Now that the president has signaled yet another collapse in agreeing to tax cuts for the rich, there is a hidden cost to this capitulation. He is now stuck defending this deal for the rest of his term. I predicted this on the show yesterday and today it's playing out exactly the way I imagined, with the president sending out advisers to talk about what a great idea it is to give tax cuts to the rich.

Once you sign off on a political position, you own it. This could be a corollary to Colin Powell's doctrine on foreign policy. Powell said if you break it, you own it. In this case, if you make it, you own it.

The president claims he will fight hard against these same tax cuts two years from now. It's hard to stop laughing long enough to make a point against that, but I will try. If you are sending out your people to talk up polls about how the right the Republicans were on the tax cuts for the rich now, how are you going to send out the same people to talk about how wrong they were - and how wrong you were - two years from now?

These are the things that make me wonder if President Obama has a firm grasp on basic political fundamentals. Yesterday he said that the political reality is that he just didn't have the votes in the Senate (by far his favorite excuse). He even said "I can't win" in the Senate. That's a damning reversal for a man who ran on "Yes we can."

But more importantly, he doesn't seem to understand Politics 101. You don't just count the votes based on how the other side says they're going to vote. From time to time, you call their bluff. Which means you go to the home states of swing senators like Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe in Maine and you campaign on this winning issue there until you make them feel the political pain. Then you put them to a decision -- do you want to risk your career voting against me on this issue where I have huge popular support or do you want to vote with me? Then you take the vote and they will bend. If he doesn't understand that, boy did we elect the wrong guy.

Of course, the alternative is that he does understand that but doesn't ever have the stomach for a real fight. Or even worse yet, secretly likes this deal and will always find an excuse to get more tax cuts and sweet deals for the rich and powerful. In which case, boy did we elect the wrong guy.

Watch The Young Turks Here

Follow Cenk Uygur on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks
Become a Fan of The Young Turks on Facebook: www.facebook.com/tytnation

Now that the president has signaled yet another collapse in agreeing to tax cuts for the rich, there is a hidden cost to this capitulation. He is now stuck defending this deal for the rest of his term. I predicted this on the show yesterday and today it's playing out exactly the way I imagined, with the president sending out advisers to talk about what a great idea it is to give tax cuts to the rich.

Once you sign off on a political position, you own it. This could be a corollary to Colin Powell's doctrine on foreign policy. Powell said if you break it, you own it. In this case, if you make it, you own it.

The president claims he will fight hard against these same tax cuts two years from now. It's hard to stop laughing long enough to make a point against that, but I will try. If you are sending out your people to talk up polls about how the right the Republicans were on the tax cuts for the rich now, how are you going to send out the same people to talk about how wrong they were - and how wrong you were - two years from now?

These are the things that make me wonder if President Obama has a firm grasp on basic political fundamentals. Yesterday he said that the political reality is that he just didn't have the votes in the Senate (by far his favorite excuse). He even said "I can't win" in the Senate. That's a damning reversal for a man who ran on "Yes we can."

But more importantly, he doesn't seem to understand Politics 101. You don't just count the votes based on how the other side says they're going to vote. From time to time, you call their bluff. Which means you go to the home states of swing senators like Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe in Maine and you campaign on this winning issue there until you make them feel the political pain. Then you put them to a decision -- do you want to risk your career voting against me on this issue where I have huge popular support or do you want to vote with me? Then you take the vote and they will bend. If he doesn't understand that, boy did we elect the wrong guy.

Of course, the alternative is that he does understand that but doesn't ever have the stomach for a real fight. Or even worse yet, secretly likes this deal and will always find an excuse to get more tax cuts and sweet deals for the rich and powerful. In which case, boy did we elect the wrong guy.

Watch The Young Turks Here

Follow Cenk Uygur on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks
Become a Fan of The Young Turks on Facebook: www.facebook.com/tytnation

I am cross posting the following diary for a blogger friend at EENR.
Originally posted at EENR Blog and also cross posted at DailyKos
..................

Well, by now we all know that the House passed the shameful (and inherently unconstitutional by just about any study of the Constitution) disgrace that is the current FISA bill with a whopping 105 Democrats supporting its passage. This is the bill that makes the warrantless wiretapping legal as well as provides immunity for the telecom companies who knowingly provided the Bush Administration with our conversations illegally.

Many of us know that a filibuster is the surest way to kill a bill in the Senate and that there are 49 Democratic Senators, nine more than are needed to sustain a filibuster. By now, many of us also know that Obama intends to vote for the bill, as of course does head capitulator Harry Reid and other assorted Senators including some Democrats. And we are starting to hear the gurgling forth of excuses from a few of them, much of it akin to what we heard in the House last Friday.

Seeing that there may, in fact, not be enough Constitution-loving Democrats to filibuster this stain of a bill, and given that "not enough votes to filibuster" should never be an excuse for something this odious to pass in the Senate, I offer (or rather educate and/or remind) the Senators of not only the meaning of the FISA bill but also ways to block a bill that exist in the Senate in addition to a filibuster.

(Info below from the Senate's own website.)

Senators, please follow me below the fold...

There's more...

Sometimes I wonder about our country. I wonder how we can let ourselves be stuck in the situations we find ourselves and not speak out, or vote out the people responsible.

I see the government getting ready to provide massive bailouts to the banking industry as they foreclose on homeowners who made ill-advised borrowing decisions based on unsound lending practices, and I know that we will let it happen.

I see a war in Iraq that we actually had some passion about for while, but that was few months ago and now we are pretty much rolling over on that one too.

I see a government that tramples civil rights and practically laughs in the face of feeble attempts at oversight, while a legislative maneuver delays the FISA bill so the passion will recede on that too. And we go along with it.

There's more...

I used to be very angry at Ralph Nader for suggesting, against all evidence to the contrary, that there was "no difference" between longtime environmentalist Al Gore and corrupt Oil-Industry/CIA-thug George W. Bush.  His disingenuous argument served to also help reinforce the MSM meme that Al Gore was the "phony", "dishonest" one, and somehow, the bumbling, corrupt-to-the-core, polluter, lie-through-his-teeth-idiot George W. Bush was the believable one.

Nader made this argument (a false one) as part of a larger argument that the whole Democratic Party is essentially indistinguishable from the Republican Party. This broader argument perhaps had some merit back in the 1990s when you examine certain bits of legislation (like NAFTA) and inaction on other fronts. But back in 2000, it still was an totally over-the-top, species argument that was unsupportable in the wake of the very visible Gingrich-Congress .vs. Bill Clinton standoffs, and also the presence of Al Gore as the nominee-successor.

There's more...