Here’s a YouTube video of an actual political debate.  (Hat tip to CorrenteWire.com.)

The Alternative Party Debate hosted by Maggie Phair Institute.Featuring:

Rocky Anderson
Justice Party nominee
http://www.voterocky.org

Roseanne Barr
Green Party candidate
http://roseanneforpresident.com

Stephen Durham
Freedom Socialist Party nominee
http://www.socialism.com/drupa…

Peta Lindsay
Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee
http://pslweb.org/votepsl/2012…

Dr. Kent Mesplay
Green Party candidate
http://mesplay.org

Dr. Jill Stein
Green Party candidate
http://www.jillstein.org

Absent from the debate were Stewart Alexander of the Socialist Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party.  Although the Libertarian Party is far to the right of most Americans, Johnson’s positions on LGBT rights deserve inclusion in the discussion.

Meanwhile, the two right-wing extremists competing for the right to implement the exact same policies are running very close in the polls because of being virtually identical on the issues.

The election is more than six months away, but with many polls showing Obama and Romney in a virtual tie, voters already are seeing the type of sharp attack ads that typically dominate the final weeks of a presidential campaign.

It’s like Obama wants to have the election stolen out from under him, à la Gore and Kerry, or, if he manages to squeak by to a second term, use the closeness of the results to publicly rationalize even more extreme policies than he has pursued thus far.  Either way, neither Obama or Romney offers an alternative vision for America.  All either of them has is more of the same shit sandwich they’ve been force-feeding us for years.

Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen did something taboo in America: he spoke in positive terms of Fidel Castro, a leftist leader who defied the U.S. corporate agenda for decades.  For daring to exercise his First Amendment rights, Guillen was raked over the proverbial coals and forced to issue an apology.  When exactly did it become unlawful to speak one’s mind in this country?

The fact is that, contrary to what the corporate-owned media has most Americans believing, and contrary to what capitalist Cuban exiles would have us believe, Castro is one of the more beloved figures in many parts of the world.  Cuba under the Castro government has sent doctors, nurses, and medical equipment to nations around the world, exporting his country’s excellent health care to the needy.  His government also supported people fighting to break free from oppression, such as in apartheid South Africa, while the U.S. has installed and propped up brutal dictatorships from Pinochet in Chile to the Saudi monarch that have slaughtered thousands.

For daring to defend Castro against critics, Ozzie Guillen was ordered by his employers to grovel before the public and offer up an apology, lest he lose his job.  Worse is that too many people in this country have no problem with that.  Regardless of what one thinks of Fidel Castro — and there are undoubtedly legitimate claims of corruption during six decades in office, not to mention the suppression of internal dissent and not allowing democratic elections — the fact is that we are supposed to enjoy the freedom to say what is on our minds no matter how unpopular or distasteful.

When we target those who say things we don’t like for punishment, we enable a frightening trend in this country toward a hideous double standard in which only a privileged few get to enjoy civil rights at all while everyone else is denied even the most basic ones conceived.  Rather than punish Ozzie Guillen for stating his opinion, we should be protecting his right to express it.

A good read on this subject may be found on Black Agenda Report’s web site.

http://blackagendareport.com/content/fidel-castro-and-ozzie-guillen-evasion-truth

The Onion has a funny video up about Democrat Party voters screwing with Barry Obama’s mind as the 2012 election kicks into gear.

Democrats: Obama Has Dicked Us Around For Four Years, Now It’s Our Turn

Back in February, The Huffing Post reported that Obama was virtually tied with a generic Republican counterpart going into November.  Rasmussen reported similar polling results last month.  And according to news reports for last week, that slim lead is not getting any wider.  What this means is that the election is well within the theft margin.

The reason for this razor-thin margin is obvious: Obama has adopted so many of the Republicans’ core policies – an ABC News poll last year found that a majority of Americans rate Obama as “just as bad” or “worse than” George W. Bush – that he presents no legitimate reasons for people to vote for him.  Web sites such as Obama the Conservative and Activist Post, whistleblowers including Thomas Drake, and bloggers including Glenn Greenwaldhave all documented the many ways in which Obama has adopted or exceeded all of the policies of his predecessors.

When the two major party candidates are so similar to one another, Harry Truman’s admonition is as relevant as ever:  ”Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.”  Even having watched as Bush and Cheney stole not one but two consecutive presidential elections – thefts that were successful in large part because the Democrat candidates were so close to their Republican counterparts on policy – Obama and his campaign team still think the failed Clintonian model is viable.  And that will cost them dearly come November.

Meanwhile, people are hungry for real alternatives, and they’re not buying into the Big Lie of Democrats not being as bad as the GOP anymore.  According to Gallup, forty percent of registered voters now identify themselves as being independent or belonging to one of the minor political parties.

With so many voters looking to punish both major parties in November, the Obama regime would do well to look back and learn from history, lest it become history.

Green Party* candidate Jill Stein, who ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2010, has taken the lead for her party’s nomination to run for president against dictator Barry Obama and whoever his Republican counterpart is this November.

According to Ballot Access News and other sources, Stein has won enough of the vote in various state primaries to qualify for matching funds.  She is competing for the Green Party nomination with Kent Mesplay and Roseanne Barr, the latter of whom she did a Skype session with to Greens across the country.

Stein has blasted Obama for his many betrayals.  She criticized his signing of the FAA Re-authorization bill, which further erodes unions, his overtures of war against Iran, his decision to support portions of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would cause further destruction to the environment and jeopardize human health and safety, his assaults on civil liberties including the “Defense” Authorization that allows American citizens to be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, his taking of single-payer and a public option off the table in favor of an insurance-industry-authored mandate to buy private coverage or face stiff tax penalties, and other far right policies embraced by the incumbent.

Stein’s alternatives to all these things and more reads like a leftist’s dream: a Green New Deal to create environment-friendly jobs, an energy policy dedicated to 100% conversion to clean, renewable sources, expanding Medicare to every American and generous funding of public education (including the forgiveness of student loan debt), protecting America’s Safety Net, and ending America’s imperial wars.

Stein does not appear to be on record so far as to prosecuting America’s war criminals, including Obama, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the thugs in their respective regimes guilty of war crimes, but I can’t imagine she would let them off the hook, since it would only reinforce the notion of total immunity for high-ranking lawbreakers – a travesty of justice.  (I’ll keep you apprised of this as I learn more.)

With many progressives determined to sit out this election, Stein’s candidacy appears to be offering a welcome alternative.

*: In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I am a registered Green Party voter and that I donated about ten or twenty dollars to Stein’s gubernatorial campaign in 2010.

Salon.com’s news editor, Steve Kornacki, lamented yesterday that “Obama won’t face a credible primary challenge”, going on about how the closest thing to a liberal challenge he has comes from Republican candidate Buddy Roemer. While it is true that many liberals aren’t seeing any “viable” candidates materialize on the left, Kornacki isn’t telling us why that is: the failure of supposedly liberal pundits to report on candidates who are actually running.

And therein lies the catch-22 bloggers like Kornacki can’t seem to escape from. They complain about Obama, but they refuse to use the public voice they’ve been given to alter the political landscape. Pundits influence public opinion simply by reporting on someone or something. And they pass up opportunity after opportunity to do so when they fail to do their journalistic duty.

Because there is a Democrat trying to get himself on the ballot to challenge Obama from the left in next year’s primaries: Aldous Tyler is seeking the nomination to run for president as a liberal Democrat. His platform hits all the right notes, including opposition to war, taxation of the wealthy, a sustainable energy policy, cleaning up the environment, and restoring and protecting the safety net, among other positions. Tyler also favors heavily regulating Wall Street and corporations.

So why aren’t supposedly liberal bloggers and pundits giving Aldous Tyler any coverage? Kornacki writes that “[t]he depths of liberal despair over his presidency are often overstated“, meaning that bitch as they might about Obama, far too many who claim to be liberal aren’t dissatisfied with his policies enough to want to be rid of him — and having so thoroughly bought into the Big Lie that Republicans are just so much worse than any Democrat no matter what the evidence disproving that notion, they fear that any challenge might weaken Obama to the point that the GOP nominee might manage to cheat his way to victory next year.

But it’s Obama’s fault that he is even in such a precarious political position in the first place. Having made big promises only to cold-bloodedly refuse to even try to deliver on so much as one of them, and after literally adding insult to injury by dissing his party’s official base, it’s no wonder that his campaign is looking a lot more like Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s lackluster, doomed efforts than, say, Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election drive. So coming out of a primary challenged beaten up and vulnerable isn’t exactly a legitimate excuse not to cover challengers, especially ones from the left of the political divide.

Isn’t it time to break the self-imposed media blackout on left-wing challenges to Obama? If Democrats are truly fed up with him, and are seeking alternatives, it only makes sense for those blessed with public voices, such as Steve Kornacki, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, or Ed Schultz to use their gifts to report on people like Aldous Tyler. The media might lament the lack of candidates, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They only need to be reported on objectively, so voters can render their own decisions.

In a comment posted in response to the Open Salon version of my previous entry, Barzin Pakandam posted the following:

Hi Michael, I completely agree with your assessment. My post goes one step further:

http://open.salon.com/blog/barzin/2011/11/10/prediction_four_more_years_with_mr_obama

Mr. Pakandam, with all due respect, I think you glossed over what I wrote about Obama. Yes, voters are fed up with far right, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-civil-liberties, pro-war, anti-environment, pro-torture, pro-corporate Republican policies. But they’re also fed up with far right, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-civil-liberties, pro-war, anti-environment, pro-torture, pro-corporate Democrat policies.

On the issue of health care, for example, Obama cynically bet that by ramming through what amounts to a corporate boondoggle, he could remove health care as a wedge issue going into 2012. And the best way he could do that was to pass something the Republicans had already passed at the state level.

Enter Romneycare, on which Obamacare was modeled and which bears many similarities to the Clinton plan Obama campaigned against in ‘08. (And they all appear to have swiped the idea from Richard Nixon. Go figure.)

The thinking on this was painfully simple, and horrendously evil. There’s an institutional crisis in how Americans are able to gain access to decent health care. So Obama’s, Clinton’s, and Romney’s plan was to institutionalize the problem. If it’s a built-in part of the system, no more crisis in the system because it’s now a feature instead of a supposed aberration. Now we’re being forced to bail out the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries because they went too far in price gouging and were losing paying customers.

And, of course, Obamacare, as is Romneycare before it, is deliberately designed to fail. As Jon Walker and Scarecrow at FDL reported last year, the Massachusetts plan failed spectacularly the same week Obamacare became law. The state objected to proposed premium increases, which prompted insurers to back out of agreements to offer new coverage.

Why pass such a flawed plan if it’s very design guarantees failure? As I wrote above, there’s a cynical political ploy at the heart of the matter. But it runs much deeper than that. By passing a health care law at the national level that’s designed to fail, the far right-wing lackeys of Wall Street (which include Obama in their ranks) can pretend to justify their long-disproven claims that government health care or insurance doesn’t work. And also as I wrote above, they got to bail out two massive industries that had priced their goods so ridiculouly high that they were starting to worry that they’d not have enough customers.

It’s pretty insidious, but then what can be expected from a guy who, as a state senator in Illinois, and at the behest of his corporate bosses, actively and enthusiastically worked to gut a proposed bill that would have extended health insurance to impoverished children?

By the way, a year after the collapse of Romneycare in Massachusetts, it was still a miserable failure.

And that’s just on health care reform. Look at each and every one of Obama’s policies and you will find a continuation or expansion of Bush’s far right policies. He isn’t doing these things out of weakness or some misguided desire to be conciliatory. He’s doing them because he is a right-wing extremist and his policies are the same as those of the Republicans. THAT is what voters rejected in Ohio on Tuesday.

Ohio voters last night voted overwhelmingly against both Republican and Democrat corporate-favoring policies in a referendum. Senate Bill 5, passed by the Republican-dominated legislature and signed into law by Republican governor John Kasich, was shot down by sixty-one percent, too large a margin for the GOP to rig the vote count in its favor.

By a reportedly larger margin than Issue 2, Obamacare, the law passed in spring of 2010 in a huge giveaway to the health insurance industry, was voted down at sixty-six percent of the vote, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. However, the constitutional amendment as written would make it extremely difficult to pass meaningful regulations on insurance companies, and pretty much rules out all hope of single-payer health insurance in the Buckeye State.

In Mississippi, voters shot down the anti-abortion amendment proposed by right-wing extremists. The bid to declare life as beginning at conception was defeated 58-42%.

The measure would have bestowed legal rights on fertilized eggs and cut off access to abortion by equating it with murder, making no exception for rape, incest or when a woman’s life is in danger. Medical groups warned it might have criminalized contraception and miscarriages while limiting access to treatments such as in-vitro fertilization.

The voters of Mississippi are smarter than the far right gives them credit for. Cheers to them!

What, however, does the defeat of Issue 2 and the passage of Issue 3 in Ohio mean? It is incredibly easy for Democrats and Republicans, and their spinmeisters in the corporate-owned media, to speculate as to what it means, and many are doing just that. But what it all boils down to is that voters are fed up with far right policies that benefit no one but large business interests. In Massachusetts, for example, according to Physicians for a National Health Program, Romneycare — the insurance giveaway on which Obamacare was modeled — nearly 400,000 people still find health insurance unaffordable, and those people are predominantly the working poor. Given this realization, it is no wonder voters would rather opt out.

On a broader scale, Americans are increasingly hostile to far right policies, be they industry bailouts, invasive laws designed to take away women’s reproductive rights, or attempts to restrict voting rights, We the People are starting to fight back against the wave of fascist power grabs. Only time, though, will tell if it’s not too little, too late.

Cross-posted from Progressive Independence.

On the Open Salon version of my previous entry, some right-winger who supports Obama kept trying to lay the blame for next year’s results on the left for failing to properly support the candidate who has done far more to pass the Republicans’ agenda than any GOP office-holder could have.

I am about certain Obama will be a one term president–and that one of the Republican clowns will win in 2012.

Most of the blame for that will fall with the unrealistic expectations and shortsightedness of people devoted to a progressive agenda.

Naturally, when pressed for what exactly is so unrealistic about expecting Obama to do the job he was elected to do, Mr. Right-Winger couldn’t answer, instead falling back on the tried and true tactic of replying with personal attacks, hoping to deflect attention away from the glaring lack of evidence to support his accusations. This is not surprising. Obamabots, lacking any substantive policy changes with which to defend their political messiah, frequently resort to attacking the messenger when it is pointed out that he has not lived up to his campaign promises.

The fact is that voter depression stems in large part from the failure — or refusal — of political parties to act in the public interest. Throw in vote-rigging (GOP) and ballot-rigging (Democrats), and it’s no wonder American voter turnout is among the lowest in the Western World. But always remember that the largest component in deciding the outcome of any election, no matter how corrupted, is what politicians do or don’t do in shaping the outcome from a policy standpoint.

In 2000, 2002, and 2004, the elections were successfully stolen primarily because the Democrats put up poor candidates, engaged in shoddy campaign strategies that left what should have been easy races competitive, but above all, continually acquiesced to Republicans on policy-making. From letting Medicare be partially privatized to supporting George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, to their confirming his fascist judicial nominees, Democrats demonstrated that they were not to be counted on to defend the public interest.

Voter anger at Republicans nevertheless built up, and in the 2006 and 2008 elections, handed Democrats the reigns of power. That the very next election cycle, 2010, saw massive voter backlash against Democrats had nothing to do with voter stupidity or unrealistic expectations — we know more about what’s going on than many pundits give us credit for — and everything to do with Democrats’ endless continuance and expansion of right-wing policies. It didn’t help that Obama and his party literally added insult to injury by taking rhetorical shots at legitimate complaints and threatening voters if they failed to turn out to maintain majorities in Congress.

One would think that Democrats and their sycophants capable of learning from their mistakes, which happen to be bad decisions to institutionalize right-wing policies, and those decisions were rationalized by nothing more than political hubris. When politicians break promises and then add fuel to the fire by attacking voters, we naturally don’t take kindly to it. We can and will punish those who use and abuse us. Given no alternatives but to vote for the same bad policies or not vote at all, many of us chose not to vote. What’s the point when nothing changes?

But try telling that to Obamabots and they will lash out with every bit as much invective as any follower of Bush and Cheney. That they refuse to acknowledge the folly of their ways, much less learn from it, says far more about them than it does about the American left.

So now we’ve heard Barry’s big “jobs speech” and it turns out to be the exact opposite of what is needed to rescue the crumbling nation.  No surprise there.

Obama’s so-called “jobs plan” is huge cuts in the payroll tax that are designed to manufacture a real future shortfall in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which will then be used as the rationale for imposing deep cuts on, or even the elimination of, all three programs.  Corporate tax cuts will drain even more revenue from the treasury, which will make extending unemployment insurance for the unemployed who currently qualify, not to mention infrastructure repair, highly unlikely.

Hugh over at Corrente Wire explains in greater detail what this “plan” entails:

$65 billion cut payroll taxes in half from 6.2% to 3.1% on first $5 million in payroll
and from 6.2% to 0 on first $50 million in wages for new hires…

$175 billion to cut employee payroll taxes in half from 6.2% to 3.1%

You know how right-wing extremists have been lying for years now about Social Security’s trust fund being empty, filled with nothing but IOUs?  That was a deliberate lie then.  But now, with Obama’s cuts in the payroll tax that resulted from his shady deal to reduce the deficit on the backs of working Americans, and with further proposed cuts, what was once a total fabrication would become a reality as collection outpaces replacement revenue.

Before Obama stepped in to do what George W. Bush couldn’t, Social Security was solvent until 2037 or 2042, depending on which figures you looked at.  This means that the trust fund would have been able to pay 100% of benefits until 2037 or 2042, by which point action would need to be taken to ensure that there is enough money to cover all of retirees’ benefits.  But under existing and proposed cuts in the payroll tax, the point at which the trust fund begins experiencing a shortage would arrive far sooner, thus providing the rationale for imposing steep cuts in the program.

The far right, and this group has always included Obama and his cronies, has been trying to gut the safety net for decades.  Now they are closer to achieving their goal than they’ve ever been, no thanks to a Democrat in the White House.  This sick joke is something that Democrats fail to get, not only to their own party’s peril but to the nation’s as well.

Also telling in Obama’s no-jobs plan is that it doesn’t actually add new help for the growing number of unemployed; it merely proposes to extend unemployment benefits for those already receiving them – jobless people whose unemployment benefits already ran out are still up a creek without any paddle.  So while one in four Americans (possibly as many as one in three) is either unemployed or severely under-employed, there is no income coming in to support people as they continue their never-ending search for work.  This means a lot of hungry people clogging up bread lines at the church food banks who should be devoting their time to looking for work, but now can’t because they have to spend that time begging already overburdened churches for a little bit of food to get them through the next few days without starving.

The proposed corporate tax cuts, which are ridiculous in the face of historically low taxes on corporations (many of which pay no taxes at all)), is another sick joke played on the public.  Reagan’s depraved trickle-down lie, which has been standard political orthodoxy for decades now, has yet to produce jobs for working people, who have watched as the jobs they once had are shipped to third world countries where labor and environmental laws either don’t exist or are even more lax than our own.

The proposed money for infrastructure repair, while a seemingly large amount, isn’t nearly enough to get this monumental task done, and is unlikely to pass the Republican-dominated House.  Even if that were to happen, Obama made no mention of exactly how such projects would be paid for, a critical omission in his speech.  They would have to be paid for by ending America’s wars and taxing the wealthy, neither of which Washington politicians, including and especially Obama, are willing to do.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Obama’s latest EPIC FAILURE.  It’s too little, too late, and serves as merely the next step in gutting what’s left of our safety net.