the consistent effort by conservative, corporate dems to try and tarnish progressive

[JDPriestly]

3. K&R.

They try to obfuscate the message of progressives by co-opting it in that way. Hey, we all like Obama. No question.

He just isn't strongly enough committed to justice and, in spite of is rhetoric, to equal opportunity. To have equal opportunity, as another DU post so aptly pointed out today, you have to have something approaching economic equality. Economic equality does not mean that everybody gets the same income. It means that the gap between poor and rich is not so huge that it is in reality almost insurmountable. It means that, as long as there are rich people with several houses, houses that they cannot reside in at one time, anyone who works and contributes will earn enough to feed, clothe and care for a family.

Obama talks the talk on this issue, but, really, even his health care bill will mean that the rich at the top of the health insurance companies continue to get a bigger than life slice of our health care dollars while the rest of us struggle to pay deductibles and co-pays. I back Obama on the ACA, but I wish he had included single payer advocates at the table in the discussions prior to the passage of the ACA. Excluding them was an example of Obama's weakness and lack of courage.

Obama always gives the top dogs, the plutocrats in the country, their 30 pieces of silver.

And once Obama (and other third wayers) has paid those 30 pieces of silver to the wolves on Wall Street and in the corporate suites, we know that the outcome for working people, unions and progressives will be anything but really good. Who sits on the commissions and at the trade negotiation tables on behalf of the Obama White House -- big business and a couple of token union leaders, that's who. Ordinary people are very rarely, if ever represented or even recognized. Ordinary working people get to sit in the audience at speeches, part of the backdrop you know. And it has been this way in D.C. for a very long time, not just under Obama.