If this is true, Obama disappoints me. The Bush administration is toxic, and American needs a clean break with it.

Joanne sat nervously by the fire, this time we really will hold his feet to the flames, no more shenanigans, she thought. Suddenly Zoey and Tim emerged from the forest, panting, out of breath with looks of stunned bewilderment. What happened, asked Joanne? Where is he? It's the damnest thing I ever saw, said Zoey, as soon as we thought we got hold of him he slipped right out of his suit, just like them trick clown suits you see in the circus. Yeah, said Tim, and he had another underneath. We tried to grab him again but he run off to the right side of the road, right into the thicket. I think we lost him.

Damn, said Joanne.

They sat in silence watching the coals.

Zoey?, said Tim, Yeah? Lets go home, the fires going out and it's gettin cold.

Joanne stayed behind just awhile longer, threw one more log on the fire, and caught a shooting star out of the corner of her eye. Man those burn out fast she thought. Sometimes you ain't sure if you really seen em or not.

Every time Obama makes a new appointment or is about to make one, change Obama-style looks more and more like the same old obsequious concessions to Empire's dark and predatory forces we have seen for generations of USian presidents.

That those appointments are called pragmatic only confirms my worst fears about Obamarama, for isn't 'pragmatic' the standard adjective that has been used for decades to describe the maneuvers of Realpolitik?

Change my ASS

And to think I was excited about voting, excited about change, excited about Obama and all we've gotten from Barack is the absolute worst cabinet he could have possibly picked! Chillary, Gates, Summers- W would be proud!

What a bunch of LIES we were fed! This ain't change.

I'm sorry America, I thought we had hope. I'll never get excited about politics again. Lousy piece of crap choices.

Are all you naive Obama supporters paying attention?

We told you so.

But nooooooo. You had to vote for a main party candidate. Sucker!

Next time vote for someone who you truly support, not someone who looks different, has nice teeth, and spits out nice sounding slogans, like "Enough" and "Change", praying to the tooth-fairy that he will do what you want.

Yes, you had plenty of other choices.

You have four years to learn your lesson, then you'll be tested again. Only next time study harder so that you don't flunk like you did this time.

Just hope that your world isn't extinguished before the next election. Thanks to you and your naive two party vote more missiles are being deployed along the Russian border. Happy Bar-B-Q day.

This is shaping up to be an interesting machine.

Talk about things that make you go Hmm.

Interesting. There must be something about him we don't know. I trust Obama, so far he has assembled an All Star team. This really makes the plot thicken.

Its a good choice to retain Gates to provide some continuity at the defense dept. Don't forget Gates was brought in to clean up the mess left by Rumsfield and it was a real mess.

Take a closer look at his choices.

I posted this late yesterday, but I'd like to get a few more people thinking about it if I could.

This doesn't really belong on this string, but when I left the Food Bank yesterday we were out of almost everything and nothing was coming in.

PLEASE donate to your local Food Bank, I understand this is not just happening to us. Giving is down everywhere for obvious reasons, but even one can would help. Please give what you can.

To any that are offended by my posting off point, my apologies.

The very first sentence of the article is in error. Obama was not consistently opposed to the war in Iraq.

Perhaps the successful elimination from the debates of the two actual anti-war Democratic candidates, Kucinich and Gravel, has successfully clouded the writer's memory or perception.

Now is there any question that the new chimp belongs to the same chimp club as the old chimp? He's surrounded himself with neocons. The audacity of business as usual! God Bless the United States of America!

I voted for McKinney. Glad I didn't fall for this crap. To think I was excited for a day or two after the election.

Change won't come from above. Voting for the president has about as much of an impact as a good fart. Might as well protest the farce and vote for a real message of change, a la the Green Party or some other candidate who sees the forest for the trees.

It's not about being a purest, it's about not having your head so far up your ass you actually believe that the Democrats represent anything more than a continuation of the same system that is at the root of War, Poverty, Inequality, and Ecocide. Neoliberal Corporate Imperialism.

How many species went extinct while we endlessly sobbed about "change"?

How many innocent Iraqis and Afghans died while we went to the polls to participate in this farce of choosing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum?

So the Greens didn't "spoil" your precious "vote" what will you do know what things don't go quite as planned? Who will you scapegoat for the continued imperialism?

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" -Epicurus

For those like myself who have excellant observational skills we weren't fooled by Obama's santimonious/pious razzledazzle, silly sloganeering, post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, buzz words and red herrings, absurd claims, spins, and saber rattling. He was, in effect, simply following the SOP that all politicians engage in "on the stump."

Obama's nothing more than a glorified standard bearer for the Chicago School of Economics (disastrous) free market policy and a willing sycophant for Corporate America - just like his predecessor, the fake president Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr. the Hollywood clown and bad actor, Reagan.

Obama is still far preferable to McCain and, of course, (like almost anyone), Bush. He is, however, no progressive and no pacifist. He's no reformer. He's a transactional leader, not a transformational one as some starry-eyed pundits claim. We can try to nudge Congress and Obama slightly to the left, but we'll be disappointed if we expect too much.

Alex

CHANGE?

FOOL ME ONCE DEMOCRATS

WHAT CHANGE?

It's interesting to note that Obama is now playing the famous "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" routine in defending his choices for cabinet and other staff positions. He's saying in effect that the views of these men and women, however much they might be criticized by the nit-pickers (us), are really irrelevant since he alone is the one with the "vision" that will determine the actions of his Administration (kind of a nicer version of Bush's self-definition as "the decider.") He seems to be envisioning his "team" as characterized primarily not by the vision of its members, but their "experience" and their talent in getting things (HIS vision) to work. Somehow I don't see folks the likes of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Bill Richardson, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker (or even Rahm Emanuel for that matter) as mere "techno-crats," chosen for their experience and their abilities to get things done. Obama may not be as clueless as G.W. Bush was about the "vision thing," but it's hard to see much vision in either domestic and foreign policy will rise over the horizon, when Obama's views about these matters continue in the transition as in the campaign, to veer away from any specifics of his vision. Actually I think we need to look very closely to the men and women behind that curtain who represent the next presidential administration and whose "visions" are a matter of public record.

Nader was right, Obamamaniacs. Say it with me.

And now Obama has just appointed another criminal---Gates committed felonies during Iran Contra and was never prosecuted. For a Harvard Law graduate to do this is just pathetic. Obama has already violated the oath he hasn't even taken yet.

Barack Obama was for single payer before he came out against it.

Apparently in a effort to reassure us progressives who're alarmed at, and/or disgusted by, Obama's top level appointees thus far, Thomas More's post above counsels us to take a "closer look" at Obama's appointees, by way of 'reassurance.

Thomas More doesn't say which appointees we should look closer at, but I assume he means a wider sampling -- not just the top slots.

OK.

And true enough: if you check-out the NYTimes webpage that tracks all of this, then you do see that some of Obama's second-tier to mid-level cabinet department/agency appointees (or the Obama transition team's announced prospects for such) appear to be an improvement over the hyper-Right hacks that Bush already has sitting in these positions.

But, since these lower level personnel slots don't formulate final policy recommendations to the president -- nor have much useful power beyond directions from their departmental chiefs -- Obama's filling of them with merely Non-
Bush types can just as easily be seen as his attempt at faux-progressive window dressing -- a gambit designed to blunt criticism by 'the Left.'
And we have to put 'the Left' in quotes because even ITS centerline is now so absurdly far to the Right in America, that Obama & Co. can easily claim to be 'progressive' simply by moving one micrometer southward of Bush & Co. -- who have been for eight years, several miles to the Right of Attila.

In the end, in order to estimate Obama's actual intentions, I thinks it's only meaningful to look at who he appoints to his top-level advisory and cabinet/agency positions -- the inner circle power fonts surrounding the Executive.
So far, every single one of Obama's appointments at these top levels have been either a neo-liberal or a neo-con (these two terms, themsevles, being artificial distinctions concocted to obscure the reality of a one-party, oligarchial state.)

Change We Can Believe In...?
Maybe.
But so far Obama's set directions look like nothing other than the staged imagery of a deception of theatre: I.e., Change We Should NOT Believe In except as theatre.

It can be argued that we progrressives need to give Obama and the bolstered Democrat Congress a reasonable amount time, in-situ, to un-bend the Bush-deepened distortions.
It can be argued that Obama and the Dems are merely, rela-world-cleverly intuiting the need to momentarily/deceptively reassure the very same Right which they mean to set off-guard and finally trump, thence to pursue the real,needed, promised progressive changes.

But as this longtime-played game of deceptively re-packaged US Oligarchy-empowering bullshit goes on and on and on, one election cycle afer another, all Obama supporters and all counselors of patience in Obama's favor, like Thomas More, have an obligation to publicly state what the limits of their, and by implication, the Peoples' limits of patience and credulity should be.

What should be, for example, the reliably actionated benchmarks of an Obama-directed Change We Can Believe In?
And how long, in the opinion of folks like Thomas More, should a reasonably progressive public be expected to wait for such reliable indicators to manifest?

I think what Mr. More and his fellow Obama apologists have to keep in mind is the hard-wired but disasterous human tendency of average citizens/average people, to bind their personal anxiety over misfitted public leadership abuses through an ever deepening personal denial of what such misfitted leaders are actually doing to them.

One can observe the same kind of anxiety-binding dynamics at work in the victims of families whose pathological dynamics generate both abusers and endlessly-hopeful, abuse-excusing victims: Tomorrow my abusers will relent if only I don't complain so much: If only I believe harder, against all evidence and common sense, that they mean well and hold legitimate authority over me.