Missed Opportunities

Not sure it's kosher, but I'm going to re-print a Paul Krugman blog post in it's entirety:

In today’s [New York Times] report on the foreclosure mess, a revealing sentence:

As the foreclosure abuses have come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy.

Surely this can serve as a generic statement:

As NAME ISSUE HERE has come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy.

Stimulus, bank rescue, China, foreclosure; it applies all along. At each point there were arguments for not acting; but the cumulative effect has been drift, and a looming catastrophe in the midterms.

Or to put it another way, the administration has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And soon there won’t be any more opportunities to miss.

===== End ====

Ouch!

Bruising Commentary on Obama & Dysfunctional Dems

The following is a from Godless Liberal Homo Blog, word for word, I couldn't have said it better. File this one under, Doh!

Ted Rall's syndicated column on Obama out Republicaning the Goppers is one of the best summaries of what has been wrong with this administration to date. The entire column is worth a read, but the comments on the wealthcare bill are of special interest.

Obama's revamp of healthcare, on the other hand, goes too far, perverting the liberal desire to provide healthcare for all Americans into a transfer of wealth from poor to rich that the hard right never dreamed of.

Buying into the classic, flawed, American assumption that a bad system can't get worse (ask the Iraqis and Afghans), ObamaCare entrusts 30 million new customers, to the tune of roughly ten grand a year each, to the tender mercies of private insurance companies.

ObamaCare pours hundreds of billions of dollars, some from taxpayers, the rest from poor people, into the gaping coffers of giant corporations. Once people find themselves paying even more for visits to the same crappy doctors and hospitals they can't afford now, they'll hold the Dems responsible at the polls. If Republicans stopped to think, they'd love it.

And if Democrats stopped to think, they'd hate it.

Some of us have stopped to think, and we do hate it.

The rightist policies of the Obama administration are going to cause some Democrats to vote Green at least some of the time for years. However, that won't be the biggest impact on the party. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their minions are doing a really effective job in persuading Democratic core constituencies that it doesn't matter much who you vote for. This means lower Democratic turnout and less volunteer time. The couch is a more effective rival than third parties, at least so far, and the DINOs in power are giving the couch a huge electoral advantage.

The Democrats are digging themselves in deeper and deeper, and they are too foolish and too bought to see it.

Source: Godless Liberal Homo Blog, "Ted Rall Nails it on Wealthcare", April 19, 2010.