Lawrence O'Donnell on DADT and Dream Act: Panel list before vote.

[vaberella]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/#40668939

A panel with Jane Hamsher and Ezra Klein and two others.

I'm posting this for several reasons. I think there seems to be a lot of misinformation running around and mostly by the pundits. First of all I want Jane Hamsher to eat crow since the repeal of DADT is done.

However, I see something that is pushed by everyone on the list. Obama and the White House has dragged it's feet on the issue of DADT. This boggles my mind. One rumor laden reporter at HP says that Manchin wasn't called by Obama then everyone is going on the media rounds saying he didn't call. While Reid himself says he was in the room as Obama and his staff were making final calls to Senators. How in the hell do they marry these things?

You'd think by now that the Liberal media side would try to find out all the information they can before running on conjecture. You would also think that they would know by now to take the media with a grain of salt and do their own investigating. This is playing out like the whole Michelle Obama "whitey" tape. There is a concerted effort to undermine this president. The media as a whole is involved and the lazy media on our side isn't helping the coverage any but pushing the same quotes.

Reid, Pelosi, Collins and so on and so forth said over and over again that they were in talks with the WH. Because Reid and Pelosi are always on television we know what they're up to. We see them ruling over Congress to get things done. Well because the WH is not on television doesn't mean that the President is hands off and not doing the best he can under the circumstances.

I'm saying this not only for our end of the media but also for us as readers in general. Because of the continuous misinformation from the Huffpost/WSJ/MSNBC---I've taken everything I hear with a grain of salt. If it's not coming from the mouth of the President himself with his reasons then I don't really believe it, because there's way too many secret santas involved for my liking.

As I've said in a lot of posts. There seems to be a quick pariahization of the President. Because he doesn't address the public people want to throw him under the bus as hating the American people or working to destroy the American people. In another thread I posted about Shelley Berkeley a Dem from Nevada's position on the tax compromise: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x572931. Which is extremely informative.

Sadly I think many on the left, and this is not something accusatory---is not looking at everything at large. In many cases they completely ignore the political climate---and when you listen to Jane Hamsher, assumes the President spends placating the left to follow lock-step but doesn't really do anything. So far, I have yet to see the President appear weak, but I have more hope than most. I also don't see the president as giving up on the American people, and when I say this middle to lower income America.

As of late I think I've only seen some liberal Dems, some pundits like Lawrence O'Donnell, Ed Schultz----when he gets a clue, and the Salon's Joan Walsh (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/12/08/obama_primary_talk/index.html) have seemed to be the only ones to really understand Obama's plight. She recognizes what he's dealing with and realizes that Congress is his biggest impediment. And this includes fellow Dems.

I see the President as progressive and unfortunately his Congress---not to be. I'm glad his Congress is doing what they can--including having some crappy blue dogs and all of the Repubs against them. I think with a progressive Congress---Obama will be pushed (by those who believe he is not Progressive enough---by a progressive Congress). While for us who do believe Obama IS a progressive, with a Progressive Congress we would have strong progressive legislation and legislative body in progress helping the President and vice versa.

As I've said in the past...we didn't really arm Obama with the best tools when he went in. We left him to try to clean up a serious mess and we gave him a fractured legislative body to work with. One that hates him either for his race or ideology. And we have him thrown under the bus more often than not by those in his own party that being either us as supporters or Congress.

I think some people on DU are getting it. I've seen many poster says that we need to work together to get Obama the congress he needs in 2012 to get shit done. And that's the mind set we should have thought about from the get go. And this includes Republicans and Democrats. Remember being a Progressive is not dominated by the left. Progressivism is not tied with any one ideology--it encompasses many ideologies but sees us moving on a forward motion and not circular or backward.

[OHdem10]

1. Progressive is not tied with any one ideology????????Are you

saying Progressives stand for nothing?????

Of course, I am a Liberal so this is confusing to me?

Progressive is New Democrat, Centrist DLC????

President Obama clearly stated he is a New Democrat
right after inauguration while walking across the WH
lawn and answering Reporters Questions.

I cannot understand why the fight. He is a Democrat.

Stretching Progressive to mean anything is confusing.

[vaberella]

4. Here is my definition for Progressive. The actions by Repubs who helped repeal DADT is progress.

It's obvious by your statement you do NOT know what a being a progressive is. You do know that Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive and same goes for Lincoln, and many other Republican Presidents.

http://www.wiretapmag.org/stories/23706

Read it and understand it. Shoot, you can look it up in wiki. You'll notice that it encompasses Democrats and Republicans. It's not an ideology, it's a mindset of forward thinking.

[GainesT1958]

2. People should recall Van Jones' comments...

At Netroots Nation this summer: "It's a very different feel when you go to work (in the White House) each morning and the first thing you see is all those missiles coming over the horizon."

Sure he's made some mistakes, but IMO he could do with a lot fewer of those "missiles" from us.

[TheWraith]

3. Well said, thank you. nt

[vaberella]

5. Sobering. Thanks for this. n/t

[Still a Democrat]

6. Dare we use the term "professional left"?

Jane Hamsher and others simply generate traffic and money when they can keep themselves and their readers feeling a perpetual sense of defeat and a world set against them.

Here's hoping the MSNBC prime timers gets some guests that aren't professional whiners.

[patrice]

7. There's also the assumption that what we are getting out of this somewhat-right-of-"center" Presiden

t has absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that there are several factions in MSM and all over the internet, including what calls itself "the Left", that are out to undercut him at any and ALL costs.

Whatever his errant inclinations are, no one is making them any better for problem solving by literally doing little else than trying to destroy him. The logical consequences of what we see going on everywhere, in aggregate, is that he HAS to move further Right. We are giving him no choice.

There's a lot about this Tax Break bill that I do not understand from a Social Justice perspective. I don't understand the catfood commission and a great deal else.

Rather than buying into the "Obama is corrupt" meme that I see and hear in so many places, I try to explain these things to myself:

This man is President of the WHOLE country, not just what is calling itself "the Left".

Our country has fundamental problems that are the effects of imbalances in political demographics. Forget party labels for a while and just think of those imbalanced forces as being related to socio-economic identities that are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of balance: R(ight) and L(eft).

When it comes to solving an equation, which is better: to give the people the answer and tell them to do it, when the POWERFUL forces arrayed against them are built out of that very critique against "Big Government" and you, thus, play right into the hands of those who wish the most to destroy whatever the people do?

- OR -

Give the people the equation and tell them that they are going to have to solve it themselves and thus negate powerfully destructive criticism against "big government"? (Not even to mention the fact that deficit producing Tax Breaks are soon going to produce budget cuts, so why set something up for failure when that happens, by NOT making the people build it themselves and thus give it the political foundation it will need to survive budget cuts - see? there's so much criticism, but not all, of this President that just DOES NOT make sense.)

In that solution producing political equation, that which constitutes the Right/Conservatism is strong, well established and functional, but there is little or nothing that constitutes the Left, other than a bunch of people, not even posting under their real names on the internet, competing for who can say the most damaging things about the President the most often. AND all of us are, with certain Media figures' help, supposed to believe that these posing actors who call themselves "the Left" have all of our best interests at heart? or that even if they did actually have our best interests at heart that they ALSO know the best way to achieve those interests? Huh?????

The equation that produces what will happen is out of balance, R:L, with a strong skew toward R and an essentially weak to non-existent L.

If you are one who wields actual power, what do you do?

Do you say "This is L: ___________, _________________, __________________, _________________ . . . ." and then be at a significant FUNDAMENTALLY VALID disadvantage relative to R, because R can IN FACT correctly claim that you favor L, so L is NOTHING/0 but your own creation?

Or do you say, "Here's the equation. See how strong R is. What should the solutions be? and What should L be relative to R in order to produce those solutions?"

If you're trying to get people to define L and its solutions for themselves, so that you don't have to weaken any of that by making it yours, is it better to fudge about R and create the impression that it is not as strong as it really is?

- OR -

Is it better to expose R in all of it's destructive horror and say in effect to the people, "This is what you are going to get if you don't stand up effectively for yourselves. And if you don't stand up effectively for yourselves, you will just have to accept the fact that R is what you deserve."

There is no Left in this country, no functional independent Liberal political mechanism. Though I heartily agree with some of the President's opposition on the issues, I much more so disagree with them on "Process".

A lot of what I have seen so far all over the internet appears to be an aggregate attempt comprised of a variety of disparate forces, many very possibly playing both sides of whatever fences, commonly represented by pseudonymous ACTORS on the internet, very possibly in-coherent amongst themselves on the issues, but with one consistent effort: to blame the President for their own weaknesses: to try to take a short cut to building a movement, a short cut around all of the nitty-gritty work in the trenches of social and economic justice, a contrary divisive vengeful, perhaps even hateful, short cut through suffering and destruction on the backs of the disadvantaged amongst us, to an ambiguous chaotic future.

Wherever I encounter such, on the internet or elsewhere, it is their apparent disregard for the means by which they achieve their implied and indeterminent ends that tip me off to the fact that this is not the Liberal Left, leaving one clear trait by which to identify them: destroy Obama at ALL costs.

[vaberella]

8. Your post is like the MOST BRILLIANT POST EVER to the point that I had to bookmark my thread.

It deserves it's own post so I can rec. Thank you for your insight and you've commented a great deal on my thinking process in a far more eloquent way. Excellent post. Your post alone deserves a kick.

:kick: and rec! :D

[patrice]

9. Just thinking things through. I offer it hypothetically, but I did teach high school for 8 years

so I think in terms of problem solving.

[great white snark]

10. +1000 outstanding analysis!

I agree with vaberella, this should be an OP.

And thanks to vaberella also.

[patrice]

12. Thanks very much. I WILL tweak it just a little and post it either later or tomorrow, 'cause

right now, I have to get dinner!

:hi:

[AtomicKitten]

11. Pres Obama also refused to abandon DADT for the START Treaty:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/20/dont-ask-dont-tell-oppone_n_799238.html

The repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy over the weekend was a major victory for the White House, but it is now imperiling a chief priority: the ratification of the nuclear-arms-reduction pact with Russia known as the New START Treaty. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had promised the White House early last week that they would deliver the votes necessary to ratify the START treaty if the administration would pull the repeal of the military's DADT policy off the lame-duck agenda, according to Democratic aides familiar with the pair's offer.

The White House declined the offer and pushed ahead with repeal; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brought it to the Senate floor Saturday, where it won 63 votes to defeat a filibuster, and 65 votes on final passage.

Now that DADT has been repealed, Graham is signaling he'll no longer vote for the treaty. "If you really want to have a chance of passing START, you better start over and do it in the next Congress because this lame duck has been poisoned," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

[patrice]

13. Those are the realities of our situation (think about this relative to the financial meltdown caused

by Bush's Crash & the "horse-trading" that must be going on around THAT!).

Those are the realities of our situation and people must stop pretending that anyone, except the transnational financial fiefdoms who own our economy, can just do whatever they want.

Our only recourse is numbers, numbers of persons. That's why we should work to stick together based on our values, Liberal values in my case, more so than any figure-head or "leader". If we're going to split over this or that person/"leader", the opposition is ALWAYS going to have us at a disadvantage.

Values should be what unites us ir-respective of whether you're anti- or pro- Obama or anyone else at this particular point in time. And even when we do enter the election cycle, values should guide us through that too.

[AtomicKitten]

14. It's the disinformation campaign coming from both the left and the right

that poisons the discourse. You know people aren't sincere when they meticulously catalog complaints and are loathe to acknowledge progress. It is reason and diligence pressing forward that binds us in a common cause.

[vaberella]

15. Jesus, these fuckers piss me off. They don't care about the country but themselves. n/t

[AtomicKitten]

18. What's worse is their party cheering them on.

:scared:

[frazzled]

16. Does Huffington Post EVER print a retraction?

Do they ever retract after they're proved wrong (which would be almost daily)?

When the START Treaty is ratified tomorrow (knock on wood), will they retract this article that suggests (bizarrely) that Obama imperiled his own treaty by pushing for DADT first? They can't let five minutes go by before they are crying "the sky is falling" again. Things are always "going" to happen. Then they don't. Much virtual ink is spilled on what MIGHT happen, what the president MIGHT be trying to do or think. Lots of headlines have question marks attached to hyperbolic hypotheticals (WIll Obama sacrifice Social Security? Um, will you stop beating your wife tomorrow?)

[AtomicKitten]

17. HuffPost has been guilty of hyperbolic, often misleading headlines.

However, I don't see where they've got this wrong, at least not yet. The crux of this has to do with Pres Obama refusing to ditch legislation to please the GOP. From what I can tell, Graham and McCain are out howling at the moon in earnest today over the START Treaty promising it's demise. But Reid is going ahead with it anyway, the outcome uncertain at this point.

[vaberella]

19. They're a blog, they don't need to.

:shrug:

[frazzled]

20. Does that mean they're not journalists?

We need to figure out what a blog, a journalistic enterprise, a web site, etc. is. It matters, actually.

[vaberella]

21. I think it does. Because I have never seen HP post a retraction. All they post is Updates.

That people rarely or never read because the people are running on the initial lie they spread. I know for a fact this happens--especially on HP. I forget what topic it was. The guy claimed Obama did something, that he got from some source. He ran on this for hours. Then posts three updates saying how he was wrong, but majority of people were running on the first half. It's nonsensical. I think you're right that clear lines need to be drawn; because I don't understand them myself.

[Number23]

22. Nice post

:thumbsup: