Cenk Uygur a sell-out? 4 million little reasons [View all]

[pnwmom]

Last edited Thu Oct 9, 2014, 02:13 AM - Edit history (4)

Few would dispute that Obama hasn’t accomplished much of what his supporters wished. But recently, Cenk Uygur claimed that Obama didn’t even have any goals – that he was just aimlessly coasting through his second term. But Cenk knows as well as anyone else that Obama had very ambitious and clearly stated goals for his second term. For Cenk to say otherwise makes no sense . . . unless he has 4 million little reasons.

Oh, wait – he does. $4 million in “seed money” last April from a right-wing group led by Buddy Roehmer (a former GOP candidate for President) Plus an "option" for another $4 million, depending on . . . nobody knows, exactly.

Check out the evolution of Cenk’s views, below, followed by two other points of view: the WA Post on Obama's "incredibly ambitious second term agenda," and then liberal economist Paul Krugman's take on Obama's accomplishments, recently published in Rolling Stone.

4/16/14

http://thedailybanter.com/2014/04/cenk-uygur-just-took-4-million-from-a-conservative-source-but-hes-still-a-better-liberal-than-you/

Just a little while ago the Young Turks Network announced that it’s inked a deal to get $4-million in seed money from a group run by Buddy Roemer. . . . In addition to his retrograde views on abortion and gay marriage, he also supported Arizona’s draconian crackdown on undocumented immigrants, is pro-torture, and is for the repeal of the ACA, saying that it amounts to government interference in healthcare. In other words, the guy is the furthest thing from a liberal.

But as we know, a large-scale political bent isn’t as important or desirable as it used to be. These days it’s entirely possible to get away with treating politics like you do everything else: as something that can be split apart and consumed à la carte and on-demand. Pick which issue is most important to you, your personal sine qua non, and ignore everything else. Think drones and kill lists are the most pressing problem facing America right now? Congratulations, you can apparently #StandWithRand and still be taken seriously as a liberal, even though he’s kind of a racist asshole. Think NSA spying matters more than anything else in the whole world? Hey, Glenn Greenwald has figured out a way to overcome the cognitive dissonance that should plague you if you choose to align yourself with otherwise repugnant creatures who happen to be anti-surveillance.

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Buddy Roemer is by no means a bad person, but he holds an entire slew of beliefs that should be deal-breakers in the eyes of someone who proclaims himself to be a liberal. Or, in Uygur’s case, someone who proclaims himself to be a better liberal than you. Uygur spends so much time arrogantly haranguing people who dare to disagree with him from the left that his willingness to be Buddy Roemer’s bitch carries with it a tasty amount of schadenfreude. Granted, 4-mil is 4-mil, but it’s going to be interesting the next time he tries to hold somebody to the progressive standard he piously claims to represent.

9/15/14

http://www.mediaite.com/online/cenk-uygur-would-lay-money-on-rand-paul-being-the-next-president/

If I was a betting man, and I am… right now I’d lay money on Rand Paul being the next president of the United States.”


10/6/2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/what-has-obama-done-for-y_b_5939762.html

Can anyone tell me what President Obama's second-term goals are? What has he accomplished? What would he like to accomplish? . . . I've never seen a guy want to coast this much as president. Even Bush who couldn't wait to get out of office and be an ex-president was at least still trying really bad ideas to the end. What in the world is President Obama's agenda?!

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Obama laid out his goals. Cenk just thinks we weren’t listening.
Or he's saying what Buddy Roemer wants him to say.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/12/obamas-incredibly-ambitious-second-term-agenda/

“Obama’s incredibly ambitious second term agenda”

Imagine, for a moment, that President Obama managed to pass every policy he proposed Tuesday night. Within a couple of years, every 4-year-old would have access to preschool. The federal minimum wage would be at $9 -- higher than it's been, after adjusting for inflation, since 1981. There'd be a cap-and-trade program limiting our carbon emissions and a vast infrastructure investment to upgrade our roads and bridges. Taxes would be higher, guns would be harder to come by, and undocumented immigrants would have a path to citizenship. America would be a markedly different country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/07/10/how-obama-has-used-executive-powers-compared-to-his-predecessors/

Obama has also signed far reaching orders on climate change in November 2013 – forcing power plants to cut their emissions by 30 percent by 2030 – which will be much discussed in this year’s elections. The president has instigated 23 separate executive orders on gun control, which have made information about mental illnesses available in background checks and expanded research into causes of gun violence. Obama has promised two new executive actions on gun control but again, there’s no sign of them.

Through his executive powers, Obama has slowly extended the rights for same-sex couples and raised the minimum wage for federal workers to $10.10. But for all the accusations of abuse of power, his actual uses of his executive authority so far aren’t that far-reaching: Not so much the smack of firm government, more nudging in a certain direction. George W. Bush for example managed to gut the Presidential Records Act (greatly reducing access to presidential records), limit federal funding for stem cell research and sidestep the Geneva Convention on interrogation techniques -- all through executive orders, even when he had Congress on his side. Interestingly, all of these orders were later rescinded by Obama.

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Of course, how far-reaching these orders are is subjective and many of Obama’s opponents would argue that combined with his efforts so far, his latest actions on gun control and immigration will go far beyond what his predecessors have done. But he’s certainly not alone among presidents who have used executive powers to get big things done.

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Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman on Obama's accomplishments -- the ones Cenk says don't exist (after inking a $4 million contract).

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-defense-of-obama-20141008

Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.

I'll go through those achievements shortly. First, however, let's take a moment to talk about the current wave of Obama-bashing. All Obama-bashing can be divided into three types. One, a constant of his time in office, is the onslaught from the right, which has never stopped portraying him as an Islamic atheist Marxist Kenyan. Nothing has changed on that front, and nothing will.

There's a different story on the left, where you now find a significant number of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who ''posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.'' They're outraged that Wall Street hasn't been punished, that income inequality remains so high, that ''neoliberal'' economic policies are still in place. All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained even his much more modest efforts. It's hard to take such claims seriously.

Finally, there's the constant belittling of Obama from mainstream pundits and talking heads. Turn on cable news (although I wouldn't advise it) and you'll hear endless talk about a rudderless, stalled administration, maybe even about a failed presidency. Such talk is often buttressed by polls showing that Obama does, indeed, have an approval rating that is very low by historical standards.

But this bashing is misguided even in its own terms – and in any case, it's focused on the wrong thing.


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