Yes We Cave

The Devil and Mr. Obama: Barack promised change - and sure enough, things changed for the worse

 

by Joe Bageant

 

Editor's note: Patrick Ward, associate editor of the UK's Socialist Review asked Joe to write a piece for the party publication. This is the unabridged text of Joe's submission.

Well lookee here! An invite from my limey comrades to recap Barack Obama's first year in office. Well comrades, I can do this thing two ways. I can simply state that the great mocha hope turned out to be a Trojan horse for Wall Street and the Pentagon. Or I can lay in an all-night stock of tequila, limes and reefer and puke up the entire miserable tale like some 5,000 word tequila purged Congolese stomach worm. I have chosen to do the latter.

As you may know, Obama's public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don't construe this as support for the GOP. It's just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans' party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.

Right now his approval ratings are in the 40th percentile and would be headed for the basement of the league were it not for the residual effect of the Kool-Aid love fest a year ago. However, millions of American liberals remain faithful, and believe Obama will arise from the dead in the third year and ascend to glory. You will find them at Huffington Post.

This frustrating ping pong game in which the margin of first time, disenchanted and undecided voters are batted back and forth has become the whole of American elections. That makes both the Republican and Democratic parties very happy, since it keeps the game down to fighting the enemy they know, each other, as opposed to being forced to deal with the real issues, or worse yet, an independent or third party candidate who might have a solution or two.

Thus, the game is limited to two players between two corporate parties. One is the Republican Party, which believes we should hand over our lives and resources directly to the local Chamber of Commerce, so the chamber can deliver them to the big corporations. The other, the Democratic Party, believes we should hand our lives and resources to a Democratic administration -- so it alone can deliver our asses to the big dogs who own the country. In the big picture it's always about who gets to deliver the money to the Wall Street hyena pack.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/25408

Sarah Palin, WWE Star

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Matt Taibbi

Taibblog

Obama knows the long odds against a right-wing populist winning the presidency, no matter how good she looks in a skirt or running clothes, brandishing a gun. He shouldn't be too cocky, however, because the death of the center is ultimately a problem for him and the whole country. If the Palinistas seize the GOP, they probably cannot take the White House. But their brand of no-prisoners partisanship sure can tie up Congress.

via How Sarah Palin Hurts the GOP And the Country | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com.

The really beautiful thing about the culture war, from an entertainment standpoint, is that it is fundamentally irresolvable. There isn't a concrete set of issues involved, where in theory both sides could give in a little and find middle ground, reach some sort of compromise.

That's because there are no issues at all. At the end of this decade what we call "politics" has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments and the really cool thing about it, if you're a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day's news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant — like who's wearing a flag lapel pin and who isn't, who spent $150K worth of campaign funds on clothes and who didn't, who wore a t-shirt calling someone a cunt and who didn't, and who put a picture of a former Vice Presidential candidate in jogging shorts on his magazine cover (and who didn't).

It doesn't matter what the argument is about. What's important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they're blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.

And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we've now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming's sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book's significance, because in some ways it's really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/11/20/sarah-palin-wwe-star/

Rethink Afghanistan: Experiences in the Afghanistan War

SIGN THE PETITION TO CONGRESS

President Obama has decided to send more than 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100 billion/year. But America cannot afford a war that does not make us safer, and Congress has the power to stop the escalation. Vote NO on any spending bill that would send more troops to Afghanistan.

 

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/?utm_source=hundredk#petition

Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails

AP / Susan Walsh

President Barack Obama speaks about the economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Tuesday.

By Robert Scheer

Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those "we the people" e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths. 

In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people's champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests. 

With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush's massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.

Health reform was the subject of Obama's Tuesday e-mail, which proclaimed in its heading, "We will not back down." Addressing me by my first name, which I assume is in acknowledgment that I, like the millions of other suckers with whom he so intimately corresponds, had contributed to his campaign, he began with a clarion call for yet another contribution, this time to donate.barackobama.com/FinalStretch.

"As we head into the final stretch of health reform, big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies hope that their relentless attacks and millions of dollars can intimidate us into accepting the status quo.  So I have a message for them, from all of us: Not this time. We have come too far. We will not turn back. We will not back down."

But we, following him, have already backed down. Does the president not recall that he began his health care reform effort by ingratiating himself with the insurance lobbyists in taking "single payer" off the table on day one? The insurers are not really upset with what may survive as a minuscule public option, for they have won the big prize: Everyone must buy insurance from them under penalty of law, and there will be no built-in requirement for cost control. Their so-called opposition to the current plans has to do with fine-tuning the president's guarantee of their future profits.

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dear_barack_spare_me_your_emails_20091208/?ln

Scientists expected to unveil the discovery of dark matter

 

This dark matter map was created by the Hubble Telescope by measuring light from distant stars thought to have been deflected by dark matter. The map of half the Universe reveals dark matter filaments, collapsing under the relentless pull of gravity and growing clumpier over time

 

By Claire Bates

Physicists have detected a particle of dark matter for the first time in human history, according to rumours buzzing around the internet.

Should it prove correct the finding would have an Earth-shattering effect on our understanding of how galaxies form.

 

Dark matter is believed to make up 90 per cent of the mass of the Universe. We can't see it but scientists think it is there due to the gravitational force it exerts.

It could help account for the 'missing mass' in the Universe that would explain why galaxies rotate at their current speeds.

Scientists have searched for evidence of the hypothetical matter since the 1970s both on Earth and in space.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1234473/Dark-matter-discovered-Scientists-key-evidence-mine.html#ixzz0ZPpWkNJE

The disconnect between the man and the IDEA of the man

Editor & Publisher closing after 108 years

By ANDREW VANACORE

NEW YORK – The Nielsen Co. is selling some of its most prominent trade journals — including The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard — and shutting down Editor & Publisher, which has chronicled the newspaper business for 108 years.

In all, Nielsen is selling eight titles to e5 Global Media LLC, a new company formed by private equity firm Pluribus Capital Management, and Guggenheim Partners, a financial services company. Nielsen said James Finkelstein, who founded Pluribus this year with George Green and Matthew Doull, will serve as e5's chairman.

Along with Editor & Publisher, the company is also shuttering the book review title Kirkus Reviews. The two publications have 18 employees combined. Nielsen would not reveal details about the financial performance of E&P or Kirkus.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091210/ap_en_ot/us_editor___publisher_closing

OMG! Alan Grayson tells Dick Cheney to ‘STFU!’

by Raw Story

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), the congressman who gained nationwide fame after declaring that the Republican plan for health care amounts to hoping that people "die quickly," has a few choice words -- or, rather, one choice acronym -- for former Vice President Dick Cheney: "STFU."

For those not familiar with the expression, that's Internet parlance for "shut the fuck up."

Grayson made the comment during an interview on MSNBC's Hardball Wednesday night. Host Chris Matthews had asked the Florida congressman about Cheney's comments on Fox News Tuesday, in which the former VP called Obama a "radical" and said the president's decision to bring accused 9/11 plotters to Manhattan to face trial was "a huge mistake."

"On the Internet there's an acronym that's used to apply to situations like this. It's called 'STFU,'" Grayson told Matthews. "I don't think I can say that on the air, but I think you know what that means."

"Well give me the first part," Matthews asked.

"Shut," Grayson responded.

"Oh, I gotcha," Matthews said. "Stop talking, in crude language. Well, I don't think you're going to get [Cheney] to do that."

Later in the segment, Grayson responded to the controversy over President Obama's bow to the Japanese emperor.

"I remember [President George W. Bush] kissing [Saudi Crown] Prince Abdullah on the cheek, and then holding his hand for an extended period of time," Grayson said. "Maybe if he'd let him get to second base, then gasoline would be a dollar a gallon."

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/alan-die-quickly-grayson-tells-cheney-stfu/

Palin's Christmas Trophy