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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2010 1:45 pm 
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Hehehe. Um, wow. I guess its true what my grandmother told me, he who sits in the middle of the road gets hit on both sides. Me? I'm still quite happy with Obama. Sure, he could be pushing some things harder (DADT repeal, DOMA repeal) or pusihing some things at all (I'm genuinely crushed he caved on prosecuting Bush's torturers). But he had made modest but incremental achievements in the face of a) the biggest economic crisis since the Depression and b) the most lunactic opposition I've ever seen in a democracy, period.

KillerBee256 wrote:
FreakyBoy I'm with you. I've been trying to give the man the benefit of the doubt but his resent so called "compromise" with republicans on the bush tax cuts is just to freaking much for me. I actually went out of my way and wrote my senator and asked him not to support it.
Hmmm, yes. The laternative of not being able to compromise being, what? Unemployment runs out, the taxes go up for everyone, and he gets tarred as the guy who does it. Now we have a second stimulus worth 900 billion dollars over two years that like the last one includes spending (unemployment extension) and unlike the last one the Republicans voted for too. And there goes the Faux News narrative about Obama not working with Repblicans, not to mention that the narrative that the Republicans give a flying glob about deficits is in tatters.

Where any of you actually expecting a messiah? I wasn't. Have any of you noticed how bad the economy is? How lunatic the Republicans are? They are sabotaging a treaty with Russia just to win stupid points. And Obama has to deal with these people. They control Congress now (or will). We got what we voted for, a smart, adult, politician. With everything that entails.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2010 3:37 pm 
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I was expecting a Democrat. You'll recall the health care plan faced unanimous opposition, not to mention public outcry about death panels. Any hopes of working with the Republicans were smashed, I'm not sure they could have opposed it more. But obviously Obama didn't have to work with those people; it passed anyways. So why, given that he was fought to the ends of the earth anyways, did he have to go with a Republican health care plan?

Obama did run on a platform of compromise. It doesn't mean we have to like that; personally, I'm sorry it's the part of his promises he decided to keep. And as far as difficulty doing things goes, it doesn't help when you are trying the wrong things in the first place.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2010 4:12 pm 
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Here's an economic analysis of the extension of the Bush tax cuts for people earning $250,000 a year or more, by the super-liberal left-wing extremist publication, The Economist.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2010 4:27 pm 
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I completely agree with that article in every respect, including the last sentence.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 9:37 am 
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I admit i did not follow US internal politics all that closely, but my overall impression is that what is lacking is a sort of a leftwing tea party.

If a faction of the democrats woud demand stuff like nationalizing all health insurence, outlawing all private health insurence and such, and threat to utterly blocade the goverment if they don't get what they want, then a Obama like president can work quite well establishing himself as sane centrist compromiser and still push some leftwing agenda at times, because in that case he compromises with the left lunatics, and get better compromises from centrist republicans, because he can negotiate with "If you don't give me the support i need, i will have to work with the left lunatics instead".

I am not so sure Hillary would have done that much better in this situation, i guess chances are good she would do very similiar politics, only that she would try more to sell it to the public as her own original idea, rather then a compromise.

So i guess FB is wrong in assuming it is Obamas fault, but he is right that throwing metaphorical rotten eggs at Obama and the rest of the democratic establishment is the best and most constructive course of action in the current situation.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 9:48 am 
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We have a Progressive Caucus in the House, which has a membership of 79 Representatives (and two Senators (the non-obvious one of which is one of mine)), making up the largest issue caucus in the Congress. They do push left-wing ideas, and did insist on things like public options - they're also heavily against this tax deal.

They just get constantly ignored as the New Democrat part of the Party (including my Representative, the Clintons, and seeming to echo many of the policies of Obama) take their votes for granted and make no effort to sway them other than "if you don't vote for this, the Republicans will do something worse". That's the bull we've been fed for twenty years now.

The country does need more representatives like Dennis Kucinich and Russ Feingold (alas, Feingold has lost his seat), who openly vote against things for not being liberal enough, but it's not like the ideas aren't out there and getting fought for. It's just that the Clintons have sold us a bill-of-goods that their voices aren't important, and Obama's got this need to "move forward" on things even if the steps he takes are towards a cliff.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 10:22 am 
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More a problem of attitude, then about the subtance of political ideas then.

It's not that you need more left politicans to develop even lefter ideas, but that they pursue their ideas more aggressive, dirty and partisan.

Threaten to bring the goverment to a grinding halt if their demands are not met. Threat to throw in monkey wrenches where they easily do so, without endagering anything they care about, even if it links unrelated issues rather then symbolically vote against in the right issues, where it has no effect.

And demonstrate that theese are not empty threats at times. Even if they are not willing to actually stop the goverment from working, at least they can stubbornly keep negotiating till the last minute just to be nuisiance. (sort of a backroom fillibuster)

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 12:09 pm 
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Looks like a few are doing just that (and in a happy surprise to me, among those signing this letter was my own Representative.)

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 6:34 pm 
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Maybe i am missing something but the link seems to direct to a "symbolically vote against the right issues". As i guess their votes are not neccessary for the tax cuts, since the republicans will not vote against that.

I was more thinking along the line of "If the tax cuts pass, we will vote against any candidate you propose in the upcoming vote for a new director for agency X", where it is expected, that most republicans will also vote against the presidents candidate.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 7:24 pm 
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I actually think this compromise by the president is actually a ploy. I think he was gambling on the republicans to still shy away because of the extension of unemployment benefits. So he could say, 'see i compromised and the republicans still won't work with me.' Also looks better on him when Pelosi and Reid say we won't agree because he can shift the blame to them as well.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2010 12:08 pm 
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FreakyBoy wrote:
Looks like a few are doing just that (and in a happy surprise to me, among those signing this letter was my own Representative.)

Ah, good, my Rep signed that.

arcosh wrote:
More a problem of attitude, then about the subtance of political ideas then.

It's not that you need more left politicans to develop even lefter ideas, but that they pursue their ideas more aggressive, dirty and partisan.

Threaten to bring the goverment to a grinding halt if their demands are not met. Threat to throw in monkey wrenches where they easily do so, without endagering anything they care about, even if it links unrelated issues rather then symbolically vote against in the right issues, where it has no effect.

And demonstrate that theese are not empty threats at times. Even if they are not willing to actually stop the goverment from working, at least they can stubbornly keep negotiating till the last minute just to be nuisiance. (sort of a backroom fillibuster)

I like this idea, and I don't like it.

On the one hand, we do need a stronger, more forceful push for left-wing politics. We've needed it for decades, and instead we've continually gotten this Clinton-Obama "Third Way" poop that concedes and concedes to the Right without ever offering us something more than a few token concessions on letting people have some slightly more diverse kinds of sexual relationships and instituting nanny-Left "social justice" programs in schools. Yes, broader efforts than that have been made, but where have we gotten on labor or the environment?

On the other hand, it reaffirms the sorry calculation that in a time and country when the government insists on negotiating with terrorists, the only logical thing to do for one's cause is become a terrorist.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2010 4:54 pm 
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Obama has continued the Bush policies from the last decade almost seamlessly while feigning helplessness at every step. We still torture, we still are giving big banks billions while cutting programs for the poor, we still have troops in TWO overseas theaters of war we never should have been fighting in the first place, the healthcare system is still broken because 'Obamacare' didn't do much except force people to buy the crappy insurance everyone hates. He has in addition ok'd assassination of American citizens, expanded the Afghan war, and lowered the estate tax, while ignoring the horrifying citizens united case, which pretty much eviscerates our democracy outright. You can't have a functioning democracy where anybody, anywhere is allowed to buy elections as long as they have enough money to pay for the brainwashing talking points and crooked politicians. His agenda has murdered climate control in favor of fossil fuels, while doing nothing to reign in the abuses which cause the gulf disaster. He has only encouraged the wealth polarization and greed which is very actively destroying our economy.

The rich have benefited from his EVERY move, while he has passed only a small fraction of all of that money on to the working classes. That to me is the acid test. Face it, we are in an active class war, and he couldn't be any more pro-wealth.

All I wanted was more government transparency and accountability, better protections of our basic civil rights, and to stop wasting tax dollars on wrongful wars and wealthy bastards WHO DO NOT NEED IT. He has only worked to make each of these issues worse than they were under Dubya! He's not just not good, he's actively bad!

I have recently reached the conclusion that Obama is a Republican Manchurian-candidate after this tax-cut debacle. He 'compromised' his way into a back-room deal with the GOP that excluded Democratic lawmakers to produce a bill that not only gives the wealthy many, many times what he passed on to the unemployed, he also actually cut Social Security funding. All while coming out to trash talk his Progressive base yet again and setting the expiration of this mess for the NEXT election year, almost garunteeing it would become permanent and would further weaken any Progressive tendency in congress after the next election. WHY ELSE WOULD HE VOLUNTEER FOR DEFEAT AT EVERY TURN?

He has missed countless opportunities to gain popularity with the base he has been alienating - how hard would it have been to come out against the TSA enhanced pat downs, when even the Israelis thought we were being nuts? How hard would it have been to champion better environmental regulation following the Deepwater Horizon spill?

HE is the main reason the GOP are ascendant again! HE IS A REPUBLICAN, WORKING FOR REPUBLICAN VICTORY. We once again find ourselves debating whether our leaders are totally incompetant or actively working against us. This time, we need to wake up, realize the incompetence is a ruse, and realize Obama is the enemy of everyone to the left of the GOP.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2010 11:57 pm 
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So how do you propose that we replace him, and/or the system of which he is part?

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2010 6:33 pm 
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You guys realize that the tea party literally marched through the country carrying guns.
Because any sort of legislation that fixed how the country was being ran was tantamount to socialization, and there were people out there who even today, threatening violent, possibly terrorist, action if any of it passed without some modicum of compromise being thrown their idealogical direction.

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 Post subject: Re: I hate the President
 Post Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2010 7:53 pm 
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I think they're all bluster and wouldn't actually do anything about it.

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