My letter to the White House

Dear Mr. President:

I urge you, I beg you not to water down your original, reasonable position on taxes, namely: extend cuts for the working class and let the cuts for income above $250,000 expire. This is the overwhelmingly popular position with the American People. It makes sense.

Compromising with the Republicans, however, will not entice them to compromise with you. It will not encourage them to work with you. It will not foster bipartisanship. It will only encourage their endless threats to hold their breaths until they get their way and to treat you like a pushover. You will gain zero respect from Republicans and zero respect from Democrats. I doubt you will win many moderates either.

Please, please, please stand up to the GOP. Don't damage our economy for the benefit of the very few, who do not need such a benefit.

I cannot express this more strongly and remain civil. Your standing with the Democratic base is already shaky and my hope in change wanes with every unreasonable compromise.

Please step out of the bubble and hear what the American People are saying.

Thank you.

[I requested a response and will add it in an update.]

--the BB

Not being George W. Bush is not enough!

Now, I do recommend being more articulate than I was. But if they want my opinion, by God, I'm going to give it to them.


My letter to the White House this evening:

Dear Mr. President:

I want to be sure that a STRONG PUBLIC OPTION is central to any reform that takes place. Without it you are playing with window dressing and it would be better to do nothing than saddle us with coops or some other benefit to the insurance industry.

Fight for the people who elected you and stop being so appeasing toward those who will oppose you to the last breath.

Frankly, I am disgusted by the weak message coming from the White House. It's past time go LBJ on Congress, twist some arms, and make public option happen. It is not just one piece, it is central and the Democratic Party will lose big if we do not make it happen.

Stop coddling the Blue Dogs! Stop letting Senator Baucus bully the entire nation. If Chuck Grassley is going to foster lies and fear in public we should NOT be listening to him.

We cannot afford to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is time for the White House to be more decisive, exercise leadership, be clear, point the way, and kick some rears. I know you can do this with class, but please do it.

I realize I am rattling on at this point but my feelings are very strong and my sense of disappointment, disgust, and anger is rising every day. Not being George W. Bush is not enough. We need progress in caring for the health of the American People. If you back off on a strong public option I, and many progressives, will lose the hope that inspired us last fall.

You know that the 20% on the far right will always be angry with you. Why alienate the entire progressive wing of this nation?

Thank you!

You can give them your piece of mind too.



--the BB

You DID want war with Iran, didn't you?

No?

Do your elected officials know that? They seem hell-bent on stupidity these days.

Do something before it's too late.

[See Tom J's diary at Daily Kos for starters.]
--the BB

"Lawful interrogations"

It is such a short post that I hope it remains within fair use to share it all. A cross-posting from Americablog....
Joe Sudbay writing about Bush's threat to veto a ban on torture:

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a ban on torture. Actually, per The Gavel, the House adopted the Army's rules prohibiting torture for other agencies. Seems the Army doesn't want to condone a practice that could be used on our soldiers. Not Bush, though. He will veto that ban:
The White House vowed to veto the measure. Limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual "would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
Bush: Just because he says we don't torture, doesn't mean we don't torture.

And just what "law" do these "lawful interrogations" fall under, you sadistic weasels?

It's a pity a frog didn't shove a firecracker up W's butt and return the favor when he was a kid. So many lives would have been spared.

Does your Representative know how you feel about this?
--the BB

Climbing the nearest church steeple

Hunter got a major rant on over at Daily Kos and I can so identify with it.

I can't do it. Maybe it's the cough medication talking. Maybe it's the season. Maybe it's the knowledge that we're about to launch into a new presidency which seems already, by many of the most important measures, to be destined for either completely out-in-the-open Republican insanity or fear-spangled Democratic timidity. But I have Outrage Overload, and I can't manage anything pithy to say about the current environment that doesn't involve just climbing the nearest church steeple and swearing at the top of my lungs.
...

Right now I just want to run every last reporter and politician on earth through a cheese grater.

--the BB

I paroli perduti

Littlebangtheory has a nice post on words, the loss thereof.

A sample:

And with these words went their meanings. “Compassionate” now means a kind of conservatism which replaces the helping hand with a boot in the ass. “Morals” now means swallowing a peculiar diet of dogma without daring to ask, “What’s in this stuff?” “Values” has become a codeword for a narrow Fundamentalism which preaches the disenfranchisement of any who disagree.

This is no quirk of etymology, no gradual shift in meaning brought on by ignorant mis-usages of nebulous words. This is the willful, blatant theft of ideas, kidnapped from the high ground of hope, dragged into the shadows, taught to kill, and then let loose among us.

Cruise (or cybertransport, or click) on over and read it all. It's a rousing article.
--the BB

Just because

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

--Abraham Lincoln