"Pathetic" is a good word for what I heard today.

The problem was in February 2009 when an inadequate stimulus was sold as a great progressive victory.

It's going to get horrendously ugly with a GOP Congress, and Obama, like Clinton before him, will still try to  "co-opt" their issues.

The jig is up.  The GOP will investigate, harass, intimidate but Republicans will not offer a single thing to alleviate the economic catastrophe we now face.  By 2012 the country will be demanding REAL CHANGE, transformation of the political debate.  There is simply nothing our current politics can produce that will address today's problems.  

Many of those groups flag and block sites for obscene language.

Jeralyn has had to spend hours fighting to unblock TL because of problems linked to use of curse words.

That Democrats are in trouble across the country as the midterm showdown nears is bad enough, for those of us who think the party has the best solutions to the global economic mess. What's worse is that, at the national level at least, they seem to be going down without much of a fight over their core principles. The New Republic's John Judis contrasted Obama and the Democrats' woes in 2010 with Ronald Reagan and the GOP's struggles in 1982, when a stubborn recession was depressing Reagan's approval ratings and portending midterm doom for his party. Did Reagan begin to parrot the concerns of his critics in the other party, the way Obama is now bleating about "debt and deficits"? Quite the opposite: As Judis explains, Reagan and his team called for voters to "stay the course" and blamed the nation's problems  on Democratic overspending. "We are clearing away the economic wreckage that was dumped in our laps," Reagan boldly declared. And while Republicans were expected to lose up to 50 House seats, they lost only 26 and broke even in the Senate. Equally important, Reagan's strong messaging kept voters optimistic he could eventually prevail. Just before the election, Judis notes, with unemployment still soaring, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that 60 percent of likely voters believed Reagan's economic program would eventually turn things around.

the administration should just start making the argument that we have a choice between prolonged high unemployment or another big stimulus package

It is a pure Nov "look at the shiny bauble" bit of legislation, yet can't have those evil Republicans offering amendments.

If unemployed people will band together en mass as a voting block they could save the democrats from themselves.

All they need do is take a cue from wall street, and demand to be bailed out in return for their support of the Democrats.

No bailout before November? No votes. Period. That should be clear enough for even the Dems and Obama to grasp, shouldn't it? Let them see what the threat of being fired feels like.

...the administration should just start making the argument that we have a choice between prolonged high unemployment or another big stimulus package.

The administration has been promoting policies that restrict economic activity, with more regulations, murky regulations, higher tax rates, and threats of even more higher tax rates.  

I submit we are in the midst of a transition to a new global economy where the US is not the manufacturing powerhouse it once was.  Unless our electric cars become widly popular, we come up w/some new doo-hickey before some other country or confidence in goods made in China, Mexico, or some other low-wage country falls, we are in for a tough ride regardless of who's in the White House.  

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