Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The sports metaphor is particularly apt. Progressives are the Devil Ray fans of the political world.

Ultimately we loose (health care, the environment, our children to No Child Left Behind) because we won't stick up for ourselves...if Democratic voters and party members are being conned it's because they choose to be--party movements are a pageant to aid in the willful deception taking place.

Peter, I have a different take.

We, in the broadest sense, inclusive of people who have no contact with the political system, lose because a gaggle of cretins and their sponsors hold the means to violently enforce a losing situation.

We, as in them, lose because they're drunk on the toxic liquor of gaining a political identity without doing anything that goes into forming an identity or political values. They're not choosing to be conned. I'm not sure they have sufficient agency or wit to make any choices. They just never made it that far.

Golly, you mean they didn't kill the personal mandate, too? Gee, willickers, I can't wait to get fined for not buying a product of "free enterprise"!

So, you're saying that the shills and aisle-crossers are equally contempitble? Aren't they actually *identical*, different faces of the same thing? And the same can be said of Republicans and Democrats -- they're all shills and aisle-crossers, masters of the shell-game.
I used to think (as recently as, say, 2002) that Swift's characterization of "fools and knvaes" fit the two party system pretty well, knaves being the Reps, and fools being the Dems. Now, I see it as a description of the governing and the governed. They're all knaves, and we're all fools.

i just received an ass fax

" for pinko eyes only "

hmmm

"for u smucks that hate everything actual and want to rev morph society in toto
for u smucks so johnsoned for the big one that nothing
less will do....
for you smucks who've tried to rad-change policy

the point for u smucks is
to understand it

this post is the mantra
why carry anything else ????

imagine a 4 party system
france had such a system for a spell
requires a two stage election process
and a charles degaulle moment

but after the pack circles the track a few times
results any different ???
no discovery there for u guys i'm sure

the struggle must rip
itself up by its own roots

attack
our "life sustaining" corporations
from their insides

rile their job forces
into disfunctioning the their job sites

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/28/the-health-care-bill-dies/
mark taibbi:

"Who among us did not know this would happen? It’s been clear from the start that the Democrats would make a great show of doing something real, then they would fold prematurely, ram through some piece-of-shit bill with some incremental/worthless change in it, and then in the end blame everything on Max Baucus and Bill Nelson, saying, “By golly, we tried our best!”

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds."

so who needs us ??

its up in lights
this guy is at ...The Stone baby

he's on to em too
just like he's on to goldman sucks

'impotent beach boys flexing their muscles..'

Good on Taibbi, but he does not have this nailed.

First of all, he writes that "it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse." WTF does he think is now happening? If anything passes out of this cadaver-cobbling, it will most definitely make things worse, by facilitating both more pointlessly rising costs and increased meanness to the uninsured.

He's also wrong on his political diagnosis
that "the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes." There's also a slew of corporate shareholders and the AMA, not to mention the Congresspersons themselves, who would lose a huge graft stream, if medical insurance went public. And there's also the wider overclass antipathy to severing insurance from employment.

md

details details details

sure the zyztem is nothin but its details
but mark gets the big one right

the modern Dembos despite what they may claim
in the end always roll to corporate interests

i wonder what it to be done type inference mark
deducts from this ????

"hey guys i just call em as i see em...u activated types gotta figure how to find a way forward

True dat, op-san.

It's Smithie's fault that I was compelled to try and read Ezra Klein's pathetic ramblings on the subject. Good God, I'm gonna' be upchucking for the next three weeks.

[shakes fist] Damn you, Smithie!

I especially love the bit where Klein jabbers that we'd better shut up and eat the shit pastry and say "yum yum yum," because we won't get another chance at it for twenty years. It's an immutable law of nature that our "chances" must be spaced apart in this fashion, apparently.

Gentlemen and ladies, I give you the people who voted for "Hope."

Take a good look at your, er, comrades, Comrade Paine. :/

Sorry, Ms. X. But if I have to suffer...