Barack the Unbalanced

Millions of people are stranded or without power and heat today in the aftermath of the fifth or maybe sixth Storm of the Century to have hit in the past year, the direct result of a stunning lack of attention to climate change on the part of our leaders. Millions of us remain unemployed and underemployed, a fifth of us are in poverty, with almost half us in danger of becoming destitute within three months of a job loss or other catastrophe. Fifty million still lack basic health care. And millions of those who do have insurance still can't afford to see a doctor because of high copays and deductibles. We cannot afford to retire because our savings and pension plans have been wiped out by financial criminals who not only caused the economic collapse of 2008, but who now continue to rob, cheat and steal with impunity thanks to the complicity of our bought-and-paid-for public officials.

To add insult to injury, we have a president who has given himself the power to imprison or even kill us without charge and without trial. And what's even more chilling is that the vast majority of Americans are totally fine with this state of affairs. They reassure themselves that they will never be put on a Terror Tuesday kill list, or have their movements monitored, or be thrown in prison because of their ethnicity or journalism. They have given their president a 60% approval rating.

But maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of us will not be complacent for very much longer if Barack Obama gets his way. This morning in his weekly radio address, he finally delivered what is essentially a coup de grace to the American people. You may not yet be in danger of drones, but you're definitely on a Kill List. He starts out with a huge whopper of a Big Lie right in his very first paragraph. And he never lets up. Rather than comforting the victims of the many storms assailing us, he foments the fear. He presents a Code Red Threat Level:

Hi, everybody. Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. That’s more than halfway towards the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists and elected officials from both parties say we need to stabilize our debt.

This deserves a Pinocchio nose the length of three football fields. Obama agreed to 100% cuts and zero revenue during the Debt Ceiling manufactured crisis of 2011. The second round, during Feckless Cliff Theater, gleaned only 30% revenue to 70% cuts. (see chart below). Moreover, not one legitimate economist has ever espoused reducing the deficit by $4 trillion, especially in the midst of an economic downturn. That toxic idea comes straight from Wall Street, straight from the plutocrats of the Fix the Debt campaign, and it's being kept alive by the echo chamber of inside-the-Beltway corporate media hacks. Barry the Unbalanced either needs some remedial 'rithmetic or an extended stay in an ethics rehab facility. 

Pies Don't Lie, Barry!

I believe we can finish the job the same way we’ve started it – with a balanced mix of more spending cuts and more tax reform. And the overwhelming majority of the American people agree – both Democrats and Republicans.

He doesn't so much want to finish the job as he wants to finish you off, as per his presidential candidacy audition, way back in 2006, to the Rubinites of the Goldman Sachs-funded Hamilton Project. The only reason that deficit reduction is the Number Three concern of those polled is because of that concentrated, relentless media propaganda campaign convincing them we have a fiscal crisis. Barry fails to mention that the top concern of all Americans happens to be JOBS.

Now, my preference – and the preference of many Members of Congress – is to do that in a balanced, comprehensive way, by making sensible changes to entitlement programs and reforming our tax code. As we speak, both the House and Senate are working towards budget proposals that I hope will lay out this kind of balanced path going forward.

"Sensible" changes for the continued enrichment of the plutocracy equal cruel changes for everyone else. The raising of the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and the chained CPI method of impoverishing already struggling retirees and veterans and disabled people remain on his table. The reformation of the tax code, rather than the scrapping of the FICA contribution cap or the imposition of a Wall Street transaction tax, is the exact same policy that Mitt Romney campaigned on. Rombama lives. Or is it Obamney? 

But the budget process takes time. And right now, if Congress doesn’t act by March 1, a series of harmful, automatic cuts to job-creating investments and defense spending – also known as the sequester – are scheduled to take effect. And the result could be a huge blow to middle-class families and our economy as a whole.

Time's a wastin'. Billionaire Shadow President Pete Peterson of the Third Way, the Council on Foreign Relations and Fix the Debt, is getting antsy. Ergo, Obama is sounding more and more like the trickle-down Reaganite he truly is. "Job-creating investments" and defense spending will help the middle class. Uh-huh. When Obama refers to "our economy" he is of course referring to the unregulated, reckless, and feckless free market -- not you. So now, it's time for him to pivot to some heavy-duty fear-mongering: 

If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off. Firefighters and food inspectors could also find themselves out of work – leaving our communities vulnerable. Programs like Head Start would be cut, and lifesaving research into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s could be scaled back. Small businesses could be prevented from getting the resources and support they need to keep their doors open. People with disabilities who are waiting for their benefits could be forced to wait even longer. All our economic progress could be put at risk.

You're all gonna DIE. America will become Max Max's Thunderdome. Your kids will turn stupid as they wander the filthy streets, your houses will burn down, a plague of disease and senility will descend upon this great land, only Walmart will be left standing to squeeze every last nickel out of you, people will thrown out of their wheelchairs and rendered incapable of even reaching a dumpster for their next meal, which will have been poisoned anyway owing to layoffs of food inspectors. Oh, and Wall Street will get the vapors. All because of a crisis manufactured with the full cooperation and connivance of the executive and legislative branches, for the sole purpose of providing a fig leaf for no less damaging (because they will be permanent) cuts to social programs.

And then there’s the impact on our military readiness. Already, the threat of deep cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf. As our military leaders have made clear, changes like this affect our ability to respond to threats in an unstable part of the world. And we will be forced to make even more tough decisions in the weeks ahead if Congress fails to act.

He won't be able to kill as many people or occupy as many countries or drone as many drones? His Kill List will resemble a frayed baseball card collection that loses all its value? Well.... okay.

The good news is, there’s another option. Two months ago, we faced a similar deadline, and instead of making deep, indiscriminate cuts that would have cost us jobs and slowed down our recovery, Democrats and Republicans came together and made responsible cuts and manageable changes to our tax code that will bring down our deficit. This time, Congress should pass a similar set of balanced cuts and close more tax loopholes until they can find a way to replace the sequester with a smarter, longer-term solution.

See above charts. The Feckless Cliff Aversion Act punished the poor and gifted the rich. We let the Social Security tax holiday expire for no apparent reason. People have less money to spend. People still have no jobs, no health care, no retirement savings. Nonetheless, Obama wants you to feed what little you do have into the voracious maw of the ruling class. Work till you die, if you're lucky enough to still have a low-wage job, so that your betters can maintain, even improve, the lifestyles to which they are accustomed. Be placated as they close the tax loopholes of the wealthy with their flimsy thread, be ignorant as they wait thirty seconds before sewing them all up again.

Right now, most Members of Congress – including many Republicans – don’t think it’s a good idea to put thousands of jobs at risk and do unnecessary damage to our economy. And yet the current Republican plan puts the burden of avoiding those cuts mainly on seniors and middle-class families. They would rather ask more from the vast majority of Americans and put our recovery at risk than close even a single tax loophole that benefits the wealthy.

Republicans want you to suffer. Your president wants you to suffer too, but only when he can call it even by easily making Lloyd Blankfein give up the tax deduction on his Lear jet. Temporarily, that is. Because once the retirement and Medicare age goes up, there will be no givebacks to poor people, who don't have lobbyists at their beck and call.

Over the last few years, we’ve made good progress towards reducing our deficit in a balanced way. There’s no reason we can’t keep chipping away at this problem. And there’s certainly no reason that middle-class families and small businesses should suffer just because Washington couldn’t come together and eliminate a few special interest tax loopholes, or government programs that just don’t work. At a time when economists and business leaders from across the spectrum have said that our economy is poised for progress, we shouldn’t allow self-inflicted wounds to put that progress in jeopardy.

 

There is no good reason why we should be worrying about the deficit at all. Chipping away at it serves no useful purpose and will, in fact, make recovery even more difficult. Barack the Unbalanced disingenuously does not admit that the very austerity he is espousing is a self-inflicted wound. Actually, that is not quite right. The wound he is inflicting is on us, not on him or his Wall Street backers. And anyway, Congress could repeal the self-inflicted wound of sequestration any time it wants to. It obviously does not want to, preferring instead to use it as a manufactured crisis to give cover for austerity and the continued unraveling of our social safety net. 

So my message to Congress is this: let’s keep working together to solve this problem. And let’s give our workers and our businesses the support they need to grow and thrive. Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Psssst! Hey, Congress and fellow plutocrats. Let's work together to gin up another phony crisis and the rubes'll never know what hit them. Together we will grow and thrive. See you on the slippery slopes.

Share the Sacrifice

A Whole Heep of Obama

President Obama has been getting plenty of heat in the past couple of days for that leaked memo that confirms once and for all that yes Virginia, he really does have the chutzpah to actually kill people at whim. Calls for his impeachment or maybe a trip to The Hague have even started popping up on liberal internet sites.

Obama is experiencing a rare, for him, moment of back-against-the-walldom. In the past 24 hours he has resorted to two defense strategies. First, he humbly announced that he is inviting a select group of senators for a privileged peek inside the workings of his own head, that they may become privy to the arcane musings of a homicidal philosopher king. And just this morning, he invoked his own exalted humility at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.

There is no transcript yet available of his remarks before the motley crew of unregistered foreign lobbyists, CEOs and slimy politicians all hiding behind the protective cloak of religion in order to advance their questionable agendas. But his overarching theme in the face of his exposure as a cruel psychopathic dictator was humility. He uttered the word so many times I expected him to sprout a carrot-top and start speaking in Cockney, just like that other famous predacious 'umblebragger -- Uriah Heep from David Copperfield.

“‘Umble we are, ‘umble we have been, ‘umble we shall ever be,” became "We must keep humility. That is the core of our leadership" and "My hope is that humility carries us over every day" at the breakfast. He then humbly and obliquely compared himself  to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Their magic Bibles have touched him with prideful humility. Obama, too, reads scripture every single day. Actually, just "snippets" of scripture that are personally selected and emailed to him by his own personal in-house spiritual White House adviser, who apparently just up and quit, according to Barry himself.

If Pride Goeth Before a Fall was among the snippets, he did not say. And anyway, the umbleness does not extend to his own immediate clan. He just couldn't let the standard line of "gosh oh golly, how your lovely girls have grown"  by the M.C. go by with just a simple nod of thanks. He opened his own remarks with "It is true that my daughters are gorgeous."

Then he went on to humble-mumble a whole bunch of mumbo-jumbo, such as: "All Americans, whether religious or secular, have a deep abiding faith in this nation" yet at the same time, we persist in seeing our lives "through a glass darkly." Tell it, Son of Cheney!

I was half-expecting him to repeat the infamous remark to the Jonas Brothers made at the 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner to this latest confab of corporate zealots : "Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming."

I bet he was thinking it, though. Actually, I don't want to know what he thinks, when what he does is scary enough all by itself. The  thought of a visit to the inside of that man's head sends a shiver right down my spine.



Keeping It 'Umble

Cocktails With a Twist of Logic

This is beyond schizophrenic. The same president now leading the national charge to keep disturbed people from using lethal weapons finds nothing too terribly disturbing about exempting himself from any guidelines at all. Whether there are rules about presidential homicide written down somewhere, or if they're just floating around in his head, he is not sharing his thought processes with the likes of you, the people he was hired to represent.

According to an Obama Administration "white paper" sent to Congress and leaked to NBC News last night, the president or some other unnamed high-ranking official (probably CIA nominee John Brennan) get to decide when, where and why they can kill you. They just don't want to get too specific, because your death is really none of your business. Their twisted logic is based on an amorphous free-floating imminence, not to be mistaken for its right-now-this-very-minute cousin known as imminent threat. There is hoi polloi self-defense and executive self-defense, which can mean anything that the president wants it to.

This is disturbing. The guy pleading the national case for gun control has dirty hands. The guy should probably recuse himself from the debate forthwith. The guy has no moral standing. He's under investigation by the United Nations for possible war crimes, for crying out loud.

We may not be able to prevent every massacre or random shooting. No law or set of laws can keep our children completely safe. But if there’s even one thing we can do, if there’s just one life we can save, we’ve got an obligation to try. -- Barack Obama, Minneapolis, Feb. 4, 2013.
 

Were the target of a lethal operation a U.S. citizen who might have rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fourth Amendment, that individual's citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation.... we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person's interest in his life. But that interest must be balanced against the United States' interest in forestalling the threat of violence to other Americans. -- Obama Administration memo to Congress, leaked Feb. 4, 2013.

So, Barack Obama meant what he said yesterday about not being able to prevent every massacre. That "balanced approach" shtick keeps rearing its ugly head, doesn't it? We must weigh the survival of impoverished old people against the equal needs of obscenely rich plutocrats. We must annihilate brown-skinned children over there, so that the affluent parents of white children over here can maintain an illusion of safety. We must honor the agendas of hate groups like the NRA by not banning outright the purchase of assault weapons, but at the same time make it a little harder for a mass murderer by reducing the size of his clips.

Although the assault weapons ban itself is widely considered DOA, it is still scheduled for a vote this Thursday -- coincidentally, on the very same day that John Brennan will be "grilled" over both his complicity on Bush-era torture and the targeted assassinations by drone before being confirmed and then advised, by bipartisan consensus, to Carry On Jeeves.

Senators can thus pretend to be against letting ordinary people possess military weapons, and then they can pretend to rail against both the secrecy of targeted killings and the targeted killings themselves. Stay tuned for a rare exciting double feature in C-Span's continuing soap opera series known as Congressional Kabuki. 

Slumlord Millionaires

If you have millions to burn and are sick and tired of plunking it down for kitschy overpriced art, and you retain some of that dim, genetic memory of the good old days when plutocrats were still allowed to own people, then JP Morgan Chase has such a deal for you.

You can now indulge your primal urge of sucking the life out of ordinary people and extracting the value out of 5,000 foreclosed properties at the same time! JPMC, that too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-jail bank with a GDP bigger than most countries, recently stole some real estate for a second time, again on the cheap, in such blighted states as Nevada, Florida and California. You know, the very same places whose economies tanked when the Wall Street subprime bubble burst, and never recovered. Those same poor slobs that JPMC and its brethren swindled out of house and home just a few short years ago will be back, eating out of your hand, giving you an immediate 8% return on your investment. Heads you win, tails they lose.

Be advised that only families with a net worth of over $5 million are under consideration for membership in the exclusive Slumlord Millionaires Club. So hurry in! You will be able to declare your rental income at the same rock-bottom tax rates just re-gifted to you by the Fiscal Cliff Aversion Act. Your tenants will never bother you, either, because they won't ever know who you are. If something breaks, and they attempt to call Jamie Dimon to get it fixed, they will be put on terminal hold. And naturally they will not be allowed to deduct the rent from their own income taxes. That is because in the Banana Republic of America, the cost of living is something only the little people have to pay for. Plus, their work is valued a lot less than your wealth.

A few years or so from now, when the Slumhoard Millionaires Club has fully cornered the residential real estate market, and home prices have once again been artificially inflated to near-bursting, you can cash in quick as you kick the proles out. The cycle of greed goes round and round, much like the wheels of the bus you throw them under.

Meanwhile, do your patriotic one percentish duty and continue crowding all those first-time home buyers right out of the market. Realtors always give preference to hedge fund operators and other shadowy financiers, who can plunk down the whole purchase price in cash. Mortgages and down-payments are only for the little people. There's a logical reason why ordinary people applying for a mortgage often don't get approved, and it has very little to do with their credit scores. When the banks cheat people in this latest rent scam, they will do so through third parties. Their culpability will have been sliced and diced through the Oligarchy. DOJ heads will explode just with the effort of thinking what crime irresponsible behavior could possibly have committed this time by those wascally wanker bankers.

It's the paper trail, stupid. Even though the mega-banks have gotten off lightly when the government occasionally bothers to notice the paperwork that proves they've been defrauding people out of a trillion dollars in household wealth, there is the little matter of a cover-up of epic proportions by government watchdogs, causing a few Senators to blink and actually write a polite letter asking for particulars.

But don't let that worry you. You're a member of The Club -- a/k/a the Legal Protection Racket.

Breaking News: Alphabet To Be Privatized

Guest Post by Elizabeth Adams

In a bold yet unsurprising move, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has begun crafting legislation to pave the way for privatization of the English/American alphabet. The ease of drowning out dissenting speech since the Citizens United ruling of 2010 has just whetted the appetites of the corporatocracy. 

First, a little history.

The rich white guys, after fighting against the occupation of the English crown's corporations in the early days of the North American takeover, formed corporations of their own in order to protect their hard-stolen riches. Natural resources were deemed ripe for the taking, by any means possible, and so the r(e)aping of the earth commenced: trees, minerals, degraded fossils, water....all taken out of public hands. Electricity, another profitable resource, spawned many more capitalizable ventures, such as appliances (TVs, computers, radio) and media.

The corporations have used their vast wealth to spawn and see to fruition legislation which benefits them, with little to no consideration of the effects on society.  Currently, the mainstream media, delivered mostly via the television, internet and radio, is owned by very few, but likeminded, corporations. The Citizens United decision of 2010 (the Supreme Court's nondemocratic ruling that conferred personhood on corporations and defined speech as whatever one can afford) started the ball rolling toward this next step: privatization of the alphabet, which, technically, is the basis for speech, which, thanks to the Supreme Court, is more free if you have lots of money.

There are many questions that need to be answered about this development, and an anonymous ALEC spokesperson slithered forward to give us some answers.  Here are a few examples:

How the fuck can something like this happen? 

ASP (Anonymous SpokesPerson): Well, first of all, I'd like to say your question would run you     about twice the proposed going rate for a declarative sentence.  Questions are extra.  And if you aren't in the 0.01%, you will only be allowed to use lower case letters.  Only the rich will be allowed to capitalize in the future "word" order.  Ha ha -- get it!  Word...world.  Anyway, to  answer your question:             Blahblahblahwaronterrorblahblahabortionblahblahgaysexblahblahblahstealyourgunsblahblah....              look!  Squirrel!

What's next?  charging me for every breath I take?

ASP: You learn quickly!  No, that would be truly ridic-- er...no comment.

Will I have to pay to use sign language?

The potential for maximized profits is there: facial expressions, body language....and double meanings!  At this point, we are trying to determine how we would capture the use of language this way. Drone technology is advancing rapidly....

Should I learn Chinese?

 ASP: Well, you could. The stock in foreign language software has gone up in price, so word is already out. We are in communication with several foreign entities who have expressed interest in our mission.  Our previous efforts to have "English only" laws passed may gain further steam,      especially when we charge more for Spanish, for example.

If the 99% of us can barely afford basic necessities, how are people going to be able to afford to speak?  In any language?

ASP: We have already started to deal with this by privatizing community libraries.  People who can't afford to speak because of credit card debt or kids to feed, for example, can spend time at  their local corporate-owned library and put "money in the bank", so to speak. Reading certain literature will grant more speech, as will watching certain video materials. We realize how important it will be for people to be able to say "I love you" to their loved ones at the end of the day.

 And we will make available a list of words -- subject to change -- that will be free to use at any time. Heck, we might even give people a little pocket change for certain words and word combinations (e.g. "free market") -- we are still working on that.

So will we be charged by the letter? Or the word?

ASP: Ppl wn't gt to sav mny by shrtning wrds.  The collective pool of the 0.01% will actually have  shares in certain letters of the alphabet, and the massive data collection centers will determine  the compensation based on usage.  The Kochs, for example, have already expressed their desire  for "p".  You can't say "paper products" without "p".

***********************************************

Elizabeth Adams is a family nurse practitioner living in Marysville, CA. She currently divides her practice between long-term care and women's health. 

 

Groundhog Day Roundup / Open Thread

Whether he saw sunshine or he saw shadow, the groundhog is now predicting Sequestration Spring will be sprung upon us right on schedule. Austerity does appear to be in our future, after all, even though it has been proven not to work. For society as a whole, that is.  But if it works out for the plutocrats, then it's all good. The poor can never be too thin, or the rich too rich.

But there's more important stuff to talk about. For instance, a pile of squishy little purple balls has been found in the Arizona desert! Nobody knows what they are or how they got there, although some people think a plant food prankster dumped them there as a joke, since they resemble those little fertilizer globules you stick in your potting soil. Or they could be deep space excreta, or genetically modified grapes. Maybe Governor Jan Brewer will announce they are the long-lost innards of those desert torsos she once claimed to have seen. You decide:

From the Department of Tell Us Something We Don't Already Know: President Obama shoots clay pigeons. It seems that a national scandal had been brewing about the possibility that Obama is just another slimy politician who merely claims to love guns in order to appease the NRA. The national corporate media had kept up a cacophany of demand until the White House finally released the photo to prove Obama's gun cred. Too bad the courtiers of the press don't make a similar outcry about his Kill List and drone assassinations and demand that he produce his alleged User's Manual.

From the Department of Delicious Irony: About 70 Harvard University students have been disciplined after they were caught cheating in a class called "Introduction to Congress." Their defense is that they didn't really cheat because it was a take-home test and besides, you learn about Congress by emulating Congress. Congress critters, too, mainly do their cheating out of C-Span view. But rest assured that at least Harvard treats its cheaters the same way Congress treats its own bad apples. The kids are getting off with warnings or temporary suspensions. There is no mass expulsion.  They will be allowed to stay or return after a brief sabbatical. It is rare that a person of privilege ever gets kicked out for life. Congressional punishments for such transgressions as graft and bribery range from public embarrassment to a slap on the wrist to, at worst, a censure. See: Charlie Rangel, and now, potentially, Bob Menendez. (D-Boardwalk Empire.) Meanwhile, the New York Times is concerned that senators are not being polite to one another.

From the Department of Entomology: Paul Krugman gingerly compares the philosophy of austerity (not the scolds themselves) to cockroaches who keep coming back even when you flush them down the toilet. In my reply, I am not quite so circumspect:

Another thing about cockroaches and deficit scolds: they'll initially scurry away when you startle them with a bright light, But once they realize that the glare of truth and facts can't really hurt them, they come back for more, more and more. They wave their tentacles at us with impunity.

Like most insects, cockroaches and deficit scolds only work in teams. You never see just one cockroach all alone against the world, just like you never see only one austerian being attacked by five Keynesians in any typical panel discussion. It's always the opposite, to give the impression that the anti-austerians are an endangered species. Or that the can of Raid has lost its oomph.

Be they literal or figurative, cockroaches always leave behind a noxious trail in order to quickly rediscover their food source. They are omnivorous and insatiable. They crave media attention, they crave tax breaks, they crave even the tiniest leftover crumbs of whatever meal they last managed to steal from their starving victims.

They may be stupid. But predatory vermin that they are, they have a keen olfactory sense. They can smell the weakness in the alleged guardians at the gate a mile away. And then they swarm.
 

 
From the Department of Pure Evil: yet another high-ranking honcho in the Cult of the Red Beanie (credit, Charles Pierce) has been exposed as an accessory before, during and after the fact of the  priest sexual abuse scandal. I think we should finally just call out this cabal out for what it is: an International Pedophile Ring. In a just world, they'd all be taking refuge in the Vatican Embassy as Interpol surrounded them. In the real world, only Julian Assange is surrounded by Interpol as he is held hostage in an embassy for the crime of speaking truth to power.

Pathetic, or Just Cynical?

The New York Times published an unsigned editorial today bemoaning the lack of spunk in the Democratic Party. They place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Harry Reid and Max Baucus, with the powerful Reid once again misrepresented as a Mr.Peepers milquetoast and Obama consigliere Max Baucus cast as the slimy corrupt renegade from a Wild West red state.

Not once does the editorial so much as wag a pinkie finger at President Obama. It embraces the same tired old canard that fear and timidity are at the root of inaction by the erstwhile party of the people:

 That’s particularly evident in the Senate, which the party controls. Last week, Democrats had a rare opportunity to change the Senate’s rules by majority vote and reduce the routine abuse of the filibuster by Republicans, which has allowed a minority to slow progress to a crawl. But there weren’t enough Democrats to support real reform, so a disappointing half-measure was approved. The reason was fear: Fear that they might return to the minority one day, fear that a weakened filibuster might hurt them, fear that Republicans might change the rules to the disadvantage of Democrats if they regain a majority. 

Come on. Do you really think Harry Reid and his cabal would have signed off on watered-down reform unless they got the big thumbs-up from The Boss? Here is my published comment: 

President Obama is the leader of the Democratic Party. Not Harry Reid. Not Max Baucus.

Liberal groups were rightly upset about the pathetic filibuster deal. Republicans were rightly pleased. But then, so was Obama! Here's what he said about continued gridlock and failure of the Congress to follow the will of the people for the next several years:

"In my State of the Union last year, I urged Congress to take steps to fix the way they do business. … And today, I am pleased that a bipartisan group of senators has agreed to take action."

Reid never would have made this tepid agreement without the president's okay. You have to conclude that the president's goal for the next four years is to be seen as trying to get things done, and then conveniently being able to blame Republicans when they don't get done. Meanwhile he is backing down on his promise in another past State of the Union -- to fight against the Citizen United decision.

Not only that. He now even has his own 501(C)(4) fund-raising machine, Organizing for Action. It is touted as a grassroots successor to his campaign apparatus, but it is also accepting anonymous corporate donations in order to "further the President's agenda." Why more liberals are not expressing shock and outrage at what amounts to an influence-peddling scheme by a sitting president is beyond me.

The inability of the Democrats to "get things done" may well be more cynical ploy than a sign of weakness. Follow the money.

Actually, a few liberal groups have been expressing outrage and demanding that Obama shut down his slush fund. From The Hill:

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, this week said Obama should shut the group down “and remain true to the repeated warnings he has given the nation about the dangers of corporate influence-money and business as usual in Washington.”

Organizing for Action has pledged to reveal its donors to the public, and as a nonprofit group, can accept unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

Former Rep. Bob Edgar (D-Pa.), the president of Common Cause, said Organizing for Action would be an avenue for special interests to gain access to the White House.

“I think labor is going to give to them. Corporations are going to give to them. Huge wealthy donors are going to give to them. They have no problem with that being known and will want to call up the White House for access,” Edgar said.
 

Labor unions, meanwhile, are holding on to their pocketbooks, waiting to see what Obama does about such inhumane ideas as Chained CPI for the sole purpose of further impoverishing Social Security recipients. They will not donate, they vow, if the president turns against the working stiff. You don't say!

Here is what my cynical little mind thinks about the rationale behind government by passive aggression.  By prearrangement, filibuster reform fails. Obama then sets himself up as lone crusader for the common man, entering full campaign mode as he endorses gun control (which absolutely horrifies Harry and Max). He goes on trips and energizes the crowds. Meanwhile, the White House directs the grassroots supporters to the OFA website where, right after they hit you up for money, you are urged to "have the president's back!"  They even provide you with a script to recite when you call your congress critter to "demand action." Meanwhile, the lobbyists pour into Congress, and the bribery coffers are stuffed to bursting as the bickering and the gridlock prolong the lucrative process for as long as possible. The NRA is as generous to the Reid Democrats as it is to the Republicans, of course. Everybody applauds Gabby Giffords and she goes to the White House for a photo-op. The corporate media mouthpieces do their own propaganda duty, and the suffering masses are corraled into the arena to mindlessly root for either the Democratic "humanistic" home team or for the GOP militia movement.

You may think that you are taking a side. But you are really just a pawn in the Money Party's games of Divide and Conquer and Winner Take All. And the winner, people, will never be you as long as the PTBs have their way.

Ignore what they say and watch what they do. Follow the money, and then get mad. Get very, very mad. And above all, create your own scripts.