Even if they’d brought a hardball to a basketball game, they might be better off.

When Dick Cheney is running circles around you, you know you’ve got problems.

Even if it’s mainly because he thinks his clothes are on fire.

Excellently put essay, Peterr.

I love the smell of Rahmbo in the morning.
It smells like smug, self-satisfied incompetence.

Obama needs to show up with a hurling stick and ball and let it fly!

or a baseball bat…

Yea, and there are millions of “armchair quarterbacks” just having a great time telling him what plays to run. You know how that worked out in the NFL when they let fans pick the play?

If I remember correctly, the Redskins ran a couple of the Nixon to George Allen plays in the early ’70s and the ‘Skins consistently lost yards…

Think of me as the guy at courtside, telling the team to get off their tails and get in the game.

Sometimes, you know, the fans do manage to get the team a little more fired up when they seem a little sluggish.

Not to mention, this is kind of our JOB as CITIZENS.
“leave Obama alooooooone!”
It’s getting frickin’ old.
FunnyDiva

Some of us are still out here just keepin the powder dry.

Maybe the President is playing Australian Rules Football: a game in which you score points by punting.

Pat Buchanan (of all people) said something truthy this w.e.–the first effectively to oppose, and to lead to the downfall of, LBJ was the left.

Well, Obama is not going out of his way to keep support on the left.

and supposedly single payer option on medical is gone

and they allowing many many mountains in Appalachia to be destroyed in search of just a small amount of coal

we are still in Iraq with no clear exit strategy

and we are ramping up in … with no clear strategy

maybe time to grow some balls and stand up

or we may be whining in a few weeks when mitch the grinch mcconnell has the pleasure of influencing the scotus appointment more than president obama’s base…

sorta sad

not much of an improvement

Understatement much, dear eCAHN? =)
XO
Funny Wheelie Diva

I think you’ll find that Obama is throwing the game.

To turn a phrase. *g*

Uh, doesn’t this all make the unwarranted assumption that the Obama Administration is somehow being stifled, and not simply pursuing its prerogatives openly?

i’m sure the potus knows best. and regardless, it’s not our place to question him.

On policies probably yes. But the constant torture drip can’t be giving them a warm & fuzzy feeling.

How unselise of you. *g*

what is all this talk of ball games? 11 dimensional chess is the game.

Things will have to get much worse, and they certainly will, before Americans hit the streets in mass, as a matter of survival, to push Obama in a progressive direction. Don’t be surprised by food and gas riots in late summer early fall. The tides of history may well sweep the accomodationist approach of Obama into the trash can.

what is all this talk of ball games? 11 dimensional chess is the game.

Of course, as it’s one of the few that doesn’t take any balls at all.

:-)

none of that stuff matters. the only thing that counts is beating the republicans.

LOL!

I’m not good at any of the above.

upside down. in cold cream-of-wheat.
and that’s Eleven-teen Dimensional Chess to you, bub.
Funny Wheelie Diva

The premise of this post ignores the fact that the mainstream media is bought-and-paid-for corporatist propaganda, closely coordinated with Republican party talking points. I’m not saying Obama’s doing everything he should, but for all I know he MAY be, but since the press doesn’t want to tell me about it then I won’t find out.

We have to stop pretending that the press is impartial or investigative – the press is a corporatist tool, and it controls the news more completely than Pravda (albeit Prava with an Internet/YouTube chaser).

How can anyone, including the White House, avoid the reframing of the issue of Bush Administration torture into the issue of Nancy Pelosi’s culpability for it, when that reframing is a major project of several media entities working in close coordination with the Republican party?

We’re heading back into the same territory we were with Clinton, where a good president is hamstrung by not being able to communicate with the public because the media is owned by corporatists.

i’ve finally figured it out! peterr has learned me:

If your team has the ball, you move. You break free from your defenders, you break toward the basket, you head for an open spot to receive a pass, you move and move and move — and you’ve got 24 seconds to get a shot off, or you give up the ball.

i was confused before, but now i see that potus has changed teams and it’s our job is to do the same. as i wrote above, potus knows best and a citizen’s job is to support the potus.

torture cover up? corp give-a-ways while pretending to address the banking crisis, the healthcare crisis, the climate crisis and war? it’s all good.

now everything makes sense.

Eleven-teen Dimensional Chess

thank you.

i’m new to this and bound to make lots of mistakes. appreciate the correction.

If we change teams, who will Obama have to play against?

Yer onna roll grrl.

Standing around is a feature, not a bug.

You could add Israel as well. Just saw on TV Netanyahu lecturing Obama how Palestinians must accept Israel as a Jewish state, he will keep expanding settlements, no return of any Palestinians, no Palestinian armed forces, etc.

When Israel reneges on its commitments there isn’t a peep from the MSM. Even when Palestinians agree with Israel, it is deemed never enough.

Juan Cole’s hortatory comment this morning was that Netanyahu is a bully and the whole fate of the ME depends on Obama not allowing Netanyahu to bully him.

Moving right along.

I’m a free agent and haven’t found a team worthy of playing the governing game.

bipartisanship baby! – it means we’re all on the same team.

Here’s the Juan Cole link.

*g*

With you on that.

I think I’ll pick up my marbles and go home. :-(

HA!

My money’s on the Jacobins

I’m neither surprised nor alarmed that the Obama administration isn’t getting behind real change. In every particular you mention, and I would add health care financing and the GWOT to your list, any forward motion risks breaking out uncontrollably into radical change. And while Obama was always clearly light years better than any Republican (and I personally worked very hard in my own small backyard to make sure he was elected instead of any Repulican), he has also clearly never been a radical or revolutionary. Oh, maybe he’ll be moved that way more easily than almost any of our politicos if pushed hard enough, but, please, natural selection has insured that none of the present crew of politicos could want anything but the good of the folks who get them re-elected, the big contributors. And the good of the big contributors is served by more of the same, more crony capitalism, not by any real change away from the rule of the oligarchs.

Obama is at most the last, best hope of the oligarchs to escape the present crisis without ending their days on the guillotine that every day that passes on a business as usual basis makes more likely we will see set up on the Mall. They might have been able to escape violent revolution by at last seeing that their enlightened and long-term self-interest would be best served by the sort of peaceful revolution our system allows. But they are incapable of enlightenment, or even the fear that less arrogant and entitled people might have of taking 10-figure bonuses for management that has sent the proles to bread lines. So they will reject all compromise, will insist, and through their hirelings in Congress succeed in this insistence, that the only way the system will be allowed to move forward is if all bubbles are reinflated with the people’s money, if all the disastrous consequences of their folly is diverted onto the heads of the proles alone, and they are guaranteed of not just protecting their past ill-gotten gains, but of even greater future profits skimmed from the recovery effort.

Obama, and still less the remainder of our political class, will not oppose the oligarchs with any force or decision. They will all go down together. Let’s hope the violence can be limited, but this has probably already passed the point at which it can end without some latter-day Committee of Public Safety.

You give too much credit to the people. There will be no revolt.

Do you mean, you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd?

Oh, wait. We’re talking BB trash talk now. You’d think Obama would be a mover rather than a stander. But Eric Holder plays BB, too, and he seems to be a stander. In fact, he seems to excel at setting picks, rather than driving to the basket.

Bob in HI

three in the key?

If there is to be a Committee of Public Safety there also needs to be a guillotine.

dude, I don’t think so

mf hypocrite is the fear

to trust the geitnerds or the new dude who helped deregulate the financial giants (what an oxymoron) to a federal post is just nonsense.

state your case a bit more articulately. I may be dum but ya’ll ain’t convinced me…
peace

my apologies. invisible snark tag was a little too invisible. (see earlier thread for my typical)

That’s what Louis XVI said.

Revolutions are never going to happen until–surprise–they do. They do not happen the way people expect, and they do not always produce the results intended. People forget that Louis was king for three years after the Revolution–until 1792. A great many revolutionaries expected to have a constitutional monarchy with lots of built-in protection for the status quo. But a diverse group of angry backbenchers, fringe politicians, and angry Parisian citizens–the Montagnards or Jacobins–came together to overthrow the Crown and execute the royal family.

It is always too easy to say it cannot happen here. After Bushism, Gang Banking, and, now, Depression, anything becomes possible, from military coups to general insurrection. And somehow I think that, like their Parisian counterparts, the citizens of the District feel the boot of our aristocratic Congress more sharply and are thus more amenable to revolutionary excess than most.

Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

depends upon which team he’s on

He’s president of the entire country. Why would he wanta buss yer hairy butt? What have you done recently to make things better? Complaining is just noise which irritates.

What game? He’s governing.

Once you’ve beaten them then what? Aaaah, just beat on them some more huh? That’s just torture. Is that all the payoff you need?