The Repugs have been sent to Obama’s outhouse to Shit Or Get Off the Pots. They know it and are now wiggling like crazy to free their dumb asses. The stink the GOPers drop into American political discharge has not reached enough Americans, but if Obama’s long-term plan works, it will reach them before voting in November.

Obama’s plan reached its second stage with his State of the Union address where after waiting patiently through his first year as president, he began the attack phase. The launch became more immediately successful than planned once the House Repugs allowed him to have its House Retreat session televised which started the GOPers inevitable march to the outhouse. If I’m right about Obama’s plan, all Repug lying, deceit and hypocrisy tactics will no longer work nearly as well except on those whose brains are frozen and ears only hear what they want to hear regardless of the facts, logic or history presented.

The first stage was simple and excruciating to those voting for Obama on the hope he could actually have some success in changing partisan Washington mowing down as many lobbyists as possible in the process. As one of those voters, of course I knew that it isn’t Washington that’s broken, but our entire election system that quickly snuffs out the vast majority of those congress critters and executive branch leaders who go to Washington to bring change. I don’t buy into those who claim Obama’s naivete is being crushed by those ruthless Repugs. He knew who and what they are and who they really represent- the Corporate Communists.

For his plan to work during the first stage, he needed to use the best weapon anyone has against this group of compassion-less hypocrites, give them enough rope and they will hang themselves. The most modern and robust example, Dubya and The Dick. That meant spending an entire year not fighting back against congressional Repug PON and Waterloo tactics no matter how emotionally tempting.

Obama does possess remarkable restraint- probably too much at times. He was clearly the right man for this job. When vicious attackers think they are winning, they become careless and don’t notice the noose that is about to lasso and strangle them. Although Obama is now fighting back in all areas. For the rest of this post, I am only going to address health care reform. It can’t take a back seat to the economy and jobs because it was Obama’s biggest legislative agenda his first year and with all its complexity the best area to defend against foolish, fear mongering, fact-less proclamations.

Obama revealed his health care reform tactics during a surprise press conference on Feb. 9 just after Sen. McConnell and Rep, Boehner held their meeting with the media at the doorstep of the White House after leaving the meeting with Obama to plan the Feb. 25 Summit Clash of the Titans. Well, only one Titan, the Repugs, definitely are far from Titans, hopefully more like road kill after the Summit. The Repugs will be in Obama’s den where he determines the agenda and sets the rules. Not a fair fight from the start.

Allow me one emotional digression before listing selected paras from the transcript of that press conference that reveal in Obama’s words how he will likely keep the Repugs from escaping until they are thoroughly pummeled. Sen. McConnell sobbed on the Senate Floor (link includes video) on Friday talking about his long tenured chief of staff who was heading for K Street to make his delayed fortune while spending his Senate career catering to Wall Street and helping them and his boss to ruin lives and our and the world’s economy. This sobbing senator is the same leader who never gives a damn about the hundreds of thousands of Americans dying due to our sick health care system and is doing all he can to murder millions more by killing health care reform.

Here are the paras:

Now, bipartisanship depends on a willingness among both Democrats and Republicans to put aside matters of party for the good of the country. I won’t hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won’t hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that’s rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience.

My hope is that this will be the first of a series of meetings that I have with leadership of both parties in Congress. We’ve got to get past the tired debates that have plagued our politics and left behind nothing but soaring debt and mounting challenges, greater hardships among the American people, and extraordinary frustrations among the American people. Those frustrations are what led me to run for President, and as long as I’m here in Washington, I intend to try to make this government work on their behalf.

So I’ve got these goals. Now, we have a package, as we work through the differences between the House and the Senate, and we’ll put it up on a Web site for all to see over a long period of time, that meets those criteria, meets those goals. But when I was in Baltimore talking to the House Republicans, they indicated, we can accomplish some of these goals at no cost. And I said, great, let me see it. And I have no interest in doing something that’s more expensive and harder to accomplish if somebody else has an easier way to do it.

So I’m going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote these goals. What I will not do, what I don’t think makes sense and I don’t think the American people want to see, would be another year of partisan wrangling around these issues; another six months or eight months or nine months worth of hearings in every single committee in the House and the Senate in which there’s a lot of posturing.

What I agree with is that the public has soured on the process that they saw over the last year. I think that actually contaminates how they view the substance of the bills. I think it is important for all of these issues to be aired so that people have confidence if we’re moving forward on such a significant part of the economy as health care, that there is complete transparency and all of these issues have been adequately vetted and adequately debated. And this gives an opportunity not just for Democrats to say here’s what we think we should do, but it also gives Republicans a showcase before the entire country to say here’s our plan; here’s why we think this will work. And one of the things that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both said is they didn’t think that the status quo was acceptable, and that’s, right there, promising. That indicates that if all sides agree that we can’t just continue with business as usual then maybe we can actually get something done.

To your question about the 25th, my hope is that this doesn’t end up being political theater, as I think some of you have phrased it. I want a substantive discussion. We haven’t refined exactly how the agenda is going to go that day. We want to talk with both the Democratic and Republican leaders to find out what they think would be most useful. I do want to make sure that there’s some people like the Congressional Budget Office, for example, that are considered non-partisan, who can answer questions. In this whole health care debate I’m reminded of the story that was told about Senator Moynihan, who was I guess in an argument with one of his colleagues, and his colleague was losing the argument so he got a little flustered and said to Senator Moynihan, “Well, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” And Senator Moynihan said, “Well, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” I think that’s the key to a successful dialogue on the 25th or on health care.

Let’s establish some common facts. Let’s establish what the issues are, what the problems are, and let’s test out in front of the American people what ideas work and what ideas don’t. And if we can establish that factual accuracy about how different approaches would work, then I think we can make some progress. And it may be that some of the facts that come up are ones that make my party a little bit uncomfortable. So if it’s established that by working seriously on medical malpractice and tort reform that we can reduce some of those costs, I’ve said from the beginning of this debate I’d be willing to work on that. On the other hand, if I’m told that that is only a fraction of the problem and that is not the biggest driver of health care costs, then I’m also going to insist, okay, let’s look at that as one aspect of it, but what else are we willing to do?

And this is where it gets back to the point I was making earlier. Bipartisanship cannot mean simply that Democrats give up everything that they believe in, find the handful of things that Republicans have been advocating for and we do those things, and then we have bipartisanship. That’s not how it works in any other realm of life. That’s certainly not how it works in my marriage with Michelle, although I usually do give in most of the time. (Laughter.) But the — there’s got to be some give and take, and that’s what I’m hoping can be accomplished. And I’m confident that’s what the American people are looking for.

I encourage you to go see Clooney play Ryan Bingham an airport warrior, Termination Facilitator, job transition specialist who fires people for a living and whose major life goal is to reach 10 million miles in the air. When corporations need to downsize quickly, he flies in and breaks the news to the new former employees. His job is the most secure when business is the most insecure.

Scriptwriter and director Reitman made the risky choice, while shooting in Detroit and St. Louis, of using real, fired people to play themselves giving them a shot at saying and doing what they wished they had done if they weren’t in such total shock when they went through this clinical, dehumanizing firing process. The movie is based on the book with the same title written by Walter Kirn in 2001. At that time Kirn told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “I … wanted to create a character who’s comfortable with all the things that the intelligentsia in America is not comfortable with, the vast and oppressive consumer culture.” Reitman appears to have gone well beyond the book’s more simple message with subtle, penetrating characters and an underlying message America most needs.

During the six years it took Reitman to make his gem, he made his own significant life transition getting married, having a child and maturing as a person. When one of his characters says, “life is better with company,” we can sense it comes from the heart. “This is the most personal film I’ve ever made,” Reitman has said, and what that means is that Up in the Air has been constructed with an underlying warmth and concern about character and an accompanying understanding of what’s of value in life, of what it means to be human in all senses of the word.

Terry Gross interviewed Reitman this month which gives insights into Reitman, Clooney and making movies.

Of all the movie reviews I’ve read two stand out for me. Frank Rich best penetrates the importance of this movie and our economic crisis which will envelope our lives for some time to come. George Will shows atypical sensitivity and normal insensitivity in the same review.

FRANK RICH: What gives our Great Recession its particular darkness — and gives this film its haunting afterlife — is the disconnect between the corporate culture that is dictating the firing and the rest of us. In the shorthand of the day, it’s the dichotomy between Wall Street and Main Street, though that oversimplifies the divide. This disconnect isn’t just about the huge gap in income between the financial sector and the rest of America. Nor is it just about the inequities of a government bailout that rescued the irresponsible bankers who helped crash the economy while shortchanging the innocent victims of their reckless gambles. What “Up in the Air” captures is less didactic. It makes palpable the cultural and even physical chasm that opened up between the two Americas for years before the financial collapse.

The private-equity deal makers who bought and sold once-solid companies like trading cards, saddling them with debt, never saw the workers whose jobs were shredded by their cunning games of financial looting. The geniuses in Washington and on Wall Street who invented junk mortgages and then bundled and sold them as securities didn’t live in the same neighborhoods as the mortgagees, small investors and retirees left holding the bag once the housing bubble burst.

Those at the top are separated from the consequences of their actions. They are exemplified by Robert Rubin, formerly of Citigroup and a mentor to both Obama’s Treasury secretary and chief economic adviser. He looked the other way when his bank made ruinous high-risk bets, and then cashed out and split, leaving taxpayers to pay for the wreckage while he escaped any accountability. Such economic wise men peer down at the country from a hermetically sealed bubble of privilege and self-interest, much as Ryan does from the plane flying him to his next mass firing. And they tend to think, as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs notoriously put it, that they are doing “God’s work” to sustain our free-market system.

Last week Goldman Sachs announced it would grant some of this year’s bonuses in stock, not cash, to try to stanch the public backlash to the record profits it piled up thanks to government largess. But Washington remains strangely oblivious to the mood out there. Financial reform has been embattled on Capitol Hill, where the financial industry has spent $344 million on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2009. The big ratings agencies that gave triple-A stamps of approval to Wall Street’s junk are back to business as usual. Bank of America and Citi are racing to return TARP money to Washington not because they have necessarily recovered but because they want to shower rewards on their executives with impunity.

The rage engendered by this status quo is across the political map. As unlikely as it sounds, Ron Paul and Jim DeMint, political heroes of the tea party right, and Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson, similarly revered on the left, have found a common cause in vilifying the Federal Reserve Bank and its chairman, Ben Bernanke. The Fed is hardly the root of all evil, but you can see why it is a handy scapegoat. Like the institutions it failed to police during the boom, it wields its power from on high with little transparency to those below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/opinion/13rich.html?ref=opinion Frank Rich

GEORGE WILL: The movie begins and ends with everyday people talking to the camera, making remarkably sensitive statements about the trauma of being declared dispensable. Some, however, recall that the consequences included being reminded that things they retained, such as their human connections, are truly indispensable.

America has an aging population and has chosen to have a welfare state that siphons increasing amounts of wealth from the economy to give to the elderly. Having willed this end, America must will the means to it — sometimes severe economic efficiency to generate revenue to finance the entitlement culture. So “Up in the Air” is sobering entertainment for a nation contemplating a giant addition to the entitlement menu. In addition to being perhaps the best American movie of 2009, “Up in the Air” is two mature themes subtly braided and nuanced for grown-ups. One is the sometimes shattering sense of failure, desperation and worthlessness that overwhelms middle-aged people who lose their livelihoods. The other is that such shocks can be reminders that there is more to life than livelihoods.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/18/AR2009121802150.html

In my post last Sunday on Hag’s blog, Corporate Cancer: An insidious disease that is consuming America and the world, I wrote about a common enemy that both left and right, middle and poor America could rally around. Those on the left chose that end of the spectrum because they recognize that those on the right are scared, frighteningly alone souls vainly searching for meaning in life. This brilliant movie shows why that choice is so wise and important to America’s soul which seems to be lost in the corporate cloud that surrounds all our lives.

We can eventually find the sun and our version of a meaningful life only if we find a way to bridge our ideological gap and attack a common enemy, Corporate Communism. Corporate Communist leaders are their own worst enemies and the most lost and sad despite their trumpeting of the “good life.” They need our help the most and are unlikely to ever realize it.

Hopefully, future historians will look at them as Flat Earthers whose stupidity knew no bounds and who nearly wiped out humanity. If not, there will be no future historians to write such a history.

Oprah, yes I still occasionally watch, did another show yesterday on shopaholic moms and how their obsession to shop hurts themselves and their families. One mom, woke up to her addiction when, you’ll like this Hag, the piles of very expensive shoe boxes in her large walk-in closet fell on her head.

Of course, like any addiction, the shopaholics used shopping to smother emotional problems or a traumatic experience they had been unable to deal with. These moms and their families were subjected to Oprah downsizing when they had to for one week: use no electronic (de)vices- TV, Cell phone, Internet, computer; walk instead of driving whenever possible; have a very limited budget to buy food; go to zero restaurants/fast food joints; and eat meals together. Every time Oprah does this exercise, the family discovers that these (de)vices have kept them from sharing family time and learning to use their intelligence to fill the vital time they thought they were losing when asked to change their life patterns. By being forced to downsize their lives, they all realized that finding those relationship building, fun family activities was far more important than the material things that had trapped them into an impersonal rat race.

Our deep recession, political talk for a depression no one wants to acknowledge, could have that same liberating result if Americans can embrace change and more important values than materialism.

Across America, people deeply affected by our economic crisis, are being confronted with no choice downsizing. I watched on another TV show where a family after losing their spacious home, moved into a 900 foot cabin in the woods and discovered they and their children loved their new life more than their old.

What would happen to your life if you had to live with just 100 things? There is a grassroots movement that a Time magazine article in June 08 alerted me to: “Excess consumption is practically an American religion. But as anyone with a filled-to-the-gills closet knows, the things we accumulate can become oppressive. With all this stuff piling up and never quite getting put away, we’re no longer huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we’re huddled masses yearning to free up space on a countertop. Which is why people are so intrigued by the 100 Thing Challenge, a grass-roots movement in which otherwise seemingly normal folks are pledging to whittle down their possessions to a mere 100 items.”

You can learn how to count the 100 things here and what a facebook group, thinks.

I’m not advocating that all Americans need to be that drastic in downsizing their lives. The movement I would like to promote is much larger in scale although not the Libertarian approach.

My scale is the world and my enemy is materialism. There are millions in the world who would love to have our materialism problem as they struggle just to live. If the consumerism world downsizes too much even more millions will suffer.

Actually, materialism is not the basic problem. It is the symptom of the real problem, inhumanity and values. We have allowed capitalistic materialism to rationalize our inhumanity by the pull yourself up by the bootstraps rationalization so we can ignore others who are not succeeding as well as we think we are even if that succeeding is rather meager. We have allowed the meaning of success to be proven by valuing my stuff as better than your stuff. We have taught ourselves to believe we are psychologically worthy because we have stuff that is worth more than your stuff.

I talked yesterday to a friend I met through local progressive politics. He was very successful financially until our recession and his recession vulnerable business dropped to where he had his cars repossessed and his home on the chopping block. He found out who his true friends were who helped him until a long-pending deal is now about to come to fruition. He went back to a profession he left 15 years ago and discovered a large company that is doing their business the way he wanted it done when he left the company that wasn’t. And he met a new friend who is going through the same training he is who seems to be identical in thinking and values.

My friend told me that he senses that a lot of his friends and acquaintances seem to be taking a fresh look at what is really important- relationships with friends, family and even strangers.

Is it possible for America and the world to shift its values in the same way? Is it possible for us to work together instead of apart? Instead of throwing up our hands and saying America and the world is too screwed up to ever be saved, why can’t we believe it is possible to remake our lives and nation. Many religious leaders have convinced millions of followers to have faith in far crazier things.

My crusade is personal. I want to believe that I can make some kind of a difference in my quest even if that difference is microscopic in scope.

All of us have an opportunity due to the downsizing that is occurring in America, to examine our own values and see what role we can play in letting this knock on the head energize us even more to help others get their materialistic heads knocked.

Please read this article that ran in the WaPo on July 17 before proceeding further.

What’s Next, Mr. President – Cardigans?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071702093.html

The authors are Nick Gillespie the editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv. Matt Welch is editor of Reason magazine. They will discuss this article online at 11 a.m. on Monday at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

The article is clearly written to support an ideology, Libertarianism, and is full of distortions. It also smacks of M$M race horse journalism although I don’t believe the authors can be considered M$M even though the article ran in the WaPo. Slamming Jimmy Carter though M$M myths created during and after Carter’s presidency and claiming Obama should follow Clinton not Carter may be the most disgusting aspect to this hit piece. When you consider Carter’s foresight, integrity and the disaster that has happened to our nation and the world because of the election of Reagan, the ascendancy of the Repugs and Neocons, how disastrous their approach has been to our economic strength, the tactics used by Gillespie and Welch keeps me just short of vomiting. So too does the Libertarian philosophy throughout the article that if we just leave things alone like the economy, everything will be fine.

These authors just discard all the factors that have led to our economic crisis and how long it will take for Americans to suffer for a real economic recovery to take place, an economy that will probably never return to the false security levels of the early 21^st century because of lost jobs that will never come back. New ones have to be created that if possible will take a long time to accomplish. The don’t raise taxes even on the filthy rich and all we need is to get government out of our business is simplistic nonsense.

To sit back in your comfortable magazine office and criticize everything the Obama Administration has done and tried to do shows the kind of journalism and punditry that I was condemning in my previous article. Their propaganda goal is to feed the minds of their reader followers with more of the same pulp and not to try to come up with reasonable ideas that could help get America back on its feet.

An article in the Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090803/johnston shows the history of how Democratic administrations, not Republican have created twice as many jobs. “Since 1940, Republicans have controlled the White House for thirty-six years; Democrats for thirty-three. Yet Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that almost two-thirds of new jobs were created during Democratic administrations. What about the years since Reagan was elected, promising prosperity through lower taxes, balanced budgets and less regulation? The Clinton years resulted in 21 million jobs, more than two decades of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. One last detail: these numbers reflect only private-sector jobs; including the public sector would widen the gap in the Democrats’ favor.”

The lead sentence by Gillespie and Welch foretells how distorted and twisted the article will prove to be, “Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike.” Or this sentence, “Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

Jimmy Carter’s problem is that he refused to play the Beltway game and bend his integrity. He provided our nation and the world a very sound blueprint for how to bring peace and justice to the world. Corrupt Washington D.C. and the corporate world were scared to death that they would lose power so they brought in a party that only cared to be in power and gain personal success. We all have seen the tragic result.

Carter has more integrity is the tip of his left small toe, than these two magazine authors. Maybe some of you would want to get on line with them on Monday and expose these charlatans and their ridiculous recommendations for what they are, Bull Shit.