Tomorrow and Truths

Dear Friends,

I have once again been chastised for not highlighting all of the great things that President Obama has accomplished.  Rachel Maddow did a great job recounting the accomplishments on her show on Friday night. Today, President Obama addressed the Netroots Nation 2010 convention in Las Vegas (here), a convention of left wing bloggers.  The post that I highlighted in my previous blog was made from that convention.  He included in his video speech to the convention several clips from the prior night's Rachel Maddow Show.

In his speech, President Obama makes the point that "the fundamental truth of our democracy - that change doesn't come from the top down, it comes from the bottom up."  He went on to ask that we hold him accountable and that we make our voices heard.  We need to do just that.


Here is the President's speech which is worth listening to and keeping in mind as we impatiently wait for change to occur.



Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Senators, Sex and Sellouts

Dear Friends,

My younger son, Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, brought a post to my attention on the Daily Kos by Hunter entitled "No Bread, but circuses". (here)  It was such a great article that I wanted to just reprint the whole thing in this post, but it is better if you follow the link and read the whole post.  Here are the first two paragraphs.

We are gathered here in Las Vegas today to discuss the one place in America where prostitution is 100% legal, unregulated, and can be broadcast on national television. I am of course speaking of the United States Senate, where every senator can act as his own pimp, can perform outrageous acts of gratification towards his patrons, and where the money flows freely.
We have only one senator "known" to frequent actual prostitutes. His name is David Vitter, and he benefits greatly from the bigotry of low expectations. The behavior of some of our senators is so bad that merely visiting with hookers hardly rates. After all, it's what Jesus would have done, except for the paying money for sex part, and Vitter feels comfortable enough in the role of martyr. Despite twenty years of preaching, and being horribly outraged, and asking what we were going to tell the children, and generally getting the vapors over all things sexual, the GOP decided that this particular outrage did not quite rise that historic level. I would make here a comment about how things might be different if a Democrat was caught frequenting prostitutes -- but now I have lost interest in this whole train of thought, because nobody wants to think about U.S. senators having sex.

Hunter continues to describe the process of buying Senators and its relationship to conservatism.  He then discusses how this leads to a dysfunctional Senate.  The following paragraphs explain why a dysfunctional Senate is a disaster for our country.

The end result is, currently, a dysfunctional government. That is a rather profound thought: here we are, still mired in war, in a time of social and class-based upheaval (caused largely by having the audacity to elect a black man as our leader, as well as general shock among the right that their policies, once implemented, turned out to be a bungle on top of a fiasco and wrapped within a boondoggle) and -- most critically to the Senate -- the worst economic conditions to hit the country since the Depression, that Depression, that big one that everyone always talks about as being the worst of all possible worsts -- and we have a Senate that is not capable of governing. Trying to claw our way out of the previous Great Depression involved acts of remarkable boldness: we have no such options. America at present simply has no such government capabilities. We will not have it at any point before the next elections; we will not get it afterwards. 

No matter how long or how deep our economic disaster, there will be no jobs programs. There will be no push to invest in a new American future, whether it be new infrastructure, or new energy, or new manufacturing. There will be little or no help to state governments so strapped for cash that even some of the most basic services are being shuttered. We could have saved a literal fortune by crafting genuinely competent healthcare legislation: thanks to the most loyal set of whores an industry could possibly ask to hire, such an action was off the table from the very beginning. We still could institute a truly miniscule transaction tax in order to put the brakes on the worst of market-crashing speculation (and gain a few bucks back in return for saving the banker's hides at our nation's expense), but it seems you might as well propose putting a colony of talking dogs on the moon, for all the good it will do.

Hunter continues by discussing the applicability of the phrase "Bread and Circuses" to American politics today. 

You really should read the entire post.  It is great, and I have not done justice to it here.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Ruling Rejects Obama Administration Retroactive Policy

Dear Friends,

Candidate Obama voiced empathy for immigrants and a strong desire to reform our disastrous immigration policy.  Unfortunately, President Obama seems to have lost any empathy that candidate Obama had.

A recent article in The New York Times (here) entitled "For Those Deported, Court Ruling Comes Too Late" caught my eye.  The first few paragraphs tell the story.

Vincenzo Donnoli was 9 when his family immigrated legally to Brooklyn. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, married and divorced in Flatbush, ran a landscaping business and had five children. But at 51 he is back — alone and jobless — in Pomarico, the hill town in southern Italy where his father was a shepherd, as a deportee banned for life from returning to the United States.
His offense: two misdemeanor convictions for possessing small amounts of cocaine, in 1988 and 2006, both guilty pleas resolved without jail time. Retroactively, immigration authorities added them up to equal an “aggravated felony” that required Mr. Donnoli’s automatic deportation last year.
That kind of arithmetic, an aggressive government interpretation of 1996 immigration laws that has been increasingly invoked in recent years, was rejected by the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision in June. But the ruling came too late for Mr. Donnoli and thousands of deportees like him, all former lawful residents who have no way to turn that legal vindication into a chance to come home.

Please note that it was the Obama Administration that deported Mr. Donnoli.  I am not a legal scholar, but I have to believe that President Obama has the power to right this wrong.  Even the Supreme Court thought that the policy being followed by the Obama Administration was wrong.

After reading this article, I did a little checking on President Obama's actual immigration record and was not pleased with what I found.  This article from the Huffington Post (here) is a great summary.  The fact is that President Obama has deported far more people than President George W. Bush ever did.  Here are the first few paragraphs of the article.

A little girl became the face of the nation's immigration debate on Wednesday, when she told First Lady Michelle Obama about her mother's fear.
"My mom ... she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn't have papers," the second-grader said after being called on by the first lady, who was visiting a suburban Maryland school with Mexico's First Lady Margarita Zavala.
And when Michele Obama replied by describing the need to make sure "that people can be here with the right kind of papers," the girl simply responded quietly: "But my mom doesn't have any." (Watch the video below.)
The girl's guilelessness and innocence, in contrast to the inchoate rage of the anti-immigrant movement -- and even to the first lady's suddenly hollow-sounding talking points -- could well turn her into an icon as immigration makes its way to the front of the national agenda.
But surely she was wrong, in suggesting that President Obama is a particular danger to undocumented immigrants? Perhaps she was confusing him with the governor of Arizona or something?
Well, actually, it turns out the little girl was right. Obama's Department of Homeland Security has been deporting more undocumented immigrants than President Bush's ever did.
The number of deportations each year more than tripled during the Bush era -- and has kept going up since then. During fiscal year 2009, the first fiscal year of the Obama era, 387,790 immigrants were deported -- almost 100,000 more during the last full fiscal year of the Bush presidency.

 Here is the video of the exchange between Mrs. Obama and the little girl:



It is time for President Obama to reclaim the empathy that candidate Obama showed towards immigrants in this country.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Quantity, Quality and Quest

Dear Friends,

Tonight certain members of my family chastised me for being too hard on President Obama.  Then I went to read the blogs that I follow and A Little Leeway (here) had the same message for her readers.

President Obama and Vice President Biden ran against John McCain and Sarah Palin and won.  So we should all start every day being thankful for that fact.  The next fact that we should be thankful for is that President Obama is not President George W. Bush.  President Obama speaks in sentences and is thoughtful and has empathy for the people of the country that he leads and for all the people of the world.  This list of ways that President Obama is better than President George W. Bush could go on for pages and pages.

Unfortunately, President George W. Bush and the Republicans left this country in such a mess and with so many crises that President Obama was put in a position that he had to be far more productive than his predecessors.  As someone who believes that he is up to the task, I intend to continue to hold him to a much higher standard.

The 111th Congress under the control of the Democrats and with President Obama in the White House has passed a large quantity of laws, more than other Congresses and this result was obtained despite the Republican Senators' just say no and filibuster policy.  Here are two quotes that lead off an article published by the American Chronicle (here):

"This is one of the most productive Congresses in history."

Norman Ornstein, Congressional Scholar at American Enterprise Institute, Financial Times 3/19/10

"… Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition… If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality."

David Leonhardt, New York Times 5/22/2010

You can see a list of what Representative John Spratt (D-SC) believes are the accomplishments of the 111th Congress here.

There is no question that the quantity of laws passed by this Congress has been impressive.  The next question is what is the quality of these laws.  There are, of course, some big ones like health care and financial reform and the stimulus package.  While these laws are generally heralded as being groundbreaking and tremendous accomplishments, none of them is actually as strong as they needed to be.  The only real solution to the health care crisis in this country is some sort of single payer universal health care coverage.  The financial reform did not address too big to fail so Wall Street can continue to find ways to gamble for huge short term profits with no downside.  The financial stimulus package was way too small and had way too many tax breaks which really are not a stimulus except in Republican dreams.

There were some great laws though that got less attention.  The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a perfect example of a high quality law.  It was necessary because the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court adopted a twisted interpretation of the fair pay laws in order to protect corporations from employees that they had screwed for years. 

So the quantity of laws is great, but the quality has not been what it could have been if President Obama had not been so intent on courting the votes of Republicans and conservative Democrats.  He should have spent his time getting the support of the American people so they would force their representatives to vote for his policies.  He has only made sporadic attempts to do this and often his attempts have come too late.  He needs to talk to the people every day to gain their support and energize them to push their representatives to vote for his policies.

In fairness to President Obama, he was left with more problems than he could possibly fix in the first 18 months of his presidency.  He needs to be on a constant quest to turn this country around.  (The last sentence should not be viewed as a criticism of his weekend vacation in Maine with his family.  The pictures and coverage of that mini-vacation were great for the psyche of the nation.)  He needs to create a sense of urgency and momentum for his plan of action.  To do this he needs to focus his attention on the American people and not the politicians.  Ultimately, the politicians need the people to vote for them.  In fact I often think that getting re-elected is the single most important driving force for our politicians today.

President Obama can do all this because he is very talented, but he needs to get aggressive and stay consistently aggressive, and he needs to understand that only the American people can force the Republicans to break ranks.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal