What happened to us once we grew up?

As I look around on a regular basis I generally find contempt for much of the world around me. It's not because I choose to be a particularly unhappy person or that I just want to be angry but rather it's because I look at a lot of things through the basic moral lenses I was issued as a child and wonder, where did we go wrong?

I honestly have had so many things just since the start of the Obama Administration bother me that I could be on here every day and it would definitely feel that this blog could become a regular soliloquy where I just rant to myself for the need to get it off my chest. Many of the topics would probably be incredibly justifiable as well.

Between the bank bailouts and the basic middle finger to LGBT groups (aside from this token Don't Ask, Don't Tell thing which is honestly the least that Obama could do) to the Arizona Legalized Racism Law to this total fucking mess known as the BP disaster, I could be here all day, every day complaining forever.

Usually, I use my Facebook to post links these days and complain about what punches into my soul. It's a much shorter version of this blog and to be honest, to write here I feel I want well thought out observations with source references on most days to make sure I am reaching the right notes. On FB, I can use all emotion (although I almost always source my work with links there as well) which is so much easier to do. Hell it's what conservatives live on. Facts require a lot of work and effort sometimes. Not to mention facts contradict their every single myopic belief.

But with all of these problems there is an overarching theme I believe. What were we taught as children about right and wrong?

We were taught to share. We were taught to be nice to others and to accept them if they were different. We were taught to not lie or cheat or steal. We were taught hurting people or threatening them was wrong. We were taught that everything good comes from hard work and perseverance. You were taught to respect your elders.

What the hell happened to us?

Could you imagine if we applied those principles to society today? You know what you would have? Socialism. Or at least a peaceful society that cares for those around us.

I think of this often when a new Robin Hood movie comes out or A Christmas Carol comes out. Teabaggers should rail against both of them.

"Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor. That's WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION! The Poor are too LAZY to work!"

"Scrooge worked hard for his money. Being forced to give it away is SOCIALISM. If poor people want a handout they should go to work for it!"

What in the hell?

The reason those two stories are so beloved is because they are two of the greatest stories in which the plight of the poor is championed and where giving them a leg up is shown in a positive light. It's pure fantasy but we teach children with these stories and Oliver Twist and the sort that caring for those less fortunate is not shameful but rather a rewarding virtue and something that shapes your character here and in the afterlife, should there exist one.

Jesus Christ himself championed such beliefs. I suppose he too would be a pariah with this gang of unruly Capitalists that make up a large majority of our population.

Going back to what we taught our kids. Imagine how the issues of today relates to the lessons of our youth...


We were taught to share.
To put this in context a little bit, imagine that you had four Kindergarten classrooms of 25 kids each and 1 kid took 90% of the toys from ALL of the classes for themselves and basically told the rest of you to make due with what was left over. That you weren't good enough to play with these toys and that kid rigged the system so that every day when they got into class they had access to get to the toys and any more toys that they wanted out of that box before you even got into the classroom. Pretty unfair right?

Well congratulations because in America, that's what we see on an everyday basis. The top 1% control our entire economic wealth and the rest of the World's right along with it and they use every cheating advantage they can to make sure that the American Dream stays just that. A never ending dream from which you will never awake.


We were taught to be nice to others and to accept them if they were different.

This one was a big deal. First, your parents didn't want you getting into fights at school because many times your mouth would try to cash checks your ass couldn't cash. But also they wanted you to make as many friends as possible. You see making friends makes school and life way less stressful and a lot more fun. You don't have to be best friends with everyone in your class but if you at least try to get along with them and understand their differences, it makes the time when you have to stand in line by each other on the playground for any length of time far less awkward. Have to sit on the school bus for a long field trip ride? Well guess what, we can talk and get along!

But today and obviously as we used to do in the past we have not always followed the same guidance we shared with our children. As adults we have tended to move to locations to shelter ourselves from different people. Despite the racial desegregation that helps to alter the demographics of the classroom and provides diversity, as adults we re-segregate ourselves into communities where we shelter ourselves from the every day realities of those different than us. In cities you will find African-American neighborhoods, Asian neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods and in many suburbs or rural areas that's where you find most white people living. It's this distance from one another that tends to make us not understand each other fully.

Inside the urban areas where most minorities live though there is a far greater understanding of each others' daily struggles and needs. They tend to see the same economic struggle because they share the same job market. They see the difficulty in their schools because they share the same school districts. White people in surburbia and rural areas don't see the same things. They forget that their grandparents and maybe even parents populated those places in the city a generation before and they too may have had an impact on the deterioration of the community. We all do our share at some point or another.

Yet from their safe distance many people tend to point fingers at one another. To hate another race of people. After the Civil War most had hoped that things would be settled once and for all on this issue. Another 100 years later and we were still working to pass a Civil Rights Act. Now we've decided to use an economic downturn and massive job losses as a reason to pass xenophobic laws that legalize racial profiling against Hispanics in Arizona and have tried to roadblock Homosexuals in every attempt to have the same legal rights as their heterosexual brethren.

In the annals of history the side that has discriminated has always come off looking as the most evil assholes of all time. Aside from White Supremicists, nobody has a very fond memory of the Strom Thurmonds or George Wallaces of the world. And the right wingers that constantly work against the equal rights and basic fairness of others, 20-30-50 years from now... will be in the same conversation as those well noted racists or hate mongers.

I'll come back to the main solution for the Arizona problem in a second.


We were taught to not lie or cheat or steal.

Basic rules to follow right? Except that our President got busted 7 years ago lying to our faces on national television to twist our arms into letting him play war for fun and there was no consequences. This after he and his brother and their henchwoman Katherine Harris cheated and stole the election down in Florida in 2000 and then were able to repeat the feat in 2004 with Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio.

I suppose the basic rules of conduct go out the window when the leader of your country broke every one of them while in power. However we know this isn't the case for low level thieves. Police investigate the small guys and they go into jail.

The problem is that it's not proportionate in how these crimes are addressed. There are probably a million political operatives and elected officials breaking the law every day in terms of how they fatten their wallets while in power and what laws they can break to continue to seize the levers of power from the American people in favor of their corporate benefactors. However we know damn well they are not ever going to see a criminal charge for a single one of those offenses.

Instead they get off Scot free while the guy that robs a liquor store gets 15 years in prison.

"Well the liquor store guy used a gun! His was putting lives in danger and there was force involved!"

Sure. Except that when you're raiding the treasury for your rich pals to get government bailouts or contracts at the expense of the social safety net (Unemployment Insurance, etc) then you really are putting lives in danger. People losing their homes and living on the streets because a company was told by our government that outsourcing is a good thing and so they laid you off, all the while you had been duped by a junk mortgage with an ever raising interest rate that you now all of a sudden couldn't afford and the only net you had was unemployment while you struggle to find work during a supposed economic recovery that is not creating many real jobs... well you just put these people in serious danger. Sure they could hope to find a place to live in a shelter.. if the shelters in their areas have room for them.. many do not.

I'd argue that in most cases the guy robbing the liquor store is at the end of his rope and doing it out of necessity. While Congress and CEOs are doing this with already overloaded and incredibly fat wallets. That to me, makes their act even more callous.

We were taught hurting people or threatening them was wrong.

Or so I thought. My son's elementary schools constantly teach about the negative effect of bullying. As adults we seem to forget that the bullying in real life has a different name. These are the people that abuse - emotionally and physically - people around them. Have you ever seen an abused spouse? Many times they allow themselves to be trapped into the routine. They have legitimate fear of leaving the situation because it could get worse if they try to go. They hold on to whatever few good times they had even when there are almost none currently nor have there been in a very long time because holding onto hope is less scary than running away and starting over... or trying to get away and being abused further if they can't leave.

I think of this pattern and see America. We remember our country's heartwarming tales. The absolute courage of the Colonists that risked their lives against a military empire just to fight for the very concept of freedom. The stories of the Underground Railroad. The Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights marches. So many of the moments we canonize as this concept of America revolve around the indelible mark the founding fathers had on us when it came to what the term 'freedom' means as a nation.

And then 9/11 comes along and we toss all of that aside for safety and protection from an enemy that does not have the ability to strike at will and planned the 9/11 major attack for years and years before finally getting lucky enough to pull it off. And this isn't even counting the fact that if Bush had cared at all to read his August 6th, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing and act upon it, we likely wouldn't have had an attack at all.

A big event happens and we, the emotionally abused victims, lied to and cheated on over other military issues in the past (Vietnam specifically), clung to our abuser even though we should have known that he was completely untrustworthy. The abuser took more liberty to take our liberties. Illegally wiretapping ALL of us (not some of us or even just suspected victims). Eliminating Habeas Corpus. Detaining American Citizens as well as regular muslim men with no association with al-Qaeda together in a place where they had no right to have a fair trial, make a really proper defense in their case or worse yet, they can be held indefinitely without even being charged with anything. It's a crime to humanity and it would make our forefathers vomit violently in their graves.

This was, of course, proceeded by the Patriot Act which helped strip our rights as Americans away.

But this is just the freedom and civil liberty thing. If you really want to see how we act like abused spouses, take a look at how moronically we cling to capitalism even when we have proof that the concept of profit over all (the very basis of capitalistic thought) means purposely destroying moral boundaries and wrecking the lives of millions. Congress plays along. They deregulate everything to help grease the skids. They pass laws making it easier for these companies to create junk products to sell people and eventually collapse the system under. They do this neatly while basically being on the payroll for these people come election time.

They have Americans so brainwashed into believing that despite the meltdowns that cost you your car, house, job and possibly family... that any other economic system, namely socialism, is Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.

Even though they totally distort the values of another economic system because they want to confuse you with examples of evil violent authoritarian governments, they do it because they know you're still confused into buying into the "American Dream".


We were taught that everything good comes from hard work and perseverance.

Ahh and here's where that American Dream comes in. It's the core basis of Reaganomics isn't it? Work incredibly hard and great things will happen to you! You may never be rich but if you go to work every day you might own a house and a car and make a decent wage and live comfortably for the rest of your life.

Of course that sort of has been the mirage the rich have been using since the beginning of time right? Spruced up just enough to keep modern and relevant to your current belief system.

Reaganomics believed that if you target everything for the rich, most notably major tax cuts, that they will take that money, reinvest some of it into their business and the crumbs that fall off their lavish dinner table might just reach you in terms of potential new jobs...

Except that the top-down economic philosophy is just a consistent failure. What we've learned is those rich guys up top they pocket that tax cut. If they hire anyone at all it's overseas for pennies on the dollar thanks to outsourcing. And in fact this new found money might allow them to expand operations in China or India or whatever and that tends to mean more factory closings state-side. The companies then report record financial numbers. The assholes that could afford large amounts of stock love this. It's an economic upturn for them. For the average guy who was working hard and living for the American Dream, they just had the dream turn into a Freddy Krueger style nightmare and they're sort of hoping they lose in the dream just so they don't have to wake up to the hell that awaits them financially.

Corporations have unprecedented access these days to Congress. It's so blatant that even the Democrats, once considered the party of the people while Republicans held the banner of the Corporate Elite above their heads proudly, turned into the same greedy, CEO-beholden group of politicians as their opposition. Corporatists like the DLC got one of their biggest players in Rahm Emanuel helping to control Obama's agenda and from there it's been a windfall for them.

The Banks and specifically Goldman Sachs got bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. HMOs and Pharmaceuticals got everything they could have wished for in a Health Care bill that forces every American to buy coverage from them and provides no price controls to prevent them from continuing to scalp consumers. And BP, when they, Transocean and Halliburton (of course) create possibly the largest environmental disaster ever does anyone force them out or do something to penalize them? Not a chance.

Oh and hey getting back to that Arizona thing like I promised... while crazed xenophobic people look at illegal immigrants as the reason they are losing jobs, I think it's time to point the finger at the people that are keeping Americans out of work. It's clearly corporations that are hiring illegal immigrants and specifically recruiting them to come here. The penalties they pay (if any regulatory agency even does anything at all about it) is usually less than the actual immigrant themselves faces. It all adds up to a cost effective solution to avoid paying the American worker even the minimum wage they deserve.

Let's not kid ourselves people. Most of these jobs are farming jobs or jobs that require the person to be on-site in the specific geographic region in which they are hired. If they could outsource this they would but they cannot due to the necessity of the job being done where the immigrants are hired.

They recruit these people for the same reason they outsource. Because they could care less about America, the community or people around them and because their CEOs want to make ungodly profits. And hey, you people can be angry and forcibly toss as many of these workers out of the country as you want, they're not getting penalized so they'll just find more. So much for your brilliant strategy now suckers...

Create a forceful regulatory agency that regularly goes through the books of these companies and double checks social security number duplication to sort out fraud and penalize these companies at $1,000,000 per offense, per worker.

Stop the recruitment and watch the immigration numbers fall sharply.

You were taught to respect your elders.

Sometimes as a kid I hated this. Parents... Grandparents... man they can be assholes. However you still had to respect them because, well, it was the rule.

I don't necessarily think you have to listen to them as if they're always right. I mean being generations older usually puts you on the wrong side of a lot of issues that have long been settled amongst younger people (racism, homophobia, etc). However it is good to at least respect our elders enough to take care of them when they get older. Such respect is hard to find when Congress aims specifically to make cuts to Medicare or wants to turn Social Security into a similar stock boondoggle that 401Ks have proven to be (biggest ponzi scheme ever?).

I think the belief in Washington is that, "well the elderly never really know what's going on anyway, let's buy off AARP and we can confuse them into whatever we want to do."

They certainly did this with the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug plan. Guys like Rep. Tom Petri who has over a $1 million in Walgreens stock were able to sponsor and pass a law that made most seniors pay even more for their prescription drug plans and prevented Medicare from doing what the VA does and group negotiate for lower drug prices. What a pile of shit.

Every time we turn around corporations are eliminating pensions leaving seniors with no retirement money and then you get Bush, the Republicans and now even Obama saying they want to "fix Social Security" which only means, "privatize it and make it a giveaway to Wall Street"... you know the guys that fuck everything up for a profit.

There is no respect for elders or for that matter other people anymore.

When I see America, I see a country that is at each others' throats. Blaming one another for the problems we see today. Victims in a misinformation campaign that has managed to create an illusion that there is no class war by the rich onto the poor and middle class but rather it's just the lazy, uninitiated poor that want to take the last of what the ever shrinking middle class has left.

That's just not true.

But you know, if we even remotely followed the rules and tenets of our childhood lessons, we might start to see the forest for the trees. We'd begin to understand that America as currently constructed is a failed state in which unless real change occurs, (not the false hope campaign sloganeering of a corporate protectionist) the concept in which our forefathers most notably Jefferson envisioned for us, will die a cruel humiliating death.

Where we went wrong…

I look back now at the 2008 Campaign season with the sort of disdain you hold for your worst enemy. Hindsight is 20/20 and as a very strong liberal it’s hard not to feel completely and utterly betrayed by how events occurred. As liberals went we weren’t sure what to make of the field, once deemed the “best field of contenders in Democratic history” by many in the media. Best field for whom?

Aside from Dennis Kucinich the field was lacking any real liberal or progressive candidates. Of the main three, John Edwards was the only one using the populist rhetoric that attacked the central issues that are plaguing this country. But even he was lacking the bonafides to make anyone believe him. Russ Feingold put it succinctly when he said Edwards was using his platform but didn’t have the Senate record to back it up.

Liberals bit their lip and decided to choose the unknown quantity (Obama) who was speaking with hopeful change rhetoric over the known quantity (Clinton) who had in a previous Administration shown that they were as pro-corporation as the Reagan Republicans were.

We’re only a year in and the disappointment and frustration couldn’t be any worse. Any liberal with a brain knew exactly how this was going to go when Rahm Emanuel was named Chief of Staff. Rahm, who famously recruited rich Republican businessmen to run as Democrats because it would be an easy seat pick up had helped (along with Chuck Schumer in the DSCC) to weed out real liberals and progressives in primaries. Specifically intervening for corporate candidates and raising so much money for them that the real progressives had to bow out or face a humiliating defeat.

Rahm kept this process going once he became Obama’s top guy by keeping Progressives out of nearly every cabinet post and purposely keeping them out of policy meetings. Every progressive campaign promise was jettisoned for whatever pro-corporate policy they could support. Gays & Lesbians were given lip service but complete inaction for their rights. Single Payer advocates were purposely excluded from the negotiating table and then arrested at Congressional Hearings by order of the corporatist Democratic allies of Obama’s Administration. Obama also escalated the war in Afghanistan and managed to do so the week before he picked up a Nobel Peace Prize that he won for just not being George W. Bush. Pretty ridiculous.

Health Care “Reform” passed the Senate by a 60-40 vote this week and now goes to committee where I bet the contentious atmosphere between what House Democrats want and Senate Democrats want stalls the process quite a bit.

Still if the bill that ultimately passes resembles anything like what the Senate passed, we would have all been better off with nothing. Mandating people buy insurance when they really can’t afford to and eliminating almost all cost control provisions just means that you fed insurance companies a huge amount of customers that they can continue to overcharge. Sure there are no pre-existing conditions to fear but also no real regulatory methods in which to prevent insurers from jacking prices up any time they would like as well. There’s nothing to really like in this bill.

The whole thing is a byproduct of the Democratic sell out to lobbyists in the Health Care Industry. They spent $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress and by the end they owned them all. It’s sickening.

But it opens up the reality of what the process should have been all along. Health Care, as pressing as it is as an issue for most Americans should have been second on the docket.

Campaign Finance Reform should have been first. Of course this would require a President who wasn’t a complete sell out to corporate interests or Republican rhetoric and Obama is neither.

Still the ONLY way for real reform on the issues in a way that benefits the entire populace and not just the top 1% of this country is to make CFR the #1 issue to change.

And it requires a real overhaul not just a small change here or there like the Democrats pathetically weak lobbyist gift rule changes from 2006.
To me this reform is the one that changes all reform after it because taking private money out of the game makes the Congress accountable to one special interest: constituents.

Before I break down the concept that I propose let me say two things.

1. I think this is a plan BOTH Republicans and Democrats would support. No, not the elected ones but the grass roots. But you have to sell it differently to each constituency. There is something to like for both.

2. This plan is very strict but if enacted I assure you the Presidency and Congress would no longer be stooges to CEOs and lobbyists.

So here’s the plan, point by point.

• All parties that want to participate in national Presidential elections must fulfill signature requirements to be placed on ballots in at least 3/4ths of the 50 states. By meeting participation guidelines they will receive public funding equal to the other candidates and receive equal time on each national debate.

• For local Congressional and Senate elections, candidate must receive prerequisite signatures to receive money and guaranteed debate slot/time.

• To qualify as a candidate all candidates must divest in all stocks, bonds and financial holdings aside from personal home real estate. All assets must be liquid at the time of campaign opening and this includes all immediate family (parents, siblings, spouse, children, grandchildren). This will eliminate any impropriety from being assigned to a committee and steering dollars to friends or companies that you are personally invested in. Failure to liquidate assets will result in automatic disqualification from campaign and should offense not be discovered until after the race is over, a candidate will be expelled from their seat retroactively for such a violation.

• The election cycle is 6 weeks for party primaries and 6 weeks for the national campaign.

• Each candidate will receive the same amount of public funding. This will be used for live campaign events (speeches, travel). Each campaign will additionally receive an equal amount of primetime TV ad time, networks cannot refuse to air any candidates’ ads or they will be stripped of their FCC license.

• Corporations and Special Interest Groups are banned from airing ads. The way the law will be written, these groups will be defined as political parties rather than advocacy organizations and by definition the private money they will collect would be in violation of federal law. A candidate will be limited to only representing one political party so they cannot have an advocacy group represent them, to which that group would then need the prerequisite signatures to receive a spot on the ballot.

• Employers and Unions are strictly prohibited from organizing for or advertising/advocating on behalf of a candidate.

• Political Parties will be granted a specific amount of money, capped to a certain amount, in which they can use to organize grass roots and build party loyalty. They will be allowed, within their financial construct, to advocate for their party’s candidates but due to the limited amount of funds, they would make better use of the funding by building a ground campaign for multiple elections rather than one at a time.

What this does is majorly clamp down and end all outside money from coming into a campaign. It prevents the process from being closed to just two parties and eliminates the need to be one of the financial elite to run for office. It eliminates special interest ads which usually smear candidates and obfuscate facts. It eliminates pressure from employers and union organizing behind a candidate.

When I say this will appease both parties, it will. It takes the corporate money out of every bill. Makes the candidates beholden to the will of their constituents and gives regular people a chance to run for office and make a difference (whereas that is nearly impossible now). The Left will be ecstatic about this. In the Health Care debate this makes Single Payer a legitimate option and eliminated many of these corporate run tea bagger town hall attacks that helped screw up the debate. It would prevent the Max Baucuses and Joe Liebermans from being able to have a seat let alone selling out the entire country for some of their rich buddies. And it opens doors for Green Party Candidates, Libertarians, etc to all have equal time on the main stage and have their views listened to and heard.

The Right will be excited because this all but ends the Democratic stranglehold on Unions and the work Unions do on campaigns. It also eliminates many of the 527 groups they hate, most notably MoveOn.org, from being a serious threat to their way of life.

If you market this for the reasons they would like the bill to each separate group, you can create a groundswell to get this type of reform passed. The media will try to fight it tooth and nail. The elected corporate sell out politicians will as well. But with a legitimate push from the grass roots on both sides, they might have no choice but to relent.

And then we’ll have a system where the laws are made of the people, by the people and for the people. Just as our forefathers seemed to intend originally, or at least they implied as much.

Spineless, Centrist CATFIGHT!!!

Okay I just thought I'd throw a misogynistic term out there right away so all the people that want to slam me with sexist claims will stay away from the post from the get-go.

It's interesting to me to see how this feud is developing. Hillary Clinton runs a dirty campaign where she constantly attacks Barack Obama, who is certain to become the party's nominee for the Presidential general election. Knowing she can't win by the will of the people, her team scheme in every possible way to steal it. They play the racism card against him, say he's not as qualified as John McCain, go after his church and then Hillary goes completely batshit crazy and thinks she was an action hero star who dodged sniper fire in Bosnia and was the person who brought peace to Northern Ireland. No really, former leader of the DNC and DLC douchebag Terry McAuliffe actually said that:

But now the Clinton campaign is really pushing the blarney boat out. On March 4th, Terry McAuliffe, her campaign chairman, has gone the further that I can see. “We would not have peace today had it not for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland," he said on CNN on March 4th. Well, that’s certainly news to those who were there at the time.

Of course the Irish have something altogether to say about that lie.

Anyway all the while they were going the smear route (and here's a partial list of the attacks), they were dreaming of ways to steal this. Go after Super Delegates, challenge the legality of caucuses, declare Michigan and Florida's delegates should be seated even if Hillary signed a pledge not to campaign and no other candidate's names were on the ballot in Michigan. Hell they even went as far as to suggest that she was going to try to twist the arms of Pledged delegates in order to subvert the will of the voters.

Of course there was going to be public pressure on Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi to say something in this regard. Especially with Hillary both slamming Obama as worse than McCain AND begging to be on a ticket with Obama at the same time.



So she did and the Hillbots went nuts. Her rich corporate donors decided to try to blackmail Pelosi and the party if she stands in the way of the Superdelegates cheating for Hillary.

Basically they feel that if Pelosi stops the Superdelegates from stealing the election for Hillary that they will withdraw the support that they give to Democratic Candidates.

Upon closer inspection though, these twenty donors who signed this letter should give serious pause to any Democrat who actually wants change in this country. All this does is open up more questions of why the Clintons still refuse to release their tax returns and makes you wonder how much money from these donors has made it into their personal finances. And if it made it into their personal finances, then you can makes claims of illegal donations to the Clinton campaign since she used some of the wealth she's obtained to lend $5 million to her own campaign. After all, if she received money from these people and then funded herself with it that's a ridiculous loophole for one to use to cheat their way around campaign finance reform.

And look at the donors. 7 of them stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House when the Clintons were practically renting it to their corporate buddies. One of them got in serious trouble for selling missile secrets to China. This is a rather notorious list of people to be trying to strong arm our party.

The Democratic Party is supposed to be, at least my definition of it has always been, the party of the people. While it was no secret that the GOP only cared about rich people and corporate interests, the Democrats were supposed to be counter to that. The opposition party.

Allowing these donors to dictate anything is bad for the party and frankly, bad for America. We already have a party that caters to the rich and is willing to destroy the poor and middle class for their benefit.

In this fight I would almost certainly support Nancy Pelosi. Yes she has been a great disappointment. When she ran against former Tennessee Congressman and current head of the DLC Harold Ford for House Minority Leader after Dick Gephardt retired she was painted as the liberal San Franciscan Democrat who would bring the party to some sort of tree hugging hippie revival or something. When she won the election amongst Democratic members of the House there was a feeling of hope that she would be the strong liberal she was painted as. After all, nobody in the House looked very strong at that point and Republicans were playing every dirty trick in the book to get legislation on the floor before anyone could read it, deny Democrats meeting rooms and pretty much silence the Democratic voice completely.

Pelosi held her own but when it was clear in 2006 that public sentiment and backlash was so strong that she could see a Democratic tidal wave of new House members elected and she could become the Speaker of a huge majority, she decided to play the spineless centrist card we all feared. Before the 2006 mid-terms she declared that impeachment was off the table. I could somewhat understand that being said before the election.

After all there are 30% of the country that are completely lacking common sense or understanding of the world and they would come out in droves to save their leader from facing the crimes he committed. So keeping them at home made sense. But after they won there was no excuse. Bill Clinton committed perjury on a personal indiscretion. The House Republicans which spent $60 million of taxpayer money and could only come up with this weak charge, impeached him.

That was a minor offense. A misdemeanor at best. Bush has committed treasonous acts against his country. It's well documented that he broke FISA laws, used signing statements to break a majority of other laws that have been passed and then tried to cover his tracks by breaking yet another law and deleting all computer records of communications. We're not even addressing the obvious election theft that they should be prosecuted for.

For the future of our country and to send a statement to American citizens as well as children who are learning about the Constitution and how America works we should have impeached and prosecuted the entire bunch of criminals. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice... all of them.

The problem is the Senate is too closely divided to complete the conviction and removal from office. So Pelosi figured a failed impeachment would look bad and partisan to the American people.

The issue isn't whether or not that was true because that reasoning certainly isn't misguided it's that it fails to recognize how the media coverage of the impeachment and the trials which would be covered nationally, interrupting daily television programming so everyone could see, would prove without a doubt the crimes they committed and turn public sentiment for the conviction so strongly in favor of it that even the safest of DLC and Republican incumbents would have to consider their own necks versus saving Bush.

She never even gave that proposition a second thought and just kept impeachment off the table.

It's that sort of spinelessness that kills Democratic hopefuls before they ever get a chance to be elected and make an impact on Congress. It reinforces every bad stereotype of the party and does it in a way that the Right Wing talking heads and the mainstream media pundits alike can attack and have some credibility on. After all some credibility is way more than the zero they usually have.

So I'm usually inclined to think everything Pelosi says is garbage, but she's absolutely right here. The will of the people should trump the opinions of party insiders and rich donors.

But even when I am warming to the idea of supporting Pelosi in a fight of this magnitude she says something stupid again.

"We can't allow the tension and pressures of a spirited Presidential contest to spill over and harm hard-working Democratic candidates running to strengthen our Democratic majority in the House," Pelosi wrote in an e-mail sent to a vast list of Democratic donors and supporters. "I will do whatever it takes to protect our candidates and make sure their campaigns to drive change forward don't skip a beat."

And Pelosi urged potential donors to make a contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before the March 31st deadline for the current fundraising quarter.

Her appeal comes two days after a group of 20 Clinton backers sent a letter to Pelosi chastising her public position that superdelegates should support the will of the people -- in other words, vote for the candidate with the most pledged delegates.

See that's the problem. Who does Pelosi urge you to send money to? The former Clinton Administration official turned Congressman Rahm Emanuel's DCCC.

The DCCC, run by Emanuel and the DSCC run by the other New York Senator Chuck Schumer are breeding grounds for DLC Centrists. Their purpose is supposed to be to help all Democratic House and Senate candidates win their races against Republicans.

The problem is they don't stay out of the primaries. They endorse the weakest, most centrist candidates whom they feel will be easiest to control in continuing their goals to serve their corporate masters. This was never more apparent than in Minnesota's 2006 Senate Campaign when centrist Amy Klobuchar who didn't really have positions on a lot of major topics was losing debates to the progressive Democratic candidate Ford Bell. Schumer ran the DSCC in, endorsed her before the primary was close to done, got big name Democrats to do fundraisers for her and voila, she had a boatload of cash and party backing to squash all opposition voices.

Those weak kneed candidates are the ones that the DCCC and DSCC constantly try to prop up. They want to infuse as much cash as possible into those candidates in specific winnable races where they can gain a seat, brag about it and claim that their strategy of a Republican, er, Centrist Democratic Party is what the voters want.

Then they act surprised when voters, the media, the pundits all see the forest for the trees and call this group of Democrats cowards when they vote for Bankruptcy laws that help Credit Card companies but not the middle class, or when they have a shot to end the war but refuse to cut off funding, when they can show backbone and stick up for the constitution and impeach Bush but don't lift a finger to do so, when they have a chance to stand up to Bush on FISA and telecom immunity and then let the bills even get to the floor.... well at least the House stepped up to the plate on that one.

In 2006 Democrats won in places they hadn't before. Thanks to the 50 state strategy employed by Howard Dean at the DNC. Considering it was his first national election as chair of the DNC and we won so big, I'd say he did a great job. Emanuel and Schumer went off on him for not limiting our money to races they targeted that we could win. Aka spend money only on a few seats in Blue states or in places where we absolutely know we can win.

That sort of alienates the rest of the Democratic Party who are trying to push back against the Republican majorities that this sort of ignorance created.

Obama's success in traditional red states is not just that he won in most of them, it's that he drew such large numbers of voters there. Voters that were not there before Howard Dean started employing his strategy to build the party in states that were not Democratic safe havens. The only way to win for the long term is to get into every state, every city, every region and get our message out there. Republicans count on and depend on these locations not having Democratic challengers and they have been able to maintain one voice, one theme on the airwaves in that area precisely because there has never been opposition there. In those cases many Democrats just refuse to vote. Why bother? Your party isn't putting out serious challengers or backing them in a meaningful way so you'll lose badly no matter what.

And that's precisely what's wrong with Nancy Pelosi here. Even when she has these people blackmailing her, she goes out and tells people to support another one of them.

There are organizations like MoveOn, Blue America, Progressive Democrats for America, etc that support progressive Democrats. That fight for candidates that aren't just status quo defenders of the rich. And short of telling people to go outside the party for help from these groups she should be telling people to help Howard Dean and the DNC out here.

Thanks to Hillary's prolonged primary battle, the DNC will be weakened considerably in the fundraising arena. Of course maybe that's what the Clintonites want since they hate Howard Dean anyways.

Even when it's clear she's in the right in a situation, Nancy Pelosi muffs the punt so to speak and fumbles away what would be an opportunity to finally recognize the impact people-driven politics has over the old-school lobbyist-funded fat cats that used to run the party. She could have driven people to places that support the power of grassroots and away from the DLCers who have helped kill the party in almost every way since Bill Clinton's 1992 election win.

In her best chance to do what was right, she couldn't even hang on to the ball.

It's a shame really.

-Rp