President Barack McBush, part two
Fri, 2008-08-15 13:32
#1
M. Spector
President Barack McBush, part two
Fri, 2008-08-15 13:32
#2
M. Spector
[url=http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=13&t=003963]Part one was here[/url]
[url=http://www.indypendent.org/2008/08/08/welcome-to-donkeyland/]Meet some more of the people Obama is taking advice from:[/url]
quote:
Robert Rubin: Treasury Secretary and top economic advisor in the Clinton administration, [b]Rubin was the architect of the financial deregulation that set the stage for the subprime mortgage crisis.[/b] Days after leaving office in 1999, Rubin took a $15 million- per-year job at Citigroup, one of the main beneficiaries of his deregulatory zeal. More recently, [b]Rubin founded the Hamilton Project, a centrist think tank that advises Democrats on economic issues.[/b] He is also co-chair of the Council on Foreign Relations.Jason Furman: [b]A champion of free trade and Wal-Mart’s low-wage business model,[/b] Furman was chosen by Robert Rubin to head the Hamilton Project in 2006. In June, [b]Obama named him to head his economic policy team,[/b] much to the dismay of unions and liberal activists.
Sam Nunn: Former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, [b]Nunn is Co-Chair of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bastion of hawkish foreign policy elites from both parties. Nunn is currently a top foreign policy advisor to Obama[/b] and is frequently mentioned as a possible vice-presidential nominee. Nunn serves on the board of ChevronTexaco and is a partner in King & Spaulding, a giant Atlanta law firm with extensive dealings in the Middle East.
David Boren: He chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence before retiring in 1994. His top aide and protege George Tenant went on to lead the CIA under Presidents Clinton and Bush, famously providing the “slam dunk” evidence for going to war with Iraq. Like Nunn, [b]Boren serves as an Obama foreign policy advisor.[/b] His son Dan Boren is an Oklahoma Congressman and one of the leaders of the conservative Blue Dog faction that holds the balance of power in the House.
James R. Jones: [b]Think Obama will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)? Ask this former Oklahoma congressman and D.C. insider who helped shepherd NAFTA into existence as Clinton’s Ambassador to Mexico[/b] from 1993 to 1997. Since leaving office he has served as the head of the U.S.-Mexico Business Commission, sat on a half-dozen corporate boards, and teamed up with former DNC Chair Charles Manatt to launch a company that helps foreign investors enter the Mexican and Latin American markets.
Lee Hamilton: This former Indiana congressman has been a go-to guy for “bipartisan” foreign policy solutions since he [b]helped bring Congress’ investigation into Ronald Reagan’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal to an early end in 1987.[/b] Hamilton was appointed by President Bush to be the top Democrat on the 9-11 Commission and he was also co-chair of the Iraq Study Group. He currently heads the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and is [b]a director of the National Endowment for Democracy, which provides training and assistance to U.S.-friendly political candidates around the world.[/b]
Tom Daschle: Daschle was the Senate Majority Leader in 2001-2002 when the Democrats [b]signed off on the USA PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War.[/b] Former staffers of his are prominent in the Obama campaign including Denis McDonough, who is Obama’s top foreign policy advisor. Daschle is currently ensconced as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, while his wife Linda Daschle, is a top lobbyist for the airline industry and has recently broadened her business into rail and telecommunications as well.
Vernon Jordan: Former civil rights leader, legendary for being [b]the Clintons’ favorite black friend,[/b] Jordan sits on numerous corporate boards, is a partner at Akin & Gump, senior managing director at the investment bank Lazard & Freres and was a member of the Iraq Study Group.
Sat, 2008-08-30 11:42
#3
M. Spector
quote:
[I]f it is indeed true that Obama has to run to the right to win, this "fact" should call into question both the idea that Obama "is a different kind of candidate" and the very notion that he is actually capable of ushering in a progressive movement a la King - in myth or reality.Just consider this: King, Randolph, and Rustin may have tailored the tactics and goals of the March for Jobs and Freedom to political realities. [b]But they did not pander to opponents to their right.[/b] In fact, these civil rights activists actually organized the march [on Washington] over the objections of influential liberals, their alleged allies, including President John F. Kennedy. March organizers ultimately refused to capitulate to the President's requests to call off the rally for two reasons. First, they understood what Frederick Douglass articulated so eloquently more than 150 years ago, "power concedes nothing without a demand." Second, King, Randolph, Rustin and the march they helped organize were all part of an extant insurgent political movement. This meant that [b]their political base was beyond the control of the Democratic Party's apparatus, empowering them, if you will, to press their demands in the face of opposition from both their enemies and their putative friends.[/b]
In this light, Obama's mantra "yes we can" cannot hold a candle to King's "I have a dream." Not because King was a more eloquent speaker than Obama. But because King's mythical speech was, in reality, just an exclamation point - albeit a powerful one - in a vibrant political insurgency.
When Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama wraps himself in the legacy of the March for Jobs and Freedom this August 28, progressives should reflect on how Obama's career to date stacks up against the hype.
If we must compare Obama to liberal icons past, his record indicates that Obama's political vision probably owes more to John F. Kennedy - the guy who opposed the March on Washington and the Freedom Rides two years earlier in the name of moderation - than the organizers of the march that helped push Kennedy and later Lyndon Johnson to enact the very legislation that laid the foundation for Obama's professional and political aspirations.
[url=http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18634]Toure F. Reed, ZNet[/url]
Sat, 2008-08-30 13:15
#4
Frustrated Mess
quote:
In this light, Obama's mantra "yes we can"
And I hope the estate of Sammy Davis Jr. is consulting legal advice.
Sat, 2008-08-30 18:57
#5
Frustrated Mess
quote:
The warmongers forgot the song learned in childhood:“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
The lyrics crawl through my consciousness as war rages on and candidates for the highest office in our land spar in their own war of words for the power prize, which is the authority to declare war. To John Bomb Bomb McCain, war is something about which to joke, promote, and accelerate. He reminds us repeatedly of his years as a tortured prisoner of war. Yet he never mentions the targets whose eyes he didn’t see--all those Vietnamese peasants, men, women, and children, whose bodies he melted. For Barack Obama who opposed the invasion of Iraq but, without fail, has voted to fund it, the prudent foreign policy strategy is to send more troops to the “right” hotspot, Afghanistan. Russia must love this.
[url=http://counterpunch.org/beattie08302008.html]Stars, Stripes, War and Shame [/url]
Sun, 2008-08-31 03:01
#6
quote:
Posted by Frustrated Mess:
[b]=================In this light, Obama's mantra "yes we can"
================
And I hope the estate of Sammy Davis Jr. is consulting legal advice.[/b]
I don't know about Sammy Davis' estate but I think there's someone else that should be upset.
[img]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QZFVGQDWL._SS500_.jpg[/img]
![http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QZFVGQDWL._SS500_.jpg[/img]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QZFVGQDWL._SS500_.jpg[/img]){kind=link}
[ 31 August 2008: Message edited by: abnormal ]
Sun, 2008-08-31 06:29
#7
quote:
John McCain gets 42% in the latest CBS national poll, just 3% behind Obama. But what CBS found was that "about one in four McCain supporters admit they are voting for him only because he is the Republican nominee or that their vote is a vote AGAINST Obama".As the pundits have been saying all along, if this race is about Obama's qualifications then McCain will win but that Obama would win if he is able to make it a race about McCain's qualifications. I guess you could say neither candidate is really that good, LOL.
[url=http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/articles/votes-are-against-obama-no... here[/url]
Interesting that the word 'race' was repeatedly chosen to be used, but never in the most pertinent context.
If Obama cannot win this election, it will clearly show the world that racism still rules the USA in the 21st century.
Sun, 2008-08-31 18:10
#8
M. Spector
quote:
Originally posted by sock puppet:
[b]If Obama cannot win this election, it will clearly show the world that racism still rules the USA in the 21st century.[/b]
And if he wins? Does that prove that racism no longer rules in the USA? Guess again.
quote:
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers,” writes [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley][Carroll] Quigley[/url]. “Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.” - [url=http://www.infowars.com/?p=3559]Source[/url]
Mon, 2008-09-01 15:02
#9
Frustrated Mess
quote:
Furthermore, there are undoubtedly members of the current administration -- centered in the office of the vice president -- who wish to attack Iran, and the military and the CIA are already conducting "special operations" there. But the foreign policy establishment in Washington -- which cuts across party lines -- believes, in the words of Democratic party deep thinker Richard Holbrooke, that "AfPak" [Afghanistan and Pakistan] is "even more important to our national security than Iraq."What he means is that that is where the most serious resistance to the U.S. attempt to dominate the region militarily is coming from. And therefore the Pentagon will send 12,000 to 15,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, as soon as the end of this year, with planning underway for a further force buildup in 2009.
[url=http://counterpunch.com/estabrook09012008.html]Change! New and Improved![/url]
Mon, 2008-09-01 15:04
#10
Frustrated Mess
quote:
“Obama offers a false hope,” said Dr. John Geyman, the former chair of family medicine at the University of Washington and author of “Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It.” “We cannot build on or tweak the present system. Different states have tried this. The problem is the private insurance industry itself. It is not as efficient as a publicly financed system. It fragments risk pools, skimming off the healthier part of the population and leaving the rest uninsured or underinsured. Its administrative and overhead costs are five to eight times higher than public financing through Medicare. It cares more about its shareholders than its enrollees or patients. A family of four now pays about $12,000 a year just in premiums, which have gone up by 87 percent from 2000 to 2006. The insurance industry is pricing itself out of the market for an ever larger part of the population. The industry resists regulation. It is unsustainable by present trends.”
[url=http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080831_curb_your_enthusiasm_for_ob... the status quo for change[/url]
Mon, 2008-09-01 16:30
#11
Boom Boom
quote:
Originally posted by M. Spector:
[url=http://www.indypendent.org/2008/08/08/welcome-to-donkeyland/]Meet some more of the people Obama is taking advice from:[/url]
excerpt:
Blue Dog Democrats — A coalition of 47 conservative Democratic lawmakers whom effectively hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives. They mostly represent rural or ex-urban districts in the South and the West, and support both large military budgets and cuts in social spending.
Bastards. [img]mad.gif" border="0[/img]
Tue, 2008-09-02 02:36
#12
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVFraQwm3c]Obama talking in Milwaukee yesterday ...[/url]
What he's trying to do, again and again, is take ideas like, in this case, people pulling together around Hurricane Gustav, and link that to things like the union movement, link that to "quiet storms of desperation" in people's economic lives, and say that kind of hurricane-relief-spirit should be far more prevalent.
You can list as many Obama advisers as you want.
And the Republicans can keep calling him a celebrity who gives a good speech.
But this is why he'd be a different President than McCain, and it's why this "Barack McBush" meme is off base. Out of the pack of people contesting the Democratic primaries, he was the only one with the potential to try and draw the US back together again (after the "I've lost the popular vote, but I'm going to pursue an evangelical-hard-right strategy" of Bush and Rove).
[url=http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama]Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, December 2007[/url]
quote:
The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics.The most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting.
The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.
Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us ... the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama -- and Obama alone -- offers the possibility of a truce.
[...]
Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.
But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
Tue, 2008-09-02 03:12
#13
quote:
From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
And Obama is necessary how?? Looks like America has been rotting from the inside out for a long long time, and the article reads like a fairytale.
Tue, 2008-09-02 06:32
#14
Frustrated Mess
quote:
the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most
I think the world needs less of America. We have seen the best the Americans can offer from Vietnam to Laos to Cambodia to Indonesia to Latin and South America to Haiti to Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan to Somalia to the all too well armed but starving Ethiopia. Please save us from another American Neo.
Sun, 2008-09-14 20:47
#15
M. Spector
quote:
Obama supports the death penalty, opposes single-payer health care, supports looking into nuclear energy, opposes a carbon pollution tax, supports sending more troops to Afghanistan, and will not end the vast array of federal subsidies to corporations, including those to the oil and gas cartel.And as the United States economy slides into a deep recession, Barack Obama is promising more of the same, despite his criticism of John McCain’s economic plan. [b]But behind the curtains of Obama's strategy team is the same set of economic troglodyte intellectuals that led us in to our current financial disaster.[/b]
Obama's advisory team includes Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman, a former Clinton adviser, who believes we ought to privatize social security. Then we have the renowned David Cutler, another Harvardite, who believes our economy can be boosted through an increase in privatized health care costs. Writing for New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, Cutler explained, "The rising cost ... of health care has been the source of a lot of saber rattling in the media and the public square, without anyone seriously analyzing the benefits gained."
And that's just the tip of a very large iceberg.
As we again face a momentous election and try to amass opposition to the war in Iraq, [b]let’s not forget what happened to the antiwar movement under the miserable and failing banner of “Anybody But Bush,” which now reads “Nobody but Obama.”[/b] It is time for an end to a bankrupt fusion politics, which ensures that we are left out election after election. - [url=http://www.counterpunch.org/frank09132008.html]Joshua Frank[/url]
Mon, 2008-11-03 23:03
#16
M. Spector
Don't expect Obama to end the Iraq war.
quote:
If Obama wins, he will face enormous pressure to abandon his pledge to stop the war in Iraq. That pressure will come from some within his own circle of advisers, many of whom saw Obama's antiwar stance as good politics but bad policy. It will come from hawkish Democrats outside Obama's circle, from those elbowing their way to get in, typified by Richard Holbrooke, who found himself shut out of Obamaland after he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primaries. It may come from more hawkish Democrats close to Senator Biden, who voted for the Iraq war in 2002. It will certainly come from conservatives, neoconservatives, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. It will come from thinktanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Center for a New American Security, which have close ties both to Obama and to the Democratic establishment.And most of all, the pressure on Obama will come from the US military and General Petraeus, who won't look kindly on an incoming administration that wants to change course.
[url=http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/378887]Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation[/url]