White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ranted that "the professional left" needed to be drug tested for their complaints and attacks on the Obama administration after all the good things Obama has done.

I agree.

We "professional leftists" do indeed need drug testing because apparently the colorful liquid inducing hallucinogenic of "hope and change" has worn off and the ugly mediocrity of modern Democratic leadership stares us in the face with the not-so-friendly smugness of a hookah-smoking caterpillar.

Maybe some good old-fashioned Window Pane or Micro Dot, or better yet, some natural organic 'Shrooms could do the trick. After all, we are all mushrooms now as the old joke goes, kept in the dark and fed a pile of bullshit.

And really, what is there to complain about? BP and the Gulf Oil disaster? Come on, there are no plumes, the oil has evaporated, and if you clap loud enough you won't notice where the poisonous garbage is being dumped. It's all good, bro. Trust us.

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No one likes to have to do all of the work of changing paradigms in the middle of the stream.

When Obama took office, the voters had had enough of Republicans. But as a nation we were still trapped in the very powerful cultural and political atmosphere of fear imposed by the Republicans after 9/11. The paradigm of the Right Wing had been shoved down America's throat for so long that everything...and I mean everything was approached, examined, and acted upon from a RW viewpoint.

All issues, policies, statements and actions were not based on what was right for the country, what was morally right, or even what would work.

All issues, policies, statements and actions were determined by how they would be viewed through the imposed Right Wing Paradigm that had been established, with the help of appealing to and exploiting deeply primal fears, by eight years of Cheney/Bush.

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When one is looking at any system, whether it is a business process or something even more complex it always helps to know what the end state is or what the purpose is. This holds true when we are talking about our government as well. What is the purpose of government? If we do not know what that is, then all policy will be a reduced to tinkering at the margins and flailing.

Conservatives have a pretty clear, if sadly simplistic, view of what the role of government is. They will talk (endlessly and in an ever rising register) about how the federal government is only for the defense of the nation and that nothing else should really be in its purview. The problem with their assertion of States Rights (aside from the racist history behind this idea) is that they don’t really want their state government’s to do a lot either. It is this kind of thinking that gets us into the situation where Republicans want, as David Corn of Mother Jones said, “Small government and Big Oil”.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

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If you were mad at all about Bush's violations of civil liberties when he was president, this will get you fuming:

In a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.

The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

This is not just a single instance of outrage. It is a microcosm of the Obama presidency, the political success of corporate America, and the failure of its opposition.

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This is the last episode of Paul Jay's interview of journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media.

In the previous episode Cohen talked about the struggle for power and direction within the Democratic Party from the days of the Viet Nam War to the present, and wound up with "Frankly... I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he's up for re-election... Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you'll never get anywhere."

Here in the conclusion of the interview Cohen expands on those ideas and fills in some of the outlines to draw a rough set of guidelines or roadmap of how to get from where things stand now with the Democrats as out and out corporatists to a world of the kind of progressive populism they have been well known for at various points in history, and how it is going to take a no more Mr. Nice Guy approach from progressives and a lot of very hardnosed and fearless aggressiveness, of the kind that I think Muhammad Ali meant when he noted so many years ago "He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."


Real News Network - February 6, 2010
Cohen: Far right Republicans are dangerous, but also need to primary against corporate Democrats

Lately there has been a spate of diaries at such web sites as FireDogLake and "Open" Left wherein lay members — typically under attack from site moderators, who act as Democratic Party hacks and gatekeepers — have sought ways to bring back the Progressive Party, or join the Greens, or build up some other institution, that will allow progressives to act together as a cohesive political unit. (I posted an entry there myself, only to end up being attacked by site moderators, threatened with banishment, and ultimately banned when I refused to back down against their incessant bullying.)

FDL's iphelgix explains the reason for leaving the Democrats.

Fellow FDLer TalkingStick points out the wisdom of studying the teabaggers for ideas about how we progressives can rebuild our own movement.

Mason calls for progressives to join him in building a Progressive Party from the ground up, apparently not aware that it already exists in states such as Vermont and Washington, and as Green Party affiliates inMissouri and Wisconsin. He is joined in this effort by MadHemingway, who posted the 1912 platform the Progressive Party ran on.

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Journalism professor Jeff Cohen of FAIR and the Park Center for Independent Media on the struggle within the Democratic Party, starting from the Viet Nam War:

There's no doubt that there's an awakening. What concerns me is that the liberal base, the Democratic Party base, has never been more educated, in my view, and that's because of the independent media. The democratic base is against an imperial foreign policy. The democratic base is for real medicare for all, or at least the strongest public option that would really hurt private insurance. There's an understanding of history, and again it's largely because the independent media is giving us the news in real time, every day when we click on the computer and we watch Real News, we watch Democracy Now.

What hasn't translated is while we have this boom in independent media on the Internet, we don't have a boom of independent politics.

What I believe are needed are new groups, that will be on the Internet, mobilizing the millions to make the kinds of demands of the Democrats that the right wing base, which has clearly transformed the country, the right wing base in the Republican Party not only took over a major party, they haven't let up on that party until their agenda is put in place, whereas on our side we don't have that.

What needs to happen, this is what a few groups are doing, Progressive Democrats of America is one, the idea is we need to take over that major political party.

When people talk about change, and then they deliver only for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street, you vote them out. You primary them. You know this is what the right wing has done for decades. It's what they're doing now.

What we get from MoveOn historically and other groups is apologies for democratic office holders who have faked left with their rhetoric and then governed for big business. And what we need is to primary these people.

Frankly... I would love to see a primary challenge to Obama when he's up for re-election.

Because unless you build a base through elections and then you hold the officials accountable, then you'll never get anywhere.

Real News Network - February 6, 2010

This is Part 3. Part 1 and 2 of this interview are at DocuDharma here. Part 4 is still to come...

At what point do progressives stop being Democrats' whipped dogs and start acting like a movement capable of putting the Dems in their proper place as the party of the people? David Sirota wrote today about Obama's latest call to increase war spending beyond its already ludicrous proportions.

How many of the extreme right-wing and criminal policies of Bush-Cheney has Obama adopted? How many of those extreme right-wing policies has he exceeded? Last month, knowledge that Obama has gone a step further than Bush, authorizing the executive branch to murder American citizens on the flimsiest of rationales. This sh__ has GOT to end.

My political activities now are focusing on the building of a viable third party as a tool of a reinvigorated and independent progressive movement. No efforts to reform the Democratic Party from within can succeed so long as the upper-level of the party establishment is able to crush dissent from within, as is explained here.

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MSNBC's Ed Schultz talking at the AM950 Blue State Bash on Saturday night to a crowd of progressive talk radio fans in Minnesota lets go with both barrels at Robert Gibbs, at Barack Obama, at the "people who have infiltrated the Democratic progressive movement", and at the whole delusional idea of bipartisanship.

"I told him he was full of sh*t is what I told him," Schultz said. "And then he gave me the Dick Cheney f-bomb the same way Senator Leahy got it on the Senate floor. I told Robert Gibbs, I said, 'I'm sorry you're swearing at me, but I'm just trying to help you out."

"I'm telling you, you're losing your base," he continued. "Do you understand that you're losing your base? And that the American people don't want public option, the American people want single-payer!?'"

Watch...

Remember that polls were out there before the voting began, both nationally and in Massachusetts, such as the Boston Globe poll indicating displeasure that Obama had not lived up to campaign promises.

For all too long the Democratic hierarchy has concluded that progressives will vote predictably on election day for the simple reason that they have no viable alternative to the Republican opposition.

Increased warnings of displeasure drew no more than a few shrugs, but now that Republican Scott Brown has won the Senate seat long held by progressive icon Ted Kennedy perhaps the Democratic Party high command will awaken before more of the same occurs. They should be well aware that if such a result can occur in liberal Massachusetts with its top heavy 3-1 Democratic registration that it can happen anywhere.

Remember what disgusted not only progressives but many mainstream moderates as well when Congress began considering a health care bill. It was made emphatically clear that the single payer system which has served as the model of America’s neighbor to the north, Canada, would not even be discussed in the wake of national polls indicating that a substantial majority of Americans favored such a proposal.

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