Get Out The Vote

If you give a damn about who we are as a country, Get Out The Vote!! Get involved, walk your neighborhoods and talk to people. Let them know what's going on. Make them realize they have the power to keep us in a democracy and not turn us into a plutocracy or worse, a theocracy. seriously people...our entire way of life is being torn down and stepped on....look anywhere where republicans are in power and you will see they don't give a damn about you or your family....not one bit. It's early in the season, I know...but this is the culture we live in. And tell your media outlets and sources that they need to do their job.  I will leave you with John Cole's words.....

And btw, we’ve talked about the Ryan plan to gut medicare and medicaid and give the proceeds to the rich while feeding the warpig, and it is important to recognize this is not some one-off. This is what they want. They are also coming for your pension, they are after your social security, they want to destroy your union so you can not organize against them, they will go after your minimum wage next, they want to get rid of the EPA so their donors can pollute your water, air, land, and food and not have to worry about being punished, they want to deregulate Wall Street more so they can screw you again and not face any consequences, they want to tell you what you can do with your body, and they are spending lots of time and money making it harder and harder for you to vote. The Ryan plan isn’t an isolated incident, it was just shots fired on another front. If you are disheartened by the budget deal the other night, which is one small skirmish in a big war, you probably should just give up and go buy yourself a ton of lube.

read the whole post here.

must reads

He sums things up nicely.
Thank the stars in the heavens for John Cole.

Hell Yeah!

If Democrats can flip the State Senate, it will be big. Even gaining a seat or two will be big. The nation is watching. I think you’re gonna find, when all this shit is over and done, I think you’re gonna find yourself one smilin’ motherfucker.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin has enough signatures to recall one of the repubs.....and I hope he's correct.

read about it here

must read....

via Balloon Juice

I have never wavered from my view, expressed among other places in Blindside in 1995, that thanks to the almost incredible, if unnoticed, speed with which Japan has been building its lead in advanced manufacturing, the United States has been losing economic position faster than any Big Power since the implosion of the Ottoman empire a century ago. Nothing indeed has shaken my conviction that already by 2000, the United States had become an economic Potemkin village — a largely hollowed-out hulk whose eroding competitiveness was overlooked at the time merely because so many commentators, not least the ten highly influential observers on this invitation list, were busy proclaiming the myth of Japan’s economic oblivion.

this life like dream ain't for me

I’ve said this before, and I will say it again. Unless your proposal includes a substantial increase in taxes and a substantial amount of cuts to the military budget as well as ending the farm subsidies and giveaways to big oil and big energy and big business, you can kindly just shut up about the deficit and the debt. Additionally, any cuts to entitlements need to include cuts to the CURRENT recipients, not grandfathering the boomers and then wondering why the cuts never materialize in the future.
If you aren’t going to do those things, just shut up. You aren’t serious.

John Cole

.....to form a more perfect union.....

I think that the rhetoric has always been with us, but I hope that we will finally learn from the consequences, not just bury them like we did after Oklahoma City. Words do matter...they always have, they always will. Sticks and stones are for children. In the adult world, words have consequences. I don't think the half wit from Alaska had anything other than political power and fame in her mind when she started this mess, but she isn't immune from her part in this. I hold the corporate media more responsible. Jon Stewart has been telling us for months, as have many of my friends, our media is supposed to be there to inform us. But all they do is create drama and make money hand over fist....as usual, the Balloon-Juice writers say it best here....

It’s an exaggeration to say that the whole Tea Party movement is built on lies, but not by much. And the beltway media is complicit in those lies, because they were so goddam eager to have a narrative of populist anger about healthcare that they conveniently neglected to emphasize that most of that anger was based on utter bullshit. The only way that’s going to change is if the same DC media decides they can call out liars and the lies they tell during next week’s repeal debate directly in the front page stories they write, not in some goody-goody factchecking ghetto buried behind the fashion section.

...our better angels....

Balloon-Juice....

E pluribus unum. Nothing else needs to be said.

...useless knowledge...

this is what I like about useless knowledge, sometimes you find gems like this.....

must read....

Dennis G. over at Balloon-Juice  is a most excellent writer and knows a lot about what the insane party is doing...you should read his stuff.
He has a new post up tonight which you can find here.

I didn't have an intention of being so pro-Obama. I sincerely believe he is the right person for the tasks that we have been kicking down the road since St. Reagan. I think there is a lot of misinformation out there. If you don't know it, our media reports on our politics as entertainment. They have to sell airtime, because the way our government runs and all the other things that we need to know is now for profit. That means that the governing becomes soundbites and when something important comes up, it becomes about winning and losing the news cycle. No one wins when that happens, hence Jon Stewart being one of the best journalists out there.

But I digress. Dennis's post is all about the long game I was talking about before. But his is better than mine...so click here to read his.  
It's about Obama going electric, a la Dylan.

From the moment Obama announced his run for the White House to now he has been following his own process and priorities—strategies and tactics—to meet some pretty ambitious progressive goals. So far, the list of accomplishment is long and I doubt there would be a fraction of these successes if he had stuck with the orthodox and predictable game plans of very knowledgeable pundits, bloggers, activists and thinkers who claim to have all the answers for progressive victory. Hell, if he followed their advice he would have never been elected in the first place. And yet for all their rage about how Obama is not following their game plan it is very hard to think of any victories won by anybody who has ever followed their advice.

Based on the evidence so far I think Obama’s approach to getting shit done is more like Dylan’s. I think he has gone electric and that he is changing what is possible in real time. He has produced real results and I expect that the next two years will produce more.
Time will tell.