``Obama's health care plan. Did people read the despicable David Brooks on Obamacare in the NYT today? He praises the current plan for not changing anything...'' AN
``The old adage that the Democratic Party is the place that social movements go to die..'' Jim Farmelant
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Lately, I've been trying to follow the `progressive' wing of the Democrats pretty close. My rep, Lee is about as progressive as it gets in the US political parties. But she is not alone. This wing is getting the shaft from the Democratic leadership and the Obama administration and they are getting pretty damned pissed.
The 64 memmber group of the CPC or congressional progressive caucus sent an open letter to the WH demanding a meeting over his healthcare reform guidelines. Kucinich sent one of his own. They have vowed to vote nay on what Obama has advocated.
If they stick to their guns, they are in a good position to hit back hard on the general maulling they've been getting from Obama and Pelosi, Reid et al. for the last nine months.
Getting blamed for no healthcare reform isn't going to hurt the CPC in their districts. If Lee's district is representative of other CPC districts and I think it is, then these are the most progressive and politicized places in the US.
What politicized means to me is, that's where all the progressive groups on the war, economy, healthcare, education, environment, energy, human rights, unions, and social justice live. Collectively they form the `left' movement that a lot of LBO claims doesn't exist.
So what I find <qualified> hopeful <qualified> is that the district constituents and their representatives seemed to have undergone a disillusionment with Obama and the Democratic leadership. This same general coalition under the umbrella of the CPC is also getting pretty pissed off at another group of Democrats called the New Democrate Coalifition or NDC. Here's the wiki on them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democrat_Coalition
This coalition has 59 to CPC's 64. The real difference in power is in the NDC Senate with 21 to 2 respectively. I suspect the NDC is who Obama is primarily addressing as some triangulation corporate friendly high-tech so-called liberal.
Out of curiousity, I read the wiki bio on Crowley the chairman of the NDC. This one line jumped out:
``Joseph Crowley attended private New York City Roman Catholic schools..'' (ca early 70s)
What that phrase meant around here in the early 70s was scared white folk without money for fancy private school to keep their kids away from the public school darkies, took the Catholic option. But that option was no longer after many black parents made the same decision by the 80s.
Anyway, the split between CPC, the House leadership, and Obama is the best hope I've seen in decades. I mean that. Obama wants to take the `left' friends for granted? ``My friends on the left''? Forget it asshole.
It's pay back and we have the votes to kill any slimebag shit you come up with. I haven't felt this bad and angry since Johnson...and I can't be alone with that thought. And olde dog face, racist Johnson was ten times more liberal than Obama. I can't believe that talk of Nigras was more forgiving than talk of taking individual responsiblity.
Obama is the Moynihan Report. The NEGRO FAMILY. Or as Stokley put it the KNEE_GROW. In the ancient lexicon, Obama is the KNEE_GROW. I don't like this rhetoric, but that's what is coming out of Obama's mouth.
Ugh. God it gets worse. The Midwestern answer to the civil war, reconstruction and the Knee-grow problem is Estes Kefauver to the Left of Obama?, or Senator Eastland? I don't even understand this. ( On our trip to Oklahoma to visit grandma, the car radio blared out Senator Taft in the the 1955 primary along route 66. I was disgusted by this prick at twelve. Of course all I heard was anti-jack-off news, which was my only political issue at that time...Creaming in gas station tolites from Neveda through Texas.)
Well, I am talking to some very old, very weird people.
CG