Wall Street-created recession increased poverty in most states

From the "gosh, you don't say" file. How in the world could anyone in Congress or the White House not see this? When polls show anger across the US, it's because such an obvious problem has been ignored. Caving to the crazies in the GOP was not viewed positively by anyone outside of White House advisers. The latest tone is good to hear but we're going to need a lot more of it and then some action if we're going to see this ugly result turned around.

Poverty rates increased in almost all U.S. states and the District of Columbia over the course of the economic recession, with the worst spike in the South, according to a congressional report released on Monday.

In the South the number of people living below the poverty threshold grew by 3.3 million, the Joint Economic Committee found, comparing U.S. Census data from 2007 with the decennial statistics recently released. The South also still has the highest poverty rate, at 16.9 percent.

The number below the poverty line grew by 2.4 million people in the West and 1.6 million in the Midwest. In the Northeast, the ranks of the poor rose by 912,000 in those three years.

Read the rest of this post...

President lectured blacks as well about their "grumbling"

I realize the President thinks this is good politics.

President Obama's fiery speech to the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Foundation's dinner on Saturday evening drew a stiff rebuke Monday from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who questioned whether it was warranted for the president to tell black voters to "stop grumbling" and "put on your marching shoes."

"Some of his words were not, I think, appropriate and surprised me a little bit," Waters said Monday morning on CBS. "I was curious about it."

He should have learned by now not to trust his gut on what makes good politics. He's ticking people off. And judging by the increased frequency of these outbursts, it's clearly part of a coordinated campaign strategy that some brainiac came up with.

The President needs to be taking advantage of the GOP's insanity to rally everyone to his side, not condescend everyone to his side.  The condescension thing has already been tried, and failed miserably.  Let's not try it again.  There's too much at stake. Read the rest of this post...

Supreme Court could rule by next spring on constitutionality of health care reform

The Justice Department made a move today that increases the likelihood of the court deciding health care reform's constitutionality before the election. I'm guessing that a few things are at play, hopefully both. 1) The administration really thinks this is the best way to win in court. And 2) having HCR decided before the election has a few positives: A) It precludes a future/possible Romney/Perry administration from litigating the case next year; and B) If it's struck down, it gives them something to run on (i.e., we need to change this Supreme Court) and fix the law so that next time HCR holds up in court. Read the rest of this post...

White House suggests "boo"-gate shows GOP don’t have what it takes to be commander-in-chief

Via Matt Negrin at Politico:

“I think the president was particularly struck by a question asked by a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ when he was booed by audience members and not a single candidate for president, people who think they have what it takes to be commander-in-chief, said anything about that when he is there defending our country,” [White House spokesman Jay] Carney said.

The White House spokesman speaking out an issue like this is not insignificant, especially with such strong words. It comes on the heels of the President speaking out on it yesterday, and of ABC reporting that while Santorum, Hunstman and Johnson criticized the boos (after the fact), Romney, Perry, Bachmann, Gingrich and Cain are still refusing to denounce the audience members who booed a US soldier serving in combat.

And remember, as ABC reported earlier, several candidates on the stage heard the boos, and one of them is certain the other candidates heard them too.

But several other presidential candidates told ABC News that they did hear the boos ring through the Orange County Convention Center... [Former NM Governor Gary] Johnson added that he could hear the boos from the stage and believes that the other candidates – despite Santorum’s denial – could as well.

As White House spokesman Carney said above, some commander in chief any of these Republicans would be when they can't even defend their own troops.

Over 8700 people have signed our open letter to the GOP candidates demanding they apologize for this affront to our troops.  Please sign it and send it around. Read the rest of this post...

Frank Rich: In praise of extremism

Thank God he's back. Though, Frank is a bona fide member of the Cassandra Club that I, much of the Netroots, and a lot of other people we like, such as Krugman and Stiglitz, belong to as well.

Should Perry get the GOP nomination, he could capsize like Goldwater on Election Day. That’s the universal prediction of today’s Restons. But maybe he won’t. Perry would have a cratered economy to exploit, unlike Goldwater, who ran in a boom time when unemployment was under 6 percent and the GDP was up 5.8 percent from the previous year. Whatever Perry’s 2012 electoral fate, his lightning ascent is final proof, if any further is needed in the day of the tea-party GOP, that a bipartisan consensus in America is as unachievable now as it was after 1964.

This is the harsh reality Obama has been way too slow to recognize. But in his post–Labor Day “Pass this jobs plan!” speech before Congress, the lip service he characteristically paid to both Republican and Democratic ideas gave way to an unmistakable preference for Democratic ideas. Soon to come were his “Buffett rule” for addressing the inequities of the Bush tax cuts and a threat to veto any budget without new tax revenues to go with spending cuts. When he tied it all up in a Rose Garden mini-tantrum pushing back against the usual cries of “class warfare,” it was enough to give one hope. No, not 2008 fired-up hope, but at least the trace memory of it. Should Obama not cave—always a big if with this president—he might have a serious shot at overcoming the huge burdens of a dark national mood and flatlined economy to win reelection.

Frank Rich on pursuing independent voters:

Obama, after all, is exactly that president. For the good deed of trying to defuse partisan tensions, he has been punished with massive desertions by the very independents who are supposed to love his pacifism. In the last Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll, his support among them had fallen by half since he took office, from 52 percent to 26 percent. Perhaps that’s because these independents, who represent roughly 36 percent of voters, are not the monochromatic ideological eunuchs they’re purported to be. One polling organization that regularly examines them in depth, Pew, has found that nearly half of independents are in fact either faithful Democrats (21 percent) or Republicans (26 percent) who simply don’t want to call themselves Democrats and Republicans. (Can you blame them?) Another 20 percent are “doubting Democrats” and another 16 percent are “disaffected” voters, respectively anti-business and anti-government, angry and populist rather than mildly centrist. The remaining 17 percent are what Pew calls “disengaged”—young and uneducated Americans, four fifths of whom don’t vote anyway. There’s nothing about the makeup of any segment of these “all-important independent voters” that suggests bipartisan civility has anything whatsoever to do with winning their support.

To pursue this motley crew of the electorate as if it had a coherent political profile is nuts.

You can't always reconcile your differences:

Obama can’t change his DNA. He is by definition a conciliatory man of the middle: as a black man raised in white America, as a mediator among warring political factions at The Harvard Law Review, as a community organizer, as a child of divorce. But sometimes blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives, and moms and dads cannot reconcile their differences. Sometimes the negotiations and compromises that are the crux of politics are nonoperative. This is one of those times. The other side has no interest in striking grand bargains or even small ones. It wants not so much to reform government, a worthy goal, as to auction off its parts and distribute the proceeds to its corporate backers. It’s a revolution beyond the one even Goldwater or Reagan imagined. They didn’t talk about seceding from the union.

Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: Paul Ryan is breaking the Social Contract, not Obama

With all this talk of "class warfare" in response to President Obama's "minimum tax on millionaires" proposal, you knew that Paul Ryan would weigh in:



There are some obvious deceptions in that clip, like comparing the U.S. rate on individuals and actual small businesses (like your plumber) to the German rate on giants like Siemens or DeutscheBank. Then there's the ubiquitous "job creators," and on and on.

But Ryan rings the class warfare bell loud and clear. So Paul Krugman weighs in on whether this really is class warfare or not (my emphasis throughout):

It [is], of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.

Then the Professor looks at what happened to income. He nicely compares income growth in the post-war years through 1979 (hmm, pre-Reagan) with income growth in the years 1979–2005. And he notices a difference:

Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

But wait, what about the rich. Shared scrifice, right?

Meanwhile, over the same period [1979–2005], the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent [0.01%] of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million. ... [T]here has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.

Wealth: That's the folks who go golfing between days at the office (if any). Work: That's the folks who foolishly vote Wealth into office.

Some of you knew this stuff. (Actually, all of you who don't vote for Wealth know most of it.) But it's nice that it's getting specific mention in those golden NY Times column inches (that wasn't a blog post but an actual column, as those of you who clicked through found out).

Some fast take-aways:

■ Props to Obama for even raising the subject. (Now go get 'em. You're impressing the voters, remember? Voters like touchdowns, not missed field goals.)

■ Ryan's a perfect example of the 180 Tell: What I'm doing, I accuse you of doing. That's how you know what I'm up to.

■ Note that the 180 Tell always incorporates the Mirror-Mirror Counterattack (a chess move developed by Capablanca). Mirror-Mirror: I can always dilute your charge by over-using it against you. (Hippies smartly called that "co-opting.")

■ And Ryan's the perfect guy to make the charge. He's one of Wall Street's favorite congressmen — which is why you're going to see his mug for the rest of your adult life.

Did I mention, props to Obama? Yes, it's still me; the point is valid. And if he's only managed to paint himself into a corner, it's a corner I want to see him in.

GP Read the rest of this post...

SEC may seek legal action against S&P;

Standard & Poors and the ratings agencies are still the 98 pound weaklings of Wall Street compared to the banks, but taking action against them is still a good idea. Obviously it would be better if the SEC was taking legal action against one of banks that triggered the global economic crisis, but that doesn't seem realistic at this point. Between the general discomfort with confrontation the administration plus the SEC employees always keeping an eye out for a job promotion to Wall Street, nobody should get their hopes up.

The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering recommending civil legal action against the Standard & Poor's debt ratings agency over its rating of a 2007 collateralized debt offering.

Collateralized debt obligations, also known as CDOs, are securities tied to multiple underlying mortgage loans. The CDO generally gains value if borrowers repay. But if borrowers default, CDO investors lose money. Soured CDOs have been blamed for making the 2008 financial crisis worse. Ratings agencies have been accused of being lax in rating CDOs.

The SEC staff said it may recommend that the commission seek civil money penalties, disgorgement of fees or other actions.

S&P; should still rest easy, as there is a lot of history that suggests a relatively easy settlement that gives them blanket protection from any new legal action is already on the table. It gives the administration an opportunity to say "we fought Wall Street" without any real consequences for anyone. Read the rest of this post...

Obama slams GOP for booing gay soldier. A lesson in how fighting back works.

I reported earlier on AMERICAblog Gay that the President slammed the Republicans yesterday for Thursday night's Fox/Google debate in which the GOP audience booed a US soldier serving in Iraq simply because he was gay.

At his first fundraiser in San Jose, President Obama took aim at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, without naming the Texas governor by name, and was critical of the recent GOP debates. He said the 2012 election will be "a contest of values."

"Some of you here may be folks who actually used to be Republicans but are puzzled by what's happened to that party, are puzzled by what's happening to that party. I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately? You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change," he said, to applause. "It's true. You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care and booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay.

"That's not reflective of who we are," Mr. Obama said. "This is a choice about the fundamental direction of our country. 2008 was an important direction. 2012 is a more important election."

Well, someone posted that blog post to Reddit (which has a decidedly liberal community), and it's currently the number one post on that site, and brought us about 20,000 new visitors in the last two hours.

Not only in this story a win for Democratic politicians - and more should be jumping on it - but hitting back is also, apparently, a win for the President.  It got the left riled up.  And nowadays, how often can the Dems claims that they've riled liberals up, in a good way? Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: Europe on a death march to the sea?

OK, that's my headline. Krugman's is much more uplifting:

Euro Zone Death Trip

There, better?

This is not good at all, folks, and it's not just a Europe story. As Joe Stiglitz told John and Chris last month, the U.S. is exposed to a European collapse via its banks (what did they loan? what derivatives do they hold?) and also via its consumer exports.

For example, here's Ben Bernanke saying that U.S. banks hold about $200 billion in European credit default swaps (CDS's). Are U.S. banks on the right side of those bets? And even if they are, what is the risk that the other side will actually pay off (something called "counter-party risk")?

Note also that if U.S. banks lost a good chunk of their $200bn, French and German banks would lose more, and that would ripple to our shores as well. I think this just scratches the surface.

Back to Krugman. He's been ringing this bell for a while, and now he thinks things have become inevitable — not because the situation in most countries can't be saved, mind you; but because the Europeans won't do what's needed to save it.

There are several segments to this column. It deserves a full read. Here's the part on where-we-are-now:

The introduction of the euro in 1999 led to a vast boom in lending to Europe’s peripheral economies, because investors believed (wrongly) that the shared currency made Greek or Spanish debt just as safe as German debt. Contrary to what you often hear, this lending boom wasn’t mostly financing profligate government spending — Spain and Ireland actually ran budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis, and had low levels of debt. Instead, the inflows of money mainly fueled huge booms in private spending, especially on housing.

But when the lending boom abruptly ended, the result was both an economic and a fiscal crisis. Savage recessions drove down tax receipts, pushing budgets deep into the red; meanwhile, the cost of bank bailouts led to a sudden increase in public debt. And one result was a collapse of investor confidence in the peripheral nations’ bonds.

Many of those CDS's mentioned above are against those bonds.

According to Krugman, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal — each for different reasons — are unsalvageable. But Spain and Italy could survive, given a "favorable external environment — specifically, a strong overall European economy with moderate inflation."

Will Europe get that climate? In a word, No.

Krugman closes by dissing Europe's (and America's) favorite bête noir, the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic. But that's not what they (and we) should be looking at, he says:

Yet they almost never talk about a much more relevant example: the policies of Heinrich Brüning, Germany’s chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose insistence on balancing budgets and preserving the gold standard made the Great Depression even worse in Germany than in the rest of Europe — setting the stage for you-know-what.

He doesn't expect a result as bad as "you-know-what". But he sees no reason for optimism.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Are you disappointed with Obama simply because you’re a racist?

Are you disappointed with Obama simply because you’re a white racist and he's black? Unlikely. Because if we were all white racists, we wouldn't have supported Barack Obama in the first place. And we did. Far more than we probably should have.

But there's an article going around, in the recent edition of the Nation, suggesting that "white" progressives (always informative for someone to judge you racist simply based on the color of your skin) are upset with the president because of a subtle form of racism that expects blacks to achieve more than similarly placed whites. Her comparison: Bill Clinton vs Barack Obama. Clinton was heartily re-elected, Obama is in trouble. Clinton was white. Obama is black.

To quote the President, "c'mon."

Joan Walsh of Salon does a wonderful job deconstructing the argument. I'll defer to her. Here are a few of the best grafs:

The difference between Clinton's booming economy and today's broken one creates political problems for Obama in another way: He was largely elected due to Americans' fears that we were headed into an abyss, and their faith that he would bring the economic change he promised. Like a pilot taking over with a plane in a nose dive, Obama kept the economy from crashing, but he hasn't lifted it into smooth skies. Maybe it makes me an unrealistic and entitled white progressive -- that's pretty much what black author Ishmael Reed called Obama's white critics -- but I think it's clear that even with a recalcitrant Congress, the president could have done more than he did to dismantle the rigged system that let Wall Street destroy the economy, as well as more to help its casualties.

You don't have to believe every conversation reported in Ron Suskind's "Confidence Men" -- and I don't -- to see that at almost every juncture, the president and his economic team sided with Wall Street and the banks that caused the crash, rather than with the crash's victims. Many politicians share the blame: Democrats and Republicans let the financial sector rig the rules to enrich itself and impoverish the rest of us for the last 30 years. They've gotten increasingly rich by lending us the cash we didn't get in raises since wages stagnated in the 1970s, after the Democrats began running away from economic populism (but that's another, longer story you can read about in my book next year). But given the political opening to challenge that system in 2009, Obama essentially left it intact.

As I wrote last week, Obama appointed the Clinton economic-team veterans most friendly to Wall Street -- most notably, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers -- while excluding and/or marginalizing the Clinton vets most critical, like Robert Reich, Laura Tyson and Gary Gensler. And whether it was the Volcker rule getting commercial banks out of speculative, proprietary trading, or efforts to sell shady derivatives on "exchanges" for the sake of transparency, or a contingency plan to force the toxic behemoth Citibank into bankruptcy, Obama let important reforms either die on the vine or be diluted into ineffectiveness. He had a rare window to change the system radically, and it's now closed.

So yeah, I did expect more of Obama. And probably expected more from him than I expected from Bill Clinton. Under George H.W. Bush I didn't feel like we were losing our country. Under his son, I did. Under George H.W. Bush, we had a recession. Under his son began the worst economic downturn since the great depression. Circumstances demanded that Obama rise to the occasion far more than Clinton, and I'm not entirely sure he has.

A president is judged by how well he handles the hand he's dealt. And if a white president had: proposed a too small stimulus, and then whittled it down even further to appease an angry (and then- irrelevant) GOP; refused to get his hands dirty with the nitty gritty of health care reform for nearly a year, until it was too late (and brokered noxious secret deals with Big Pharma); promised to be a fierce advocate on gay rights and then dawdled far too long; embraced budget cutting mania while the economy was still on life support; and caved time after time to insane Republican demands in order to avoid a fight he might just have been able to win, then yeah, I'd have been ticked at him too.

And I was ticked at Clinton. I still have that copy of the NYT, buried somewhere, containing a photo of me and Gregg Haifley, from our days at the Children's Defense Fund, picketing the Clinton White House over welfare reform. And then there was the time during the 1993 (gay) March on Washington when we all put plastic doctors' gloves atop the points of the White House fence in order to protest the Secret Service's then-absurd policy on (not) welcoming people with AIDS. So yeah, we annoyed Bill Clinton too (and I'm sure his wife wasn't very pleased with me either about 3 years ago, and last time I checked, she's white too).

And I remember, in the middle of the impeachment, telling a friend that I didn't want Clinton impeached, but I did want him to just go away.  Plus ça change...

One more thing, since the author of the Nation piece claims that gays were happier with Clinton than we are with Obama, and that this too is allegedly because of our subtle racism.  The Obama folks like to claim that Barack Obama has done so much more than Bill Clinton ever did for the gays.  But that's not entirely true.  Bill Clinton had the first openly gay person with AIDS, Bob Hattoy, speak during primetime at his convention in 1992.  It was a huge deal for our community, and it forced the Republicans to have a PWA speak during their convention as well.  Bill Clinton appointed "that damned lesbian" Robert Achtenberg to be an assistant secretary at HUD before it was cool to have an openly gay assistant secretary.  Bill Clinton appointed the first openly gay ambassador, the first White House gay liaison (a job that's been downsized in the Obama White House).  Bill Clinton gladly accepted gay money when Dukakis had openly shunned it ("[A] fundraiser for the Dukakis campaign told Mixner that Governor Dukakis would not accept the million dollars Mixner and his friends planned to raise for him"). Yes, Bill Clinton signed DADT and DOMA - and don't think that the gays didn't hold him account, one of his then- best friends, David Mixner, repeatedly went on TV to castigate the new President for his botched handling of gays in the military, and even got himself arrested outside the White House fence (torpedoing a quite lucrative consulting practice in the process).

So, yes, Bill Clinton signed DADT and DOMA, but he also did a hell of a lot of "firsts" for my community in an era in which it wasn't nearly as easy to be pro-gay as it is today.

President Obama gets big kudos for the repeal of DADT (though he handled it poorly, and it almost didn't happen as a result).  But other than that, I'm hard pressed to come up with as many examples of President Obama using his limited supply of political chits for the gay community.  (Was appointing an openly gay head of OPM really that hard a slog?  No, it wasn't.  That doesn't negate it being a good thing.  But it does negate it being a great thing.  And it's not nearly as big a deal, in context, as appointing Achtenberg and Hormel during the 1990s.)

And that, I think, is a large part of the (more than just gay) dismay with Barack Obama.  He doesn't stick his neck out nearly enough.  Clinton did, while Obama plays it safe.  Clinton eventually became a fighter.  Perhaps Obama can too.  And if he does, I'm happy to remember him fondly as well. Read the rest of this post...

A Christmas card from Troy Davis

The following guest blog post is from Mahwish Khan, who got to know, and corresponded with, with Troy Davis through her class at American University.
_______________

In the fall of 2007, in one of my first classes in the Public Communications program at American University, Professor Gemma Puglisi introduced me -- and 13 others -- to Troy Davis. She came to the class that first day, flummoxed, tired, slightly bleary-eyed as she gave us the background of his case. The next forty minutes were filled with details of a harrowing story of injustice. His case was rife with inconsistencies, rumors of police coercion, and witness recantations. Sadly, it ended with a guilty verdict and many appeals. For nearly twenty years, Troy Davis had been fighting for his life, with his mother and his sister, Martina Correia, loyally by his side.

For those of you who don't know the story, this is how it goes:

A little more than 20 years ago, Davis was convicted of the murder of police officer Mark MacPhail. The crime took place outside a Burger King, and no DNA or other physical evidence was found. Davis was convicted solely on the testimony of nine witnesses. But since the August 1989 shooting, seven of these witnesses have recanted. Several people have said that one of those who testified at Davis's trial, Sylvester "Redd" Coles, has admitted to them that he was the killer.

When our professor finished telling us Davis' story, we were horrified. We decided that our goal for at least the next semester would be to get as much media attention as possible for Troy Davis. Like the dorks that we were (and many of us I’m sure still are – I know I am), we called ourselves “The Davis 14.”

The Washington Post came to do a story about us. The Atlanta Journal Constitution published my professor’s op-ed. Day in and day out, we were pitching stories and we were writing him letters. Being “international” I pitched a story to the International Herald Tribune, to no avail. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who failed. The truth is that nobody knew who Troy Davis was, and it seemed that not many cared for reasons that we’re all too well aware of – reasons that make me too sick to mention. "How is this different than any other story of a man claiming to be innocent on death row?" was probably what many reporters at the time thought.

For his birthday, we sent him a class photo, books, and a card that a friend and I had hand-made. A thank you note soon followed, as did more letters for each of us. He asked about our families, and gave us advice on how to live our lives. Forgiveness was a common theme. The semester ended with a surprise visit from Martina who thanked us for our work. Following is that year’s Christmas card, which I found Friday morning, in a frantic search for his letters:

Dear Mahwish,

May you, family and friends have a Blessed Holiday Season. I’m glad all of you had a chance to meet Martina.

Yes, I knew she would be there but I was sworn to secrecy. :p

Thank you for your card, prayers and support. Hopefully by this time next year I’ll be free to finally meet you and everyone else in Ms. Gemma’s class.

Please take care of yourself and thank you so much.

God Bless You!

Mr. Troy A. Davis

Martina is currently battling cancer, and Troy’s mother passed away earlier this year. Gemma, who I spoke with following Troy's execution, informed me that the coroner wouldn’t release his body until they determined cause of death.

Disheartened, I wrote an email to many of the people I work with, asking them to take a moment of silence for Troy. A colleague soon responded, reminding me that there’s still a fight to be won.

“Don't lose heart,” she wrote, “that's what the bastards want us to do...”

That was the same sentiment in Troy's last letter to his supporters, in which he wrote:

There are so many more Troy Davises. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to stand with you. No matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing, “I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”

Never stop fighting for justice and we will win!

From the San Francisco Bay View: To send his grieving family, who worked so hard for his freedom, your love and condolences, email troyanthonydavis@yahoo.com. Read the rest of this post...

More unfortunate words about progressives from our President

The President, yesterday, at a fundraiser in the San Jose (from the pool report):

Mr. Obama said it's not enough for the supporters in the audience to support him. He said if their friends and neighbors are reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page or watching Fox News the donors at this event need to talk to "push back" on their "inadequate information."

"And in some cases I may need you to have some arguments with our progressive friends," Mr. Obama said.

He said over the last 2.5 years even though he's gotten a lot done a lot of Democrats "get dispirited." He brought up the complaint about health care reform without a public option - "c'mon!" he said. He said he hasn't got everything done on the environmental front because of the economy.

"We're going to have a stark choice in this election. But I have to make sure that our side is as passionate and as motivated and is working just as hard as the folks on the other side because this is a contest of value. This is a choice about who we are and what we stand for and whoever wins this next election is going to set the template for this country for a long time to come."

He told the donors if they believe in a "fact-based" America, they need to work hard for him.

POTUS also quoted "my friend Joe Biden," who likes to say, "Don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative."

Yes, that's the problem.  Too many of us mistook Barack Obama for God.

If the President wants us to believe that he's changed these past few weeks, that he finally understands what he's done wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it, then he needs to stop publicly mocking the people who got him elected. His apparent, ongoing, contempt for his own party is distressing, but far worse, it suggests that he still doesn't get why people are upset with him. And it's going to be awfully difficult for him to change what he doesn't even understand. Read the rest of this post...