If no cuts to Social Security, why must the president include "protections for the vulnerable?"

[woo me with science]

134. You're so right.

It's absolutely our job.

About the ignores...

I think we're all in different stages of waking up to this horrible truth about what's been done to our nation and the American dream and the government that we were always told would have our best interests at heart. And here at DU, to the truth that our own party is now aggressively complicit in the betrayal. As a result, some are going to ignore for now, because hearing it and acknowledging the enormity of what has happened is just too much to bear.

I was watching Bill Moyers interview Richard Wolff on his show the other day (fantastic show - if you haven't seen it yet, here is the link: http://billmoyers.com/segment/richard-wolff-on-fighting-for-economic-justice-and-fair-wages/),

...and Moyers asked him why Americans seem so silent and passive about everything that's being done to us.

Wolff compared Americans to deer in the headlights. and he suggested that some are defensively clinging even harder, initially, to belief in what they are beginning to realize has been ripped away. But he also said that that stunned denial is a temporary thing....that it gives way to boiling anger at having been deceived, and then to action that will force change.

That's my hope, too.

For what it's worth, I think a hell of a lot more people are listening than it feels like. Whenever I start to get discouraged at DU, someone posts a marvelous thread that lays it all out and gets hundreds of recommendations. The message IS getting through. Like most media now, this board is heavily propagandized and provides a lot of nasty blowback for speaking the truth, and I think that dissuades a lot of people from speaking out. But people are reading, and we vastly outnumber the propagandists.

Out in the community I have honestly been stunned over the past year at how many people get it....How often I am drawn by total strangers into conversations at a local restaurant or grocery store, with people hungry out of the blue to tell me what they have discovered about the truth of what's happened to our government and our country. And when you start to talk back and they realize that you see it, too, there is this tremendous sense of kinship and shared outrage and determination that something needs to be done.

I think people really are waking up. I hope desperately that we are.