What are the White House’s Priorities?

After reading a Denver Post article that detailed some of the efforts that the Obama White House went to in order to ensure appointed Senator Michael Bennet won his Democratic Primary a couple of days ago, I’m left with that question.

And here’s why: Americans are frustrated with the D.C. culture of doing as little as possible.  Americans voted for Obama in record numbers in 2008 mostly because they wanted to see progress made on a suite of issues that had been left to languish or purposefully decimated in the previous 8 years of the Bush Regime.  Instead of getting things done, as was promised in the 2008 campaigns across America, the White House chose instead to waste months of time in order to get one or two Republicans to vote for bills that were being continually watered down.

The nation’s biggest banks got taxpayer dollars which they used to buy smaller banks and reduce competition.  They’re not lending much of those billions of dollars to small businesses or the people who would spend it and finally get this economy back on track.

Healthcare legislation became a health industry giveaway.  The system remains broken, as Americans will continue to affirm for themselves over the next few years.

No climate legislation will be passed any time soon – and I mean any time in the next few years.  Or at least until climate-related disasters affect more Americans personally.

Guantanamo remains open; we’re still occupying Iraq; we’re still occupying Afghanistan.

Unemployment officially remains near 10%, though the more realistic number hovers nearer 18%.

Real take-home income still hasn’t increased measurably since 1974.

Despite all of the things that weren’t done at all , or were done partway, Obama’s machine has decided to back every incumbent Democrat this year, whether they worked to pass any part of his agenda or not.  A number of those candidates have already failed to win their primaries or are behind enough in the polls that Republican wins are all but guaranteed in 3 short months.

That machine wouldn’t be necessary if the President’s team had decided that America’s agenda needed some attention in 2009 and earlier this year.

I’m not at all sure what Obama expects will get done in 2011-2012 with fewer Democrats in the House, which did a monumental job getting good legislation passed, or the Senate, which is broken.  But if he feels better about himself because his machine helped get a couple incumbents through their primaries, more power to him.

Not The Change I Voted For

I know President Obama wants us to make him be the President we want him to be.

So, who wants Presidents Obama to make it easier for the FBI to search through their online activities without a warrant?

Maybe he’s just pre-emptively giving the Cons something else so that one of their Senators might one day vote for more of his watered down legislation.  That’s not the change I voted for.

Will Obama’s 2010 Message Resonate?

I don’t think it will.

The Obama administration’s new message:

Republicans caused the nation’s economic troubles, but he and the Democrats are starting to fix them. So stick with the Democrats and don’t go back to the GOP.

On a factual level, the first sentence is absolutely true.  On a messaging level, the second will have a hard time resonating.

For activists such as myself, it won’t resonate because we know Obama and his team made the decision to take the easy road.  They didn’t want to fight with the Cons that drove us all into the metaphorical ditch Obama is talking about.  Heck, the Obama crew did everything they could to try to get the Cons to work the shift pedal while they worked the gas pedal.  Guess what happened?  The Cons kept their promise and didn’t work with the Dems.

To expand on Obama’s framing, the car has lurched all over the road, giving Americans whiplash and bruised limbs.  We voted for Democrats in 2008 because they said they would fight for us.  Backroom deals for industries has rendered signature legislation toothless and ineffectual.  And instead of fighting for us, the Dems have done everything they could to not fight with the Cons.

For Americans that aren’t activists and don’t follow policy developments closely, Obama’s message will have a hard time resonating because they simply haven’t seen many positive results of giving Democrats massive Congressional majorities and the White House – something that has happened every few decades.  Those Americans might not know the extent to which the stimulus was pared back or how little the Health Insurance Reform Giveaway will change their lives in the future.  All they see is, as week after week slides by, their lives aren’t changing for the better.  When you’re barely treading water, or in the process of drowning, “Stay Pat” doesn’t solve those problems.  You can’t tread for years; how possible is it to recover from drowning?

The worst part for Americans is the big projected Democratic losses will occur in the place where the best and most solutions have originated: the House.  It’s the Senate that’s broken.  It’s the White House that decided not to aggressively pursue policies.  Yet it could very well be the House members who take the brunt of the electorate’s frustration.  If there are fewer Democrats in 2011-2012, will the solutions we need be crafted?  One thing is for sure, it will be a lot harder to do so.  More importantly, if the Democrats don’t fix the broken Senate, it doesn’t matter how many Democrats lose their House seats.  More necessary legislation will continue to die in the upper chamber.

Obama White House Continues Right-Wing Pandering & Left-Wing Slamming

President Obama’s administration had better start figuring out who helped propel them into office and who will never vote for them.

In the wake of the Obama administration’s largest initiative failure to date, an administration official ran crying to the tone-deaf Politico, telling them that it was all the enviros fault that a climate and energy bill won’t be taken up in the dysfunctional, anti-democratic Senate this year.

While Obama’s team keeps asking, “How high?” every time Fox Propaganda and Rush think about telling them to jump, action on issue after issue is reduced to a hollow shell and progressives are kicked to the bottom of the ditch by the side of the road.

The biggest problem with this whole scenario isn’t Obama or Sen. Reid or the right-wing disinformation and smear bloc – it’s unelected yo-yos like this official who just like to see their b.s. in D.C.-based media.  These clowns don’t care what the science says; they don’t care what Americans outside of D.C. think or want.  They’re attention whores and they’ll gladly sabotage any initiative that leans slightly left of the tea-baggers.

“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” the official told POLITICO. “They spent like $100 million and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”

In this idiot’s world, the administration is supposed to sit back and let issue groups write legislation and decide who needs to be targeted to pass it.  The President has the biggest bully pulpit in this country, but it’s people like this official who are holding him and this country back from the greatness we can achieve.

How much did the dirty energy corporations spend to water down the House legislation and water down the Senate Committee version even further? A lot more than $100 million, I assure you.  Which amounts to round-off error for corporations posting the biggest profits in the history of the world.

Politico does provide some context for how monumental this failure really is for the Obama administration:

Eighteen months ago, Barack Obama took office pledging to deal with a “planet in peril.”

His party held big majorities in Congress, and the House answered by passing a tough cap-and-trade bill. A massive climate conference in Copenhagen, with Obama at the center of the action, focused the world on the need to address global warming.

Then came the nation’s worst-ever environmental disaster, an oil spill in the Gulf that put momentum behind environmentalists and scarred the image of big, polluting industries.

Add in a summer of record-high temperatures, and it would seem the stars had been aligned like never before for climate legislation.

Climate legislation that the cowardly Dems have decided not to pursue this year.  Because there’s always next year, or maybe 2012 would be better … no, there’s a Presidential election that year – we wouldn’t want the Dems to have to make tough decisions while running for re-election.  Well, there’s always 2013, right?  I mean, big parts of the Health Insurance Reform Giveaway won’t even take effect until 2013 or 2014.  The Dems could certainly take up at least a small climate/energy bill in 2013 or so.

By all means, keep putting the most important issue our species faces until it’s a sure thing politically.  It’s not like this country faces any kind of negative consequences as a result of your continued inaction incompetence.

Just don’t take progressives’ votes and hard work for granted after you keep slapping us aside.

Krugman: Entering 3rd Depression?

Instead of addressing the unemployment crisis, the U.S. and other major world economies are foolishly acting concerned about potential future deficits.  Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman opines that this deficit-attention could lead us into the third depression in modern history.

If you want to see where the true crisis lays, go to this HuffPo article and scroll down a bit to see the long-term unemployment graph.  For the first time in recorded history, more than 7,000,000 people have been recorded as unemployed for longer than 27 weeks.  That’s 8 months or more, folks.  And it absolutely crushes the previous record set in the Reagan Regime of a mere 3,000,000 unemployed people.

What’s the response to 7,000,000 long-term unemployed Americans?  A continuation of Reaganomics, the economic theory that got us in this disaster in the first place.  President Obama must want to only serve one term.  That’s certainly what he’ll get if he continues to be led around by the nose by deficit-concern-trolls.

Ryan Grim: Obama Economic Policy Article

This is well worth the read: Ryan Grim writes a piece that includes Obama’s economic advisers recognizing their deficit-peacock attitude will not be beneficial politically or policy-wise in the long-term.

So why adhere to that mis-begotten attitude?

Tea Partiers Are Mostly Wealthy, White, Ultra-Conservative Men

It’s a little surprising to me why so much attention is being given to the extremist Tea Party.  What’s so shocking about a bunch of older, white rich men being angry at the rest of the country?  They’ve demonstrated for the better part of 30 years that they love to cast themselves as the victims of our society – so nothing they’re saying today is novel, let alone grounded in reality.

Be that as it may, more and more corporate media outlets are running polls to try to crack the nearly impenetrable nut that the Tea Party supposedly represents.  In politics, it’s always good to have numbers to back up arguments.  It won’t make the fringe right-wing any more accountable for their own actions, but the rest of America at least gets a chance to see who they really are.

A majority of Tea Party folks don’t actually seem to be so terribly upset about taxes, which commenters commonly cite as their raison d’etre.  They have said so themselves – they think they’re being taxed fairly.  They have a skewed view of the job President Obama is doing, especially as it relates to the federal deficit and the health insurance mess that was the result of a wasted year of “debate”.

Their deficit concerns are incredibly laughable.  And I think they actually demonstrate what they’re really concerned about.  Before I get to that, I would like to point out that no media polling has yet asked a very important question: if the deficit is really so troubling to you, where were you in the years 2001-2008, when the federal deficit exploded?  President Obama has added a little to the national deficit, it’s true.  I say a little because the last president added many times what this President has or will.  Angry, old, rich white men weren’t screaming about revolts and revolutions last decade.

Why?  Because the president looked like them; because he was one of them.  When the Tea Partiers are threatening to commit violence and cheering domestic terrorists in 2009 and 2010, it is in no small part due to the fact that they don’t like operating in a society that takes care of everybody.  The Tea Partiers loved the historic transfer of wealth that the Cons gave to rich white people.  They’re angry because some of that wealth might find its way back to the people who gave it up in the last 10 years.  Tea Partiers are greedy and selfish.  A majority of them are racist, evidenced by a growing number of poll results, given by the Tea Partiers themselves.

These extremists have made up their own twisted version of history and are trying to force it onto the rest of the country.  Terrorists and their supporters should not be given credence by our media.  That wouldn’t happen if the corporate media didn’t cater primarily to them.

Obama Opens Up Off-Shore Areas For Dirty Energy Exploration

President Barack Obama announced his off-shore oil drilling plan today.  Count me among the folks who are pretty frustrated with the announcement and its details.  I’ll start with what the announcement included, then get into why I think it’s a bad set of proposals.

Atlantic coast drilling would be open for exploration from Delaware to mid-Florida.  Gulf of Mexico exploration would be open off the south and west coasts of Florida.  The Chukchi and Beaufort Sea areas off the north coast of Alaska would be opened.  For now, the West Coast remains off-limits.  Additionally, the Department of Agriculture will work with the Pentagon to use more biofuels in military vehicles.  Thousands of hybrid vehicles will also be purchased for the federal motor pool.

This decision marks a reversal of off-shore drilling policies that Obama campaigned on in 2008.  To secure the Democratic Party nomination and win the general election, Obama distinguished himself from the Bush Regime and Sen. McCain.  Now, “compromise” and “bipartisanship” appear to demand something else entirely.

Colorado’s Share of President Obama’s Smart Grid Investments

Did you hear all the talk about President Obama’s announcement that $3.4 Billion in energy grid modernization investment? It hasn’t exactly dominated the top-of-the-hour news reports, but made some small ripples on Tuesday.

While Congress remains bogged down on health care, to say nothing of energy and climate, legislation, the executive branch has been very busy this year starting initiatives and issuing new rules and threatening regulations. This is the latest in that series of actions.

Two projects in Colorado are receiving investment money. More on them below…

Cheney’s Daughter Is A Serious Foreign Policy Expert?

The Cons live in a very strange world.  It’s a world in which the “free-market” supposedly fixes everything by itself and so is pursued with religious vigor that would make Orthodox followers scratch their heads.  It’s a world in which every dark-skinned person in a viable, current threat to the safety and security of the Cons’ gated communities, except for the ones that are rich (see: Saudi Arabian royalty, etc).  It’s a world in which the term climate-change is a far-left conspiracy theory that has somehow grabbed power in nearly every country’s government, that nearly every scientist is somehow a part of and that nearly every media outlet is somehow a part of to boot.  It doesn’t have to make sense to the rest of us – the Cons excel at cognitive dissonance.

In this fantasy land, the daughter of the last Vice-President Puppet-Master is somehow considered to be a leader in developing Con opposition to President Obama’s foreign policy initiatives.  Never mind that saying the President’s foreign policies weren’t in America’s interests got you labeled “traitor” and “terrist-lover” by the same Cons just one short year ago.  The difference was the “President” was a Con, so his directives comes down from up-high, don’tcha know?  Now that the President is a half-black man, all that is out the window.  Nothing President Obama can or will do will ever be good enough for these rigid ideologues.