If they're only willing to pay lip service -- if that -- to progressive policies then what good are they?

So, could be worse. I'll vote conservative over crazy any day. But I'd rather vote progressive.

n/t

Its not that they're Democrats per se. Our only hope is electing the right kind of Democrats. Well, that and and honest, clear thinking people who feel more of a duty to those who elect them than to the money that allowed to reach them.

There's something about us humans that makes us feel empowered when we kill ourselves just to feel 'right'. Odd, that.

I don't get the reference.

...

eom

Sorry :)

I been banging my head against this wall at this site for a very long time. I scratch my head every day when I listen to the extreme left of the party and their willingness to completely ignore reality for these wildly impossible goals that when not reached are obvious failures and then quit the game and then let the right wing take over again and do some more severe damage. It is sad, and especially disingenuous with all of the very very real problems that keep accumulating between this dam of denialism from the right and left.

Healthcare being just the latest iteration. So kick the can down the road, and we get another twenty forty fifty years and I suppose 80 million uninsured.

My true theory is that progressives are really at heart closet right wingers. They hate government as much as the right, or immigrants, or minorities, and rather than admit it create impossible 'standards' that can never be achieved so that by a back door means can vote republican without actually pulling the lever.

Good luck.

Our leaders are good. Like Boxer the horse, we should all just work harder.

Here, I think, is the problem. Most of the folks here are not simply Democratic Party hacks. We are Democrats because they come closest to our Progressive ideas. But when the party gives only lip service to those ideas, the frustration grows.

I, for one, have supported the Democratic Party for all of these years despite my disappointment with their performance. George Bush, however, changed my mind. He proved, once again, that determined leadership can make the "impossible" happen. I want to see determined leadership for Progressive ideas. Would be happy not to get the pony if we actually got something. Instead we get a continuation of the status quo with the added fillup that, from the right, the failures of policy will be blamed on a so-called Progressive administration.

The slide to the right continues. Until we get the opportunity to actually test Progressive policies (which I believe will actually work) the slide will continue as long as Dems can be accused of being Progressive while barely changing the failed policies of the right.

This is simply a race to the bottom.

I was very afraid of the Obama candidacy from the start, and expressed those concerns here, because I believed he was a confirmed centrist (read right of center) running as a Progressive.

Not enough change is a prescription for disaster.

The issue is to get rid of Lieberman and Nelson, or stupak or Bachman. The Senate is an institutionally conservative body. It is designed to resist change. No way around that structural reality at this point. Parliamentary systems have no Senate. This is the first year after eight years of Bush.

The really sad thing is we could be looking at having achieved eight years under Al Gore. I think all of these issues would have been so much further than where they are. Energy policy would have been for sure, and technology support would have been so much stronger. We would have had a much better financial oversight.

But the Nader folks gave us Bush. That is the danger in the structural system of democracy of the U.S. Now we dig out and if not in ten months then they want to hand it back to the Republicans.

I have started referring to this site as a right wing blog.

(thank you chickadee)

the right.

with you it is the same old lines. All this time on the site and you still feel the need to resort to the same old insults when people don't agree with you. We are not left radicals or right wing, make up your mind. Or you just might consider this is a site with diverse opinions who even tolerate yours. And that is not a right wing prop it was a xmas present! pay attention

...at least, this site has moved significantly to the left since 2003, MHO. Seriously, a lot of the stuff folks vent about isn't what I would term "progressive" in the sense of the potential of a realist America taking a place of leadership in the wider world - it's more than anything about inward looking emotive reaction to the last 8 years.

“The absence of any US-Iran bilateral channel...may have the perverse effect of reinforcing Iranian interest in progressing in the nuclear realm so that the US will be forced to take it seriously and engage it directly." ~ Richard Haass

for all the evil in the world because the man decided to run as a 100% non-evil candidate? The more I hear that worn-out yet preposterous meme, the less I believe it.

The real lesson to be learned was that if the Dem clown had been just half the man that Nader was, he'd have had that extra 10% of the vote in his pocket and we could have avoided eight years of darkness and ruin.

But he wasn't. And we didn't.

... that was a good one. Thx, I needed it.

Meet the new boss, not exactly the same as the old boss, but close enough.

The past eight years are being cloned in a new, shiny package.

Objective facts:

- we still have give aways to Wall Street
- there is no legislation to stem foreclosures
- credit legislation failed to cap interest rates
- unemployment is at 17% (U6) and no programs are in place
- we're still in Iraq and we're expanding Afthanistan
- the health insurance companies are now getting bailouts
- none of constitutional guarantees severed have been returned

and more.

The good news is that the people are not buying the shiny package. That's why the president is at 46% approval and dropping. People don't buy the bull shit anymore.

Why endorse this type of sham?

Why tolerate it?

Yesterday I actually called the offices of both my senators (Democratic women representing Washington State) and told them I no longer supported the senate healthcare reform bill because it was too watered down.

I don't really expect that the healthcare bill will be defeated because it isn't progressive enough. Although Barry Sanders may stall things as much as Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman. But I think it's important that Dem senators hear from their progressive constituents that what they're crafting is half-ass reform.

I spent enough time yesterday examining the issue and changing my mind, or perhaps backing away from full-scale support of the White House position. I don't need to see single-payer adapted, but I do need to see excessive profits from health insurance eliminated. That's not happening anymore, so I can't keep up my loyalty to this administration's attempt at healthcare reform.

Rereading my initial comment here, I think I struck too personal a tone. I only mean to critique the ideas here, not the people, as I respect the thinking across the Agonist as much as any blog available.

Tom Robinson

Way back when, when I first became a member of MoveOn they would poll the members for priority of effort.

I voted for campaign finance reform saying all other efforts would be for naught without it.

I lost. Then left.

Zman for getting to the heart of it.

It's about the gravitational fields generated by extreme wealth.

It's just our luck to have been born at the precise moment in history when all of the planet's vacuum cleaners - carefully designed to suction wealth out of the darkest pockets of the globe - ran out of distant pockets to suction. Someone connected all the hoses together, and the fatal countdown began.

That feeling we're experiencing? That's the air pressure dropping.

Jeff,

In Canada the NDP has won provincial elections from time to time, but competes with Greens and Liberals for left-of-center votes, and has no representation in three provinces including Quebec. Right now the NDP is in power in Manitoba and Nova Scotia. It has never won more than 43 seats in Canada's 345-seat parliament, nor more than 20% of the vote. In the last election, the NDP got 37 seats and about 18% of the vote. Canada's Greens got another 6% but no members of parliament.

One can make a case that the NDP often is a key player in ruling coalitions at the federal and provincial level in Canada. That seems like the very best one could hope for with a US progressive party. The downside in the States, though, is that in presdiential elections a Progressive Party would peel votes away from Democrats, just like Perot peeled them off from Republicans in 1992 and 1996. That's why I never see how an NDP-type party, let alone the Greens, ever achieves political success in the US.

Tom Robinson

a parliment system. Progessive or green are teabaggers of the left. The last time in 2000 they all went for the Nadar bandwagon and we got the Iraq war, thousands dead. None of which would have happened if Gore had won that election. The far left has as much blood on their hands as the right.

but he had already lost the election on his own merits. Or lack thereof.

Why don't you ask the man why he chose to concede rather than sticking up for the plurality of voters who voted for him?

It must be easier for you to blame the folks who wanted something better than the same old naked corruption and corporate plutocracy and ludicrous economic inequities. If you think those things would have gotten better under Pres. Albert Gore, you're fooling yourself.

The goddamn Democrats can't even speak the truth, let alone bring themselves to act on behalf of their people. And we're supposed to hold our noses and consent to them anyway? Sorry, but that direction leads to us all swirling inexorably down the bowl.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I voted for Nader in '04. If he hadn't been shut out of the ballot in Texas in '08, I'd have voted for him again. And if he runs in '12, I'll vote for him yet again-- as long as the major parties keep to their turd sandwich vs. giant douche theme, and if no more compelling leftist runs for office.

But, you know, bad and unpredictable shit can happen to anybody. That's why you and I should care as well.

even now. Its all about grassroots party organizing and those willing to do it.

We need a NATION WIDE STRIKE for Real healthcare reform