Huge K&R. For the same reason we have trouble accepting

that a profit-sucking corporate middleman is essential to a well-functioning health care system.

For the same reason we struggle with the eminently reasonable concept of attaching a profit motive to the imprisonment of human beings.

For the same reason we recalcitrantly blink when told that the definition of "militant" has been amended to include any male of a certain age who happens to have been blown to pieces by the drone...

...and that the Espionage Act has been reinterpreted to cast as "terrorism" many of the behaviors defining investigative journalism.

For the same reason we stubbornly ignore that putting Social Security cuts on the table and in one's own budget (except during election years) *really* signals a principle-based opposition to such cuts.

For the same reason we are too naive to understand that withdrawing or drawing down some troops in an election year is a great victory, even if the money is diverted to other military actions or to pay for replacement mercenary forces.

For the same reason we don't understand that it is possible to care deeply about climate change and the environment, while simultaneously expanding drilling and fracking and fast-tracking a massive free trade agreement that will allow corporations to sue and challenge national regulations.

For the same reason we don't understand that it is possible to care deeply about income inequality while simultaneously enabling criminal banks and fast-tracking a massive trade agreement that will force Americans to compete with workers in impoverished countries and slash wages across the board.

For the same reason we don't get why it's essential to our safety for the government to spy on us; store our movements online, conversations, and sexual activities in a database for use in the future; and use our taxpayer-funded government agencies for suppression of dissent and corporate espionage.

+10000 Not only that, the threats were used to implement real austerity.

and they were used to poison the Democratic Party message and entrench the lying Republican narrative tying Social Security to the deficit and implying that deficit cutting is the most important goal for the country.

Every Democrat, every American, should be sick of the constant Third Way implication that these Social Security threats have been just words and didn't harm anyone. They have harmed EVERYONE.

1. Without the threatened axe of Social Security cuts (which kept returning as the austerity kept escalating), the Third Way would never have been able to sell the vicious budget and social program cuts they HAVE inflicted on Americans...by justifying them as the lesser of two evils.

If you had told us a few years ago that the Barack Obama administration would be presiding over government spending that assaults the poor even more viciously than the RYAN plan, we would never have believed it. Yet that is exactly where we found ourselves, surrounded by corporate mouthpieces exhorting us to be grateful, "because he didn't cut Social Security."

2. For years, Republicans have drummed lies into the heads of the American people about the source of our economic problems and how to fix them. They have pushed vicious austerity and malignant, economy-starving deficit-cutting instead of the real help to the 99 percent that is needed, and they have preached lies about the need to cut SS and LIES about its contribution to the deficit.

President Obama had from Day One of this Presidency to change the narrative about deficits and Social Security. Instead, he has yet again cemented the Republican narrative and made it a "bipartisan" narrative in a way that will not be undone anytime soon.

And this TEMPORARY suspension of the threats, of course during an election year, and of course simultaneously repeating Republican lies about how the deficit will cause them to return in the future....is the obscene Third Way cherry on top.

Third Way Surreal: President seeks credit for election-year pause in his own hostage-taking.

He's *temporarily* removing, during an election year, the ax *he* suspends over our heads repeatedly as a tool to continue implementing vicious Third Way austerity.

"It will remain on the table"

for exactly as long as the Third Way finds it useful to create hostage situations to justify other vicious austerity measures.

I see the predictable, dishonest Third Way lecturing has already begun upthread...the garbage suggestion that all these threats have somehow been merely decorative and haven't harmed a soul...

'It's always on the table, and nothing ever happens!'

NSA spying and inequality are deeply, inextricably linked.

It is deeply disingenuous to try to argue that they aren't related, or that people focusing on one are ignoring the other.

They are deeply, intimately connected.

Why do plutocrats put a sweeping, Constitution-assaulting, spying infrastructure into place? To create total information awareness, power and control; to spy on competitors and politicians; to facilitate their corporate predatory agenda; to prevent investigation of their abuses by a free press; and to crush dissent by protesters and the citizens they are systematically exploiting, stripping of their rights, and impoverishing.

Caring about poverty REQUIRES that we take a powerful stand against this government spying. This sort of government abuse enables every corporate outrage that is the CAUSE of the poverty we are talking about.