And Yes, He Did

The Biden ad is correct about Sanders and Obama:

I think Barack Obama was one hell of a President. I was proud to stand alongside him every step of the way — and fought like hell to make sure he was re-elected.

Bernie Sanders can't say the same. pic.twitter.com/7wM4PFUXDZ

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) February 24, 2020

The proof is right here in this tweet:

In response to a new digital ad from Joe Biden, Bernie’s campaign put out a statement that Bernie never called for primarying Obama.

Yet here he is doing exactly that....ON VIDEO.

pic.twitter.com/m5e62tqoiD

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) February 24, 2020

Sanders always gets caught. What else is new?

Highlights of Yesterday's Democratic National Convention

Everybody was talking about Obama's 50-minute speech, but like him as a president in general, I have never been impressed. Obama is not an orator but a lecturer, and his speechwriting skills leave a lot to be desired.

Truly, Michael Bloomberg should have edited Obama's speech. Bloomberg's speech was short and to the point. It was an absolute epic takedown of Donald Trump while at the same time a clear endorsement of Hillary Clinton. It took him 11 minutes to say what took 50 goddamned minutes for Obama to say, and it was far more effective.

Obama's speech:



Obama forgot to remember that this is supposed to be a support speech for Hillary Clinton,not an acceptance speech or a State of the Union speech.

Contrast that longwinded gasbag's verbal diarrhea to Michael Bloomberg's speech, by far the best of both conventions:




VP Joe Biden did well last night. I would rank his speech third behind Bloomberg and Bill Clinton for the best speech of the convention:



Lowlight was the Bernie or Bush idiots booing Leon Panetta:




HRC running mate Tim Kaine's speech:

A Lousy Excuse for a President Looks Back on the Damage He Created

Nothing is ever to go change my mind about how terrible Barack Obama is.

As a president, of course, not as a person.

I will be glad when he is gone. Maybe Michelle will be glad, too, when he is out of there so she can divorce him, if the rumors are true.

View More: Live News|More News Videos

True, there are worse presidents out there, but that doesn't say much for Obama being a flop and doing a ton of damage to the Democratic Party brand.

Obama State of the Union Address 2016

The speech, in case you missed it and are too lazy to find it on YouTube:

State of the Union Speech Live Stream

Obama's last one can be viewed here.

There are other sites I am sure.

Roseburg is Embarrassing

Roseburg is a red town in the red part of Oregon, which is most of the state outside of the Willamette Valley. The Willamette Valley, which includes Eugene, Salem, and Portland, is where 70 percent of Oregon's people live. This is like California and many other so-called "blue states." The populous areas are in smaller locations while the rednecks live in more rural areas. Roseburg, of course, is no exception to being a redneck town.

But as redneck as Roseburg is, there is NO justification for organizing an embarrassing protest against Obama. It is just tacky and gives the rest of the country--again, with the vast majority of people living in urban areas--the message these protesters value guns more than human lives.

It's a disgrace, and people who read this blog know I am no fan of Obama's.

The Stench of Obamacation Will Remain Long After Duncan Is Gone

If there was an argument ever to be made against Barack Obama, it is in his attempted dismantling of a key component of our democracy, public education. This is untenable with any kind of Democratic Party belief or any American belief. It forever labeled him as a fraud, a neolib, who was cynically used by his wealthy backers to undermine the party while neutralizing any opposition from key constituencies like African Americans. I loathe the man as a politician and feel he has damaged the party almost beyond repair.

We know from his years with the Joyce Foundation he was a tool for charter schools, total scams designed to siphon money away from public schools and transfer more wealth to the rich. Yet this fraud was put in there in 2009. The destruction of public ed began almost overnight with this good-for-nothing sack of shit. It was all Obama and his puppetmasters' doing. He put in his basketball-playing crony to head the DOE, the spectacularly unqualified Arne Duncan, who was nothing more than a dumb jock who made George W. Bush look like Einstein. He was that stupid. His intellectual shortcomings were obvious, but he, like Obama, actually believed that because they got into Harvard and other Ivy League schools they were smarter than the rest of us.

Now Obama has somebody named John King, a worse foul ball than even Duncan, to take over the rest of Duncan's tenure at the DOE. He has clear contempt for the teaching profession and education. Another Ivy League-"educated" arrogant shitstain who thinks he knows more than the rest of us, especially those of us who are teachers or in the education field. Another impeachable piece of shit like the man who appointed him and the man who was his predecessor.

More about Duncan's "legacy" here:

Sticking with the theme of lightning rods, Politico’s Michael Grunwald recently wrote a profile of now-outgoing Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and one of the big takeaways of the piece is that Duncan managed to unite the left and the right — in opposition. Do you have a theory to explain this particular kind of bipartisanship?

Education creates very odd coalitions in America, and it has throughout history. Conservatives who are opposed to the Arne Duncan package of reform generally oppose national curriculum. They do that because they’re coming from the states’ rights perspective, which obviously has pretty deep historical roots in the United States. (That’s one reason why it was such a surprise that No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan piece of legislation.)

Can't Wait For Obama To Leave Office

It has been the longest eight years--okay, six-and-a-half years--of my life to endure the fake Democrat Barack Obama. He is now trying to prove his "liberal" credentials by screwing over older people to pander to a sliver of the population.

How about expanding dental coverage for older Americans instead of pandering to weirdos with mental illnesses or sexual fetishes? Obama, whether he realizes it or not, is undermining women in order to pander to a sliver of people who are screwed up mentally. That is because he is trying to undermine Title IX without the approval of Congress by pandering to these weirdos and throwing half of the human race--women and girls--under the bus so these (mostly) guys can get their freak on, exposing themselves--a crime, by the way--in female-only spaces and committing sexual harassment by definition.

On a somewhat related topic, having watched Bruce Jenner's "reality" show, I can confidently say that within a few years, provided he is still alive, Jenner will contact the likes of detransitioner Walt Heyer and detransition himself. I think he already regrets having butchered his body to satisfy his autogynephilia. It is clear on the show if you pay close attention. Jenner does NOT fit in with his new trans "friends" on the show. He can't relate to them at all. He asks the most basic questions of people like "Candis Cayne" (Brendan McDaniel), and he still has a very hard time grasping it. He is a straight man, and most of these people in his new clique are gay men who have butchered themselves to try and con straight men into thinking they really are women. Of course it is an extremely lonely life for these trans because few men, gay, straight, or bi, would ever have them. It goes without saying women, straight, bi, or lesbian, would not have them, either. Butchering the body does not treat the pain within the person; in fact, it is extremely unethical to treat mental problems with surgery. It is little wonder trans have a very high suicide rate, but that is because they have untreated mental illness to begin with that butchering their bodies does not solve and if anything worsens their depression and other illnesses.

But one can have sympathy for these people battling their own demons without trashing women's rights and giving men the unfettered right to harass and intimidate women and girls. I don't hate people who think they have no way out other than surgical butchery, but I despise people who enable this stuff while silencing the very real concerns of the critics. We also need to have some sane priorities, and Obama is NOT doing this. He is trying to be one of the "kool kids," while not giving a shit whether older people have any kind of dental coverage or whether women have any kind of rights at all to privacy and harassment-free places.

B.S. By Any Other Name Is Still B.S.

You couldn't pay me a million dollars to tell baldface lies about what a "great president" this neoliberal sack of shit is.

He is nowhere near FDR or LBJ level. He ain't as bad as James Buchanan or Richard Nixon, but that is damning this president with faint praise, indeed. He is more like Bush III.

He is a flop by any objective measure. His education policies, for example, are a complete and total disaster and should have gotten him and Arne Duncan impeached. They completely violated the separation of powers with their abuse of the grant system and their insane mandates. Sorry if I call it out like it is. He is one of those neoliberals who are destroying the country and have overtaken both political parties. Dylan Matthews is just totally full of it by calling this far right politician a "progressive." "Progressives" don't push for ruinous trade agreements. "Progressives" don't push for destroying public education. His health insurance plan is nothing but a gift to corporations while rationing health care to the masses thanks to outrageously high premiums and deductibles. No amount of propaganda changes the truth about this horrible president.

One of the Many Reasons I Didn't Vote for Him

It's neoliberal bullshit like this that made me decide to vote third party in 2012.

There is no division in the Democratic Party between progressives and liberals because in truth they are the same thing. What there IS a division of is between NEOLIBERALS and everybody else in the party.

Neoliberalism is extremely right-wing and is actually libertarian.


Obama was up in Portland yesterday trying to peddle this continued destruction of the American economy in the name of the debunked globalism.

We need a return to high tariffs, not selling off what is left of the middle class in this country.


Remember, Washington D.C. politicians are the enemy of the American people. Obama is one of the worst offenders who claims he is a "Democrat."

He's a big fake and always was.

State of the Union Address 2015

Hardly anybody sat through Obama's STFU speech of last night, including yours truly.

Here is the video in case anybody out there gives a rip about what he had to say:



He sometimes sounded like a Democrat during the speech instead of the neoliberal sellout he truly is, but of course, none of his proposals will ever pass with that batshit bunch in Congress, also known as the Incongruous Congress.

If you can't stand his voice, you can read the damned thing here.

Referendum on Obama

That's the long and short of the midterms, and of course innocent and guilty Democrats are paying the price for this stupid shit in the White House. The GOP is deliriously happy with the results, but of course they don't REALLY want to govern, for no thinking person would put up with the shit they have been running on. The divided government suits these clowns just fine, and they will continue on their lazy asses "working" three days a week with at least nine months off during the year to prove "government" doesn't work for the "people" anymore.

Of course it doesn't. It's government of, by, and for the tiny number of financial elites.

I told readers of my misgivings of Obama way, way back in 2006 or 2007, and unfortunately I have been proven right.

The 2016 elections can't come soon enough for me, provided death doesn't come to me sooner. I'll be fucking 61 at that point. However, we may get a pair of dynastic types for the major two parties if that goddamned Jeb Bush becomes the GOP nominee.

You'd think people would learn after two president Bushes (actually one, since Cheney was the puppetmaster of the younger one) not to repeat the mistake a third time. But the landscape is totally different now. The GOP doesn't have to rig elections since both political parties are owned by the same crooks and billionaires and will do the same thing anyway to screw over the rest of us.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

We are coming up on another election, which I haven't closely followed, to tell you the truth. We are once being entertained by the usual cadre of crackpots who file frivolous lawsuits because somehow these individuals pass a state bar.

The rest of us who had REAL cases to file couldn't get anywhere, yet these clowns like Klayman clog up the courts.

By the way, how do you explain George Romney and John McCain, both of whom were born outside of the United States? Of course they, like Obama, were and are U.S. citizens.

I Told You So

I have been saying this for years, but I am just a lowly blogger and peon.

Of course Obama is a fake; that was the point of getting him elected in the first place. He was put in there to carry out what the elites want under the guise of being a "Democrat," tarnishing the party brand in the process.

West:

No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair. And that’s a very sad moment in the history of the nation because we are—we’re an empire in decline. Our culture is in increasing decay. Our school systems are in deep trouble. Our political system is dysfunctional. Our leaders are more and more bought off with legalized bribery and normalized corruption in Congress and too much of our civil life. You would think that we needed somebody—a Lincoln-like figure who could revive some democratic spirit and democratic possibility.

True, although there is no such thing as a "neoliberal centrist." Neoliberals are right wing, even fascistic.

The Truth About Obama and Teachers

There was a lengthy and great comment following this post at Diane Ravitch's blog that explains the whole sordid story. It's worth posting here, I think, for posterity's sake:

Diane, I’m sorry this is so long, but I just needed to get some of the local (Chicago) history about Barack Obama into part of the record, so thanks for asking whether the teacher unions have any friends left in the administration.

No!

That’s the short answer.

But as a historian, Diane, I hope you’ll appreciate the details of how the Chicago Teachers Union put Barack Obama in the United States Senate and thereby gave him the launching pad to the rest of his career. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll share.

Barack Obama became the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Senate seat because the Chicago Teachers Union under the leadership at that time of Deborah Lynch stood firm against a local favorite (Tom Hynes) and pushed for Barack Obama, then an almost unknown State Senator who had just gerrymandered his South Side district so it would run south to north (to include the Gold Coast) rather than east to west (stretching through the Black Community). Little did we realize that Barack Obama was telegraphing his subsequent opportunism with that move. Instead of the thousands of poor Black people in place like Englewood, he was suddenly Illinois Senator representing a few Black people (mostly in Hyde Park) and then the wealthiest people in Chicago (including his Sugar Mommy, billionaire Penny Pritzker).

But without out support, Barack Obama would never have been a United States Senator to give that immortal speech to the Democratic Convention. And he was in the Senate because the leaders and most of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union put him there by giving him the nomination in a tough fight against the Ward Committeemen, who wanted Hynes. No Pritzker could have done that for the guy who used to walk around the union offices (where I worked as “Director of Security and Safety” during those years) telling us “Call me Barack” and sharing one of the weakest handshakes in history. (That’s another story for another time, but the first time we shook hands I was really surprised because most politicians don’t have such weak hands; even if they have never worked with their hands — and Obama has never been a worker — they get stronger hands by shaking hands with thousands of us…).

It was not easy supporting Obama in those days.

I remember sitting in front of a Christmas Tree at a major union holiday party and being cornered by a drunken friend, a teacher who had also been long active in ward politics in the 43rd Ward (I live in the 45th; Chicagoans know their geo-locations primarily by ward, parish, and “side”… tertiarily by “community”) screaming at me so that he attracted attention.

Basically, he was insisting that we were giving away a Senate seat by forcing Barack Obama on Illinois. Nobody, my friend said (and we remained friends) outside of Chicago will vote for a guy whose name is “Osama” and who is Black.

My answer to that had been practiced by then.

“I’ve heard this guy speak. He will go all the way down to Cairo and Carbondale [Illinois towns south of the Mason Dixon line] and charm those ladies to the point where they will bake him pies, then go home and dust off the KKK robes their fathers wore back in the day…”

And that’s precisely what happened.

Barack Obama practiced that “guy with a strange name and funny-looking ears…” speech on teachers and other friendly audiences for months. It worked. So did the “I’m not against all wars, just bad wars and the wrong wars…” speech he used to gut the candidacy of Hillary Clinton by early 2008. My wife and mother-in-law heard that speech in Chicago’s Federal Plaza and we helped it go viral before things could “go viral” in the sense we use it today. By that summer, when Yearly Kos was in Chicago, Obama was pulling ahead of the pack, despite the slick operation Hillary had.

By the summer of 2008, all of the dishonesty of Barack Obama and his “team” was already in place. For me, there are two memorable points.

In july 2008, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) met in Chicago at Navy Pier. We were out of power then. Debbie Lynch’s PACT caucus had been defeated by Marilyn Stewart’s “New United Progressive Caucus” in 2004 and re-elected in 2007. Lynch by 2008 was finished. I was out of work, editing Substance, and part of the group that was building CORE (which was to win union power in the CTU two years later).

I covered the AFT convention in July 2008 for Substance. Hillary Clinton announced that she would speak to the convention, but Barack Obama told the convention planners that he had a “conflict…” Sorry, but he just couldn’t be with us, so he would Skype in (which he did). His claim was that he wouldn’t be in town, blah blah blah.

He was lying. The night before he was supposed to speak by Skype, I was at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and noticed some young people silently holding small signs that said OBAMA and pointing when asked. I followed the trail into a lower area and was blocked by a bunch of young people manning tables. “Is Barack Obama here?” I asked and was told “Yes” but that it was “by invitation only.”

I tried to get into the room where he was, but was threatened with arrest because it was a “private” thing. Not having backup, I didn’t try to barge in as press. But I wanted to see him myself so I could report that he had been at the convention hotel at a time when he had told the AFT leadership “Sorry…”

The trick was to follow the money. The people going in to the Obama event were very VERY well dressed. So… I waited at the exit from the hotel parking lot surrounded by some of Chicago’s wealthiest people, all of whom had to wait for their cars. Secret service were blocking everyone and the hotel staff were not getting cars for anyone. Then the Obama convoy pulled out (I counted three of those SUVs…) and the middle car stopped and the candidate rolled down the window, thanks the people who were waiting, and sped away. So I had seen Obama at the hotel the night before he would be “too busy” to speak directly to the union’s 3,000 delegates.

The next morning, I went to the press room and asked what the AFT leadership had said when they learned that Obama had lied to them about not being in town. At first, I got one of those “What are you talking about?” thingies. Finally, a guy I knew pulled me aside and said that he had been with Ed McElvoy (then AFT president) when Ed talked with Obama on the telephone about the snub. The call, according to my source, ended abruptly, McElvoy expressing his anger with the Obama deception in vivid language.

Second came in The New York Times later that summer.

The Times ran a page one story about how the Obama thing was built. It include a lot of local Chicago stuff (leaving out the gerrymandering of the Obama State Senate district out of Black Chicago, among other things) — but left out the work the Chicago Teachers Union had done to get Obama into the United States Senate.

Instead, to read the official version from All The News That’s Fit to Print, it was a bunch of old “movement” people from the defunct “New left” that had helped strategize the Obama campaign locally. The Chicago Teachers Union was not even mentioned!

One of those who had fought the hardest during the time we were pushing to get the nomination for our friend the state senator had been Howard Heath, who was Vice President of the Chicago Teachers Union in the early 2000s and also the lead union lobbyist in Springfield, the state capitol. Howard knew “Barack” very well in those days, when our future president played lots of basketball and select poker games as part of his networking.

It was Howard who caught the most heat during the months we were fighting to get the nomination for “Barack.”

After the Arne Duncan appointment in December 2008, we knew what was going to unfold. I asked Howard later whether he had heard from Barack and Michelle, both buddies once upon a time, since they became international rock stars. Of course not.

On my refrigerator, we have a photograph I took at a LEAD (Legislators Educators Appreciation Dinner) of Barack Obama and my wife Sharon and young son Sam back then. We leave it up and now and then people will be looking over all the Little League and friends and school and family pictures and exclaim…

Is that Sharon and Sam with the President?!

Yes. I don’t have a photograph of myself with him because I was always taking the photographs, not posing in them.

The guy is a hypocrite and worse in more ways than most of us know now.

Like many people who were used by Barack Obama in his ruthless climb to the “top,” the American Federation of Teachers and the Chicago Teachers Union can continue to remember the facts. History has a way of catching up with various lies and liars.

The truth is never pretty.

Maybe There is Hope for Bill Clinton After All

According to that reliable source the Daily Mail, despite the truce between the Clintons and the Obamas following the messy and brutal 2008 campaign, both sides hate each others' guts. Actually, it isn't so much the Mail making that claim as it is paraphrasing a new book that's come out about it.

Considering Obama was the Manchurian candidate for the neolibs deciding they needed to pollute the Democratic Party to destroy it and make it an imitation of the GOP, only with a little more benign exterior, I can't blame the Clintons if true.

Unfortunately, Bill Clinton was often a tool of the same people only he did hold some traditional Democratic Party principles. However, his screwing over the poor on "welfare reform," his signing ruinous trade agreements, his signing of the Glass-Steagall repeal, and his being in bed with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan make my choosing sides in this "feud" complicated. Both sides cancel each other out.

I don't want the Clintons anywhere near the White House anymore. They need to retire from public life.

We don't need any more neoliberals, or "neos" of any kind. We need real Democrats who believe in traditional Democratic Party principles and who believe in democracy, not in privatizing the public sector.

Given the author is one who has trashed both sides before, it probably isn't a reliable book, no matter how much I wish it to be true. The kicker is Klein many years ago was a legitimate journalist who worked for Newsweek, but at some point he found there was a lot more money carrying water for right-wing interests.

The fact it is published by the infamous Regnery publishing house makes it even less reliable, not to mention there was a split between Klein and HarperCollins a couple of months ago over the reliability of this reporter:

Two publishing sources blamed the contract termination on Klein’s reporting, which has been called into question in the past by his subjects and the political press. Klein’s agent and publisher would not comment on the reasons for the split. Both said their author left HarperCollins’s William Morrow imprint by choice.

But the feud is an early sign of the new challenges facing an unsteady conservative book business — and of the stakes accompanying a reborn anti-Clinton industry.

However, thanks to bulk purchases, despite this era of renting books via Kindle, it'll probably be a bestseller.

Anyway, back to the "feud":

The Clintons have become convinced that Obama will not back Hillary for 2016 and that he is seeking to endorse Joe Biden or a new, young politician, just like he was.

'He’s convinced himself he’s been a brilliant president, and wants to clone himself — to find his Mini-Me,' says Bill Clinton according to Klein.

'He’s hunting for someone to succeed him, and he believes the American people don’t want to vote for someone who’s been around for a long time. He thinks that your mother and I are what he calls ‘so 20th century.’ He’s looking for ­another Barack Obama.'

If Obama really thinks he's been a "brilliant president," he needs a goddamned shrink, not be a king maker. I can just see him promoting a candidate like Cory Booker who is even a bigger fraud than he is.

Besides, Obama's presidency has been a train wreck from start to finish.

The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, or, Why Obama is a Complete Failure as President

His disastrous education policies are reason alone to list him as the very worst president in American history, except maybe James Buchanan, but even Buchanan, as bad as he was, never had the far-reaching impact this president will likely have in destroying ANY chance for upward mobility of the vast majority of people in order to help his buddies at the top.

Of course I have said I had no hope he was going to be any good at all when he got elected in 2008. It almost took an act of God to get me to actually pick his name in the voting booth on the very last day of "early voting" in Nevada. I damned near didn't do it, and I wouldn't have done it had there been a decent third-party alternative (naturally I didn't vote from him at all in 2012 and went third party). Almost nobody, yours truly included, had ANY idea he was on the board of a think tank that supported charter schools, the Joyce Foundation, in the 1990s, and that alone should have disqualified him from any national or local office. However, his rhetoric, if people had paid any close attention at all, was very, very worrisome if you cared about public institutions and the public good. He was repeating the same crap the GOP had been repeating for years. He was and is nothing but a Wall Street tool.

His appointment of Arne Duncan was the very worst cabinet appointment in American history. This corrupt and intellectually challenged individual has been give virtually free rein to subvert the U.S. constitution and mandate what state and local governments can or can't do with education, which is a state and local matter, going so far as to bribe them into submission to carry out "reforms" that have been uniformly disastrous. Impeachment and removal are warranted, but nobody in Congress will do it because 90 percent or more of them actually support destroying public education.

This is nothing but a naked assault on democracy. It took a "Democrat" to do what the extremists in the GOP could NEVER do and NEVER get away with.

A snip from the piece:

Let us recall some highlights of this presidential campaign. In 2010, Education Secretary Arne Duncan castigated public school teachers in Rhode Island for going on strike to protest arbitrary changes in working conditions and wages while encouraging authorities to fire them if necessary. He "applauded" the move to fire every teacher at Central Falls High School (as reported in the Providence Journal). This is from an administration that never asked anyone to resign from AIG, Bank of America, CITI, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Fannie Mae or Sally Mae.

Similarly, in 2012-2013, Obama lent the tacit backing of the White House to Rahm Emanuel's strategy for busting the Chicago teachers union and for a mass closing of public schools. The follow-on 'charter' program has been cited as rife with corruption. Secretary Duncan has been given free rein to use the powers of his department to cajole and pressure states into the unqualified promotion of charter schools -- whatever the record shows about their mediocre record.

Duncan's office has been the moving force behind a concerted effort to conceal the reality of what charter schools have, and have not, accomplished. The truth is not very pretty. Overall, the performance of their students on standardized tests, and graduation rates, are marginally worse on than those of the country's public schools. The drop-out rate among minorities is actually higher.** This dismal record is despite the preferential treatment that charter schools' receive: subsidies above and beyond the budgets of counterpart public schools; the cherry-picking of students that excludes many of those with chronic learning and/or discipline problems and/or from non-English speaking families; etc.

You will never, EVER convince me this rotten president is anything than one of the very worst, if not THE worst, who has ever come down the pike.

At least to date. I can bet the gangsters who control both political parties will find some puppet even worse and run on the Democratic Party ticket to appear as more sane than whoever the GOP nominates.

Class Warfare

With Obama signing food stamp cuts, an absolutely unconscionable act when he could veto the goddamned thing, he has proven what a complete and total FRAUD he is, and that there is no substantial difference between the two political parties anymore, other than the fringe, absolutely irrelevant issues.

Ditto for Democrats refusing to do away with "cloture," therefore giving them an excuse not to do a goddamned thing about the CRISIS in unemployment.

The Democratic Party needs to be completely overhauled, or a third party NOT hijacked by billionaire/Wall Street interests needs to be formed.

A Root Canal Is Definitely Preferable

to listening to last night's bullshit being spewed by the Liar-in-Chief who has absolutely NO intention of doing one goddamned thing about the economy or much else. He, like the vast majority of Congress, isn't about to do one damned thing that doesn't benefit the megarich or the Wall Street crooks who own both of them.

The game is SO obvious and SO rigged, I am amazed people still think there is a real difference between the two parties anymore on issues that truly matter, such as the economy, jobs, education, and foreign policy. It's just that one party plays the crazy aunt routine in order to get people to vote for the party that really WILL screw over the American people, now that the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by neoliberal fakers and puppets like Obama. Both parties exploit the stupid "social issues" as a way to distract people away from the reality their pockets are being picked by these crooks and their henchmen.

The STFU speech was basically a waste of time, for Obama spewed a bunch of platitudes that he is going to push for this and push for that, but he isn't going to do one thing that won't fuck people over. We know, whether or not we want to admit it, the ACA is just Wall Street's scheme to abolish employer-paid health insurance and once again force employees to carry all the risk and the expense, just as they have been forced to take crap 401(k)s instead of pensions. Next on the agenda will be the abolition of unemployment insurance; after all, the demented neolibs who control the political narrative think that businesses should not have to undergo laws and regulations that would "impede" their "right" to make money and screw over workers who make that moneymaking possible by being workers and consumers. I won't even talk about the horrendous education policies that make Obama unpalatable as a real Democrat or as somebody who truly cares about people. It angers me too much to rehash it.

In the speech, Obama yapped about increasing the minimum wage, but we all know the blue states are the only ones that can be relied upon to do anything about it. Congress isn't going to do squat.

I was watching old cigarette television ads on YouTube while the speech was going on. I felt they are much better for my health.

The speech, from the White House YouTube:

Lie Like a Rug

That's Obama's stock in trade while peddling pseudo-Democratic Party rhetoric so people on his "left" don't get too pissed off over his far right policies:

President Obama, the Grand Facilitator of the greatest consolidation of financial wealth in human history, began his sixth year in office declaring that income inequality is “the defining challenge of our time.” The Grand Bargainer who saved George Bush’s bank bailout and presided over the (ongoing) infusion of tens of trillions of dollars into Wall Street accounts, and who bragged less than two years ago that, “Since I’ve been president, federal spending has actually risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years,” now calls for government action to reverse the momentum of his own policies. The Great Pretender, who in 2008 called for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, and then did absolutely nothing to effectuate it when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, now proposes to raise the bar to $10 an hour in order to embarrass Republicans in an election year. The Daring Debt Buster who, on his own initiative, has frozen federal workers’ wages since 2010, and worked hand in glove with Republicans to gut social programs in the name of fiscal restraint, laments “growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” among the masses.

He lies like a goddamned rug.

Speaking of liars, I guess Chris Christie has fallen out of favor with the ruling class, now that he's embroiled in a big NJ scandal regarding construction work and delays on the George Washington Bridge some months ago. More than anything I suspect the elites who control both parties have decided the "Democrats" will retain the White House in 2016; it's only a matter of picking the right puppet for the job to do these bastards' dirty work of fleecing the American people more. All they need is some token opposition to whoever the "Democrat" happens to be.

It's obvious Christie doesn't fill the bill here because he could actually be elected president, so he has to go. He's awful, which means he's about as bad as Obama. It would simply be another Bush/Obama term if he got in on the face of it. However, the "Democrats" in Congress would actually have to act like Democrats are supposed to act, and they would veto any radical proposals that the elites want under a Christie regime, so a Christie presidency could actually result in a leftward movement in politics. With a fake Democrat like Obama in the White House, congressional Democrats would go along with the far right agendas these neoliberal assholes want.