It is beautiful out, warm and sunny and only the faintest of breezes. Needless to say, I ran outside, gutting out four miles and feeling pretty good about a 10-mile week.
Another day, another disappointment for progressives (this time, oil drilling), another reason to stop pretending that the Obama administration is something that it’s not.
Consider this an open letter to my liberal comrades, those who still believe that Barack Obama offers the kind of hope he promised during his campaign. He is better than the alternatives were, at least the major party candidates, but he is proving not to be a transformational president. In fact, he is nothing more than a milder, more liberal version of Bill Clinton, a member of the corporate status quo interested only in tinkering around the edge.
Liberal friends, as yourself these questions. Would you support a candidate who:
You want to say “no,” but you would be lying to yourself, your continued, unquestioning loyalty to the president regardless of his actions is proof of the lie. Yes, Obama is better than McCain, Palin, even Hillary Clinton, but that is not enough, should not be enough.
Core principles matter. We have to show the president and Congress what our core principles are and make it clear they have to respect them, take them seriously and start building policy based on our core principles and not those of the corporate order.
Dispatches this week offers the saga of Dwight Gooden: From tragedy to farce — a Met fan’s thoughts.
A taste from my latest Grassroots column in The Progressive Populist:
Liberals have ceded the moment. The liberal establishment has been operating too long in the thin air of amoral political expediency, standing with the Democrats and the president even when the Democrats and president have sold out progressive goals for short-term political gain.
On financial reform, the environment, job creation and, most spectacularly, healthcare reform, the liberal establishment has looked over the political landscape, identified potential obstacles and punted.
This has allowed the tea-partiers to gain a foothold, to push a narrative about government that paints it as a foreign, antagonistic force. Government, however, is not inherently bad. The problem in the United States is that the corporate order has taken it over and the citizenry has lost the ability to set priorities and influence its actions.
To read more, go to The Progressive Populist.
The way to address our energy needs is not to drill, but to alter our energy needs, to conserve and find alternative sources.
And yet, President Barack Obama announced a plan today to open more land to drilling with this contradictory claim:
“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling,” Mr. Obama said. “But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy.”
So, according to the president, we are going to move from an economy that runs on fossil fuels to on that runs on newly drilled fossil fuels? Is the only goal to reduce dependence on foreign oil? Or is it to move away from greenhouse-gas-producing fuel sources?
But this may not be about clean energy at all. As the Times story suggests, this may have been more about prospecting for votes for a relatively weak climate change bill, the benefits of which may end up being offset by the damage done to our oceans — will a rather paltry amount of oil to show for our efforts.
Oil company executives and geologists expressed guarded enthusiasm for the president’s initiative. But experts said it was impossible to know how much oil and gas the new tracts contain, in part because some existing data is based on 30-year-old studies.
Even at the high end of government estimates, the new production, if and when it occurs, will displace only a small fraction of the oil and gas the country now imports and consumes.
And that just seems a bad tradeoff and should make the voters who viewed Obama as a savior question their allegiance to him, a point made by Frank Tursi, a preservationist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation:
“It all leaves the president with a delicious irony and that is: In order to garner support for a bill that is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the administration is willing to expand the very substance that causes those emissions in the first place,” Mr. Tursi said. “Pandering for votes that rely on a polluting fuel of the past is not the kind of change many of us expected.”
