prole

Thanks for forwarding the party communique. The verbal contortions on display are quite impressive. I respect the ACLU's commitment to protecting civil rights even when that means defending Nazis and the rest. I get it. But their acceptance of the underlying assumption that corporations deserve rights equal to those of individuals is simply wrong. That political speech is human speech is a no-brainer. What is also a no-brainer is that corporations are not people and that corporate speech isn't speech, it's called advertising. They shouldn't be afforded the full rights and privileges of the individual and what they say is not, and can never be, free expression; it's an investment. The legal system is fully capable of making distinctions between what rights are afforded human beings and what protections (or restrictions) are afforded associations and organizations as a whole. It's also capable of placing limitations on political speech in the form of contributions that are appropriate to maintaining a functional electoral system, the cornerstone of a viable Republic based on the will of the governed. I'm not really sure from what you've written above which slippery slope you're worried about, but when you wake up from whatever they put in the coffee at your meeting you'll find we just landed at the bottom of a very big one.

More fetishization of the law. Legally, corporations are individuals, therefore they must be given equal protection under the law. Yeah, it's a problem with the legal designation. Yeah, the ACLU is institutionally blind to it. Not complicated. It's why I'm not a joiner.

Are you kidding? Get a fucking clue.

SEE, THE SYSTEM WORKS!!!

Yeah, what he said.

It's not a teabagger issue. The ACLU, for example, has long held the policy that campaign finance constitutes free speech (much to the ire of a good portion of its membership). How do I feel about it? Haven't figured that one out yet. The teabagger thing was a comment on the idiotic fetishization and idealization of our governmental structure at the expense making necessary changes to an anachronistic set of institutions. This view is most recently typified by red-faced morons in tri-cornered hats waving the Constitution at pharmaceutical and insurance industry sponsored rallies. As far as the Supreme Court ruling goes, corporations are not individuals. Period. Government elections, like health care, should be not-for-profit.

Obama is full of shit. He ran a grassroots campaign on the ideas of increased citizen participation and transparency then promptly abandoned that strategy (the only one that could ensure any measure of success against entrenched interests) for the Rahm Emanuel "the adults can take it from here" style of disconnected every-four-years politics. They did nothing to "sell" health care to the public, didn't even craft their own legislation out of a decade old fear of the demise of Hillarycare, and handed it to the "pragmatists" (read: corporate whores) in Congress. If you want to "do something different from politics as usual" you actually have to lift a finger and do something different from politics as usual. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house".

And guess which justices came down where. Big Fucking Surprise. And as for the media including labor unions as part of this dialogue as if they mattered, purely a sop to "the altar of the appearance of fair and balanced". This political system is a joke. Next teabagger I see dressed up like James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, imma run his ass over.

HEY, THE SYSTEM WORKS!!!

The scale of the problems we're facing and the degree to which corporate and military power are entrenched within the State require a whole lot more than "getting out the vote" every two or four years. Obama was able to get elected against enormous odds (even after 8 years of Bush) because of the quality and depth of the organizing. This infrastructure evaporated almost immediately when Obama took office and he appointed fuckhead political operators like Rahm Emanuel who basically told the public, "thanks, the professionals can take it from here". Predictably, without maintaining a mobilized constituency to put pressure (loud, angry, and often) on local pols to put forward and support the broad changes they voted for, Obama's failed to enact even modest reforms on the issues he ran on. The political machinations in Washington, horserace horseshit, and Peter Puget's Poll-Watching Spray MiniBlog are not nearly as relevant as the fact that nothing scares the shit out of politicians more than the kind of mobilization that the Teabaggers pulled off last year. Unfortunately, unlike the Right, progressives are lulled into complacency by a combination of a political leadership that only cares about them at election-time (lest "the mob" upset the fragile equilibrium of pandering, influence peddling, etc. they've grown accustomed to), the lack of corporate sponsorship, and the high entry costs to access a media more than willing to broadcast any flavor of bile as long as the price is right. With all due respect for the idea of a "bubble inflated agenda of excess", I don't think a lot of this is true. While many of the forms of bigotry and racism rightly associated with conservatives has morphed, gone underground, or lost much of its appeal, they have not backed an inch from the neoliberal program of deregulation, "corporate cocksucking", privatization, commodification and the rest. Just ask Spray's resident Cato Institute employee. Whether you like Klein or not, her premise that crises (financial and otherwise) are likely to provoke an intensification of attempts to foist "free-market reforms" rather than a rethinking of how we got into the mess has been borne out again and again in the last couple of years. While the GOP has been craftily co-opting the populist rage in recent months in their appeals to fiscal responsibility(?!), their agenda has and will remain firmly in the ass of globalized capital. As for militarism, conservatives' newly rediscovered taste for isolation, like the town-drunk's Sunday morning sobriety is born more from the realization that they ain't got no money than from a moment of clarity. Given the pronounced case of historical amnesia on display in America and the fact that much of the Democratic leadership is following the exact same idiotic policies, I'd say you're overly optimistic. I hope not.

All of which would suggest that heeding advice to move further to the right would certainly doom the Obama Administration. Huh, no wonder conservatives are beating that drum so hard...

That's one subsidy we won't be hearing the free-market fundamentalists bitch about.

Cubs at Safeco this year!

I just read this phrase again. Hilarious on a couple of levels.

More anti-public sector demagoguery; for nostalgia's sake you'll soon be talking about $900 hammers bought by the defense department. Oops, you won't do that since it's now mostly privatized/contracted out and the People are now purchasing $10,000 hammers. What, no "welfare mothers" and "ghetto Cadillacs"? Try harder Jay_B!

And the Obama Administration virtually abandoned those energized voters and the grassroots strategies that might have put enough pressure on their representatives (R and D alike)to enact a stronger set of reforms. As it is, they walked away from any meaningful attempt to "change the culture of Washington", turned their backs on the people and ideas that got them elected, and embraced the typical influence peddling, wheeling and dealing, corporate pandering "political system" that Jay_B seems to think characterizes a functioning institution. Also, liberals are stupid. Apparently they were so exhausted by all the Facebooking they were doing to get Obama elected that they were happy to be told that their work was done and they didn't have to do any more nasty-wasty powitical work anymore. If progressives had been as organized, insistent and as vocal as the teabaggers were (and if the corporate media actually covered them), we'd be looking at very different health care "reform" outcome.

And more of the Indians and Chinese doing it for us? And anyway, are you trying to say that fewer jobs is a good thing? Well I suppose for the employers, yes, it could be, if they found cheaper labor somewhere else. We are going to be the informational, designer, work from home, Ebay entrepreneural, synergistically networked, innovating, ideational, paradigm shifting creative class strata of the new global economy! Oh wait...FUCK! All that already got outsourced...Yep, there's too many of us.

...and when what exists is fucked. There's plenty of nice countries with parliamentary systems that impose fewer constraints on the party in power. Canada, NZ, Australia, England, etc, etc, etc. Given that your odds of seeing the constitution modified in a manner that suits your ideological preferences is indistinguishable from zero, the only choices available to you are to live with it or emmigrate. NZ is pretty sweet. If the political equilibrium and the checks and balances here bothered me as much as they do you I would have emmigrated a long time ago. Really. Funny how you folks are always happy to view our political system as an idealized abstraction created ex nihilo by demigods rather than as how it is actually working in reality. If you can't see "system" for the farce of corporate interests, petty ambitious plutocrats, and thugs that it is and that it's no longer functional in any real sense then you're either entirely happy with that arrangement in that it's working for you, you're playing dumb, or you're walking around in a History Channel-induced state of delusion. I suspect that it's always been the first for you.

...and when what exists is fucked.

You're usually in the middle...

The GOP should tread lightly here, as they may actually find themselves in some kind of position of power and actually might have to, you know, like...govern. That should be fun considering that the financial meltdown, the New Depression, and their electoral losses last year have prompted exactly ZERO rethinking on their part in terms of what policies might help extricate the majority of people from the morass the Neocons and Neoliberals created. Since they've got no new ideas, they'll trot out the old ones. If they do end up anywhere close to the levers of power in the near term, we can expect to hear arguments that "we didn't go far enough" with deregulation, privatization, global war, and the country will continue sliding towards something that more closely resembles Mexico in its social outlook than the post-WWII golden years. Ole'!

I hope this means that we can start getting back to the conservative principles that made this country great. America needs a change.