Looks like a lot of people fell for Obama's okie-doke.  No matter to me.  Though I supported Hillary, its always been pretty clear that Obama is a centrist Democrat just like Hillary.  The difference between the two is that Hillary is a fighter and Obama is an appeaser.  Now the primary is over and Obama is the nominee and all I can say is, boy did you guys fall for it or what?

My respect for Dailykos has been the biggest casualty of this primary season.

This is a paraphrase of Kos.  

Barack Obama will be the least inspiring vote for President I have ever cast (going back to 1992).  It isn't even Obama himself that has me so turned off, it is his supporters.  At least I'll be able to watch football this fall rather than be working on a campaign.

Disenfranchising Florida is not just for George W Bush anymore.  Now the Democratic Party is saying Florida votes don't count.  It is wrong and it should not stand.  Certainly not if we expect to win Florida come November.  It would be a fool's errand to say your vote didn't count in the primaries but please vote for us in November.

I know it's practically not allowed to be a Hillary supporter in these parts but I've been on kos for 5 years now and damnit, I support Hillary Clinton for president.  

Hillary is a fighter and a winner.
Hillary has been fighting for the middle class of this country her entire political career.  She does not reach out to Republicans to meet their bad ideas halfway.  She doesn't trash Social Security (which is in strong financial condition), she doesn't join the Gang of 14 which allows Bush to get any nominee he wants on the Supreme Court, and she doesn't want to transform the country the way Ronald Reagan did (by appealing to racist, white Southerners and getting them to vote Republican I guess).  Hillary will fight bad Republican ideas and defeat them.  That should be our goal in this time - not meeting bad Republican ideas halfway.

There are compromise Democrats and there are fighting Democrats.  There is a time and a place for both but right now the time is for Fightin' Dems.  Isn't that why we rallied around Howard Dean?  Because he was a fighter.  The Dem to rally around now is the Fighting Dem Hillary Clinton.  She's been fighting for more than 15 years.  

It saddens me to see so many on DailyKos doing the work of conservatives in bashing, undermining, and destroying Hillary Clinton.  The "will Hillary Clinton admit she made a mistake" meme is textbook conservative / mainstream media destruction of Democratic leaders. It is the same technique they tried on Bill Clinton and successfully used against Al Gore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry.  Just read Cenk Uygar's opinion piece here to see the big picture:

http://abcnews.go.com/...

You heard it here first, folks.  I am predicting the US economy will be in recession by the end of this year.

We are at the beginning of a textbook Keynesian contraction.  Moderate growth combined with contractionary monetary policy and now, with the new Bush budget, contractionary fiscal policy.  The labor market is weak as evidenced by the steep decline in the labor force participation rate and declining real wages.  In fact, as of January, the participation rate in the labor force of men is the lowest it has ever been since records began in 1948.  Workers are finding few options in the job market just as investors are finding few options in the capital markets.  Which leads us to:

This headline is meant to give the casual reader the impression that the Iraqi Police are on the offensive.  The truth is that the insurgents attacked and killed at least 26, most of whom were Iraqi Police.  Now, I'm not rooting against the Iraqi Police or anything.  I just wish that our media would stop biasing its news reports in favor of the Bush Administration and its allies.  Contact CNN and let them know what you think of this bias in their reporting.  Even Fox News has the decency to just report: 30 Dead in Iraq Attacks.  It's getting hard to tell which news organization is worse.

If you look at Andrew Sullivan's website, a recent David Brooks article, or Bill Kristol on the Daily Show last week you can see Republicans spinning furiously away from the storyline that the homophobe brought home this election for George Bush.  They know that vote ultimately can be the albatross we hang them by.  They know that many of the more reasonable (though misguided) people who voted for Bush on the basis of fighting terror will be horrified to find that what they really voted for was to keep their gay cousin down.  So they spin away and say that evangelicals didn't really turn out in higher numbers or that the "values" issue isn't really code for gay-bashing.  

Send a complaint to CNN. Particularly the CNN Live show.  They are running a lengthy speech from Dick Cheney criticizing Kerry's recent comments in New York Times Magazine.  After running Cheney's clip for a minute they offered no rebuttal from a Kerry supporter whatsoever.

The goring of Kerry continues.  Let's do something about it!

For music fans there is no doubt this album is tremendous and will be a seminal event of 2004.  But is there a story here for political junkies?  I think so.

Flashback to the 1992 election and Beck's #1 hit "Loser" which put a clip near the end of George H W Bush pathetically saying, "I'm a winner, I can feel it".  That essentially decapitated any possible support Bush I may have gotten from the youth vote.  And remember, the youth vote was instrumental in getting Clinton elected.

The Green Day album is filled with social commentary but only really hits on the politics twice.  Many have heard the titletrack, "American Idiot" which is strong but the song "Holiday" has potential to become a real factor with the youth vote, IMHO.  How are these for lyrics:

"Hear the Sound of the falling rain
Coming down like an Armageddon Flame
The Shame
The ones who died without a name.
Hear the dogs howling out of key
To a hymn called "Faith and Misery"
And bleed the company lost the war today.
Chorus:
I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies
This is the dawning of the rest of our lives
On Holidayyyyyy

Hear the drum pounding out of time
Another protester has crossed the line
To find the money's on the other side.
Can I get another amen?
There's a flag wrapped around a score of men
A gag
A plastic bag on a monument.
Chorus

The representative of California has the floor:
'Zieg heil to the president gasman
Bombs away is your punishment
Pulverize the Eiffel Towers
Who criticize your government
Bang bang goes the broken glass
Kill all the fags that don't agree
Trials by fire setting fire'
Is not a way that's meant for me.
Just because - just cause because we're outlaws.
Chorus"

Now many songs have been critical of the President's agenda in the last few years but this song is different.  This song has #1 hit potential written all over it.  It was written in the pop hit format and has the musical chops to go to the top and stay there.  But is it too flammable for mass consumption?  Clear Channel will work against this becoming a big single before the election.  Will they succeed?  How will it play out?

At www.clintonfoundation.org there is a link for get well messages to President Clinton who is about to undergo heart surgery.  We all owe him this, at the least.  President Clinton was definitely the greatest President of my lifetime (31 years) and probably our greatest President since FDR.  Send him a note and a prayer.  

Check out Frank Rich's article in the Sunday New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html

This is how the Kerry crowd should present it every time.  Read, learn, and hammer it home!

He is the Big Dog, after all

For this post:

"For the record Tacitus,
I don't like you.  I don't like your style, your veiled threats, or your arrogance, which surpasses my own arrogance by an alarming degree.  I have decided that if I am going to avoid using profanity on this website then I will have to generally ignore you.
I do enjoy dissecting the issues with the other co-founders and the other guests".

No wonder there is no conservative site where an honest discussion can be had.  Some of these people are truly opposed to free speech.

On Chris Matthews show, Matthews asked for predictions from his roundtable of guests.  After Bennett's prediction Matthews said to him, "Wanna bet"?

hehehehe

With the White House playing damage control over its chief economist, Gregory Mankiw, claiming that outsourcing jobs overseas is actually a long-run good for the United States, we democrats are left debating which side of the free-trade issue is the correct side for the country.  Ever since Bill Clinton supported NAFTA in the early 1990s there has been a split between the old-guard labor union Democrats and the pro-growth coalition Bill Clinton created.

As the New York Times reports, we had a record trade deficit in 2003 despite a sharp drop in the value of the dollar (which should stimulate exports and slow imports reducing the trade deficit).  So what is the answer to the question:  Does free trade increase national wealth as its supporters say or does it cause us to lose jobs as its detractor claim?  How about, both are correct.  

For the last thirty years our economy has been undergoing a transformation from a manufacturing economy to a service sector (emphasis on financial services) economy.  So instead of manufacturing 100,000 cars here in America, we finance the manufacture of 100,000 cars overseas.  Net wealth in America increases under this scenario because finance in America is more profitable than manufacture in America.  However, it takes far fewer workers to process the financing and thus the wealth is consolidated into far fewer hands.  Beware when economists make the claim that we are wealthier on average or per capita income is up.  A few people at the top of the income ladder can raise national averages without helping, and possibly harming, the vast majority of us.  Ask the economist who raises the issue about median wealth because if they are not prepared to discuss this statistic than they are just promoting a political agenda.  

As Democrats, we need to find an effective public policy that maximizes national wealth while keeping our people employed in jobs that can support a family to the standards we expect here in America.  I don't have the answer on this one but I suspect it is somewhere between absolute free trade which the business community endorses as a way of consolidating wealth in their hands and a tariff-based economy which unions may prefer.  In short, we need new ideas.

For a deeper understanding of this issue I recommend Kevin Phillip's book, Wealth and Democracy.

www.buythepeople.blogspot.com

Alan Greenspan provided testimony today and provided some insights on our current job weakness. No surprise to any market watchers, he explained that jobs were slack because of continued increases in productivity. Well, isn't that what the technology revolution of the 1990s was all about?

"The productivity performance of the past few years has been particularly striking in that these increases occurred in a period of relatively sluggish output growth. The vigorous advance in efficiency represents a notable extension of the pickup that started around the mid-1990s. Apparently, businesses are still reaping the benefits of the marked acceleration in technology. The strong gains in productivity, however, have obviated robust increases in business payrolls. To date, the expansion of employment has significantly lagged increases in output."

Essentially, the message here is that in the mid-1990s productivity increases jumped and are still well above historical averages. Any predictor for large job increases requires productivity to return to historical norms. Of course, the idea behind a revolution, any revolution, is complete change. So when we ushered in the technology revolution we ushered in unpredictable change. Will the efficiency increases by satiated this year? Next year? Next decade?

I don't bring this up to begin a luddite's argument against advances in technology. There are two critical points here: 1) We don't know when jobs are coming back and when Larry Kudlow and other Bush Administration sycophants say the job market has returned we can only wonder what kind of work they would be doing if they weren't so good at blowing hot air around for the powers-that-be. 2) The Bush Administration itself is predicting huge gains in employment this year based on a collapse in productivity. Brad DeLong points out how ludicrous the Bush numbers are and the reasons for them - to make the claim that we will have superior job growth by election day no matter how the numbers need to be manipulated to get the projections there. The media puts on its blinders and reports.

www.buythepeople.blogspot.com