The Justice Department, which anticipated the adverse result based upon Judge Hudson's previous comments about the validity of the new law in a court hearing early this year, will almost certainly appeal his ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A DOJ spokesman said Monday in the immediate wake of Judge Hudson's order: "We are disappointed in today's ruling but continue to believe – as other federal courts in Virginia and Michigan have found – that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. There is clear and well-established legal precedent that Congress acted within its constitutional authority in passing this law and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail."

It is also conceivable, but far less likely, that the federal government will seek an expedited review of the matter by the Supreme Court. And it is far less likely still that the justices would welcome such a request before more lower court judges, and perhaps two or more federal appeals courts, chime in on the constitutional questions raised by the new measure. In any event, neither of their appellate options must look appetizing now to federal lawyers. The 4th Circuit is one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the nation. And the Supreme Court itself has a clear conservative majority, which includes Justices Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Virginia Thomas, is a member of a Virginia political group that has actively opposed the new health care laws.

At 3:25 p.m. on Tuesday, a UK judge reverses an earlier court decision and granted bail to Julian Assange, who is being held in a British prison on a warrant for "sexual misconduct" charges in Sweden. The bail is attached with heavy conditions, including the demand for a large wad of cash upfront, a daily curfew (which will keep Assange off the prime-time news), and the requirement of wearing an electric tag.

The ruling does not free Assange, however; he is sent back to jail pending the gathering of the cash, and pending a decision by Swedish authorities to appeal the bail ruling.

At 4:18 p.m., outside the courtroom, film director Ken Loach, one of the many people putting up money for Assange's case, makes this comment:

Clearly, if the Swedish government opposes bail it will show there is some vindictiveness beyond this case. It will show there is some political element that goes beyond the case.

Indeed. At this writing, it is not believed that Sweden has never pursued anyone so zealously (if at all) through the international criminal justice system on a charge of 'sexual misconduct' (not rape).

At 5:26 p.m., it is announced that Swedish authorities are indeed challenging the decision. Assange, although granted bail, will remain in prison until the appeal is heard -- at some point in the next 48 hours.

The Guardian's legal affairs editor, Afua Hirsch, explains the draconian laws -- enacted post-9/11, natch -- that allow government authorities across Europe to amplify their reach across several borders:

Followers of the WikiLeaks story wonder how Assange could be extradited with so few questions asked. Why, for example, can our prisons detain someone (Assange is currently on remand in Wandsworth prison) for an offence under Swedish law that does not exist in British law? And how can a judge agree to an extradition without having seen enough evidence to make out a prima facie case?

The 2003 Extradition Act originated in an EU decision agreed just one week after 9/11. It was sold to voters as a way of ensuring cross-border cohesion in prosecuting suspects wanted across Europe for terrorism and serious crime. ... It's been downhill from there. Around three people per day are now extradited from the UK, and there is little to suggest that the majority are terrorists or serious criminals. In fact those involved in the process agree that many of the cases are "trivial".

This month I watched proceedings in Westminster magistrates' court as Jacek Jaskolski, a disabled 58-year-old science teacher, fought an EAW issued against him by his native Poland. Jaskolski – also the primary carer for his disabled wife – has been in the UK since 2004. His crime? Ten years ago, when he still lived in Poland, Jaskolski went over his bank overdraft limit. There are instances when unauthorised bank borrowing can have criminal elements, but this is not one of them. The bank recovered the money, and there is no allegation of dishonesty. A similar case in Britain would be a civil, not a criminal, matter.

But it is a criminal offence in Poland, where every criminal offence has to be investigated and prosecuted, no matter how trivial. As a result Poland requested 5,000 extraditions last year alone, accounting for 40% of all those dealt with by Britain. By contrast the UK made just 220 requests.

In 2008 a Polish man was extradited for theft of a dessert from a restaurant, using a European arrest warrant containing a list of the ingredients. People are being flown to Poland in specially chartered planes to answer charges that would not be thought worthy of an arrest in the UK, while we pick up the tab for police, court, experts' and lawyers' time to process a thousand cases a year.

But if you start a war; or if you get another country to start a war for you; or if you continue and expand a war; or if you actually assassinate, murder, hundreds of innocent people in cold blood far outside a war zone, then you will not only not be jailed, you will be honored, celebrated, enriched and obeyed. Hell, you can even murder people and harvest their organs for sale, and you will be feted and supported as a great ally of the defenders of civilization, as long as you play ball with their agenda of domination.

But tell the truth about power? Or just try to live your ordinary life, care for your loved ones, go to work, harm no one, pose no threat, make no provocation -- other than being an attractive, and defenseless, piece of fodder for petty power to glut itself upon? Oh then, my friend, you can be stitched up, put in the frame anytime they damn well please.

What kind of world do you think you're living in? Well, the Old Man said it years ago:

"Democracy don't rule the world;
Better get that through your head.
This world is ruled by violence:
But that's better left unsaid."

A Virginia judge’s decision to throw out a central plank of the health insurance reform law underscores how ill considered was the Obama plan.

Forcing people to buy coverage from costly, unreliable and often unscrupulous private insurance companies was, in fact, a coercive approach, as Judge Henry Hudson ruled. And it was one that the insurance companies loved, because they were guaranteed tens of millions of new customers whom they could gouge.

By ruling this approach unconstitutional, Hudson has set up a showdown at the Supreme Court, since other judges have ruled the mandate constitutional. It’s unclear how the Supremes will referee this one, but I wouldn’t bet the hospital that the conservative majority will uphold that part of the Obama law.

And if Roberts, Scalia, et. al., reject it, the Obama hope to limit health care costs would be dashed.

“Without the requirement that everyone be included, the risk pools are subject to adverse selection (only those with greater health care needs enroll),” says Dr. Don McCanne, senior health policy fellow at Physicians for a National Health Program. As a result, he says, premiums would “skyrocket.”

Rather than coercing everyone into the private insurance market, Obama should have proposed universal, comprehensive, and affordable health care, which is provided, as a right, to all citizens.

This Medicare For All program—or, at a minimum, Medicare For All Who Want It—would not have been the boondoggle to the private insurance companies that the current law is.

And it would have been impervious to court challenges.

“After almost half a century of success, only a fool would challenge the constitutionality of Medicare,” says Dr. McCanne.

There may be a couple of fools on the Supreme Court who would try. But it’s unlikely there would be five.

Obama chose, however, to maintain the system of private insurance. He imposed no federal limits on what insurance companies can charge, so they are already able to raise rates exorbitantly. And if “everybody in” is ruled unconstitutional, you can expect your rates to become totally unaffordable very soon, if they aren’t already.

Like it or not — and I don’t — the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal, with its mixture of very bad stuff and sort-of-kind-of good stuff, is likely to pass Congress. Then what?

The deal will, without question, give the economy a short-term boost. The prevailing view, as far as I can tell — and that includes within the Obama administration — is that this short-term boost is all we need. The deal, we’re told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragile recovery time to strengthen.

I say, block those metaphors. America’s economy isn’t a stalled car, nor is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets a bit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies.

And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designed, sustained support.

The root of our current troubles lies in the debt American families ran up during the Bush-era housing bubble. Twenty years ago, the average American household’s debt was 83 percent of its income; by a decade ago, that had crept up to 92 percent; but by late 2007, debts were 130 percent of income.

All this borrowing took place both because banks had abandoned any notion of sound lending and because everyone assumed that house prices would never fall. And then the bubble burst.

What we’ve been dealing with ever since is a painful process of “deleveraging”: highly indebted Americans not only can’t spend the way they used to, they’re having to pay down the debts they ran up in the bubble years. This would be fine if someone else were taking up the slack. But what’s actually happening is that some people are spending much less while nobody is spending more — and this translates into a depressed economy and high unemployment.

What the government should be doing in this situation is spending more while the private sector is spending less, supporting employment while those debts are paid down. And this government spending needs to be sustained: we’re not talking about a brief burst of aid; we’re talking about spending that lasts long enough for households to get their debts back under control. The original Obama stimulus wasn’t just too small; it was also much too short-lived, with much of the positive effect already gone.

It’s true that we’re making progress on deleveraging. Household debt is down to 118 percent of income, and a strong recovery would bring that number down further. But we’re still at least several years from the point at which households will be in good enough shape that the economy no longer needs government support.

But wouldn’t it be expensive to have the government support the economy for years to come? Yes, it would — which is why the stimulus should be done well, getting as much bang for the buck as possible.

Which brings me back to the Obama-McConnell deal. I’m often asked how I can oppose that deal given my consistent position in favor of more stimulus. The answer is that yes, I believe that stimulus can have major benefits in our current situation — but these benefits have to be weighed against the costs. And the tax-cut deal is likely to deliver relatively small benefits in return for very large costs.

The point is that while the deal will cost a lot — adding more to federal debt than the original Obama stimulus — it’s likely to get very little bang for the buck. Tax cuts for the wealthy will barely be spent at all; even middle-class tax cuts won’t add much to spending. And the business tax break will, I believe, do hardly anything to spur investment given the excess capacity businesses already have.

The actual stimulus in the plan comes from the other measures, mainly unemployment benefits and the payroll tax break. And these measures (a) won’t make more than a modest dent in unemployment and (b) will fade out quickly, with the good stuff going away at the end of 2011.

The question, then, is whether a year of modestly better performance is worth $850 billion in additional debt, plus a significantly raised probability that those tax cuts for the rich will become permanent. And I say no.

The Obama team obviously disagrees. As I understand it, the administration believes that all it needs is a little more time and money, that any day now the economic engine will catch and we’ll be on the road back to prosperity. I hope it’s right, but I don’t think it is.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubišová approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubišová had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance, “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the Communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubišová.

I had reported on the fall of East Germany before I arrived in Prague. I would leave Czechoslovakia to cover the bloody overthrow of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu. The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a lesson about the long, hard road of peaceful defiance that makes profound social change possible. The rebellion in Prague, as in East Germany, was not led by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists, writers, clerics, activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, whom we met with most nights during the upheavals in Prague in the Magic Lantern Theater. These activists, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom. Their stances and protests, which took place over 40 years of Communist rule, turned them into figures of ridicule, or saw the state seek to erase them from national consciousness. They were dismissed by the pundits who controlled the airwaves as cranks, agents of foreign powers, fascists or misguided and irrelevant dreamers.

I spent a day during the Velvet Revolution with several elderly professors who had been expelled from the Romance language department at Charles University for denouncing the Soviet invasion. Their careers, like the careers of thousands of professors, teachers, artists, social workers, government employees and journalists in our own universities during the Communist witch hunts, were destroyed. After the Soviet invasion, the professors had been shipped to a remote part of Bohemia where they were forced to work on a road construction crew. They shoveled tar and graded roadbeds. And as they worked they dedicated each day to one of the languages in which they all were fluent—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish or German. They argued and fought over their interpretations of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Proust and Cervantes. They remained intellectually and morally alive. Kubišova, who had been the most popular recording star in the country, was by then reduced to working for a factory that assembled toys. The playwright Havel was in and out of jail.

The long, long road of sacrifice, tears and suffering that led to the collapse of these regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their protests would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot and corruption of the state.

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the Communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’état carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state. We too have our designated pariahs, whether Ralph Nader or Noam Chomksy, and huge black holes of state-sponsored historical amnesia to make us ignore the militant movements, rebels and radical ideas that advanced our democracy. We opened up our society to ordinary people not because we deified the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the sanctity of the Constitution. We opened it up because of communist, socialist and anarchist leaders like Big Bill Haywood and his militant unionists in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored by a media that caters to the needs and profits of corporations, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

All energy directed toward reforming political and state structures is useless. All efforts to push through a “progressive” agenda within the corridors of power are naive. Trust in the reformation of our corporate state reflects a failure to recognize that those who govern, including Barack Obama, are as deaf to public demands and suffering as those in the old Communist regimes. We cannot rely on any systems of power, including the pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, liberal religious institutions, universities, labor, culture and the Democratic Party. They have been weakened to the point of anemia or work directly for the corporations that dominate our existence. We can rely now on only ourselves, on each other.

Go to Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 10 a.m. Dec. 16. Join dozens of military veterans, myself, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and many others who will make visible a hope the corporate state does not want you to see, hear or participate in. Don’t be discouraged if it is not a large crowd. Don’t let your friends or colleagues talk you into believing it is useless. Don’t be seduced by the sophisticated public relations campaigns disseminated by the mass media, the state or the Democratic Party. Don’t, if you decide to carry out civil disobedience, be cowed by the police. Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.

Wow! What got into Barack Obama?!?!

This week we saw two behaviors out of him that have been completely absent for his entire presidency. Two attitudinal displays that many of us have been longing to witness for a couple of years now.

First, he’s showing some real passion, campaigning hard for a big item on his policy agenda.

And, second, he’s using some tough talk against the people who are in his way.

It’s great to see. And many of us have long wondered why he never did this before, back when his health care bill was getting savaged, or when we needed someone pounding the bully pulpit to stand up for working people or the unemployed.

Yeah, it’s great to see.

Except for one small caveat.

The passion he’s finally showing is for a horrific piece of legislation, and the people he’s dumping on are his own base.

How great is that, eh? The right can do anything they want to this president, say anything about him they want, personally or politically, and he can’t be bothered to hold them remotely accountable for their monstrous excesses. But if the people who actually made him president get angry at being crapped on by their own guy for the umpteenth time, if they finally stand-up and just say no to another sell-out, if they shake their heads in wonder at the dude who once talked about “the fierce urgency of now,” well then, by gosh, that right there unleashes his unbridled rage and contempt.

Truth be told, I think his mocking anger – on full display at his press conference this week – is driven by shame. Pardon the armchair psychology, but I think he’s hiding from his own embarrassment. I think he knows that his mother would not approve of the sell-out he has become. I think he knows that the Barack Obama of just two years ago would not himself approve of the loser occupying his body today. I think he has to transmogrify his shame into rage, and then direct it at those who point out his failings in order to live with his sorry self.

I think, in short, that Obama knows that he is an astonishingly complete coward, a wimp of epic proportions. I think he knows that the product of his cowardice is the wreckage of millions of lives and his own presidency. And I think that is finally just too much to bear, so he has attacked those who, after two years of remarkable forbearance, have finally had enough out of him, and have finally said so.

Obama’s actually worse than a coward. Most cowards can at least identify their tormentors. Not President Bendback Overa. How many times will Republicans unanimously oppose his legislation before he figures out that they’re not his friends? How many times do they need to literally say out loud that they’re committed to his political destruction before he believes that they’re committed to his political destruction? How many times does he need to get his butt kicked by them before he stops further empowering these thugs?

And how many times does he need to completely fold and yield to their agenda before he realizes that he’s a loser and a joke?

Can you imagine what the last two years have been like within the top echelons of the Republican Party? At first, they must have thought they were toast. They must have figured that they were fighting against the very extinction of the party. They must have known that Bush and Cheney and Rove had driven them to the edge of a cliff. And now here was this new guy, with a new politics, and a hungry and mobilized public rallying behind him. They must have known that if he wanted to, he could give them the final and fatal push over the edge. And he could do so just by telling a few basic truths, so long absent from American politics.

Then, imagine their shock and their stunned glee as they came to realize over time that what they had on their hands was just the opposite of everything they had feared. That Obama was an even weaker pansy than Carter or Clinton or Kerry or Reid. That he was even wimpier than that still, that he was hopelessly predisposed to bargaining with his enemies just for the sake of giving his legislation some sort of jive kumbaya, bipartisan, transcendent, hopey-changey bullshit patina. That you could string the guy along forever. That you could get anything out of him. That you could say anything about him. That he ultimately stood for nothing. That he liked you better than the legions of liberal dupes whom he had fooled into making him president, and for whom he had only sneering, supercilious contempt. Imagine Republican surprise and joy when the guy who looked potentially like the slayer to their former giant turned out instead to be their savior, the naval-gazing punk who snatched resuscitation and historic victory from the jaws of crushing defeat and near annihilation. Imagine their shock and awe when it turned out that the greatest gift the Republican Party ever got was a Democratic president, and not even because of some White House intern sex scandal.

This tax deal that Oweenie just agreed to is an abomination, and it never needed to happen. If you have any doubt about how bad it is, consider solely the fact that the Republicans are in favor of it. Look at Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and the rest of them. These are not your grandfather’s Republicans. These are predatory thugs. They have come to Washington to serve the interests of their oligarchic puppet-masters, and nowadays they are capable of taking any action, telling any lie, and savaging any opponent to fulfill that singular agenda. If these folks are for it – and especially if it involves taxes – you can safely bet any several of your bodily appendages that the legislation in question is purely evil. Don’t worry, you’ll emerge fully intact.

If GOP support is not a sufficient barometer of the true nature of this sick dog of a deal, consider that it was bad enough even to wake the somnolent Democrats in Congress out of their slumberous thirty year coma, causing them to rise up and flip a fat bird in the direction of their own Dear Leader. No doubt this new-found independence has something to do with the fact that he just led them over a cliff in last month’s election debacle, his ‘leadership’ bequeathing them a gift-wrapped defeat of proportions unseen for nearly a century. But I think there’s more than that. Indicators suggest that Democratic members of Congress are actually genuinely furious with the president for the piece of crap he delivered to them, both because if its content and because of the arrogance with which he took them for granted, negotiating with the Yanomami cannibal warriors of the GOP instead, and assuming that members of his own party would have no choice but to go along for the ride. When one member of Congress was defending the president in a speech to his fellow Democrats this week, out of nowhere another actually blurted out, “Fuck the president." I don’t think they’re just posturing this time.

Nor should they be. This deal is sickening in every respect. And I’m sickened, too, when I hear nice, buttoned-down, safe little liberal sanitary napkin defenders of Obummer defend him by saying, “What did you want him to do? He didn’t have the votes.” Arrrrggggghhhhh!!!! As if the only two choices a president has are to take a lousy deal or take no deal. As if the president doesn’t have the world’s biggest bully pulpit with which to sway public sentiment and votes in Congress. As if the public didn’t already overwhelmingly support ending tax cuts for the wealthy. As if Obama doesn’t have, and hasn’t had for two years, giant majorities in both houses of Congress. As if the visage of Republicans kicking the unemployed to the street in order to cater to billionaires couldn’t be portrayed as exactly the plutocratic heartless greed that it actually is, if only the president were willing to say so, rather than legitimating these thieves instead through negotiations. As if caving into “hostage-takers” (Neville Quisling Obama’s own term) doesn’t just encourage them to come back for more. As if, worst case scenario, it isn’t better lose on principle sometimes than it is to win in shame. As if thinking you’re winning when you’re actually badly losing isn’t the worst case scenario of all. As if Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush would have just neatly folded their hands together, pursed their lips, noted their regret, and explained that, golly gosh, they just couldn’t get what they wanted because the darned votes weren’t there.

Barack Obama is an utter failure as a president. In part, that is because his policies are almost entirely as regressive as any and all of George W. Bush’s, and regressive policies have been ruining America for thirty years now. Now that the right has brought a once great country to its knees, more of the same is the absolute last thing we need, but that message somehow hasn’t gotten to this supposedly Democratic president, who won election precisely on that principle.

But Obama is also a failure because he is a total coward. He fights for nothing. His view of the presidency as some sort of passive, dormant institution that does what it’s told to by Congress and otherwise lays low, buffeted this way and that by the winds of circumstance, would have been an excellent fit for any of the benevolent, politically quiet, decades of the nineteenth century. It’s a disaster for our time, however, when so much more is expected of presidents, and when the country is now faced with multiple crises. His cowardice will almost assuredly make him a one-term president. That breaks my heart, I assure you. What’s really disastrous, however, is what having such a punk at the helm of the country in this historical moment means for the 98 percent of us who aren’t rich and connected. If the election of last month didn’t make the point emphatically enough, far worse times are likely ahead of us in the coming years, and my guess is that there’ll then be even worse times after that.

The extent of President Milquetoast’s capitulations are now becoming the stuff of legend. In the last week alone, he gave us a remarkable record of multiple and thorough assume-the-position-full-on-presidential-reamings, one directly following the next, as his adversaries passed around his rag doll self between them. No wonder regressive New York Times columnist David Brooks declared it had been a good week for Obama.

He stood on the sidelines silently watching as the repeal of the noxious Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy went down to destruction. Previously claiming that he opposed the policy and that it would be ended on his watch (despite his administration having gone to court in support of both DADT and the Defense of Marriage Act), it seemingly never occurred to him to get out and fight for its repeal. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that that’s what you’re supposed to do with the presidency.

Similarly, his embarrassing efforts to placate the Israelis sufficiently to get them to simply halt their colonialist project for a mere ninety days also blew-up in his face. He had promised to sell them a whole slew of fighter jets, but that was not enough. Then he promised to give them a whole bunch more for free, on top of the original ones. All in exchange for a whopping ninety days worth of a construction halt on an illegal project! This great ally of ours proceeded to laugh in the face of a president whom they fear about as much as Father Christmas. This week it was announced that the Obama administration (or, more accurately, the Obama administered) is now giving up its effort, and along with that goes their much-vaunted peace initiative. It seems never to have occurred to Obambi to actually turn the screws a little bit on the Israelis. Its not like he even needed to use sticks to get his way (god forbid a president should twist arms!). We give so much money and existential security protection to the arrogant Israelis that the president could have even gotten substantial leverage by simply denying them a few of the carrots already in the pipeline. But, gosh, that would be so, so... proactive.

Of course, the worst of it was the deal on taxes, which is so wrong in so many ways it defies words. But I’ll try anyhow.

It is wrong, to start with, because this is no tax cut at all. None of them have been, since Reagan started doing this in the 1980s. In fact, if you borrow money in order to fund a tax ‘cut’ – and what the Republicans got from the president will require massive borrowing to finance it – what you’re really doing is a tax increase. You’re still going to have to pay every penny back in taxes, but now you’re also going to have to pay back a lot more pennies – compounding annually – as well, in the form of interest on those loans. Add it up and it’s easy to see that net taxes go way up, not down. So why do the oligarchs want this so badly? Because what it really is is a tax transfer, from them to the rest of us, because it comes back at lower percentage rates for elites then it went out at in the form of tax-avoidance loans. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the president to be concerned about what this means for those of us who are not economic elites. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to be concerned about what this means for our mountain of national debt that is approaching dangerous levels now. It doesn’t even seem to have occurred to him to have publically offered the Republicans his acceptance of their beloved tax ‘cuts’, contingent on them merely showing what expenditures from the federal budget they would cut to pay for them. Not only would this expose the GOP thugs as either deficit frauds or entitlement destroyers, but it would have had the huge political advantage of driving a wedge between the tea party and establishment camps within the GOP. But that would mean that the president might have actually won the battle, so we can’t have that now, can we? And, of course, we didn’t.

His stupid deal was wrong, secondly, because he held nearly all the cards. He had control of both houses of Congress. He had public opinion solidly behind ending tax rip-offs for millionaires and billionaires. He had the powerful deficit argument against these cuts, and the inability of his opponents to argue against it. He had solid public support for extending unemployment benefits, both on moral grounds and because of their excellent stimulative effect. And he had the default position in his favor. That is, if nothing happened, if they couldn’t agree to a deal, if he refused to give in, Republicans lose, when the tax rates expire at the end of this year. With his veto pen, he could prevent them from getting the single thing they most crave in the entire universe for the next two years. He had everything, and all he had to do was show some spine. Oops – I forgot. It’s Barack Obama we’re talking about here.

This thing was also wrong because the politics favored the president, and still he folded. On taxes, the only difference between his position and theirs was over tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. On unemployment, they are on record as saying that these meager payments to people suffering badly under George Bush’s Great Recession just encourage laziness among recipients. He could have easily prevailed on these fights had he shown the courage to turn them into public relations battles. He could have done long-term damage to the GOP by showing them to be exactly what they are – a destructive disease willing to do anything to the rest of us in order to better the already rich. Republicans have won politically over and over again by telling enormous lies, simply because nobody stands up to them and speaks the truth. Some political situations are more conducive to that than others (because, my god, they’re such good liars), but few as much as this one. Allowing the GOP to paint itself as being precisely as heartless, greedy, deceitful and hypocritical as it actually is would have been a public relations bonanza far exceeding the one Newt Gingrich put on in his display of petulance that undid the party in the 1990s, if only Oworthless would have merely called their bluff. You know you’re a sorry thing indeed when the likes of Bill Clinton makes you look weak and regressive by comparison.

Finally, this whole thing is tragically wrong because it is yet another major swing of the wrecking ball in the multi-decade effort to destroy the American welfare state. The fabulously wealthy just absolutely can’t stand it that the rest of us should have some moderately decent quality of life instead of all that money getting crammed into their already overstuffed pockets. That’s why these sociopaths have been trying for thirty years to unravel the New Deal and more. That means breaking unions, that means trade deals shipping decent jobs overseas, that means changing the tax structure in their favor, that means deregulation, and that means privatization. And what it also means is killing popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare the only way that seems possible: by creating a debt crisis that would give politicians plausible political cover for slashing these otherwise untouchable third-rail (you touch it, you die) benefits. It’s bad enough to have Republicans work so hard toward that end. Now, in the age of Clinton and Obama, Democrats are every bit as culpable.

Barack Obama is the biggest political wimp to walk the global stage since Neville Chamberlain donned lederhosen and hoisted a beer with the Führer in Munich. Even Chamberlain had an excuse, though. Had the Nazis devoted their full attention to gobbling up Britain, it seemed reasonable at the time to imagine that they could well have succeeded. After all, France would later fall in a mere seven weeks. And, indeed, Chamberlain was canonized at the time for saving his country by means of what looked then like a politically adroit, if highly cynical, deal with the devil.

Obama has no such excuse. He’s just a freaking coward, and his cowardice is killing this country. It must be stopped.

If we progressives have learned anything these last two dismal years, it is that an over-reliance on electoral solutions to our problems is a failed strategy, especially when you live in a country with a one-party two-party system. Now, more than ever, we must think of solutions outside the realm of conventional practice.

That said, there’s no reason to ignore electoral politics at the same time we are acting elsewhere. The actions – and, especially, the non-actions – of this president have made a primary challenger to him coming from the left more than merely something to be contemplated in the face of incontrovertible evidence of his worthless nature.

It is now an absolute necessity.

The reactionary right-wing, neo-conservative, religious-based, hate-empowered GOP once again owes the half-crazed ideologues in the Supreme Court a hearty thanks for plunging yet another dagger into the heart of democracy with its Citizens United corporate giveaway. And no Justice on that venerable body is more ideologically rigid than Dick Cheney's hunting buddy Antonin Scalia, who ramrodded the Court's 2000 Presidential "Selection" for George W. Bush, and is now out there taking aim at the century-old 17th Amendment to the US Constitution, which is literally the last barrier to a corporate-owned nation.

The 17th Amendment allows U.S. Senators to be elected by the people, rather than by individual state legislatures. Recently, referring to the Constitution, Scalia said the 17th Amendment "has changed things enormously. We changed that in a burst of progressivism in 1913, and you can trace the decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the 20th century..."

We need another "burst of progressivism" -- and soon. We are in the throes of a political convulsion, an intellectual and moral battle that we are increasingly in danger of losing. It's time to stop, take a deep national breath, and then...take a deep national bath. This nation has been in a spiraling nose dive for a decade...We need to make a genuine effort to actually see what we've only been looking at -- actually listen to what we've only been hearing.

Neither party spent much time talking about the issues; the real problems facing this country. Perhaps that's because the Republican party is a greedy force, too corrupt and venal to change -- and the Democratic Party is a shameless enabler, too timid and flabby to make a difference. Throw the corporate media in there, where it's all politics all the time because that's where the money is, and it's easy to see -- if you're really looking -- why we're caught up in the patriotic spirit of waving the flag for more tax cuts, trading freedoms for safety and following our presidential Pied Piper into the quagmire of endless war.

Republicans are dangerous. Like Bush, they are morally depraved, in that they feel no guilt or remorse for anything they say or do, regardless of the outcome. It's far too easy in this Tea Party sodden society to rationalize that murdering, wounding, displacing millions of innocent human beings was, and continues to be, necessary in order to protect the American people.

They say they are against big government, and justify their destruction of the social network by repeating "the american people...the american people...the american people" in mind-numbing repetition, much as Bush justified his bloodlust with a constant "september the 11th...september the 11th...september the 11th."

The only things Republicans have ever given to the American people is depression, poverty and despair. And their foot-stomping threats to shut down the government until their billionaire donors get a tax cut is a clear warning that more is on the way.

Having a Black man within a country mile of the Oval Office has driven a majority of Republicans, and some Democrats -- as liberal radio commentator Mike Malloy says -- "bat-shit crazy," and they are determined to destroy President Obama. Just days before the mid-term election, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Really? With the barrage of critical issues swirling throughout this nation -- more than 15-million "american people" unemployed and, every day, more losing jobs, homes, unemployment insurance, health insurance, their very lives -- yet nothing is more important than destroying the President?

Lest anyone think the old Kentuckian was racist, just days after the election, he chucked his hood and went into safe, regressive "american people" spin, saying for all practical purposes -- the american people reminded us this week that we work for the american people and we owe it to the american people and to future generations of the american people to work together to find solutions to present troubles of the american people and to help guide our nation of american people to better days...

“The formula is simple, really," McConnell said. "When the administration agrees with the American people, we will agree with the administration. When it disagrees with the American people, we won’t … If the administration wants cooperation, it will have to begin to move in our direction.”

Simple translation -- what all Republicans are saying if you listen -- Our way, or the highway -- and to hell with the American people.

Neither party can escape its history. American people struggling to prevent the American Flag from becoming their funeral shroud should remember that the Great Depression did not come about by accident. While Americans were standing in soup lines, the Republican administration was carrying Big Business through the crisis. Banks, insurance companies and corporate donors all got bailed out; big business got tax cuts -- but there was no relief for "the american people."

Sound familiar? Yes, because President Obama, in his cowering attempt at bipartisanship, is taking us "forward to the past" so rapidly that our knees are hitting our chins for nothing less than endless war, a recession caused by a permanent rich-man's tax cut and the final shredding of our social safety net. It is likely that our veterans, our children, our elderly will be forgotten or cast aside simply for the enrichment of lobbyists who paid for Republican campaigns and are now swarming all over the Capital.

Time is running out. Like Jon Stewart said when explaining the reason for his Oct. 30 Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall, the American people -- regardless of their political affiliation -- "Know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together."