was right on point. To paraphrase, you explained that the people of Connecticut favor a public option by a margin of 47 percentage points, and that Lieberman's threat to filibuster against the public option thus cannot be representative of his constituents. Rather, it's evidence of how he's been bought by millions of dollars from the insurance industry that's so strong in his state. It's simply "legalized bribery," corruption of the most "sleazy" kind.

Strong words, and completely true. I'm sick of the words "campaign contributions." They're a lie. I've believed and said for many years that corporate "campaign contributions" are nothing but bribery, and we should call it by its real name.

We cannot have democracy in this country until we overthrow the rule of the corporations. Instead, what we have is a corporate state, which is the essence of fascism. It's that simple. Dick Durbin himself said it: The banks own Congress. He could have said, The corporations own Congress. They also own the president. That means that the United States of America is not a democracy. We have some of the trappings, but if we were ever a valid democracy, we are no longer.

That's the Obama way. When he made plainly stated promises, and people believed him, he said, "People are projecting their wishes onto me," and "People hear what they want to hear," and "If you think that's what I said then you weren't listening," and then he went right on breaking his promises - blaming the people who believed him.

Blame Congress? Sure. It bears a responsibility it has horribly abdicated in the last nine years. But that doesn't relieve a president of his or her own responsibility.

The same goes with the courts. Yes, the courts have allowed (but not as often or as drastically as Congress) the president to bend if not break the law, not to mention the Constitution. But again, a president has an inherent responsibility to obey the Constitution.

See, the thing is that we have a right to expect the president to follow the Constitution without having to take him to court or demand Congress rein him in! Yglesias is beyond fatuous when he says forcing the president to obey the law and prevent presidential overreaching is Congress's job.

Yes, of course that's Congress's job. But a president is obligated by the Constitution to obey the Constitution, whether anyone is nagging him about it or not - it's in his oath of office, and that's what the republic depends upon most of all for the preservation of democratic institutions: the president's honor. Taking that oath is the supreme invocation of a president's honor and duty - despite all the eloquence of the written words upon which our country is founded, it all comes down to the honor of the person elected to the presidency.

And certainly Obama promised such obeisance, regardless of how many times he blames voters for not listening to him, for not parsing his statements for subtlety and nuance, and for hearing only what supported their own beliefs while ignoring anything else. He's developed quite the repertoire of excuses, including the "now that we're in office we're finding things are much more complicated than we thought" excuse. None of his excuses suffices.

Obama practices a high degree of sophistry, and given the extraordinary number of broken promises he's leaving in his wake after less than a year, one can only conclude that his sophistry is purposeful and calculated, and thus the man is simply dishonest.