If the purpose of the agency is to extort money from financial criminals in exchange for not charging them with crimes well... then Rand is being proven correct at a scary pace. BUT, there is a strong odor here of 'just resist anything that the Kenyan Muslim in the white house does' about the whole thing.

This is certainly true of the moderate republican who would've eaten this up had Bush II proposed it. Presuming the Tea Party caucus believes what it proposes (a big leap, no doubt) it is perfectly logical for them to oppose policy that conflicts with their ideology. When the gulf between the parties is so great regarding the proper role of government why should any compromise be expected, or even desired? Such a compromise would be so watered down as to be unproductive.

huntsman 2012

I read 19 pages of comments about the article Ellis Eamos posted. Apparently anyone on the left is a traitor to speak favorably of Ron Paul vis a vis Obama.

Do progressives really believe that Medicare and Social Security are sustainable over the long term if only we can tax the 1% more? All of this talk of Republicans attempting to destroy the social safety net seems to ignore the pending demographic problems. Is the plan that we open the borders wide open and hope that enough minimum wage immigrants will be able to support the retirement of baby boomers? I guess thats not a terrible idea as long as we don't give them the vote.

i liked the overall message of the article:

what makes Obama progressive are things he has to send to congress, conversely, what he can do w/o congress he is not progressive at all.

what makes Paul progressive are things he could do w/o congress, what makes him unappealing to progressive voters he would have to send to congress anyway.

That was a pretty good piece EE, thanks for it posting it.

I also agree with the what I thought was the overall theme; in order to do what's best for the progressive agenda, voters need to look beyond the team red / team blue name tags and look at what can be accomplished. One of the reasons I flip-flop back and forth between candidates is that I am more interest in my key issue areas (non-location based ticketing, no ticket lotteries, maintaining seniority, etc.) and I follow the person that best aligns with those priorities I find most important in life.

Bush term 3 keeps getting worse every day. Until we blow up the war mongering Republocrat machine we are fucked as a nation and will keep declining.

People joke about Obama being the "messiah" to the left but to many I talk to it really comes across that way. There is no action he can take that they won't defend, even if they were foaming at the mouth when Bush took similar steps to Obama's increasing Presidential power, destroying liberties, waging wars, assassinating US citizens and their families, signing legislation that directly pushes the US towards the security based police state, making the US the battlefield in perpetual conflict, etc. I voted for him and when I talk to other people who are left leaning they just make up excuses, rationalize, blame the right, and the best was to claim that he has to do this yet if he gets re-elected he is going to come out guns blazing looking to roll back all the bullshit that has been going on in Washington for so long. It is blind faith for so many I talk to. I guess you have to blame the servile corporate media that kowtows to Washington for access and runs mostly fluff or distraction pieces to keep people from paying attention to the real issues. Not sure what is worse, our government or our mass media. We have a system that regardless of who we vote for does the same thing in the end.

Maybe one day we will start to interact with nations with honest trade and diplomacy instead of drone strikes and other forms of war. But Iran has to be bombed it seems, Syria too, and god knows how hot the new cold war against the Chinese will get, especially in Africa for all those sweet natural resources.

China is not the USSR, and neither us nor the Chinese want it to be that way. The USSR was not a major player in the world economic system, unlike China. Proxy wars seem quite unlikely. Not that some balancing in Asia won't take place, but while you're mentioning US intentions, you might want to mention that the countries we're balancing against China with want to balance against China--they are not being coerced into balancing; they are more fearful of China than the US. The US has done two things in East Asia since World War II: save South Korea from communism and Kim Il Sung's rule, and help the region's countries become wealthy and conflict-free.

I don't see Obama bombing Iran either, outside of limited covert actions like attacks against specific figures, like the nuclear scientists. I don't like these (and they seem an awful lot like terrorism, but that's neither for nor against them) but I also recognize that they are not a full blown bombing campaign.

In any case, Syria is a different story, but I don't see an intervention there happening either, and I especially don't see American ground forces there, barring major change in the situation. If any model is followed (and for a variety of reasons I don't see it happening but I could be wrong), it would likely be the Libya model, and intervening in Libya (or, if you prefer, saving Benghazi from massacre, helping overthrow an autocrat, etc) was the right decision.

This may be a nitpick considering I liked the rest of your post, but is this really true? Didn't the Comecon play a major role in communist-aligned countries in its heyday?

I don't see ground troops either, just bombings and drones and air power. And it will be dressed up as humanitarian like the Libya intervention, which we had no business doing and really exposed Obama as the imperialist he is. That was for US economic interests, not to save lives. Hillary Clinton had a so lovely statement about that, we saw, we came, he died, said with a nice chuckle too. Just vile. How attacking nations with no threat to us is a good thing blows my mind. Obama ones said it was unconstitutional use of power, but then again that was before he got into office. He's good at talking, not very good at doing what he said. Then again what politician is?

how is there not a democratic challenger to Obama in this election? i dont see how you could consider yourself a liberal/progressive and not be incredibly dissappointed in him.

There were other candidates on the Democratic ballot in NH yesterday.

Sorry, yeah, by world economy i meant the "free world" economy, or liberal international economic order, or whatever you want to call it. My main point was interdependence: both the US and China lose a lot from conflict, even conflict that disrupts other parts of the world economy (like piracy, or the shut down of the Strait of Hormuz, or similar). The USSR didn't depend on trade with the US for domestic legitimacy, unlike China. Conversely, the US didn't depend on the USSR for low price goods and debt purchases, unlike contemporary US economic dependence on China.

b/c i'm feeling lazy, this is thanks to Nixon, right? Clinton's work w/ China was what?

Sure, it may have been unconstitutional, I won't dispute that. And of course, even if we went in solely to protect civilians, the end game had to be Qaddafi's overthrow, or a permanent no fly zone. You can't stop an attack and just go away, or the attack will happen again. I'll grant you those ,and I'm okay with those.

Still, what did we gain economically from intervention in Libya? What do we gain economically from any of our manpower intensive interventions? Yes, we gain from maintaining an alliance with the Saudis, from going easier on the Bahraini regime than that of Assad or Qaddafi or Saleh. But what are we gaining economically from the places we do intervene? What spoils are we seeing from Iraq? Afghanistan? Where are these American economic interests in Libya? Now, much of our foreign policy is driven by a belief in the need for a leading world power to prevent disruptions to the world economy. But in the recent cases of intervention, where is this logic?

Nixon opened China to diplomatic integration into the UN and to take its seat on the Security Council, which Taiwan had previously held. The opening of China, economically, was a largely internal process to my knowledge, though I doubt it would have happened at the time and pace it did without political opening.

Clinton's most important work was to more fully integrate China economically by playing a large role in getting them into the WTO (which meant lower tariffs and other barriers to trade, and promises to lower them further over a number of years).

ah, thanks. i thought it was worth noting that our presidents' use of economic diplomacy was pretty effective at aligning usa's and china's interests.