Basically, it boils down to this:

1) She will not admit she was unbelievably wrong about Toyota’s electronics in the wake of the NHTSA report, because:
A) Not a single auto expert works for the NHTSA
B) There are still lawsuits pending, however:
I) If the lawsuits are resolved in Toyota’s favor, they don’t count, because:
a) Marcy Wheeler talked to some disgruntled former Toyota service people in 2007, and
b) she can read Toyota’s corporate mind and just knows that they have secret chip problems, and
c) she isn’t providing any evidence for any of these assertions

Follow that? I know it’s pretty amazing. This is what always gets me about Marcy Wheeler’s ‘reporting’ and one of the things that drove me to abandon FDL, save for David Dayen’s work and a bit of the community blogging. Wheeler is free to make whatever fact-free, paranoid, borderline racist/nativist accusations she wants, so long as they’re against typical liberal bugaboos (corporations, Republicans, foreign companies). Sometimes they turn out to be true; just as often, they’re baseless. Her fans ignore the misses and exaggerate the hits, and thus, a star is born. About half of her posts actually take the form of her asking for indulgence as she ‘goes into the weeds’, aka, raves fantastically about her latest pet conspiracy theory.

It looks more than a bit like apophenia, honestly. She sees elaborate conspiracies everywhere. In the Bush era, this was slightly more likely to turn up ‘results’, simply because they engaged in so many conspiracies at once.

That’s not praiseworthy for Wheeler, however; it’s just a sad commentary on the Bush government.

Anyway, when I confronted her about her Toyota fixation from last year, now conveniently forgotten, she engaged in the delusional self-justification I described above for a bit.

Image of Twitter conversation up on Flickr. Roughly arranged in chronological order; timestamps are visible anyway.

In short, although I never normally link the two, I have been covering the protests here in Madison for The Zombie Rights Campaign, our charity/grassrootsy organizing group, and putting regular updates on the blog using a special tag. You can see all those posts by going to this link.

I have also taken tons of pictures and you can see the whole collection on Flickr here. Video has gone on the ZRC youtube channel here.

Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to keep up both blog fronts and handle these protests at the moment. I’m running ragged just trying to keep up.

THURSDAY, Feb. 3 (HealthDay News) — Under the new Affordable Care Act, the health reform package signed into law by President Barack Obama last March, millions of Americans whose income fluctuates during the year may lose health insurance for periods of time as their eligibility for different programs changes.

The authors of a new study appearing in the February issue of Health Affairs estimated that as many as 28 million U.S. adults might “churn” in and out of health insurance programs during the course of a year, sometimes losing coverage more than once.

“It’s a critical issue,” said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of The Commonwealth Fund, who was not involved with the study. “You could get a raise or lose a week of work or gain a week, and move in and out of coverage.”

…

By taking a look at U.S. Census data from the last five years, Sommers and a colleague estimated that in the first six months, 35% of families with incomes below 200% of the poverty level will change eligibility while half (28 million) would have crossed the threshold at least once during the first year.

An estimated one-quarter of beneficiaries will likely have their coverage disrupted by crossing the income dividing line at least twice in one year, and 39% will over the span of two years, the authors added.

Within four years, up to 38% will have their coverage disrupted four times or more, they predicted.

…

“It would be easier to fine-tune if it was a continuous program,” Schoen said, and it would reduce costs.

Yes, Medicare for all really *would* be better, in that it would stand a snowball’s chance in hell of actually working.

But hey, good job, Balloon Juicers. Now not only have you helped turn us into an official corporatocracy, but millions of people will be constantly losing health coverage, which they probably won’t be able to afford to use anyway, every year.

It’s like the O-bots built a machine to kick people in the teeth, over and over again. Fantastic.

President Obama claims that he likes to take his time and check his facts before making public statements.

So why did he lie about Social Security to promote his tax giveaway to the wealthy?

President Barack Obama rewrote the history of the Social Security system during a Dec. 7 press conference, claiming that only widows and orphans originally benefited from the program.

…

But the president’s claim is not true. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, benefits were not originally intended just for widows and orphans. From the SSA’s own historical page:

SSA: The two major provisions relating to the elderly were Title I- Grants to States for Old-Age Assistance, which supported state welfare programs for the aged, and Title II-Federal Old-Age Benefits. It was Title II that was the new social insurance program we now think of as Social Security. In the original Act benefits were to be paid only to the primary worker when he/she retired at age 65. Benefits were to be based on payroll tax contributions that the worker made during his/her working life. Taxes would first be collected in 1937 and monthly benefits would begin in 1942. (Under amendments passed in 1939, payments were advanced to 1940.)

*cue sad trumpets*

In fact, Obama has it precisely backward; Social Security advanced its most critical, longest-lasting and core benefits FIRST, then expanded to cover widows and orphans, not the other way around.

This is important because it counteracts the core of his ‘point’; in Obama’s world, Good Moderate Centrist Ideas Advance Incrementally. There’s no goal that you can’t advance in tiny bits and pieces to make compromises and everyone feel all warm and fuzzy.

The real world doesn’t work that way; sometimes a compromise is worse than no policy at all, like with his ‘health care reform’, which delivers the citizens into serfdom to line Wellpoint’s pockets.

It’s true that Social Security advanced over time, but that’s because its core, critical, initial function was solidly designed and wildly popular. You can build, but you need to build on success, on a solid foundation, a well-executed central portion of your plan. Obama doesn’t believe that because it means there’s not always room to bargain with his friends across the aisle, so he twists the facts about the single most immensely successful Progressive program of all time to fit his pet political theories.

Think it’s a casual slip-up? Well, if it is, then he’s about as incurious and ill-educated as our last Commander in Chief, because he’s been peddling this revisionist history (also known as a ‘lie’) despite being called on it, for months:

This isn’t the first time the president has made the error when discussing Social Security’s origins. The conservative Media Research Center’s Newsbusters.org found the president made a similar claim during an interview with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart back in October of this year.

When the hacks at Newsbusters are better scholars of Progressive history than you are, you have a serious problem.

Public option overwhelmingly popular? Too bad; the filibuster.

Wall Street regulation overwhelmingly popular? Too bad; the filibuster.

Immigration reform? Filibuster.

Ending the wars? Filibuster.

Climate change work? Filibuster.

Actual liberal nominees for the courts? Filibuster. (Sotomayor is a fine choice based on her body of work experience, especially vital trial judge work, but not exactly a liberal firebrand. Kagan’s grossly unqualified and her presence on the Supreme Court is a disgrace to the legal profession.)

So, now that the lower House is in Republican hands, and the Senate likely to fall in 2012, what do the Dems in the Senate finally want to get around to doing?

Removing the filibuster. Aka, the only tool that liberals have to even slow the Tea Party infused Conservative juggernaut down.

Naturally.

Greg Sargent reports that Harry Reid will respond to the call of his entire caucus and devise rules to reform the Senate rules.

At a caucus meeting this week attended only by Senators and no staff, Reid and fellow Dems devoted a significant chunk of time to a discussion about specific ideas on how to proceed, the aide says [...]

“They are already talking it through and devising a plan,” the aide said of Reid and fellow Dems, adding that Reid is having “conversations” with other members of the caucus “about the best way to move forward.”

Let me spell this out so that any of my fellow travelers on the Left who haven’t caught on to the scam:

This was the plan all along.

No, it’s not an elaborate conspiracy of every single Democrat in the Senate to disenfranchise liberals. Quite the contrary; the scam lies in disreputable centrist hacks like Reid knowing full well that, given a bit of good governance, Civics 101 rhetoric at the right moment, Progressives will shoot their agenda, their power, and their constituents squarely in the face to do The Right Thing for Democracy.

Like this:

The decision to reform the Senate rules has engendered some controversy among the progressive community. They question whether the timing is right, with a Republican majority in the House and the Senate likely to tip to Republicans in 2012, to make this reform. I wonder why they think that Republicans haven’t considered abolishing the filibuster rules outright the moment they get into power, but OK.

My position is that democracy can only work with a functioning legislature. If the people of the United States choose a Republican government, they endorsed Republican solutions to the nation’s problems. Those solutions should be advanced for the nation to endure. That’s the only way accountability in government can occur. This kabuki dance, where one party or another takes power and then laments the rules from stopping them from action, does not serve the public.

Why don’t I think the Republicans will do that? I’m not sure if they will or won’t. They didn’t previously, largely because Senate Republicans would be making the call, and as much as they love their agenda, they love their sense of self-importance more. That might hold true again, or not. But regardless, it wouldn’t happen for TWO MORE YEARS.

Here’s how this has gone, will probably play out, and keep in mind, this is The Plan:

-For two years, Republicans block all vaguely progressive legislation, ‘forcing’ Obama, Reid and Pelosi to tack to the right and give quasi-fascistic policies on everything.
-This serves the corporations well, weakens Dem support, and the Republicans can frame it to their base as, paradoxically, ‘socialism’.
-Then after the election, Dems disassemble the filibuster.
-Now, the Republicans in the House can ‘force’ Obama to…. tack to the right and give quasi-fascistic policies on everything.

It’s all about which corporate interests they needed to serve. In the first two years, we got massive bailouts of Healthcare and Finance, lobbies traditionally either friendly to Dems, or not actively unfriendly. (Witness how New York is very solidly blue, and yet very solidly in bed with Wall Street).

In the second two years of the Obama term, we’ll get bailouts of more traditionally Red corporate interests. The prisons, the military, Big Ag, Resource Extraction, Fossil Fuels, etc. Your full gamut of Captain Planet Dystopian villainy.

We needed Dem majorities to pass the first bailouts; we need unopposed Republicans for the second batch.

This is the plan. But ‘plan’ could be a misleading word. Perhaps it’s just the natural behavior of a captured system, a sort of emergent phenomenon. The most powerful interests acted first, and acted through Dems until they got worn out; now other interests will act through Republicans. Beyond a few truly monstrous cynics like Obama and Reid, who only care for their own power and prospects, who knows if it rises to a conscious level.

With Obama though, I’d certainly wager it does. All he cares about is the chance to make bold compromises so that he can try and buy his father’s love and approval via Republican proxy. It’s a fixation. This setup gives him another glorious two years of hippie-punching therapy.

That won’t stop some, like Mr. Dayen here, regrettably, from hoping desperately for a different future:

On key economic issues, one suspects that Democrats, nominally the party of the people, have no interest in living up to their rhetoric on the campaign trail. In this reading, they hide behind the Senate’s rules to confirm their inability to get anything done. Limiting the rules obstacles would kick the legs out from that excuse. In the words of this commenter, “The rule change issue will either save the Democratic Party or expose it as a corporate tool with a smiley face. Either outcome is a step ahead of where we are now.”

Sigh. Expose them, really? No, no, no. They already have a better excuse waiting: ‘The Constitution says all spending bills have to originate in the House. The Tea Partiers now control our budget. We’re helpless! Again!’

If the filibuster was intact, Dem voters might see through the con, and expect their Senators to, you know, filibuster. Hence it’s got to go. The ultimate goal for the Democratic Party is to appear helpless at all times, so that it can be blameless for all woe.

Hope, as they say, springs eternal.

This means, of course, that it is next to worthless. Enjoy the new Republican era, brought to you by the Democratic Party.

PS: Just earlier today, Dayen wrote this:

Regardless of whether filibuster rules change or not, political progress from the left in the next two years borders on the impossible. If we make it to 2012 unscathed with nothing more than gridlock it’ll be a miracle.

If gridlock is the best outcome, why the hell would you want to grease the skids? Oh, right. Hopeful idealism.

*rolls eyes*

TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.

When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.

The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house and thrown out her belongings, without alerting Ms. Ash beforehand.

The piece goes on to outline several cases, including one where the guy didn’t even have a mortgage (yet again) and the bank stole the house anyway:

In Texas, for example, Bank of America had the locks changed and the electricity shut off last year at Alan Schroit’s second home in Galveston, according to court papers. Mr. Schroit, who had paid off the house, had stored 75 pounds of salmon and halibut in his refrigerator and freezer, caught during a recent Alaskan fishing vacation.

“Lacking power, the freezer’s contents melted, spoiled and reeking melt water spread through the property and leaked through the flooring into joists and lower areas,” the lawsuit says. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

So to get this straight: banks will break into your home whether entitled to or not, whether you have a mortgage or not, and steal any and all of its contents as they see fit, including HUMAN REMAINS.

But we don’t need a foreclosure moratorium, right John Cole?

Schmucks.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s not only continues to do nothing, but allows the Fed (Bernanke was his choice, don’t forget) to block meaningful action to protect homeowners from thieves who are literally looting the dead:

Top policymakers at the Federal Reserve are fighting efforts to rein in widely reported bank abuses, sparking an inter-agency feud with the FDIC and the Treasury Department. The Fed, along with the more bank-friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is resisting moves to craft rules cracking down on banks that charge illegal fees and carry out improper foreclosures. The FDIC supports such rules, according to an FDIC official involved in the dispute.

But we don’t need a national moratorium. I mean, they’re only stealing houses and dead husbands, right? Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Remember this from Mr. Balloon Juice himself, John Cole?

I’m not siding with the banksters, I just don’t understand what good would come from a national moratorium. Forty state AG’s are on the ball, what exactly could a national moratorium do? The idea is to stop the bad foreclosures, not grind every single transaction in this sector to a damned halt.

You aren’t hurting the banksters when you do something like that. You’re hurting every single buyer and seller in the market. It would be catastrophic.

Yeah I bet he’s hoping we’ll all forget it too. Though maybe, years after the all the ruined lives and stolen homes, we can get another wonderfully contrite apology which supposedly restores all his credibility. (Much like it brings back the dead from a needless war based on transparent lies)

After all, we can’t have the catastrophe of an insolvent bank eating some of their losses. Stealing a woman’s dead spouse is a small price to pay to keep this wonderful mortgage market going full speed.

President Obama gets precisely what he wants, almost all the time.

Don’t believe me? Try to name a major policy initiative that Obama wanted that he didn’t get. Note: one he *actually* wanted, not one he said he did.

–President Obama did NOT want a public option in his so-called healthcare reform bill. We didn’t get one. He lied to Congress about supporting one, but we know for a fact that he had traded it away months previously.

–President Obama did NOT want drug reimportation allowed under HCR, and when it looked like it might pass, his administration sabotaged the measure, at considerable taxpayer expense. Remember those higher prices whenever you get a script filled at Walgreens.

–Obama, also known as President Fierce Advocate, did NOT want DADT repeal initially, and so it languished, despite another of his patented public displays of support, until the gay rights lobby made it so painful for him that he DID want it, and then, when he needed a victory to validate his so-called liberalism, he was able to make it happen within *days*

–Lest you forget how much his administration hates gays, they passionately defended DOMA by comparing a state’s authority to refuse gay marriages to the authority to refuse to acknowledge incestuous marriages or child marriage.

–President Obama did NOT want to empower unions or any other major Democratic power center outside of his own party, and so Unions in particular have gotten the shaft, repeatedly, throughout his administration. (brutal pay-cuts at the American Automakers alongside loans to foreign competitors, attacks on their healthcare premiums under HCR, a total lack of support for the Employee Free Choice Act, the new trade deal with South Korea which will cost us over 150,000 American jobs, etc)

–President Obama hates Social Security with a white hot passion. When the Congress refused to create a ‘Deficit’ Commission exclusively designed to cut it, he created one on his own, and stacked the deck with people who shared his dream of destroying or at least crippling the premiere social safety program in the United States. When the commission still couldn’t come to a consensus, he set up a ‘tax deal’ that cuts billions out of Social Security’s revenue stream, to be paid for out of general revenue, which for the first time makes Social Security part of the deficit problem and opens it up to be cut by the new, Teabagger Congress.

–President Obama hates the poor and the middle class. Sorry to break this to you, but he does. Hence his administration’s heinous to the point of absurdity implementation of HAMP, a program that was supposedly created to help struggling homeowners, but in fact was nothing more than predatory lending backed with taxpayer funds. Hence his support for Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, two of the men who are most responsible for the current economic disaster that has destroyed so much of the American middle class. Hence this newest tax cut ‘deal’ which actually raises taxes on 1/3 of American workers; the poorest third.

Yes, that’s right. President Obama is about to raise taxes on the poor, so he can cut taxes on the rich. It also shuts out public employees who don’t pay into Social Security because they have a different pension system.

–Speaking of, President Obama loves the rich. Loves them. That’s why his new tax cut deal, the one that raises taxes on the working poor, slashes them on the rich and further lowers the estate tax.

–President Obama is literally taking food from poor childrens’ plates to make a crass political point. Ie, to fund a shiny new school lunch program that is amongst his wife’s pet projects, he slashed funding for food stamps. Next year TANF, the federal successor to welfare, also gets steep cuts.

–President Obama loves torture and loves war. He continues torture to this very day, including the torture of Bradley Manning, who dared to expose some of the crimes of both the Bush and Obama administrations. President Obama has consistently refused to prosecute war criminals and torturers, and now American crimes, if they are to receive any review at all, will have to be tried in foreign courts. He has escalated the war in Afghanistan even though his process stands absolutely zero chance of success and the Taliban gain ground day after day, year after year. He’s also greatly expanded the undeclared war in Pakistan and launched a shadow war in Yemen.

–President Obama loves assassination and frequently employs assassins. That’s what you call firing a missile from an unmanned vehicle into civilian populations in a country we are not at war with, btw. It’s not a ‘battle’, and it’s certainly not war. It’s assassination, execution without trial, also known as murder. It doesn’t make a bit of difference that the assassin uses a predator drone.

–President Obama hates immigrants, wants to get rid of as many as he can and doesn’t care how much it hurts the Democratic Party. This would be why his administration is objectively worse on deportations than Bush, or why despite public promises to the contrary he never once made immigration reform a priority.

Now that we’ve established that President Obama hates Social Security, the poor, immigrants, the middle class, unions, health care recipients and loves war, assassination and the wealthy, we should be able to make some predictions about the next two years:

–Obama will go to the mat to cut Social Security. Expect cuts, or even the complete dismantling of the program. Obama hates it. It has to go. Social Security is his white whale.

–Obama will further weaken unions. It might be with more free trade deals, it might be by simply letting their membership fade away over time as it has for decades.

–Obama will slash social any and all social spending he can get his hands on, allying with the Tea Party to do it. Expect more cuts to public assistance, welfare, anything that helps keep people off the streets, in part so that he can keep getting money for his assassination robots in Pakistan and Yemen. The current tax cut deal explicitly leaves Tea Party whackos the leverage needed to cut back all the stimulative spending, such as it is, early next year. This is by design, not accident; Obama and the Dem leadership together have decided to hand Republicans the lever to ‘force’ them to do what Obama wanted in the first place.

–Speaking of overseas wars funded with money we need at home, expect them to expand. Since we can’t win in Afghanistan, in Nixonian fashion, Obama has to expand the war to somewhere he thinks we *can* win. Will Pakistan be the new Cambodia? Hard to say. Someone’s got to eat some serious civilian casualties as we head toward the 2012 elections though.

–We will be in Afghanistan until 2012, guaranteed. If Obama is re-elected, we will be there until after 2014, maybe forever. He loves that war too much, and has staked too much on its ‘success’, to stop throwing away blood and treasure on it. Someone would have to make him stop, and that’s not going to be Republicans.

–Health Care Reform may or may not be dismantled, but it doesn’t really matter. Obama wanted two things out of HCR: 1) to avoid real reform of the medical industries and their profits (because he is a Reaganite and loves corporations more than people) and 2) to avoid having to pass any real Democratic priorities (like immigration reform, DADT [at that time], environmental regulation, climate change, etc.) He got those objectives, and if the Republicans take his bill apart, he can campaign against them screaming about sick kids without healthcare (you know, like the ones whose families won’t be able to afford the outrageous copays under his plan) You wouldn’t believe the number of flyers with airbrushed actors playing sick kids I got from Dems in the last election cycle; they think this issue is a winner for them, and want to use it again and again and again. A winning policy doesn’t give them cheap election ads, so single payer never stood a chance; better the Republicans play-act as the bad guys.

–There will be no real action on Climate Change. At all. Period. See, President Obama doesn’t want action on climate change because it would hurt large corporate interests, but he needed to stall until he had a Republican Congress to block it. Now he has that, so mysteriously, the US and China hammered out a meaningless compromise at Cancun just recently. Doesn’t matter; the Republicans will play the bad guys and block any implementation of meaningful climate change legislation (cap and trade or carbon tax, doesn’t matter) and the deal will fall through or amount to nothing. As he wants it to. Meanwhile, expect Obama to help dial back any other common-sense, lifesaving regulations (as he is already doing with smog and incinerators)

–Since the Gulf really is filthy and full of poison, it will turn out that the food that the Obama administration pushed to get back into supermarkets by greenwashing BP’s response was poisonous, carcinogenic, full of oil and heavy metals and suchlike. (Actually, this is already proving true) It won’t lead to any significant environmental reforms though.

–More tax cuts for the wealthy. I mean, this one’s so obvious it’s a gimme.

That’s the agenda for the next two years, I’d say. More death all around, more war, less money for the poor and sick, more for the rich, no action on climate change, health care reform failing either because his plan stays in effect (and sucks) or because it’s torn apart, and anyone who’s been eating Gulf seafood? I’d get good life insurance before the rates go up.

You might be asking yourself, “Why? Why is he doing this?” (unless you’re a rabid Obama diehard in which case you’ll sound a lot like this video).

There seem to be two arguments about that. The first, as articulated by Matt Taibbi recently for Rolling Stone, is that Obama is an unprincipled flip-flopper, a bad leader with few, if any, core beliefs:

I contrast this now to the behavior of Barack Obama. I can’t even count how many times I listened to Barack Obama on the campaign trail talk about how, as president, he would rescind the Bush tax cuts as soon as he had the chance. He stood up and he said over and over again – I can still hear him saying “Let me be clear!” with that Great Statesman voice of his, before he went into this routine – that the Bush tax cuts were wrong and immoral. He said more than once that they “offended his conscience.” Then, just as he did with drug re-importation and Guantanamo and bulk Medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and the issue of whether or not he would bring registered lobbyists into his White House and a host of other promises, he tossed his campaign “convictions” in the toilet and changed his mind once he was more accountable to lobbyists than primary voters.

…

This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity. It’s just that most of our politicians – our president included, apparently – would rather not bother.

The second, articulated below by Ian Welsh, and which I’m think, sadly, to be more correct, is that Obama in fact has principles, albeit evil ones, and the current state of affairs is *precisely* what he’s wanted all along:

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. Moreover he despises left wingers, likes kicking gays and women whenever he gets a chance and believes deeply and truly in the security state (you did notice that Obama administration told everyone to take their objections to backscatter scanners and groping and shove them where the sun don’t shine, then told you they’re thinking of extending TSA police state activities to other public transit?)

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

If the left doesn’t stand against Obama and doesn’t primary him, it stands for nothing and for nobody.

Regardless of what goes on inside Obama’s head, the larger proposition is undeniable: Obama is a bad man. Anyone who would torture and murder without trial is a bad man. Anyone who would clusterbomb Yemeni civilians is a bad man. Anyone who would accept a peace prize while escalating hopeless wars he knows cannot be won is a bad man. Anyone who would steal food from starving kids to rack up a cheap political victory for his unelected wife is a bad man. Anyone who wants to destroy Social Security, a wildly successful public program that has rescued millions of elderly people from poverty and want? A bad man.

You get the idea, and over the next two years, America’s going to get yet another object lesson in governance by bad men.

It’s like they distilled the essence of Balloon Juice into a four minute video. Absolutely astounding.

Excerpt:

When these progressives refer to themselves as Mr. Obama’s base, all they see is themselves. They ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos. And now they are whispering about a primary challenge against the president. Brilliant! The kind of suicidal gesture that destroyed Jimmy Carter — and a way to lose the black vote forever.

Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents. They know when not to shout. The president, the coolest man in the room, who worked among the unemployed in Chicago, knows too.

White progressives, hell, ANY PROGRESSIVES are used to ‘getting it all’? In.. America? God, Ishmael Reed must be the dumbest motherfucker alive. We’ve had 30, I repeat because literacy and history are obviously not his strong suit, 30 straight, continuous years of uninterrupted conservative governance, and progressives have been ‘getting it all’? Are you high? I seriously have to wonder. You can’t make an assertion like that and not be either profoundly stupid or in an altered mental state.

The second part is, of course, that white progressives must be inherently selfish. How dare they criticize a minority president, what with having gotten it all (at some point, in an alternate universe). How childish to oppose new NAFTA deals that will cost 159,000 jobs, or a foreclosure crisis that, amongst other things, is destroying the black middle class? How dare they want the EPA to act on climate change and smog instead of punting? How dare they oppose the ridiculous Obama tax cut deal, which will raise taxes from their current rates for 1/3 of Americans, the vast majority of those the working poor?

Wow. How selfish! How conceited!

It’s truly astonishing to see an argument that, because racists who don’t like black intellectuals might not like a black president showing some spine, we on the left have to shut up and ask for nothing from said black president because maybe someday the racists will like him?

Look, Obama had to know, if he’s not terminally stupid, about these stereotypes when running for office. He knew he’d have to work to overcome them, and he chose to take the job anyway. Using those backwards ass stereotypes now, as a shield to prevent legitimate policy criticism, is simply outrageous, hypocritical and passive-aggressive in the extreme. What if past Presidents had acted this way? What if FDR had said, ‘Well, I want to enact some major economic policies, but if the Republicans inform the public that my legs are crippled, I’ll surely lose re-election because of prejudice. Time to cut taxes instead!’

Fuck you with a rusty coat-hanger, Ishmael.

Naturally, this has led John Cole over at Balloon Juice (Motto: Dead-enders for life) to fawn over the piece because it gives him a wedge to attack his own commenters and anyone who dares criticize Dear Leader, using the old ‘We’re not saying you (racists) are racist for attacking our guy on the merits, we’re just saying you’re childish and far too immature to see his great wisdom. Also, you’re probably racists.’ tack.

Again, fuck you John Cole. And hey, while we’re at it, how’s that no-need-for-a-foreclosure-moratorium thing working out for you?

What with the banks outright theft of homes moving into what I can only describe as domestic terrorism:

One such suit was filed in March by Pennsylvania homeowner Angela Iannelli. She was up to date on her payments when, she says, she arrived home in October 2009 to find that Bank of America had ransacked her belongings, cut off her utilities, poured anti-freeze down her drains, padlocked her doors and confiscated Luke, her pet parrot of 10 years. It took her six weeks to get the bank to clean up the house.

Not only do they break in and vandalize homes, even the wrong ones, to further their reign of terror, they sell homes they don’t own:

A funny thing happened to DeBary resident Russ Vas Dais as he was about to buy a foreclosed home: He learned the bank selling him the house didn’t actually own it.

Fannie Mae had foreclosed on the property but, in an apparent paperwork problem, never took ownership.

“It was quite shocking to learn the bank didn’t have title to it,” said Vas Dais, who had worked in the real-estate sales and appraisal business for 18 years. “I just felt that there are a lot of incompetent professionals who aren’t paying much attention.”

And I guess since we don’t need a moratorium, the little people don’t deserve lawyers either, which explains why Treasury refuses to allow TARP funds to help out anyone but the banksters:

There are foreclosure mediation groups and activists, like NACA, who are setting up face-to-face meetings between lenders and borrowers. There are successful advocacy groups like ESOP in Cleveland, also mediating on behalf of homeowners. And there are the lawyers, foreclosure defense attorneys who have uncovered virtually every seedy game the servicers and the banks have been playing, who have effectively represented their clients.

If anything, the government should strongly support these efforts. The status quo is hopelessly broken, and it threatens economic recovery. The Treasury Department should demand that banks stop the rush to foreclose, and having effective representation for borrowers goes a long way toward that. But when given the option to allow TARP funds to be used for legal aid for foreclosure victims, the Treasury blocked it.

Here’s a lovely sideshow of the devastation that the banks get to wreak, thanks in large part to jackasses like Obama and Cole and Ishmael Reed.

Oops, I guess going out and documenting the horrors that Obama’s policies and Administration have allowed, nay, aided and abetted, why, that’s selfish and intemperate. How dare we want to get it all?

Newsflash, Mr. President: The Republicans don’t love you, and never will.

Neither did Daddy.

Grow the fuck up.