Sometimes you are the ladybug floating in a brook,

doing a innocent dance on a thin wet brown oak leaf.

Then you becomes a orange spotted ladybug surfing.

Then you become a mad red fox who bites my finger.

You may think my little pinky is a stick of`Beef Jerky?

Well, I admit I may wear out a welcome mat, so adios.

Maybe I need to focus. I do agree. I'll go be elsewhere.

No worry. No dye your hair. Joy. Glare. Go bald or grey?

Has anyone bothered to notice that not one of these sorry bastards we call Congresspersons have allowed the word "retraining" to fall from their lips viz a viz the autoworker crisis?

I'm going to disregard the tone of your post, because I take particular offense to your belief, evidenced in the above sentence, that you know solutions to problems that you really don't know. So sorry.

Louis Uchitelle wrote an exposé on this retraining canard, adapted from his book, for the New York Times. Here you go,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/business/yourmoney/26lou.html

Have a good read.

In early 2006, when the article was written, the job market, although not good, was much better than it is now, and the siren song of retraining was being used to justify endless mindless globalization, to wit, shipping manufacturing jobs overseas on the grounds that the "crucible of innovation" was going to produce a "fountain of entrepreneurship" and replace the jobs leaving with much better, newer jobs in all the new industries that were going to spring up.

He found that was anything but the case. Job re-training programs for, for instance, airline mechanics tried desperately to locate jobs that they could be retrained for that would pay the same wages and standard of living as their former jobs. They ended up settling for retraining these highly skilled workers as truck drivers. A cut in pay of about 1/2 or more, and a job of considerably less specialized skill.

So the real question for us when we run into someone who is so obviously far out ahead of us in thinking as you is, "Re-train for what?"

"Between excessive citizen activism and excessive trust or passivity, the former is far preferable to the latter."

Yep. And, as Hildebrand's weak-ish (imo) post at Huffington shows, the push/pull noise from the left is being heard by team Obama.

The Left universally scorned Bush's "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" message, and rightfully so. Which makes it all the more amazing that some seem to want to hang a similar banner on Obama.: "Mission accomplished--we've won--go home."

'Even in this New Era of Trans-Partisan Harmony, there's nothing wrong with citizens objecting to what political leaders do and trying to pressure them to move in directions that they perceive are better. That's actually called "democracy." As upsetting as that disharmony apparently is to some, it's actually far preferable than the alternative, where everyone lines up behind a leader and agrees to remain respectfully silent and trusting in his superior judgment. Between excessive citizen activism and excessive trust or passivity, the former is far preferable to the latter'. -

Beautifully written like a poem - as Obama thrives on criticism... as long as nobody suggests it was him who tried to sell his senate seat to the highest bidder.

I too am weary

Of uncritical Obamabots

They should beat their shares

Into national concerns and cares

Or else join Jason and his Argonauts

Some liberals said they would have only themselves to blame if their expectations were not met. “So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in the online magazine Salon. “But it wasn’t Obama who misled them. It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/us/politics/09obama.html?pagewanted=2

Klytus. You a teething banker drooling on a internet keyboard?

Who are you planning to foreclose on a home or rob of a auto?

Gaze into a bathroom mirror. Stay near flush Spring commode.

A banker who kills people's hope is a same-same. Bone skulls.

OY! A unskilled neurosurgeon NO fixes SUVS. No opt to QUITS.

Oy! Gag. A politico is worst than a black bloodsucker eel leech.

You ever respect Treasury Secretary? A CIA Snoop? Ugh Stench.

"[...] The breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said in a statement. "They allege that Blagojevich put a 'for sale' sign on the naming of a United States senator, [...]"

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/12/source-feds-take-gov-blagojevich-into-custody.html

Release from US Attorney's Office:

http://thepage.time.com/release-from-us-attorneys-office-on-blagojevich-arrest/

From the Center for Constitutional Rights

Arar v Ashcroft- Rally & Argument- New York, NY, Second Circuit Court of Appeals

More information: http://tinyurl.com/6ge748 (link @ sig)

Arar Argument - 3:00 ET

Over this last part of your most recent update:

Between excessive citizen activism and excessive trust or passivity, the former is far preferable to the latter.

I'd offer, as I did in my long comment above, that there are actually 3 paths, not 2. In addition to these two paths that you mentioned of either "excessive" activism (of which I think there can never be enough and which can therefore never be truly excessive) and actually excessive trust or passivity, I'd add the existance of a third path of destructively excessive mistrust, cynicism and rejectionism, of the sort displayed by those who claim that Obama's a complete fraud and little more than a smarter and more competent Bush, and that only the destruction of the two-party system (and of the two parties themselves) and some sort of spontaneous (or perhaps planned) revolution can bring about real improvement.

(One can, I suppose, also include within this group far-right "He's a commie" nutjobs, but I'm specifically talking about the "He's a RW shill" far left here, and am restricting my evaluation of the various stances being adopted towards Obama to those being taken by people from the approximate center to the far left, and am excluding both the right, and the far right.)

Oddly, or perhaps not, it appears (to me at least) that these three groups are approximately equally composed and intense. While it's true that at present, Obama "supporters" appear to vastly outnumber both his supportive and rejectionist critics, if you peel away Obama's passive know-little "supporters", i.e. those who attended his rallies, donated money to his campaign, maybe volunteered for it, and of course voted for him, but who really know very little about what he actually stands for and has done, I think that you're left with a much smaller group of true believers, who are approximately similar in number and intensity to these other two groups.

And they represent, roughly, the three choices one can make, if one is not on the right (let alone far right), with respect to how one views and relates to the Obama presidency (in addition to, I suppose, a fourth group of people who are and will remain effectively clueless about actual political reality and how Obama fits within it, and whose support for, or opposition to him, will shift with the times, as is always the case--and, I guess, that fifth group of far-right nutjobs). I.e. either total or near total adulation, total or near total rejection, or something in-between these two silly and unproductive extremes, combining both support and criticism, and a lot of activism. Because if Obama's at all going to push a truly progressive agenda, it will likely only be to the extent that he's pressured to do so by the center, center-left, and true left.