Too true!

Well said! As Progressives we need to follow our beliefs - not a "cult of Personality". We also can't simpy accept "our side" when they step out of line or decide to bow to big monied interests over WE THE PEOPLE. We revolted against Bush when he did it and now we have to revolt against Obama when he does it. Or we're the hypocrites we railed against previously. What exactly has Obama done that is different than the Bush Admin?

It seems to be dawning on progressives that Obama is not one of them. I'm still waiting for the crowd to come to the obvious conclusion that if you want a progressive government, you first need to vote for one.

It is not unknown that President Obama didn't always support those who supported him; at least that is the "take" on his days at the Harvard Law Review. So, if you want acknowledgement and action, then raise an aweful lot of hell. President Obama seems to not accept or acknowledge the not so secret fact, that the GOP and the "conservatives" are NOT going to support him no matter what he does. SO I SAY, FORGET THEM! DO WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE WITH THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE. . .in the long run, your supporters will likely stay with you; display leadership, which is not the same as appeasment. The obstructionist and bomb-throwers do not care unless they get their way. So make them irrelevant.

"Barack Obama has ties to the progressive movement, but he is an inherently cautious - and, at times, frightened - politician. He is first and foremost desperate to appease his opposition, even if his opposition is political terrorists who can never be appeased. And that's especially true as the progressive movement refuses to "make him do it" - that is, refuses to put real, organized and even unfriendly pressure on him to deliver."

True enough David. But it's easier for the super-rich few to oppose him than for the rest of us to push him. All they have to do is write some big checks. We don't have that kind of money so we have to hit the streets, put our asses on the line and hope the oligarch's MSM gives us a tiny mention on the bottom of page 5. It's much easier and safer for Obama and other pols to take the money they offer than to act on the demands and insults of the rabble.

But there is a fairly safe and simple solution for Obama: Put each contentious issue up to a vote and let the people make these decisions instead of compromised politicians. It's a proven method used by the resource poor, per-capita income rich Swiss.

The answer is ...

Vote Green ...

No candidate on the ballot ?

Write one in ...

And if the Republicans win ?

It is better to fight an enemy than get stabbed in the back
by your so-called friends ...

Barack Obama has ties to the progressive movement, but he is an inherently cautious - and, at times, frightened - politician.

STOP BEING POLITE!!!!!!! Barack Obama is a miserable coward. Unfortunately for him (but much more so for us) he became president after an eight year slow motion coup d'etat that left in its wake the entirely believable possibility of a fascist United States emerging out of the Republican locust swarm. Obama's job was to save democracy, the constitution and the rule of law in this nation. It would have meant jeopardizing his reelection and standing up to the pigs in no uncertain terms, as Joseph Welch once brilliantly stood up to Joe McCarthy. We have no such luck with this slick, supercillious technocrat of BS. If the United States disappears down the dark maw of dictatorship, Obama will have played a pivotal role.

I think it was very clear prior to the election that Obama had NO "ties" to the progressive movement beyond those he needed to become elected, which is what Paul Street and a few others of note wrote about very often, but which found no airing on CD or other "progressive" sites other than ZNET. Clearly, Sirota and those like him, deliberately chose to ignore--or throw under the bus--the very well doccumented arguments about Obama that predicted he'd do just what he's doing. So, the sense of betrayal is actually false. The public was conned once again by a sociopath and its allies in the Propaganda System. Date-Rape is probably a better term. I refused to be date-raped by Obama, and it is for that crime as well as many others that he ought to be viewed as Public Enemy #1, right up there with the Plutocracy whose bidding he's so obviously doing.

I've never voted Green before, and faulted them for Al Gore's loss in 2000. However, eight years of Bush later and Beck is calling the shots in the Obama White House, and I'm ready for Sirota's perscription: its time for progressives to join together and exert power the way it must be exerted, by twisting arms. Is it time for the Green Party now?

I so wished that Van Jones would have stood his ground and refused to step down. He let Obama off the hook too easily. Go out fighting and make that "empty suit" in the White House have to answer for this fiasco. Will this White House stand up to anybody???

progressives are to the democrats in 2009 as evangelicals were to the republicans in 2001 -- 'we love your votes, but we are not going to let your opinions affect our policy'

I posted the following on the previous CD video piece about the Van Jones Keynote at Powershift 09.

If David Sirota is reading CD I'd welcome his (or anyone's) comment on points 3,4 and 5 below:

As an outsider let me make a few points for consideration. I watched the Powershift 09 video and also the CNN debate with Sirota and Frum.

1) The Powershift 09 speech was a very radical one that would scare 95% of corporations and especially the energy and military industrial complex. It was perhaps too good a speech for political survival, although Van Jones did, if only by absence, pass on doing anything in his generation. Instead the speech tended to pass that responsibility on to the audience -those in the next generation.

2) Regarding the CNN debate and Van Jones' 'mistake' of questioning Bush's possible knowledge beforehand of the event -given the Bush administration's false linking of 9/11 to Iraq, the falsification of intelligence on WMD's and the hundreds of thousands killed, I think any rational person would question that event.

How come with the world's biggest defence force and the most radar coverage anywhere, that not a single plane was scrambled even with the 20 minute delay between tower hits?
I think these are very valid technical questions for any rational person and have nothing to connect with any conspiracy theories or being labelled a 'truther'.

3) How can a question -about whether an undeniably corrupt and lying administration like Bush's knew something- constitute a lie? It doesn't even make grammatical or syntactical sense. Yet Frum gets away with that unchallenged. I must confess to being disappointed by Sirota.

4) In typical binary blinker no-nuance Right-wing fashion Frum spews a pile of non-seqiturs. How on earth do you logically get from questioning an event to being labelled a terrorist? Regardless of your political viewpoint, none of Frum's venom would hold any water in even a shallow analysis.

5) Whether Van Jones was targeted by virtue of being Black or not, I am not sure that it was a good tactic by Sirota to raise that. It is a very difficult thing to prove what anyone else is thinking and the racist label has been so over-used that it has just become an automatic political insult viewed without much credibility. In the discussion it just muddied the waters and became an unwelcome diversion along with the terrorist epithet.

6) A Left-Right debate is really not very helpful. Not moderated, it just descended into a shouting match and it was impossible to hear what either was saying towards the end. That's CNN for you.

Join the movement to draft Van Jones for governor of California:

http://bit.ly/DraftVanJonesCA

Mr. Sirota,
When I worked for the Federal Aviation Administration, I managed to move from air trafic controller to computer programming for about 5 years. When writing a large, complex patch (a program that is inserted into the main air traffic control computer program), you debug it with what we called the first pass, second pass, third pass, etc.
What's this got to do with the President and health care legislation?
You are okay on the first pass. The program crashes on the second pass and forget the third pass.
The flaw in your logic is the premise that the President is timid. The President has no goal of achieving any but the most superficial health care reform. Get this: HE DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN! He's an excellent actor. He's begolden to elite corporate interests, period.
Now let me tell you what is happening.
1) You, Mr. Sirota, have been suckered.
2) The program you propose is acceptable as a PR film but not as workable reality for the Insurance corporations.
3) "WE" don't have to "get to worK" to "make" anyone do anything. We have representatives that will do what the corporations want and a block of progressive representatives that will do what the people need.
4) It's high fucking time that those progressives in congress voted their conscience and stopped worrying about politics. If they need their hand held now then they shouldn't be there at all.
5) The ones that need to worry are the corporate whores and prissy Wall Street Journal assholes that bow down to their situational ethics statue six times a day (after they've bowed to the statue labeled "The Number").

This isn't rocket science. The ONLY people in government loyal to the people of the USA are the progressives. The rest are traitors, pure and simple. The Progressives are the nucleus of a strong populist political party. They must vote as a block and block any legislation that is the least bit corrupt, period. You should be screaming for HR676 or a robust Medicare from the cradle to the grave. Anything else is not acceptable.

No, the invented snarky word "begolden" wasn't a typo.

While I dont carry water for the Rockefeller Rangelers,
I would say that, walking into the white house jan 20
requires quite a bit of HELP that can only come from party insiders. No candidate no matter how popular comes in with
outsiders and takes over...he/she is confronted with an
institutionalzed cadre of experienced BULLSHITTERS who
are quite accustomed to lying for a living. Thats what
'top-secret' means , you're in on the SHAM.

I think its high time the Progressives in this country acknowledge that in fact most of our belief's are Socialist in nature and our frustrations with the Democratic Party is because the Party is not "leftist" enough to suit us. I believe we need to embrace the Political reality of Socialism for the good of this country. We need to stop being afraid of being branded as Socialist's and instead embrace the term and hold it close to our hearts as a means to get this country moving again for the People of this Country. I'm proud of being a Socialist as it feels good to work for real a Party that does care for the average citizen of this country and not the Capitalist Corporations.

"we have to start thinking and acting like a real movement"

Mr. Sirota, your progressive movement isn't really progressive. It's pseudo-progressive. If it were truly progressive, Pelosi's constituents would have elected Cindy Sheehan. If it were really progressive, your movement would have put the big nudge to the Demoks by handing Ralph Nader 15% of the vote in 2008.

Your movement isn't progressive. It's pseudo-progressive. Its members are busy fondling their Lexus SUV brochures and don't have time to "make O'Bamba do it". They want to continue to buy those new SUVs every two years. So really they got what they want - a servant of capital in the oval orifice to maintain "business as usual".

Van Jones' comments were far outside the mainstream and of moderates that elected Obama. He should never had gotten that job in the first place. Progressives are a small minority.

Right on, David! Now is the "no further retreat" line for us progressives, and for the majority of Americans who share our views and goals. I worked hard for Obama, and predicted he has the talent to become one of our greatest ever presidents. But my hope was based on his talent, his vision and his adoption of change as his mantra. Since his inauguration, though, he has fawned far too much on bipartisanship (impossible given Republican hostility) and on the cries for "moderation" by pundits and centrist Democrats. Now is the time for him to draw a firm line in the sand and show unflinching leadership - - in the manner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt - - and Harry Truman. That is why he was elected! That is what the majority of Americans want!

It is not as if you couldn't see this coming even before the election. Our current president was pretty far down on my wish list of candidates as a result. True, he is superior to the abomination that preceded him, but sadly he, like almost all elected Democrats, tends to be naive, gullible, wishywashy, uncommitted, lazy, timid, ineffectual and far more interested in simply remaining in office than actually doing anything with the office.

I'd vote for a Republican in a second if, say, Teddy Roosevelt or even Nelson Rockefeller perhaps were still alive. To bad every single last liberal, brave, principled and fair minded Republicans have been purged from that party. Unfortunately, that party has nothing left but truly scary, frightfully ignorant, and aggressively arrogant ideological demagogues who hate and fear everything and everybody in sight.

I wonder if Bill Moyers could be persuaded to run? Maybe he would fight for liberal and progressive principles so desperately needed at the moment.