Words of Power: Remember Grant Park? It was Not a Mirage; it was a True Turning from Death to Life, That is Why We are Engulfed by Rising Madness & Deepening Menace

To talk about these town hall events as some organic outpouring of average American folks who have concerns about health care is to be willfully blind as to what is really going on-which is professional P.R. operatives generating exploitive, manufactured, strategically deployed outrage in order to line their own pockets. These P.R. spinmeisters get paid a lot of money for doing it. The corporations they work for get to kill legislation that would hurt their profits. ...
This is professional, corporate-funded, Republican staffed P.R., and it should be reported as such. Rachel Maddow, Rachel Maddow Show, 8-5-09

I warn you all ... Every poll, every analysis, every vote, every region of this country supports health care reform, and the essential great leveling agent of a government-funded alternative to the unchecked duopoly of profiteering private insurance corporations. Cross us all at your peril.
Because, Rep. Ross, you are not the Representative from Blue Cross.
And Mr. Baucus, you are not the Senator from Schering-Plough Global Health Care even if they have already given you $76,000 towards your re-election. And Ms. Lincoln, you are not the Senator from DaVita Dialysis. Keith Olbermann, Special Comment, MSNBC Countdown, 8-4-09

We do not live in a functioning democracy - republican, direct, or otherwise ... Right now, we're watching six U.S. senators (from some of the most sparsely populated states) and seven Commerce Committee Blue Dog Democrats hijack the health care debate. Together, these 13 tyrants represent just 13 million people - or 4 percent of the total population. And they are obstructing a health care bill for the other 300 million of us. David Sirota, Health Care's 13 Tyrants, Huffington Post, 7-31-09

Remember Grant Park? It was Not a Mirage; it was a True Turning from Death to Life, That is Why We are Engulfed by Rising Madness & Deepening Menace

By Richard Power

Yes, six months into the journey, the election night celebration in Grant Park seems very far away, and sometimes it even seems as if it was a mirage. But it wasn't.

Like many of you, I am unhappy with some of what Barack Obama has done and much of what Barack Obama has not done. But I think I understand where he is and what he is doing. He is not playing chess, or basketball, he is playing poker. And he is a very good poker player. We shall see sooner than later if he is good enough to win while playing against a house that has marked the cards.

In the last few days there have been two events of profound existential meaning that bode well for the future, in spite of the fierce struggle ahead.

A "wise Latina" has ascended to SCOTUS.

And in the process, the tragedy of John McCain deepened; the man who chose Sarah Palin to run for Vice- President of the United States, voted against Sonia Sotomayor. Pathetic. A once intriguing politician who drank the kool-aid too late. Yes, Karl Rove did break him in South Carolina in 2000.

And within the same news cycle, we learned that unlike McCain's legend which has been swallowed up in the Jonestown of the Cult formerly known as the Republican Party, the legend of Bill Clinton has a lot of life left in it.

With his high-stakes humanitarian mission to the Hermit Kingdom to bring Laura Ling and Euna Lee home, Bill Clinton has reminded us that there is more to Achilles than his heel. (Do you remember the origin of the phrase, "Achilles' Heel"? It is, after all, not about weakness; it is about strength. Achilles' mother, the Goddess Thetis, dipped him into the River Styx to give him immortality, except that she held him by the heel of one foot, and so that one small area of his physical body was still vulnerable to attack; i.e., he was otherwise invincible in battle.)