The most disappointing news for me this week was not the RIP of the public option.  The Obama Administration approved the oil drilling off of Alaska.  

Why didn't I think of that.

The Democrats would be KICKING ASS if not for that bum Obama.  Have you ever noticed how everyone else in the party is poised and competent except for him??  He is single-handedly dragging down a veritable Dream Team of progressive politics.

We have come to the same point that Republicans came to in 1974 when they realized that Richard Nixon had to be put to sleep for the sake of the party.  The same needs to be done with Obama.

Do you know what "putting to sleep" means? Your diaries are high speed drive-by diarrhea in action.

...

Obama accpeted the Nobel Peace Prize today.
OK Kent, Upstate Dem,Bartcop, the little crybabies at Democratic Underground  and everybody else in the cult of Kucinich who get off kicking this man around, go over to DKos, check the diaries for a picture spread from Oslo and then come back and tell me he has to go.
I didn't vote for him, he scares me at times, he definitely scares most of may family and friends, but I also pray for him as much as I can and I'm not all that uncomfortable with him inthe Oval Office.
You people actually supported him. I wish you had his back.

Pal;in vs. Kucinich in 2012--the Flying Monkey Right or the Gimmie a Pony Left?  

You see them all the time, but rarely so well defined.

"I did vote for him and even heavily supported him in the primary.  However, the man a supported is not the same man who is now President." - Kent, October 2009

"What more did they expect?  I always knew that Obama knew almost nothing about how Washington worked and expected nothing to get done." - Kent, November 2009

Brilliant.  So, tell us, what's your plan for removing this cancer?

"Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout -- to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.

That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar -- former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett -- the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize -- for evil."

But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle -- and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters -- chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush -- still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.

So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts should be laid to rest."

It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!

Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup -- Michael Froman -- before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.

Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government's bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. "Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he's already co-managing what's happening now," observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.

edit: forgot the cite. it's from Taibbi's new piece about Obama being owned by the banks.

can anybody argue with that?

thanks, that's what i wanted to hear. good to know we all agree who wrote it

When you say, "This man is almost singlehandedly bringing the Democratic party down to its knees," I assume "Obama" was a typo and what you really meant were "Nelson and Lieberman" and "these men".