Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘bad days

The Day America Ran Out of Gas

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Between the Supreme Court’s throwing open the corpocracy barn and the gutless Democratic Party proving itself totally incapable of governing, with Air America’s collapse thrown on the fire for good measure, today was an epically bad day for American democracy, on par with November 2, 2004, or December 12, 2000. In some ways this is actually the worst of the three, as Democrats have had great electoral successes in recent years and it still somehow adds up to less than nothing. At least before we had hope that things might someday be different; now we know it doesn’t matter if we win or lose, because even when we elect a massively popular progressive president and huge Congressional majorities we still get screwed. It’s really hard to say how things get better from here; both Congressional Dems and the White House seemed bound and determined to sabotage the only possible legislative achievement Democrats could hope to show for themselves by November. If you want to turn the ship around, you:

* pass the Senate health care bill through the House;

* pass fixes and popular improvements to the health care bill that can be passed through the Senate via reconciliation;

* move the hell on to something less toxic, like (say) a jobs bill, or massive tax cuts for middle-class workers and senior citizens. Whatever works.

If health care dies on the vine this administration is crippled and 2010 will be a bloodbath. Health care reform has to come first and it has to come quickly; it could happen tomorrow if the House Democrats had any brains.

What a mess.