Should Democratic base VOTE bipartisan like Dem leaders?

Seriously, since Obama continued the Wall Street Bailout, based half the stimulus on GOP ideas, asked Republicans for advice on health care reform and passed a version strikingly similar to Republican Mitt Romney's in Massachusetts, and now are making noises about the need to cut the budget, especially social security with his catfood commission headed by right wing crank Alan Simpson, wouldn't he be pleased if we donated to, campaigned, and voted for SOME Democrats and SOME Republicans?

I can't think of a single Republican I'd want to vote for, but they must have an important contribution to make since the White House bends over backwards to get their advice and uses their ideas even when it doesn't result in Republican votes and even when he didn't NEED Republican votes.

Wouldn't it make him happy if we followed in his footsteps?

Would Obama, Rahm and gang be happy if Democratic base practiced bipartisan voting and campaigning?
	YES, we should follow the example of our leader
	YES, Obama, Rahm and gang would be more comfortable working with Republicans anyway.
	NO, only our leaders know when it's best to do the heavy lifting for their political opponents.
	other
pollcode.com free polls

Obama: don't bow & scrape to business--divide & conquer

An article in Politico says the Obama administration is worried the are gaining an unfair reputation of being anti-business and includes the pitch Rahm Emanuel is making publicly to get back in corporate America's good graces, but only one part of it is on target, the point about reregulation (see highlight in excerpt below).

The fact is, when Wall Street is run like a boiler room scam factory, it's bad for legitimate businesses that produce actual goods and services, who could become the target of the next pump and dump bubble. Worse, without fairly applied regulation, smaller businesses must always be afraid that larger, more politically connected corporations will cheat them in deals or use monopolistic tactics to put them out of business with impunity.

There is also the old Henry Ford case to be made prosperous workers buy more products, and the various scams and exorbitant health insurance costs have meant less money for workers to spend buying electronics, cars, and refrigerators.

Probably the best cases to be made though is a Machiavellian divide and conquer one: not all businesses are the same just as not all people are. There were and are some bad actors who harmed not just the American people but all other American businesses.

Unless a business really believed they could get out of paying for health insurance altogether, health care reform will help them (and it would have helped them more if it had been even more progressive and gave people a public option).

Likewise, the damage BP has done to fisheries, tourism, and probably even some agriculture in the Gulf of Mexico is incalculable. When you add the other hidden costs of catering to the oil industry like the taxes we pay that go to subsidies, tax breaks, and troops to seize and protect oil reserves and pipeline routes, taking care of the health effects of burning fossil fuels, and the suppression of alternative energy to replace it.

Rahm's approach assumes that a business is a business is a business, but that is like saying your corner diner is the same as Microsoft is the same as a tobacco company, ''massage'' parlor, or Tony Robbins get-rich-quick scam.

Clamping down on and holding the bad actors accountable makes it possible for ethical businesses to thrive since the lack of regulation puts ethical businesses at a disadvantage against the unethical who will cut corners in product or worker safety or by giving their customers less than promised.

And just as many conservatives think certain individuals are so dangerous to society that they cannot be allowed to live, so it is with certain businesses and even whole industries that need to be put to death or at least put out on ice floe in the arctic, so that their survival depends on their anti-climate change propaganda being true.

If BP hasn't earned that fate, we should apologize for executing Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer*, and Tim McVeigh.

To do this though, taking care of the public good would have to be a top priority, and if you read up on the DLC, corporate wing of the Democratic Party that Obama has filled his administration with, it is obvious that they would rather replace the Republicans not just in elected offices, but in the hearts of sociopathic CEO's and trust fund babies as their most trusted servants, and if that means grinding us up and using us to chum for sharks off the back of the wealthy's yacht, so be it.

W.H. works to flip anti-business rep
By: Ben White
July 8, 2010 12:51 PM EDT

Obama has been happy to be seen by voters as cracking down on Wall Street but those efforts have had an unintended result: feeding a sense that the president and his party are indifferent or even actively hostile toward big business, whether those businesses are Silicon Valley tech companies, Midwestern manufacturers or Main Street small businesses.

And it is more than just politics: Obama’s aides believe confidence in the general direction of White House policy has an effect on the willingness of corporations to hire, invest and push the economy toward a more solid recovery.

The stakes are high. Nearly every economic report suggests that corporate America, flush with cash and generating strong profits, is waiting to unleash a wave of hiring if only they have confidence there will be no double-dip recession and that consumers will have money to spend.

***

In a Thursday interview, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argued that rather than recoiling against Obama, business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a half-dozen counts: his advocacy of greater international trade and education reform open markets despite union skepticism; his rejection of calls from some quarters to nationalize banks during the financial meltdown; the rescue of the automobile industry; the fact that the overhaul of health care preserved the private delivery system; the fact that billions in the stimulus package benefited business with lucrative new contracts, and that financial regulation reform will take away the uncertainty that existed with a broken, pre-crash regulatory apparatus.

FULL TEXT

*NOTE: I know Dahmer was only executed by poetic justice not by the judicial system.

BP spill could move Southern whites left, but will Dems be there?

I was a conservative & evangelical in 1989, seemingly the unshakable base of the GOP, but I went to work as a commercial fisherman in Alaska that summer and ended up cleaning oil off rocks and picking up dead animals instead.

More disturbing to me than the actual spill though, was the relationship between the Coast Guard and Exxon, the corporation that caused the damage.

A helicopter landed on a beach we were cleaning, and a Coast Guard captain and a greasy, frat boy Exxon exec got out. I expected the captain to be leading this guy around by the scruff of his neck and rubbing his nose in the oil patties. Instead, the Exxon exec was barking out orders and the Coast Guard captain was all "Yes, sir! No, sir! Right away, Sir!"

I grew up with a great respect for the military, was in a cadet program all through high school, served briefly in the military myself, and was shocked to see a high ranking officer grovel before a corporate criminal.

It was clear that Exxon was above the law, we needed politicians who would change that, and Republicans refused to do so, so I became a New Deal Democrat on the spot.

I suspect the same will happen to many Southern whites as they try to get help by appealing to their Republican elected officials and get nothing. They will migrate to politicians and the party more likely to restore and protect the waters that give them their livelihood.

Sadly, over twenty years later I saw the same scene re-enacted with a BP exec in the Gulf of Mexico even though we have a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House of Representatives. So even as Southern whites may be driven left, they will find no major party there to receive them, just more bowing and scraping to corporate money and power.

An unequivocally progressive Democratic Party could capitalize on this moment and re-establish a New Deal-like consensus that would last decades.

Instead, under the leadership of Rahm Emanuel, and unfortunately even President Obama, they are striving to replace the GOP as corporate water boy, and looking to line their pockets with corporate donations now and when they leave elected office, with fat salaries as corporate lobbyists, CEO's, and board members.

The newly lefter bubbas will find they have nowhere to go.

Is Rahm Emanuel Karl Rove's retarded cousin?

I would submit that he is equally amoral as Karl Rove but less competent.

Rove at least seemed to have a coherent plan to keep his guy in office: smear and fear. Smear your critics, make the public and legislators fear terrorists and crossing Bush. While the corruption and incompetence of the Bushies at actually governing or conducting a war led to their eventual train wreck, Rove's smoke and mirrors were enough to get Bush into his second term.

By contrast, whatever political advice Rahm Emanuel is giving Obama seems solely designed to appeal to corporate patrons with little thought to how it will play with average Americans, particularly, no thought to how the public will react if the final form of health insurance reform is perceived as a gift to insurance companies instead of helping the rest of us.

It is really dishonest to say they are ''moderate'' or ''pragmatic'' when in reality, they are serving their corporate donors and future corporate employers rather than the wishes of their constituents.

This has been made most obvious in polls of voters in blue dogs' states and districts about the public option in health care reform:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/21/montantans-not...

http://www.laprogressive.com/2009/09/22/new-study-publi... /

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/analysis-public-...

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/10/abc-new...

Even voters who reside in more conservative districts are not retarded or prefer being raped by insurance companies to having access to something like Medicare as an alternative.

In fact, one CBS poll found that even Republican voters favor a public option.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/poll-even-re...

Even in places where people have drunken the conservative KoolAid and think they don't want a public option, once they had it given to them, they would probably cling to as tenaciously as the teabaggers cling to Medicare, even as they decry ''socialized medicine.''

Giving people a real public option would yield long term dividends for the Democrats.

Even severe compromises on health care would have been easier to swallow if Obama had taken swift action to punish, rein in, and neuter Wall Street--especially after giving them the second half of the Bush no strings attached bailout.

Obama has certainly done good things on less visible issues like student aid and repairing our image abroad although even the foreign affection for Obama will wear off if he continues Bush like policies in Afghanistan and starts a new Operation Condor in Latin America.

And if corporate compliant Rahm is calling the shots, that is likely to be the trajectory.

Even on the pragmatic level of giving Obama's base a reason to pound the pavement and open our wallets for him in 2012, baldly corporate first action seems stupid.

So my question is, is Rahm brilliantly playing some long game of chess on behalf of the American people, or is he so syphilictically corrupt that he can't help but do a Bush-like corporate smash-and-grab robbery of the treasury on behalf of big business?

NOTE: no offense meant to the retarded, those with syphilis, or Karl Rove

Is Rahm Emanuel more short-sighted than Karl Rove?
	NO--Rahm has some brilliant strategery that hasn't played out yet
	YES-- Rahm thinks he is Karl Rove, but he's really the Dem's Palin--everything he touches turns to shit
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Would Dem leaders work be OK from cop, lawyer, doctor or exterminator?

From impeachment, to ending the Iraq War, to prevent the Iran War, the Democratic leadership in Congress has made at best half-hearted efforts toward representing the public, without using every procedural and investigative option at their disposal, and at worst have fallen all over themselves to enable Bush as in the case of ramping up for the Iran War and funding the Iraq War.

Imagine someone in other professions applying the same kind of effort and getting the same results as Democratic leaders like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Rahm Emanuel.

How long would you continue to employ them?

What would happen to a cop if he applied the same level of effort to a murder investigation?

He tells the grieving family that the victim was in a dangerous neighborhood, which is why he was killed, but neither gives more details nor asks for them. He tells the family they are lucky he's the cop and not the murderer. When pressed, the cop reluctantly investigates some, but when a suspect starts to emerge, he apologizes to the suspect and suggests the law should be changed to make murder legal.

Or a lawyer.

A prosecutor never speaks during the trial for the murder of your loved one except to make lunch arrangements with the defense counsel and try to line up a job with the accused or at least get campaign donations from him. During a break, you stick your head in another trial and notice the prosecutor is objecting and even demanding a mistrial for lesser misconduct than you have seen from the defendant's counsel in your trial. You go back and talk to the prosecutor in your case, and he starts to object on peripheral issues but says a mistrial is "off the table" even though the defense is clearly winning over the jury.

or a judge.

You are a judge in the trial like the one above. The prosecution has put forward compelling evidence beyond a reasonable doubt and the jury has decided to convict the defendant. You rebuke the jury, set aside their verdict, release the defendant, and apologize to him because murder happens to be illegal at the moment, but you hope that will change soon.

or a doctor.

A doctor discovers a cancerous tumor in your abdomen. Instead of removing it, he redirects blood vessels to it. Doing some research on your own, you discover this ''treatment'' will lead to the tumor growing faster, and that removal, chemotherapy, and radiation are the usual treatments. When you confront your doctor with this, he gets offended and asks who has more experience in dealing with cancer, him or you. Meanwhile, the tumor grows to the size of a basketball.

Or an exterminator.

You notice cockroaches. You call the exterminator. When he arrives, he sprays insecticide on your children, leaving them coughing and rubbing their burning eyes, and then takes some food out of your fridge and puts it down where the cockroaches can find it. When they come out, he makes sure they all get enough to eat and sets up a little cockroach playground for them. You try to stomp on the cockroaches, and he grabs your foot to stop you.

and so on.

In any of these other professions, you would not only fire them, but sue them for malpractice.