Those Pesky Headwinds and Their Blowing Spin

It's Hard Out There for a Windy Presidential Candidate

Last fall, it was the car driven into the ditch by Republicans that President Obama blamed for the lousy pace of the recovery.  He has finally picked a new metaphor to show just how much he personally distances himself from the ongoing crisis: "headwinds".

At a speech Friday to workers in a Jeep plant, Obama said: "We're facing some tough headwinds. Lately, it's high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and unease about the European fiscal situation. That will happen from time to time."

(Yeah, every once in awhile those breezy conditions pop up and just blow away all those jobs -- poof!).

And from his weekly radio address Saturday:  "Even though our economy has created more than two million private sector jobs over the past 15 months and continues to grow, we're facing some tough headwinds. Lately, it's high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and unease about the European fiscal situation."

(Uh-huh. Wall Street and tax-dodging corporations are all a-tremble that a big quake will strike Lower Manhattan.  And oh, that market unease.  If only the global plutocracy could just get confident, everything would be A-OK!.  The cost of filling up their Hummers and armed Mercedes has left them reeling and unable to hire even a part-time janitor to scrub out their gold plated toilets).

Of course, the obedient little stenographers of the mainstream media are marching right in lockstep with Leader.  Here is what Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg wrote in The New York Times Saturday:

"The campaign is shaping up as a test of whether the much-vaunted organizing abilities of Mr. Obama and his team can offset the headwinds he faces. In battleground states, volunteers are fanning out by the thousands to reach out to neighbors who helped Mr. Obama in his first presidential campaign and persuade them to re-up."

Of course, the press is making Friday's dismal jobs report all about how it will effect the 2012 presidential race -  not about how it is affecting the actual people who don't have jobs. At least it's a switch from the totally made-up Debt Ceiling Showdown bringing us to financial Zero Hour. It can't be all that bad: after all, good buddies Obama and John Boehner have a golf date next weekend.

But getting back to that Times article.  It was nothing more than a thinly disguised piece of White House boosterism.  Zeleny and Rutenberg uncritically reported that "several thousand times a week, still-committed volunteers knock on the doors of potential new recruits and neighbors involved four years ago to see if they will join in."  These two supposedly seasoned reporters were in Chicago for a campaign pep rally and obviously are swallowing the Messina gospel hook, line and sinker.  They did not provide locations or names or photos to prove claims that thousands of Obamabots are annoying their neighbors in "battleground" states a year and a half before Election Day.

But back to what Obama is not doing about jobs -- his campaign has a thrilling answer. Again, according to the Times article:  

"While Mr. Obama will not fully engage in campaign activity until next year, aides said, he is embarking on weekly economic-focused trips throughout the summer. Doing so will allow him to use his bully pulpit to show that he is focused on addressing joblessness, the issue that more than any other could shape his electoral prospects and that Republicans are using to assert that his policies have failed."

Nothing like using the bully pulpit in a new factory every week, speaking in that g-droppin' folksy campaign rhetoric, surrounded by the 250 blue collar workers of America who still have $10 an hour jobs, to show how much he is addressing unemployment.  It's like the family sittin around the table.  You lose a job, what do you do?  You tighten your belts, you don't go on vacation, you don't go out to eat as much.  But what you don't do is you don't stop savin for college to win the future.  The guy doesn't even need a teleprompter for this kind of soarin oratory.

That's it.  Just campaign talk, buying time till he gets that second term.  We really should be hoping that either Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman get the nomination, because among the three of these men, there is little difference.  All three, for example, have espoused the same kind of health care "reform" we really got.  All three are traditional, conservative Republicans and none is really admitting it.  Obama must pretend to be somewhat progressive, while the other two are forced to pander to the right wing Tea Party.  All three are pro-corporate, status quo kind of guys. Choice we can believe in.

NYT Slow on the Censorship Uptake

The comments I submit to The New York Times get dumped or buried much of the time, but today I reached a milestone.  I had a comment (#12) get published under the "Playing With Matches on the Debt" editorial at about 1:30 a.m. today, got over 100 readers' recommendations with a ranking of fourth or fifth in popularity -- but when I went back to check it some twelve hours later, the comment was replaced with the "This comment has been removed" message.  No more comment!  No more readers' recommendations!  No more turkey soup, turkey hash, turkey sandwiches.  The Times Bumpus Hound moderators done struck!

So I am reprinting it here, because I can, dammit!

And the silence from The White House is deafening.  The debt ceiling "crisis" is a wholly manufactured theatrical trick to give both parties cover as they fail to conduct the business of the American people.  On a daily basis we get TV soundbites of these politicians crossing the street, meeting behind closed doors, and then somberly reappearing before the microphones with their usual message: "Everything is on the table."

For all we know, these hacks are having a game of pinochle as the world waits with baited breath.  It will play out as it always does:  a new Crisis Zero Hour will approach, President Obama will pretend-capitulate to the Republicans and call it a victory, and the slow and steady dismantling of the New Deal will continue its preordained course.

And the corporate media are playing along, deflecting our attention with Sarah's mystery bus tour and Anthony's Weiner, while unemployment reaches critical mass and both Democrats and Republicans do the bidding of their Wall Street masters.  We know it, they know we know it, and they do it anyway.  One of these days, their cynicism and corruption will backfire on them.... one of these days, right in the kisser! 

Okay, on second thought, I am really surprised this got past the censors at all.  Anyway, thanks to all the readers who recommended it.  I shall never forget.

Obama Swears off Lobbyists and PACs, Claims Obama

I got another one of those time-warp letters from Senator Barack Obama this morning, and it reads like it's 2008.  He wants me to go up to somebody I don't know, and somebody he doesn't know, tap them on the shoulder, hit them up for money and get them to join this neat grass-roots "movement" he is starting.  The email reads, in part:

You have the ability to reach out to someone who isn't yet invested in this campaign and say, "Hey -- we've got to get started."

Our campaign will not take money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs. You're going to build this 2012 campaign by bringing in more people who share our values. We'll ask them to find a few more. Those people will find a few more -- and after a few million person-to-person connections, we'll have built a grassroots campaign that can change the outcome of an election and change the course of this country.

That's the spirit that drives us.

It all starts with a tap on the shoulder, and your willingness to match someone's commitment. Give it a try.

Okay, this is getting scary.  He wants us to believe he has split himself in two and that there are really two Obamas.  There's the guy in the White House, who has surrounded himself with lobbyists (David Plouffe, straight from a one-year, million dollar gig at G.E.) and CEOs (Jeffrey Immelt of G.E. is handling the unemployment crisis by shipping more jobs overseas and not paying corporate taxes) and bankers (Chief of Staff Bill Daley of Morgan Stanley) and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (of the Glass-Steagall repeal banking cabal). And then there is that long-forgotten hope-monger who has just been living in the shadows this whole time. 

 Obama is obviously a puppet of Wall Street, yet he persists in claiming he is not taking any campaign donations from PACs, even as the Democratic Party has already admitted it will be taking advantage of anonymous donations courtesy of the Citizens United decision.

He is still pretending to be a blank slate upon which we can pin our hopes and dreams.  And what are his "values"?  I wish he would be more specific.  But I don't think he knows.  I don't even think he wrote the email.

Ralph Nader was right.  We need a second political party with a strong labor platform. What we have now is a deeply corrupt duopoly - one united Wall Street front of two slightly different factions, each manufacturing grass-roots movements to retain power.  The corrupt politicians are pretending to fight over a manufactured debt ceiling crisis as we slide into a Third Great Depression.  All they are doing is the bidding of their masters.

Share My Value

P.S./Update:  Thanks to "P. Kent", who just sent me this video of George Carlin speaking of the Death of the American Dream.  RIP, George. Your words are more apt than ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q