Wow. Talk about divorce from reality. Bush II whacks taxes left and right, especially for the richest and mightiest, and lo! Jobs are hemorrhaging at unprecedented rates. So what say the Republicans? We need more! Cause that will bring the jobs back!

Do these mentally challenged individuals think we are idiots?

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

--Albert Einstein

oomex wrote:

"etc, etc, etc"

The most articulate portion of your post.

Snap!

But I did find something to agree with farragut:

You people have no stomache(sic) for politics

This is true. Most of us don't like buying a new car because we don't know how to negotiate. We'd rather walk into a dealership and pay a stated price, even if it isn't the best one. Other peoples are more used to adversarial negotiation. When I lived abroad I would accompany my mom (who is Spanish) to the marketplace. She had favorite sellers she would buy from, but you would never have known it from all the arguing and carrying on they did before they settled on a price. Hugely entertaining.

Politics in a democracy is contentious and messy. That is its normal state, and that is the point Glenn is making here. But whenever we encounter a good dose of it we tend to get upset. Look at the Florida recount. A Constitutional Crisis! The Florida Supreme Court is stealing the election! Gore should concede! Time is running out! And other idiocies. No harm and much good would have come from allowing the process, messy as it was, to run to completion.

Dems should play hardball with the Republicans, who after all lost. They should have taken their majority and their honeymoon period and steamrolled the best package they could come up with ASAP. Republicans will squeal but so what? No one will care if they can go back to work. But no. In search of a meaningless "post-partisan harmony" Democrats have probably lost their best chance to do something worthwhile.

BTW, farragut: It is with Israel, not Hamas and Iran, that we have to learn to negotiate with. We are to Israel what the Gringo is to the market ladies my mom dealt with: prime suckers.

We need to rein them in :)

Sorry. I loved the post, as usual, but homophones are my pet peeve.

To hear MLK's excellent Riverside Church speech (and others) run off to Demorcacy Now! (www.democracynow.org) and check out the Jan 20 show. It is dedicated to MLK, in his own words. The man was brilliant.

BTW, DN has been giving voice to family members of victims of the Israeli aggression. It is heartrending, but it's vital that we hear these stories. These people are well aware of where the Apache gunships, white phosphorus, and Hellfire missiles are coming from.

A nation involved in foreign wars will inevitably act like a War Nation at home. That's just a universal truth.

As any reader of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky will understand this is indeed one of the purposes--not an unfortunate side-effect--of getting involved in these foreign wars. It gives the elites greater power to crush dissent at home (we are at war!), and distracts the general population from the issues that really matter to them (and that are usually opposed by the elites).

...but they really need to make a din. These are some steps in the right direction, but this is no time for half measures.

We need to seriously spend on infrastructure, and building a new type of economy based on alternative energy. Really, we gave Wall Street far more than Obama is proposing for this. As for the financial world, that needs to be completely revamped. It failed us miserably. Neo-liberalism is dead and should not be resurrected for anything.

We need to seriously cut back on the National Security State (defense, homeland security, etc.) It is far too expensive and is nothing but a big boondoggle for the defense and security industry, which must be cut down to size. This industry makes us the largest arms exporter in the world, not an enviable distinction. Further, its business model demands and thrives on conflict, fear and uncertainty, and pushes our foreign policy in directions that foment this.

And finally, all those tax cuts must be repealed. The rich and large corporations should be taxed at much higher rates than now, both income and capital gains. Not only to discourage entities to become "too large to fail", but also because I agree with Old Poor Richard: we shouldn't leave our kids holding this bag.

Then maybe, just maybe, we'll pull out of this. As for Republicans, they have shown themselves to be failures and totally irrelevant. There should be no compulsion towards bi-partisanship. It will not be returned in any case.

Smithers release the hounds trots out yet again the discredited tactic of equating the Left with Communism. No doubt he's running from the Right as fast as he can "because of all those other stunning success stories": you know, Fascism, countless freedom loving right wing dictators around the world, World Financial Collapse, oppressive poverty.

Nothing proposed by Obama and the Democrats even vaguely resembles communism. As for successes on the Left, there are many. Most European nations are left of our center. Almost all institute national health care, national pension plans, etc. The Scandinavian nations have been left-of-center (even by European standards) since the Great Depression, with demonstrable success. But Smithers won't mention that. They boast some of the highest standards of living in the West, the lowest crime rates, the lowest illiteracy rates, the lowest poverty rates. And speaking of communism, the Scandinavian Model whas what Gorbachev wished to emulate in the Soviet Union after his Perestroika progam. That was before Washington backed Clinton-era neo-liberals intervened and instituted crony-capitalism instead. (See Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine for that sad story.)