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Bernie is right, too. How come we all can see it but the White House can’t??

“let Obama be Obama. Bring back one of the great inspirational leaders of our time [Obama]”
Sanders doesn’t have a clue about what leadership is. He confuses speechifying with leadership. Big difference.

“It [HCR] is a bill that can be successfully defended in a campaign”
I don’t think so.

“we must continue the effort, which Democrats have already pushed, to strengthen the safety net.”
He voted for the make-bankruptcy-harder bill (up-thread).

“replace chairman Ben Bernanke, a major economic adviser in the Bush administration, with a progressive economist who understands that one of the Fed’s core missions is full employment.”
That’s good — see Dean Baker’s take on my new diary.

“Pass a major bill that creates millions of new jobs”
That’s good.

“Democrats must be prepared to take quick and decisive action against Wall Street and other Big Money interests”
Good — but with Obama? (see Bernanke).

“Enact Senate reform.”
Sure — dump Reid, or let the Nevada voters do it ( It’ll take a bit longer).

Take a look at Arriana:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/obama-one-year-later-the_b_343209.html

How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he “would not forget the middle class” choose as his chief economic advisor a man who recently argued against extending unemployment benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression?

I’m referring, of course, to Larry Summers. According to a White House official I spoke with — later confirmed by sources in the White House and on the Hill — Summers was against the extension. And it took a lot of Congressional pushing back behind the scenes for the president to overrule him.

And, according to another senior White House official, when foreclosures or job numbers come up at the regular White House morning meeting, Summers’ response is that nothing can be done. Nothing can be done about skyrocketing foreclosures or lost jobs.

Nothing can be done — pretty much the opposite of “Yes we can,” isn’t it?

According to Plouffe, “reform is in Obama’s DNA.” Then how do you have in your inner circle a man who has “nothing can be done” in his DNA? Unless, of course, the problem on the table has to do with Wall Street, in which case “everything can be done, has been done, and will be done.”

snip

“I feel such an obligation to them,” Obama told Plouffe during the campaign. “They believe in me. In us. In themselves. What keeps me going day after day? Besides a clear sense of why I am running for president, it’s them, our volunteers. It is a special thing we’ve built here and I don’t want to let them down.”

I asked Plouffe if the president had read the book. “He read a couple of sections in it,” he replied, “and even discovered a couple of things he didn’t know.”

Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn’t let down the millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he should read the The Audacity to Win from beginning to end — and rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have forgotten.

Then he can complete the journey from The Audacity of Hope and The Audacity To Win to The Audacity to Govern.

I know. Tweety’s tingle will always be there, I have a feeling.

Wonder how Tweety’s tingle is going?

Frank Rich is right on this one.

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After looking at the source code on this website, I noticed an e-mail address for taylor@taylormarsh.com (used for PayPal donations) and most likely the e-mail for website correspondence as well.

I apologize if I’m giving away secrets, but it took me all of 30 seconds to locate.

Hugh Hewitt on the SCOTUS ruling:
The question on every board room table is whether that company owes it to its shareholders, investors and employees to use its full abilities to elect good candidates and defeat bad ones. . . .Ask your General Counsel to run down your options, which are now truly unlimited. You can, if you want to –and I hope you do want to– spend $10 million in an independent expenditure campaign to defeat Barbara Boxer. (If you are a coal company, why wouldn’t you? And with an open declaration of why and how you intend to go about it.)
http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24Rich.html?

Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

snip

It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.

Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground.

snip

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.

snip

Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.

The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

This is not a lecture: The deficit tripled from fiscal year 2008 ($455 billion ) to 2009 ($1.4 trillion).

Good luck on that–
Bureau of Labor Statistics Report:
IN 2009 JOBLESS RATES INCREASED IN ALL FIFTY STATES AND DC

Over the year [2009], jobless rates increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The national unemployment rate was unchanged in December at 10.0 percent but was 2.6 percentage points higher than a year earlier.

Among the nine geographic divisions, the Pacific continued to report the highest jobless rate, 11.7 percent in December. The East North Central recorded the next highest rate, 11.3 percent.

Michigan again recorded the highest unemployment rate among the states, 14.6 percent in December. The states with the next highest rates were Nevada, 13.0 percent; Rhode Island, 12.9 percent; South Carolina, 12.6 percent and California 12.4 percent. The rate in South Carolina set a new series high, as did the rates in three other states: Delaware (9.0 percent), Florida (11.8 percent), and North Carolina (11.2 percent).

All states and the District of Columbia recorded statistically significant increases in their jobless rates from December 2008. The largest of these increases were in Nevada and West Virginia (+4.6 percentage points each), closely followed by Alabama (+4.5 points) and Michigan (+4.4 points). Over the year, 44 states experienced statistically significant changes in employment, all of which were decreases. The largest statistically significant job losses occurred in California (-579,400), Texas (-276,000), Illinois (-237,300), Florida (-232,400), and Michigan (-207,100).
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm