul E. Singer, the founder of Elliott Management and an ardent Republican donor; Clifford S. Asness, the head of the quant fund AQR Capital; and Daniel S. Loeb, the leader of Third Point.

For too long, critics have been shouted down or shut out, but that has to change. It's well past time for us to hold the feet of our self-appointed leaders to the fire and demand some answers.

• Where are the results? During the two and a half years of the Obama administration, hell, during the previous 20 years - where are the victories for the environmental and progressive movements? Civil rights? Anti-poverty? Feminists? Any wins? Any concrete results?
  
• When are you going to fight for us? Since January 20 2009, which progressive or pro-environmental actions of the Obama administration have you supported and assisted to become stronger? We don't want to know about all the times you attacked the President, we want to know when have you ever supported something positive that they did?
• Coal mine safety regulation? The Department of Labor has been in a pitched battle against Massey for years, what are you doing to help?
• Coal burning regulation? EPA regulation? Other than EDF, have any of you tried to build public support?
• Nuclear power safety - the head of the NRC is under attack by NRC staff and Republicans for emphasizing safety and cutting off the Yucca mountain fiasco. What have you done to support this and push back against the nuclear industry?
• Labor - what are you doing to support the NLRB against Boeing and for quicker union elections?
• Wall Street Regulation - the Senate GOP is blocking consideration of ANY chair for the financial regulation bureau. What are you doing about it?
• Anything? Electric cars? Smart grid? Pesticide regulation? Civil rights enforcement? Any one single thing? Nothing at all?

With a 33-29 vote in the NY State Senate, the contentious debate over the adoption of gay marriage in New York is finally history as the NY State Senate assembly has passed a bill allowing same sex marriage making New York the sixth State plus DC to adapt the law. Today is indeed a great day for many who could not exercise the same rights as heterosexual couples in NY to finally have the ability to legally marry their loved ones restoring their civil rights to be treated fairly and equally in the eyes of the law. Thank you the NY State Assembly, those who voted to make history on this important issue of equality. Thank you Governor Cuomo for leading a hard fought behind close door negotiation to make this happen. Thank you President Obama for orchestrating the NY Governor's election that paved the way for Governor Cuomo to run for the Governorship when there was deep concern about former Governor Paterson’s ability to hold on to the office of the Governorship in 2009. I often wondered what the make up of the NY Senate Assembly would have been had it not been for the Obama Administration bold move to step into the mix.

All that was missing was John Boehner sobbing uncontrollably in front of a microphone when Republicans walked out of negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats over structuring a spending related package to increase the nation's debt limit, which must be raised by August 2 to avoid very dire consequences. You see, apparently, VP Biden and Congressional Democrats are proving a little bit of a tough cookie for the Republicans to take the heat, and so they ran out and started throwing tantrums.

But why, you ask? Why else, they couldn't resolve the ... umm, "tax issue" as Eric Can't[or] calls it. President Obama's representative VP Biden as well as Congressional Democrats had the temerity to insist that certain revenue measures are required to put the nation's fiscal health back together and not just spending cuts. But of course, the Republicans can't spend time worrying about fiscal health; they have poor people and the elderly to screw and the oil barons to lick the feet of.

Mr. Cantor had previously expressed optimism that the sessions could produce a deal. But he announced he would not be attending Thursday’s scheduled meeting because Democrats continued to press for part of the more than $2 trillion savings target to come from moves like phasing out tax breaks.

When President Obama's National Labor Relations Board stopped Boeing from illegally punishing its employees for the sin of unionization, the "progressive" media relegated the story to "ehh, boring." So don't be surprised when you also hardly find coverage of another important step the NLRB is about to take: cutting red tape that helps union busters and helping speed up organization of workers into unions. The AP reports that the new rules are likely to rein in the period of time big business would have to harass and intimidate workers. The SEIU, on their blog, has a good explanation of what the rule will do and why we need to stand by the NLRB in this process (emphasis theirs):

[On June 21] the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a proposed rule that would restore a measure of fairness to the union election process. As it stands, most workers who want to form a union will never get the chance. The current rules allow employers to drag out the process for months - in some cases years - while they wage a campaign in the workplace to mislead and intimidate their employees.

For decades, the federal government has allowed big corporations to litigate workers' efforts to death when they are trying to form a union and get a leg up in supporting their families. Irresponsible companies typically delay the vote and often retaliate against employees who want to form union. During organizing campaigns, more than one-third of employers fire pro-union workers. [...]

This proposed rule change announced today presents a level playing field. When working people choose to exercise their legal right to form a union, they should be able to do so without the fierce intimidation, bullying and threats from cash-cow-corporations.

In a Government for the People by the People, the People have many choices in how they want to lead their lives, who they choose to elect into office to represent them, how they want their Government to govern, how they view the world and prioritize their issues, etc. When a blogger I have met and respect the other day said, Our Government Is a Fucking Disgrace, pointing out the waste and the priority our Government has put instead of focusing on the people, I started thinking about our messed up political process and how it is really set up for the haves or those hand picked by the wealthy or Corporate America to represent their special interest while these same folks are elected in the name of the People to destroy the livelihood of many Americans.

While I understand the People have limitation to be able to compete individually with the big money special interests, the People have proven that as individuals if we create a coalition, we can weed through and clean the dirt to elect lawmakers that can indeed represent the People. After all, we have elected the first Black President, swiped the path to a Democratic majority Congress and Senate in 2008 who have done a whole lot more for many Americans in recent legislative history.

2008 was a year for a new beginning where the People came out and voted saying that misguided policies, war profiteering, lack of regulation, sacrificing our troops, stripping our safety net, passing huge debt to the next generation, etc., was not acceptable. We cleaned house, held the majority and made some bad ass progress like giving our economy a normal heart beat that would have been on the road to a multiple by-pass surgery right about now had it not been to our President and the Democratic Congress.

I will invite you to watch and learn the progress made in the first two years of the Obama Administration from independent sources. These results were driven from our firm commitment to stand together no matter how imperfect, slow, and at time compromised some issues were.

Mark your calendars for July 21. That's when the nation's first ever federal agency dedicated solely to consumer protection - the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - begins its work. Yes, the Republicans in the Senate have refused to consider any nominee to lead the Bureau unless its powers are significantly weakened (and concentrated their attacks on Elizabeth Warren, to the point of being complete jackasses and insulting her at a Congressional hearing), it won't stop the Bureau from beginning its work:

On July 21, the bureau will formally open its doors and will be able to send its examiners into Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other financial titans — whether or not it has a director. It can also issue new rules for big banks, examine their books and file enforcement actions, all crucial steps for an agency that was born only a year ago.

“They have almost unlimited ability to go after the banks on consumer issues,” said Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst at MF Global. “They’re saying, ‘We’re the new sheriff in town.’ ”

On Sunday, I wrote about the new National Prevention Strategy that was made possible by last year's heatlh reform legislation. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Americans on Medicare have been receiving the benefits of no-cost sharing preventive care for a while now. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is now reporting that 5.5 million Americans have already taken advantage of free preventive care under traditional Medicare. Why was preventive care even more essential than usual for Medicare beneficiaries?

This new emphasis on prevention is centered on the fact that we know that we can reduce many of the highest cost chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, hip fracture and several cancers. This is especially critical in the Medicare population, where the average beneficiary with a chronic condition sees three primary care physicians and six or seven specialists.   

Given that no-copay preventive care has only been available under traditional Medicare since the beginning of this year, the numbers are all the more impressive.

As of June 10, 2011, approximately 5.5 million people with traditional Medicare used one or more of the preventive benefits including, most prominently, mammograms, bone density screenings, and screenings for prostate cancer.  This is 16 percent - almost one in six - of the more than 33 million Americans who had traditional Medicare in June 2011.

I don't know if Fox's friend, Grover Norquist understudy, leader of a political advertising network that accepts money from the GOP and blackface-spreader  Ms. Jane Hamsher realizes this, but she just made a funny. In her gratuitous excuse of a column written to whine about her buddy Dan Choi losing it and yelling at an OFA volunteer who was working to defeat the Minnesota same sex marriage ban, she makes this lovely revelation: "I hadn’t planned on going to Netroots Nation until a few weeks ago." How come? Scheduling conflict? No. Family activity? No. She didn't plan on going because of her "not being a fan of summer travel (okay, well, travel period)."

Funny, because for a convention she didn't think amounted to enough of a hill of beans to get over her own travel-aversion, she sure uses it to sell FDL ... umm... suckerships, err, I mean memberships. One of her sucker benefits she touts for her own website is - drumrolls, please - 15% off the price of Netroots Nation!

15% off registration at Netroots Nation
FDL members receive a 15% discount off registration for Netroots Nation, the annual progressive conference attended by politicians, bloggers, and activists to share ideas and strategies on the direction of the progressive movement. This discount alone pays for the price of your membership!

Oops. She will tout it as the conference to set "the direction of the progressive movement," so you would please please pretty please buy her membership, but as for Her Majesty, ehh, conference schmonference. Her Majesty is not a fan of summer travel!

In 2005, DailyKos published an article about tactics by a US Senator. The author said:

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists[..] we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era. I think this perspective misreads the American people.I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don't think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs.

Of course, the Senator was Senator Obama.

When us health reform supporters claimed that last year's reform law had the potential to shift the paradigm from sickness treatment to health and wellness care, we weren't exaggerating. The administration and health reform advocates were ridiculed for backing this strategy that is essential for both a healthy population and in order to control health care costs. As President Obama says, however, cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom, and reformers aren't much interested in it. Instead, the administration is moving forward with the country's very first National Prevention Strategy.

The National Prevention Strategy is rather comprehensive. But what stood out for me is that the understanding that when we are talking about prevention, we are not merely talking about reducing visible at-risk behavior of individuals but improving health in workplaces, communities and homes. As a country, we have been talking about tobacco use, drug and alcohol abuse, healthy eating and exercise, and injury prevention for a good deal, and all those things are essential and are addressed in the strategy. But prevention and healthy living are also integrally linked to what I believe are areas often missed in the national discourse (and frankly, kitchen table discussions) over preventive care: Environmental causes and health disparities in communities, reproductive and sexual health, and mental health and emotional well-being. It's those areas that I will be focusing on today.

At Netroots Nation today, Dan Choi was approached by Organizing for America volunteer Nick Tschida, an organizer at one of Minnesota's legislative districts who working hard against a proposed state constitutional amendment in Minnesota to ban same sex marriages that will be up for a popular vote in 2012. So instead of giving this man kudos and shoring up support in favor of the effort to defeat the ban, Dan Choi insulted and humiliated the OFA volunteer by ripping up his Obama poster and yelling at him. The problem? Nick Tschida mentioned that he wasn't sure he supported full marriage equality.

Watch the exchange:



Yes, it's painful to hear from one of the people who are working on our side that they are not sure of their support for marriage equality. But that is no excuse for us not to recognize the hard work people are doing to keep discrimination and bigotry from being written into the Constitutions of our states. Whether this volunteer believes in marriage equality or not, he and OFA are working hard for the cause of marriage equality by organizing against such a discriminatory amendment.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer was heckled and booed Friday at the annual Netroots Nation conference in Minnesota, a gathering of liberal activists from the online political community. When Mr. Pfeiffer reminded the audience that the president championed an equal-pay law, the moderator replied, “Frankly we’re a little sick of hearing about that one. Washington Times

The far right wing segregationist Washington Times is sympathetic to Netroots: all that equal pay stuff is so boooring. What do our Progressive Leaders want to hear about?

Pfeiffer was only booed (lightly) once. That was when he was asked why Obama had filled out a survey in 1996 stating his approval of gay marriage, but had moved right on the issue as president.

That whopper is from right wing blogger Dave Weigel who says President Obama "moved right on the issue as President" - apparently by sticking by what he said during the campaign instead of what he said on a questionnaire from twelve years earlier. Here's Weigel with some more Netroots wit and wisdom

So what do they plan to do for jobs? "Passing an infrastructure bill including the infrastructure bank," said Pfeiffer. "We have a pending fight on unemployment benefits. We want to get the economy moving on a large scale."

Someone at my table started chuckling. "Where do people learn to talk like this?" he asked.

Where do people learn to talk intelligently about complex issues? Not from Netroots, that's for sure. But I'm grateful we don't have to read about appropriate "progressive" views from DailyKos and Salon (shallow cynicism double power) anymore - and can read them from the Washington Times and Dave Weigel. Maybe eventually we can cut out all the middlemen and just get messages from Frank Luntz directly.

So we found out yesterday that Democratic Congressmen John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Capuano have joined forces with seven Republicans to sue President Obama for doing something completely legal and in keeping with his basic Constitutional powers: taking action in Libya in support of a unanimous UN Security Council resolution and under NATO command. I have explained previously (once and twice) why the action in Libya is completely legal and expected given the backdrop of our treaty obligations in conjunction with the President's Constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy.

As The Reid Report notes, Conyers refused to hold impeachment hearings against George W. Bush while he was the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, but suddenly sees it fit to sue Obama for acting legally.

Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider produced a graph which shows that Federal interest payments on debt are falling rapidly relative to the size of the economy. That is, the amount of money the government spends paying interest on the Federal debt is far less of a burden on the economy than it was even a few years ago. The debt is big (probably too big) and there is too much debt in the economy as a whole, but there is no crisis - except for Bond Investors who get really low interest rates on US treasuries.(By the way - note that the debt was most troublesome due to Ronald Reagan's Presidency). The Republicans, with their usual flair for just making it up are claiming that the US needs radical cuts in deficits to reassure a bond market that is supposedly alarmed at how much we've borrowed - even though in the real world bond traders are queuing up to buy US treasuries and keep pushing the interest rates down (which is why the graph shows such a drop on the right). The real problem with the economy is that investment money is going into Treasuries (for safety) and wild speculation (in an attempt to find high profits and also to insure against inflation) - but not into the kinds of productive long term projects that the economy actually needs. But if we discussed that, we'd need to talk about Federal subsidy of Wall Street via the way IRAs are structured and Federal protection for commodity speculation and other topics that would make Republicans and Conservadems unhappy.

Glenn Greenwald has been up to his old tricks: bashing President Obama at every chance he gets. Heck, he will make up an opportunity if none exists. He'll argue just to argue. Just to whine. Just to whip up his followers. So I have been thinking what most aptly describes this behavior. And I think I got it: drama queen. No, I'm not calling Greenwald a "queen" because he's gay. I'm gay. I'm calling him a drama queen because he's a drama queen. Actually, he's a pretty damn impressive one. He could teach it at a university but for the lack of such classes being offered. Shame, really. So, welcome to class.

In any case, today, I am going to talk about Glenn's piece on Sunday. In it, Greenwald has a hissy fit because the FBI is expanding some powers for its agents (legal powers, mind you), and because Obama has courted some donors who work on Wall Street. Not sure what one has to do with the other, but Greenwald put them together, so I guess I'm stuck doing the same. Ergo, Professor Greenwald's Drama Queen 101 has the following assignments: totally freaking out about legal powers of the FBI, and getting bent out of shape about Obama's fundraising.

In the past couple of weeks, there has been lots of doom and gloom stories about the economy based on a single month of bad economic data. To be sure, when the economy hits a bump in the road to recovery - especially a recovery from a downturn that is unparalleled in living memory - a good deal of concern is what we get. What is different now is that in our traditional and non-traditional media, we have replaced real analysis with panic, and real news with sensationalism. Hence, while everyone was screaming about how bad the economy was getting, they forgot to tell us something something pretty big happening in this country: our exports are at a record level.

The American trade deficit shrank unexpectedly in April after the United States sold $175.6 billion in goods and services overseas, the most exports on record, the government reported on Thursday.

The Commerce Department report said that exports of goods were $126.4 billion and services $49.1 billion, while total imports were $219.2 billion, resulting in a trade deficit of $43.7 billion, the lowest since December. The deficit in March was revised down to $46.8 billion from $48.2 billion, the department said.

The gap had been forecast by some economists to widen to $48.8 billion.

We’re all familiar with the American Dream: No matter who you are, where you come from or what you believe, if you work hard enough, you can make something of yourself and provide a better future for your family. I grew up believing that more passionately than the religious beliefs of my youth. And unlike those religious beliefs, the American Dream steadfastly withstands even the closest scrutiny. Absolutely nothing I’ve seen, read or encountered in life has done anything to uncouple me from my belief in that foundation of our modern society.

There are many dreams in this country that have been brilliantly articulated over the years. John F. Kennedy taught me to dream of the future. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. worked his magic on my pre-teen soul, dazzling me with his longing for a society that fulfilled the promise of our Founding Fathers. In America we are taught to dream of possibilities.

Quite without my realizing it I have been harboring and nurturing a dream of a different nature. This dream has little to do with ideals or social change or justice. It’s a simple dream really, yet one that is tricky to convey. I dream of an America that works.

Some people would go the extra mile to sweep the progress made by this Administration under the rug. Well, they have a reputation of doing that day-in and day-out. In fact, it appears like they have a search engine built to find and flags bad news, articles, quotes and narratives and they put it all together as facts and HEY if some media personality say it, it must be the reality. Bullshit!

Since the 2008 election of Barack Obama, these kinds of phony articles have had a life of their own in the eyes of some of the disgruntled progressive voters that did not support Barack Obama during the primaries and who held their nose to elect him in the general election. Let's not forget these same people have in the past called or supported statements such as the President is a "rapist", a "piece of shit", hope that he gets "impeached" and "thrown in jail, etc., for pulling this country out of depression and giving it a life that was hanging on a thread. Some of the articles written by these folks is as bad as Huffpost's yellow journalism some progressives seem to embrace instead of shaming it.

Progressive communities reward a lot of these kinds of people who are hell bent to point out nothing but the sky is falling rhetoric to polarizing the advances we have made in the last two and half years as if they don't have any comprehension and understanding of "the let's fucking make Obama's life miserable Republican Party politics". The sad part of all this is that some of these people claim they are progressives but appear to node the ridiculing of our President high-fiving and gloating with their sensationalist uninformed foolishness.

Across the country, states are redrawing their Congressional district borders after the new census last year. In the vast majority of states, politicians in the state legislature draw the borders, gerrymandering and protecting entrenched politicians and making as few competitive districts as possible. That changed in California, however, with the 2010 elections, when voters passed Proposition 20, a redistricting reform measure that gave the power of redistricting to a citizen commission and took it away from the state legislature. Prop 20 was a successor to Prop 11, which gave the same authority to the same commission, but only over state legislative districts. At the time, both the Democratic and Republican parties in the state vehemently opposed the initiative for the usual reasons.

In the interest of full disclosure, I voted for both Prop 11 and Prop 20. While a lot of my Democratic friends told me it could risk some "safe Democratic" districts, I argued that it would make elections more competitive and Democrats will have the chance to pick up seats we could never imagine (barring the Paul Ryan factor). Well, the citizen commission is now working, and they have released the first draft of the maps, and not to brag, but I happen to have been right:

Cook Political Report:

David Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, said the maps could boost the Democrats’ numbers in the state’s 53-member House delegation by four seats, identifying as among the biggest losers in the remapping proposals Dreier, of San Dimas, and fellow Republicans Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley, Gary Miller of Diamond Bar and either Brian Bilbray of Carlsbad or Jeff Denham of Atwater.

Another "liberal" beltway opinion writer, Harold Meyerson, caused a bit of a hu-ah moment, so to speak, in the Left Puritan blogsphere with his backhanded, poorly thought out column in the Washington Post earlier this week. In a piece that the nutroots ate up like a tripple chocolate Sundae, under the veil of discussing how history will judge President Obama's economic policies, Meyerson purports to write, at once, both history's judgment on President Obama's economic policies and his political obituary.

Meyerson starts with this juvenile paragraph:

When historians look back at how Barack Obama lost the 2012 election — or won it only because the Republicans nominated a certifiable space case — they will doubtless focus on his first few months in office and ponder why he didn’t do more to stanch the recession and arrest the downward mobility of the American people.

I'll tell you what a certifiable space case is - it's this column by Meyerson. For a moment, let's set aside the fact that Meyerson is attempting to write the history of Barack Obama's presidency when Obama has been in office for less than two and a half years. So historians will focus on the first few months in office of Barack Obama and ask why he didn't do more, will they? Sure, if by "historians" Meyerson means people who are bereft of historical perspective, he might be right. But so long as we are talking about how historians will judge something or what they will ask, it seems logical that one will want to examine the history of the conditions Barack Obama took office and what, from it, he delivered.

It’s time we stopped complaining about how poorly the Democrats do messaging and started learning how to implement effective methods for communicating.

Have you ever watched a television pundit interview a Republican spokesperson and been aggravated because the Republican mouthpiece never seems to be answering the pundit's question? Over and over the pundit or ‘journalist’ will try to get information from the guest and the guest seemingly ignores the question and uses up the allotted time speaking about something entirely different. This technique is called Pivoting. The speaker Pivots off the question and advances his own agenda. The Pivot is one of the most effective tools in the communication toolbox. It’s also a tool that is largely counter-intuitive to the Democratic brain.

Yesterday, President Obama did something really crucial about the economy and jobs. But I bet you did not hear a peep of it on the TV machine. He went to Northern Virginia Community College to talk about an initiative he has launched in partnership with private businesses with one goal in mind: tailor the training training of a manufacturing workforce to match the skills jobs require. First, watch the President's remarks:



There's a reason I made you sit through a 13-minute speech from the President before delving into just what is happening here and why it is so important. Nearly every word the president said was essential. But here is the part the partnership he announced focuses on and the central focus of this column (from the transcript):

...the irony is even though a lot of folks are looking for work, there are a lot of companies that are actually also looking for skilled workers. There’s a mismatch that we can close.

Yes, yesterday I said,

[L]et him own his shit and dig himself out of the hole.

Because honestly as Steve Benen puts it in Weiner comes clean article:

Given what we know, Weiner shared adult content with women he met online. They were adults and the interactions were consensual. He didn’t commit adultery (Ensign), he didn’t hire prostitutes (Vitter, Spitzer), he didn’t solicit anyone in an airport bathroom (Craig), he didn’t pretend to be someone else in order to try to pick up women (Lee), he didn’t abandon his office for a rendezvous with his lover (Sanford), he didn’t leave his first two wives after they got sick (Gingrich), he didn’t have a child with his housekeeper (Schwarzenegger), there’s no sex tape (Edwards), and no interns were involved (Clinton). He’s not even a hypocrite — Weiner has never championed conservative “family values,” condemning others for their “moral failings.”* Major media outlets clearly disagree with me, but Anthony Weiner’s controversy is rather dull by comparison. It’s possible more information will come out, some of it damaging, but for now, I’m still not sure why anyone would care about this.

To be honest, I don't give a rats ass about his sharing of whatever we know and don't know to whoever in the internet. That is between him and his wife.

I would call this unbelievable, but it's not really. You have got Puritan, radical Leftists in American politics who are so embellished by their own ego, so driven by self-deluding propaganda, that they now claim equal status with the protesters in the streets of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and numerous other countries who ushered in the Arab Spring. Seriously. Never mind that calling President Obama a war criminal has become a national sport among the professional poutrage artists. FDL, David Swanson, and others are now launching an effort to protest President Obama's "war machine," while comparing their effort to Tahrir square, where it all started in Egypt.

Tehrir square, in Egypt, stands as a witness to history - most recently the history of the struggle of the Egyptian people that ousted their dictator, Hosni Mubarak. It is where the Arab Spring came out of its infancy, and it is the place that stood living witness to the successful, peaceful determination of a people to march towards freedom.

There aren't ANY cost-control mechanisms in health reform! It doesn't CAP premiums! It's just a recipe to fork over to the private insurance companies as much money as they want! Kill it! That is how the argument went from the Purity Left for killing health reform last year. "Yeah, right, this bill contains cost! Haha! I'll believe it when pigs fly," they said. Well...

It turns out that pigs do fly. Last month, insurer Aetna received approval from Connecticut regulators of its request to reduce premiums on individual policies by an average 10 percent, starting in September. Yes, you read that right: reduce the premium. The decrease, which affects some 15,000 consumers, will save those policyholders $259 annually, on average.

“I think it’s the shape of things to come,” Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, says of Aetna’s move.

Say what? No, really. WHAT? Health insurance premiums are going down? Yup, for some people they certainly are. And as Professor Jost said, it is the shape of things to come.

That is what Weiner had said about President Obama about two and half months ago:

The Democratic Party remains unclear as to its core policy principles, Weiner said, and part of the problem is Obama.

//snip

"On our side is this weird squishy affirmative sense of what government should do and how we're opposed to this cut and that cut, rather than saying, 'Here are the things: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, environment and education. We're not cutting those. Those are off the table. That's non-negotiable,'" said Weiner, adding, "We haven't really done that very well.That's because the president fundamentally -- he's not a values guy. He wants to try to get the best deal for the American people and that's virtuous in its own right, but it becomes very difficult to make a strategy. There's been much greater global strategy thinking on [progressive media] outlets, frankly, than at 1600 Pennsylvania."

I am disgusted with what has just transpired regarding Rep. Weiner admitted lies and his fantasizing fetish behavior and stupidity sending a picture of his _____ and I wonder what else there is we don't know engaging women on the internet. How can a respected liberal hawk, articulate politician and someone who has a promising future become such a disgraceful sack of lying POS?

As an American and as a strong supporter of Israel, the most embarrassing moment in recent memory for me was when the US Congress - apparently without regard to party - showered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a smooch fest for a foreign leader who stood before the US Congress and insulted the American president for having a sensible idea of a two-state solution. When Netanyahu was spreading the "no 1967 border" propaganda (no one ever said that Israel needed to return to the 1967 borders without change) and members of Congress were fawning all over him, as an American, I was ashamed of our Congress.

Apparently, Americans weren't the only people embarrassed by our national leaders and proud of the stance that President Obama took to usher in a peace process. So were Israelis. On Saturday, Israelis answered the US Congress' Netanyahu-ass-kissing by taking to the streets in support of President Obama's plan.

This Saturday, a march organized by various peace groups and political parties of Israel including Kadima, Hadash, Labor and Meretz delivered 25,000 people in the streets of Central Tel Aviv in support of the establishment of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.

This comes in the important news that fell through the cracks category from last week. The Department of Health and Human Services just sent a strong message to culture warriors in state houses: No screwing with Medicaid to de-fund women's health care services. You see, Republican legislatures and governors, in their culture warrior true form, are likely violating federal law by trying to deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. And HHS made that very clear to Indiana, after its governor and former Bush budget director Mitch Daniels signed a regressive, culture-warrior law denying all Medicaid funding to any provider that performs legal abortion services, even though the abortion services are not funded by any government funding. HHS, in essence, ordered Indiana to shape up:

In a letter sent to Indiana's Medicaid director, Medicaid Administrator Donald M. Berwick said Indiana's plan will improperly bar beneficiaries from receiving services. Federal law requires Medicaid beneficiaries to be able to obtain services from any qualified provider.

"Medicaid programs may not exclude qualified health care providers from providing services that are funded under the program because of a provider's scope of practice," Berwick wrote in a letter to Patricia Cassanova, the director of Indiana's office of Medicaid Policy and Planning. "Such a restriction would have a particular effect on beneficiaries' ability to access family planning providers."

We know that the Republicans in Congress are using the debt limit debate to try to kill Medicare. The vast majority of Congressional Republicans (all but four House Republicans and 40 Senate Republicans) are on the record, having voted for the Paul Ryan plan to kill Medicare. John Boehner, after inexplicably making his caucus vote to kill Medicare is now crowing that raising the debt limit will require trillions in cuts.

On the other hand, we have hotheads on sites like Firedoglake calling President Obama dumb and the rest of the left puritan whackjobs singing in unison deriding the president's deficit commission as "catfood commission" and refusing to seriously look at any of their proposals. Basically, the ideological Left wants a federal jobs program, has no idea how to come up with the votes for it in Congress, and wants to bash President Obama anyway.

In essence, the media and the reactionaries have created two polls of this debate, both wrong. The first, the Right, purports to believe that deficit and spending reduction is the primary goal in and of itself, and it should be done without regard to how it affects ordinary citizens. They also believe this to be an opportunity to destroy social safety nets they have always seen as immoral. Oh, but you can't raise taxes on multinational corporations, tax cheats or the super rich, according to this crowd. The second crowd, consisting of the Left reactionaries, argues that deficits do not matter at all, severe deficits are not bad for the economy, and that fiscal responsibility is a goal contrary to economic growth.

One of the biggest complaints you hear from the left ideologue critics of President Obama is that he has willfully refused to prosecute people on Wall Street in the wake of the financial meltdown that's grappled the country in 2008 and the effects of which America is still badly suffering from. The gripe is of course largely an unfounded one, especially in light of enforcement activities that have taken place and the context of 30 years of systematic dismantling of legal and regulatory framework prior to President Obama's taking office.

The most recent and most famous of the administration's aggressive prosecutions is probably the conviction on 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy of Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam, a billionaire hedge fund manager in the largest insider trading case in a generation. Rajaratnam was convicted of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud with stocks of mostly high-tech companies, ranging from Intel to ATI, but also including Goldman Sachs. Rajaratnam is currently under surveillance but free on $100 million bail till his sentencing hearing in July, in which he faces up to 25 years in prison. Mr. Rajaratnam's attorney seemed particularly mad at CNBC, for some reason, after the verdict was announced. Watch this:

Paul Krugman writes, and not for the first or second or 10th time: "Back when the original 2009 Obama stimulus was enacted, some of us warned that it was both too small and too short-lived." Well, give yourself a gold star, Paul, but even if you were right, which you are not, your repetition of this point is deeply counterproductive.

1. Suppose Krugman is 100% on the mark and that a failure of nerve or vision or personal integrity or something caused the Obama administration to miss an opportunity for a bigger stimulus that would have fixed the economy - then what? It's not early 2009 anymore and certainly "we shouldda" is not going to get a single person a job. What does Professor Krugman propose? Where's a plausible policy for the Federal Reserve Bank or the Obama administration given the Republican party's open commitment to destroying the economy and the short sighted, self-destructive, yet enormously powerful efforts of Wall Street and the corporate media? The media is 24/7 attempting to sell the message that we must cut and one of the few voices of dissent allowed in the media devotes his time to "I was right". It's almost as if we are only permitted to see two opinions: the far right opinion and the opinion that resistance is futile and all we can do is bemoan the failure of the government to read memos from the wise. And just to show how it could be done here are two proposals:

The California state assembly just took a major step to overhauling the way health insurance companies are regulated in the state, by passing AB 52, a bill to empower California's Insurance Commissioner and our Department of Managed Health Care to block premium increases for California health insurance consumers. In fact, it would require prior approval of regulators before rate increases can take effect. The efforts of the Obama administration under health reform to encourage just this type of action was not gone unnoticed by the bill's sponsor, Assemblymember Mike Feuer:

It's an extremely important piece of legislation not just here in California, but nationally. We know that the Obama administration, through its Secretary of HHS, Secretary Sebelius, has called for states accross the country to give their insurance commissioners the authority to regulate health insurance rates.

Here's Assemblymember Feuer, making this statement to the press:

It is understandable that President Obama would select John Bryson as his nominee: he is a founder of a radical environmental organization and a member of a United Nations advisory group on climate change,” Mr. Inhofe said. He especially criticized Mr. Bryson for speaking well of cap-and-trade legislation to reduce carbon emissions, saying it would cost jobs and raise the price of gasoline and energy. NYT The photo to the left is of Jim Inhofe' boss, David Koch at the opening of the David H. Koch hall in Lincoln Center in New York City. Inhofe is supposed to be working for the people of Oklahoma, but he's pretty much tied up helping protect the Koch family business against competition from green energy companies when he's not out using tax money to visit corrupt African dictators for weird cult leader Doug Coe or endangering the lives of airport construction crews because safety rules are for the little people. President Obama's nominee to run the commerce department, the guy who Inhofe is calling "radical", has run one of California's biggest utilities for 2 decades, and is on the board of Boeing and Disney. He's has been endorsed by the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC)and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Chamber of Commerce. The President expects him to go out and help American companies, especially green manufacturing ones, export our products around the world.

Recently, PolitiFact gave Nancy Pelosi's office a "pants on fire" rating for the debt numbers it released, pointing out which president raised the debt by how much. They found out that Pelosi's office had mistakenly used the national debt figure on January 20, 2010, rather than January 20, 2009 to compute both Obama's and Bush's debt numbers. So PolitiFact corrected Pelosi thusly:

January 20, 1993 (end of George H.W. Bush and beginning of Clinton): $4.188 trillion
January 19, 2001 (end of Clinton and beginning of George W. Bush): $5.728 trillion
January 20, 2009 (end of George W. Bush and beginning of Obama): $10.627 trillion
April 29, 2011 (closing date of the chart): $14.288 trillion

This allows us to determine how much the debt rose under each president:

Under Clinton: Increase of $1.54 trillion, or 37 percent
Under George W. Bush: Increase of $4.899 trillion, or 86 percent
Under Obama: Increase of $3.661 trillion, or 34 percent

At first look, their analysis seems fair enough. And so much so, Pelosi's Flickr account subsequently made a correction. But this is hardly a correct evaluation of who jacked up how much debt. First and foremost, when Barack Obama assumed office on January 20, 2009, the US was under the budget of fiscal year 2009, which started on October 1, 2008. This budget was signed into law by President Bush, not President Obama. So President Obama can hardly be held responsible for that. So the numbers we should be using are FY numbers, not January numbers. Luckily, the US Department of Treasury has data available just by that, fiscal year. Using those numbers, we have the following:

So I was at the gym last night. I had a little time before my group class started, and I was looking at the TV. CNN was on. They were playing Dana Bash, and her sidekick CNN Congressional Producer and bonafide jackass Ted Barrett, hounding Congressman Anthony Weiner about his hacked twitter account sending an inappropriate picture. Interestingly enough, the story got wings when Andrew Breitbart's site started to sell spread it.. It was this video here that Dana Bash talks to Wolf Blitzer about: