The Republic of T.

It’s a little unnerving — because I’m not used to being in the majority — but it looks like I am now, at least when it comes to the president’s decision not to release pictures of Obsama bin Laden’s dead body. It turns out, nearly two thirds of Americans agree with Obama’s decision not to release bin Laden’s death photos.

Close to two-thirds of Americans support President Barack Obama’s decision not to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s corpse.

An NBC News poll conducted in the weekend after the White House decided against putting out the images taken after the successful raid in Pakistan found 52 percent of Americans saying they strongly back the president’s choice to keep the photos under wraps. Another 12 percent of those surveyed said they agreed, but not strongly, for a total of 64 percent.

…Of those surveyed, 24 percent said they strongly think the photos should be released, while another five percent agreed less strongly. Shortly after news of the president’s decision broke, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called it “a mistake,” saying that images of the dead Al Qaeda leader would “prove that fact to the rest of the world.” On Saturday, the U.S. released videos of bin Laden taken from his compound which were interpreted by some as part of an effort to prove to Pakistanis that the raid did really happen to skeptical Pakistanis.

Well. Let’s face it. Some people are never going to be convinced that the Obama administration pulled this off, no matter how many other images or video footage are released.

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Warning: Graphic images below the fold. NSFW. Strong trigger warning re: graphic depictions of violence, abuse, etc.

Here, we go again. Why does it seem, lately, that a significant portion of the country sounds a lot like our three-year-old every time he sees me looking at something I my iPhone: “Let me see! I wanna see!”

It doesn’t matter what there is to see, or whether it’s something we should see. I doesn’t matter if we know what we’re seeing. It doesn’t even matter whether it matters if we see it. There’s something to see, and we just gotta see it.

So of course, having learned that there are pictures of Osama bin Laden’s corpse, it’s become the hottest “must see” piece of GWOT “war porn.”

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Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 24 hours, you’ve probably heard that Osama Bin Laden is dead.

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

The world may well be a better place without it. It is certainly no worse off without him. But, this isn’t really the end of anything.

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OK. I think I understand why he did it. At first I didn’t think Obama’s release of his long form birth certificate would do him much good. But now I’m beginning to think the president knows exactly what he’s doing, how it could help him, and how it can potentially hurt the GOP.

The White House released President Obama’s original birth certificate Wednesday.

The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Trump said, “I have accomplished something nobody else has accomplished.”

“I want to look at it, but I hope it’s true,” he added. “He should have done it a long time ago. I am really honored to have played such a big role in hopefully getting rid of this issue.”

Earlier Wednesday, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said the debate has been “really bad for the Republican Party.”

The so-called “birther” debate is “good politics” but “bad for the country,” said Pfeiffer

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Now, you can see it for yourself.

Again, on one level I understand why he did it. He explained as much in his remarks.

I know that there is going to be a segment of people that no matter what we put out, this issue is not going to be put to rest,” he told reporters. “We don’t have time for this kind of silliness. We have better stuff to do. I have better stuff to do.”

Obama gave the surprise remarks nearly an hour after releasing his long-form birth certificate in an effort to put to rest a debate spanning more than two years over whether he was born in Hawaii and the United States and has a legitimate right to be president under the Constitution.

Instead of focusing on the birther issue,the American public and the media should pay more attention to the raging budget debate taking place between Democrats and Republicans, which will have enormous implications for the future of the country, Obama said.

“We’ve got some enormous challenges out there,” Obama said. “We’re going to have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we deal with our deficit and our debt…but we’re not going to be able to do it if we’re distracted, if we spend time vilifying each other.”

“We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts, if we get distracted by a sideshow and carnival barkers,” he continued.

The “sideshow and carnival barkers” makes me think Obama knows what he’s doing. He knows very well that the hard core GOP birthers won’t be satisfied by this.

It might shut Trump up (though I somehow doubt it), but it runs too deep with birthers to be satisfied by this.

Because, as I said before, birthers are the latest incarnation of a very old American phenomenon.

Has there been anything on the political scene, in recent memory, as amusing or disturbing as the “Birthers”.

Birther – A racist sore loser who can’t deal with having a black president so they make up absurd conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

I didn’t recognize them at first, when we first met them. Their particular brand of insanity hadn’t yet blossomed during the campaign. But the seeds, long planted, were ready and waiting.

They burst through the loamy soil of modern conservatism. They were fertilized all along the campaign trail, actively cultivated by the McCain/Palin campaign. Palin never failed to toss out fresh rhetorical dung during her campaign speeches. The not-so-subtle references to “real America” and “real Americans” (phrases used and defended even in the mainstream media, which helped water the young tendrils of birtherdom as well), and suggestions that Obama just didn’t “get” America ANC “real Americans.”

That’s because their definition of American — and especially “real American” — really means only one thing. And their insistence on pressing their irredeemably inaccurate case, and resolute ignorance of how citizenship works is really flimsy a cover for their ideas on who is and isn’t an American or a “real American.” In fact, the “Birthers” are the just the most recent example of American conservatism’s own brand of “identity politics.”

The Guardian’s Tom Rogan aptly explains what I earlier called the birthers’ (and the GOP’s) “resolute ignorance” on how citizenship works.

There was even a meme, debunked by Snopes.com, that Obama’s mother was not eligible to confer automatic citizenship upon her son because she was “too young” to have met the requirement of being a U.S. citizen and having live in the country for 10 years, at least five of those years after the age of 16. According to Snopes, the requirement applies only to those Americans who were born outside of the United States, and since Obama was born in Hawaii (and, yes, Hawaii was a state when he was born, and had been for two years), it makes no difference how old his mother was at the time.

Of course, Obama wasn’t talking to the hardcore birthers. He was talking over their heads to the other “adults in the room” who were likely nodding their heads in agreement with his remarks about how the question of his birth got more attention than any of the serious challenges the country is grappling with.

Obama was speaking over the birthers’ heads to the 4 out of 10 Americans who believe the economy is getting worse. He was talking to those Americans who are mystified by the agenda the GOP is pursuing in the midst of what Robert Reich called a “wageless recovery” that puts many households in a bind because they had a tough enough time making ends meet with two paychecks before the recession, and now they’re down to “one-and-a-half, or just one, and its shrinking.”

Obama spoke to Americans who are exasperate with lawmakers who seem oblivious to their economic realities and their concerns.

We already knew that the folks involved in debating and designing economic policy had a weak understanding of economics, that is why they couldn’t see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy, but now it seems that they are breaking their ties to reality altogether. The country is still smoldering in the wreckage of the collapsed housing bubble, but the victims have left the policy debate altogether.

Twenty five million people are unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether, but that’s not on anyone’s agenda. Millions of homeowners are underwater in their mortgage and facing the loss of their homes, that’s also not on anyone’s agenda. Tens of millions of baby boomers are at the edge of retirement and have just lost their life savings. This also is not on anyone’s agenda.

Washington is, once again, out of touch with American families — as Eugene Robinson noted.

What is it about the word jobs that our nation’s leaders fail to understand? How has the most painful economic crisis in decades somehow escaped their notice? Why do they ignore the issues that Americans care most desperately about?

Listening to the debate in Washington, you’d think the nation was absorbed by the compelling saga of deficit reduction. You’d get the impression that in households across America, parents put their children to bed and then stay up half the night sifting through piles of think-tank reports on the kitchen table, trying to calculate whether there will be enough in the Social Security trust fund to pay benefits beyond 2037.

And you’d be wrong. Those parents are looking at a pile of bills on the kitchen table, trying to decide which ones have to be paid now and which can slide. The question isn’t how to manage health care or retirement costs two decades from now. It’s how the family can make it to the end of the month.

President Obama gives signs of beginning to perceive this disconnect. His Republican opponents, not so much.

Perhaps the president was speaking directly to those Americans who are taking concerns directly to Republicans at town halls across the country.

Obama likely had two goals with this speech, and neither of them was to finally put birther claims to rest.

First, he was giving millions of Americans a sign that he is at least as fed up as they are with a GOP agenda that both ignores and draws attention from the “enormous challenges” the country faces, and the economic challenges American families struggle with every day. He wasn’t talking to the GOP, the tea party, or the birthers when he said “We don’t have time for this kind of silliness. We have better stuff to do. I have better stuff to do.” He was talking to millions of Americans who are growing increasingly weary of right-wing “silliness.”

Second, Obama was giving the GOP just enough rope to hang themselves, politically. Obama knows what the GOP knows: that the birther’s are something of a “tar baby” for Republicans.

The Tar-Baby is a doll made of tar and turpentine used to entrap Br’er Rabbit in the second of the Uncle Remus stories. The more that Br’er Rabbit fights the Tar-Baby, the more entangled he becomes. In modern usage, “tar baby” refers to any “sticky situation” that is only aggravated by additional contact. The only way to solve such a situation is by separation.^[1]

It’s no coincidence that Trump rode the birther issue all the way to the front of the pack of GOP candidates for 2012. He wasn’t just appealing to racial feelings as old as the nation itself. He was appealing to birthers who make up a majority of likely GOP primary voters in 2012. He was appealing to a sizable chunk of Republicans too.

Of the two top items in my newsreader, I’m not sure which I like best. First, there’s President Obama’s open-mic incident after his big speech. Apparently, Obama had what he thought was a private conversation with campaign donors, but it turned out the microphone was on for part of his remarks.

Mark Knoller of CBS News listened to and recorded the president’s remarks, and the result is a surprising picture of Obama as a tough negotiator.

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To hear some progressive bloggers tell it, Paul Ryan’s response to President Obama’s State of the Union address was an utter failure, and the GOP blundered in picking him to carry its message. But the true measure of a speech’s success is how well the speaker reaches the intended audience, with the intended effect. Given the job of reaching two audiences — reassuring one of the purity of his politics, while allaying the fears of the other about the likely results of his politics —  Ryan may well have succeeded by appearing to fail.

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Two years into his first term, President Obama can claim credit for two passing historic reforms — health care reform and financial reform. However, both were merely a beginning — a first step toward real reform — and fell far short of addressing effectively the crises devastating our families and communities. In his State of the Union address, Obama must defend those first steps to reform, and make the case for extending them particularly financial reform. It is imperative to defend and extend financial reform, to prevent and protect us from the next financial crisis.

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Everyone either wondered what the President would say, or knew what he should say. Now we know what he did say.

It may be the finest speech he’s given as president, thus far.

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"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."

- Eric Holder, United States Attorney General

Ed. Note: The second half of this post was written before the reading of the constitution on the House floor, at the opening of this session of Congress, and has since been updated.

Like a lot of people, when the new GOP majority in the House announced that they would begin this session by reading the constitution on the floor of the house, I was both amused and bemused. On one hand, I thought sarcastically, it might be educational. Some of them seem to know less about what’s in it, than about all the things of which they’re fond of saying "That’s not in the Constitution," while waving around the copy of the constitution they keep in their front pockets. (I’d wave around the copy I have on my iPhone, but I don’ thing it would have the same dramatic effect.)

I was bemused, because I wondered how conservatives would handle some uncomfortable parts of our history reflected in the Constitution. When I found out, I was more angry than amused, and more bitter than bemused. Congressional conservatives proved themselves to be callow and cowardly regarding the Constitution — unwilling to understand it in anything except a literalist framework, and unable to face up to the contradictions between our history and idealized image of ourselves, when the Constitution lays them out in black and white.

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"Mama Grizzlies" and "refudiate" made the banished words list for 2010, but here’s some news that ought to make Sarah Palin smile. America’s obesity epidemic is proving good for business — the funeral business, that is.

It’s no secret that Americans are battling obesity. …The obesity problem not only affects how we live, but it changes what happens to our bodies when we die … and that has forced the funeral industry to change its business.

Twelve years ago, Cedar Memorial in Cedar Rapids purchased a body lift, capable of raising and lowering bodies and caskets weighing up to 1,000 pounds.

A Cedar Rapids-based company, Mortuary Lift Company, sells the lifts and the lift business is booming. Katie Hill’s company has grown 20 percent a year. Just this year, she sold more than 100 lifts in the United States and abroad. "It started out, you know, selling three machines a year on up, and now we’re actually producing quite a bit," Hill said.

Cedar Memorial president John Linge says larger loved ones also present a challenge for burial. "The funeral industry has had to respond by providing caskets, mausoleum crypts and burial vaults that will accommodate larger individuals." According to Linge, Cedar Memorial plans to add oversized burial crypts to its mausoleum in the next five years, showing that the obesity trend is not likely to end soon.

According to the Casket and Funeral Supply Association of America, oversized caskets may cost 15 to 25% more, but Linge says they help families visualize their loved ones in comfort.

So, why would this make Sarah Palin smile?

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Last week, when the president’s tax cut deal with Republicans was all but done, I wrote that the Democrats and progressives risk moral failure if we do not meet the moral obligation the tax cut deal would create. Now the deal is well and truly done — passed by the House and the Senate, and signed by the president. It’s time to look at the nature of that moral obligation and what it will take to truly meet it.

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Well, it’s official. The president will sign the tax cut deal into law this afternoon.

The 99ers are getting nothing for Christmas, while the White House and the Tea Party congratulate themselves on extending tax cuts that don’t create jobs or stimulate the economy, because the rich don’t spend tax cuts — but nothing at all that will help those Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.

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It has been said before — recently, even — but it bears saying again and again, as any truth does. Conservatives have finally, and completely, abandoned compassion. Progressives spent much of the previous decade declaring the "compassionate conservatism" of the Bush era a cruel joke. Policy gestures in that vein were seldom backed with the money to make them work. And there there was Bush administration’s cruel habit of praising successful programs only to have his administration recommend devastating cuts to the same programs — often as the president’s praise was still ringing in the air.

In her 2003 column, "The Uncompassionate Conservative," Molly Ivins cited as an example of the above  President George W. Bush’s praise of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program [LIHEAP] — which helps low income families heat their homes in the winter — during a presidential debate in 2000, only to turn around and cut $300 million from the program in his first budget as president — even as people were freezing to death. Ivins attributes this to a kind of pathological cluelessness on the part of Bush and his "compassionate conservatism."

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Faced with a foreclosure fiasco of astounding proportions — as duly chronicled by fellow bloggers Zach Carter and Richard Eskow —  in which banks literally kick down doors to foreclose on houses even though they can’t prove they own the mortgages, president Obama fretted that a foreclosure moratorium would help people who “don’t deserve it.” He needn’t have worried. Since the housing bubble popped and sent the economy into free-fall, the government has been helping people don’t deserve it.

Of course, I mean the banks and financial institutions bailed out by the very taxpayers they are throwing out of the homes, without being able to prove they have the right to do so. Reading the stories of what has gone on, makes it hard to imagine how this has gone on without so much as a ripple of outraged. It’s simple, the banks — and I believe they know this, and count on it — have their biggest allies in the American people themselves.

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It Won’t Work

Not to pick on Kathleen Parker, but the “narrative” she suggested the Democrats take from midterm elections — “You can’t sell people what they don’t want” — is more likely to end up being the narrative the Republicans take from 2012 — if the president and the Democrats do what they need to do. Karl Rove was half-right when he said voters didn’t toss out the Democrats because are “enraptured with the GOP.” People are angry sure, but the numbers tell a different story.

People are angry not at what the Democrats did after 2008, but what they didn’t do. They didn’t “buy” what the GOP was selling. Like a shopper who ordered one thing and got another, American voters ordered transformative change in 2008 but got the same old transactional politics instead. The midterms of 2010 is their letter or complaint.

Here at Campaign for America’s Future, we just released a voter survey that shows voter fears about the economy and anger at government failure to help middle- working-class families even as Wall Street got bailed out.

Findings include:

• Compared to a candidate who attacked Democrats for the economic stimulus and health care reform, 57 percent of voters said they were much or somewhat more likely to support a candidate with a “made-in-America” campaign message that points out that Republicans have “pledged to support free trade deals and protect tax breaks for companies that send American jobs to India and China.”
• Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that “America is falling behind” in the global economy and that “we need a clear strategy to make things in America, make our economy competitive, and revive America’s middle class.”
• Sixty-nine percent said that “politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare” as they attempt to address the national deficit.
• A majority opposed the Republican plan to cut $100 billion from domestic spending programs while extending the Bush tax cuts to those earning more than $250,000, while 51 percent said they agreed that those top-end tax cuts should expire and with proposals offered by Democrats to reduce the deficit over time.
• Significant majorities in the poll supported new investments in infrastructure through a national infrastructure bank, a five-year strategy for reviving manufacturing in America

Why stop at one poll?

The GOP is not popular with Americans, nor is its agenda. Poll after poll leading up to the election bear this out. Their approval/favorability ratings were low going into the election, lower than the Democrats in many cases.

This is in the context of low approval ratings for Congress overall. But, as I said in the previous post, The Democrats’ problem is failing to deliver on the agenda Americans voted for in 2008. The Republicans problem is an agenda that remains toxic to most Americans.

Americans offer tepid support for much of the Republican Party’s domestic agenda, including repealing the new healthcare law and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center.

The results suggest Republicans could struggle to pass legislation advancing many of the smaller-government themes that have dominated their campaigns in the midterm elections, even if the party wins control of one or both houses of Congress in November.

In particular, the party appears to risk a backlash from senior citizens, a critical voting bloc that harbors deep skepticism about tinkering with entitlement programs.

The survey is the most comprehensive polling look so far at the major elements of the agenda that key Republicans have been discussing in the weeks leading up to the election.

Not all the news was good for Democrats…

…Still, the poll offered little to suggest that the surge in voter support for Republican candidates, whom analysts project to win major gains this fall, carries over to support for policies championed this fall by Republican leaders in Washington and on the campaign trail.

Kos posted a handy breakdown when the poll came out.

• 29% of Americans support extending all of the Bush tax cuts.
• 32% support repealing the newly passed health care law.
• 33% support replacing Medicare with vouchers.
• 58% support creating Social Security private accounts.
• 46% support amending the Constitution to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants (49 are opposed).
• Fewer than half of Republican respondents favored extending all the Bush tax cuts or replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers.
• Poll respondents continue to disapprove of President Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, 45% to 38%.
• Three-quarters said they could not name the leader of the Republican Party, or that the party does not have a leader.

What do Americans want? Here’s a hint, it’s not what the Republicans campaigned on.

• A September AP poll said that Americans who wish health care reform went further outnumber opponents of health care reform by 2-to-1.
• An October poll by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard university found that six in ten Americans say they want their representatives to fight for more government spending in their districts, to spur job growth.
• That’s compared to 39% who said they want cuts even if it means fewer local jobs. (That’s a flip from 1994, by the way, when 53% wanted their Reps. to fight for cuts, while 42% were on the other side.)
• In the same poll, 50% supported more government spending to boost the economy, while 46% prioritized deficit reduction.
• Not only did voters defeat major anti-tax measures in several states, but an AP poll less than 50 days before the election showed that 54% of Americans favored raising taxes on the highest earners, compare to 44% opposed.
• A Stanford University poll showed that 86% of Americans want government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit.
• And 76% favored government regulating greenhouse gasses in particular.
• Another poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks and designed by Yale researches showed that 77% believe that global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress.
• And 94% believe that developing sources of clean energy should be a priority for the president and Congress.
• Meanwhile, 77% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

And that’s an overview, because a detailed analysis is more than I have space to do here.

Not of the above adds up to what the GOP was “selling” in this election. But it’s what more Americans “bought” in 2008 than voted in the midterm elections and any number of special elections since.

Parker follows the example of other conservatives who, after every election election since November 2008 have rushed to declare that “the people have spoken.” When voters in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey elected Republicans, they somehow “spoke” louder than those Americans who spoke in 2008. When 45 million fewer vote in 2010 than voted in 2008, “the people have spoken.”

The people spoke in 2008, and have been speaking since then. It’s just that neither party has listened.

The people spoke in 2008, upwards of 130 million of them, compared to 82.5 million in 2010. The numbers above, all from polls taken in the last half of this year, reflect what they voted for then and have wanted since.

From Democrats they got health care reform with no public option; and no fight to defend it; financial reform that left “Too Big To Fail” standing; a stimulus that was too small for the jobs crisis the country faces; a foreclosure prevention program that, in order to avoid helping the “wrong people,” helped almost no one; and no climate/energy legislation, given up without much of a fight.

From the GOP they got an agenda written by and for corporate interests.

The GOP is in an unenviable position. It is constitutionally incapable of delivering what Americans truly want. Meanwhile, the party must content with an extreme right that wants what Republicans cannot deliver without angering a great many Americans.

It won’t work.

The Democrats have a chance to come back if they want it. But they need a plan to finish what the started, and deliver what Americans said they wanted in 2008 and are still waiting for.

Then they have to convince us that they mean it.

First, let’s just face it. For the next couple of years, at least, this is the end of any progress on jobs or the economy. Whatever legitimate gripes progressives had with the outgoing Democratic Congress, the got a lot done. More, in fact, than most others. Ezra Klein called it a “Do-Something Congress.”

That this has been the most “do-something” Congress we’ve seen in 40 years hasn’t made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That’s true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington toz do.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post dubbed the 110th Congress a “Do-Something Congress”, when the Democrats took over in 2007, in hopes it would get more done than the outgoing Congress.

WHEN DEMOCRATS take over the House next year, the regular workweek will stretch to a backbreaking five days — up from the now-customary Tuesday-through-Thursday arrangement. Members of the House and Senate — no doubt reeling from the two weeks they’ve worked since the election — will have a mere four weeks off after they leave town Friday. Hard to believe, but the new leadership actually expects them to come to work on Jan. 4 rather than enjoy the usual elongated holiday break as they wait around for the president to deliver his State of the Union address in late January. In the Senate, the weeklong March break is being eliminated and the two-week April vacation cut in half.

…It would be quite a change. The 109th Congress will have been in session for a grand total of 103 days this year, which, as Lyndsey Layton pointed out in yesterday’s Post, is seven days fewer than the “Do-Nothing Congress” of 1948. An ordinary full-time worker with a generous four weeks of vacation would have clocked 240 days of work during that same period.

With the GOP taking over the House, the likelihood is that we’re faced with another “Do-Nothing” Congress, at least in term of creating jobs, fixing the economy, etc. As Bill pointed out before election day, the country is about to be saddled with a Congress that not only doesn’t work, but one determined not to let the President work either.

That’s not just because of gridlock, though there will be gridlock. It’s because conservative philosophy basically holds that a “Do-Nothing Congress” is exactly as it should be. And that’s exactly the GOP’s victory may be a Pyrrhic victory. Hemmed in by by a base that wants one thing, major (though anonymous) donors that want another, and an American voters angry that not enough been done to ease their economic pain — and who want more done — Republicans won’t be able to make it work without abandoning their base, their donors, the basic tenets of conservatism, or Americans demanding solutions the GOP just doesn’t have.

It won’t work. That’s what we face for the next two years. The best chance Democrats have for 2012 is to give voters a clear choice that does work, by offering solutions founded in progressive values, making the case for them, and fighting for them.

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A dear departed friend of mine, Alex, was know for saying “We all have choices.” It was usually in the form of advice and/or a warning to a friend who was about to make disastrous choice, with serious implications for his/her future. The not-so-thinly veiled implication was that our choices have consequences, and that we consider our choices carefully to avoid the worst consequences.

Sometimes, if someone particularly daft still wasn’t getting the message, Alex would add a note of severity by saying, “But sometimes those choices get taken away.” I thought about Alex’s warning today at the America’s Fiscal Choices conference. Well into a economic crisis, America still has fiscal choices, but if we don’t make the right choices — and make them soon — those choices will almost certainly be taken away.

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When last we left our story, the young guns came galloping into a critical moment. The recession is over, and as the dust settles it reveals that the American economy and middle class lay bleeding: 45 million Americans are living in poverty, last year saw the largest increase in the U.S. poverty rate in 40 years,, 41 million Americans are on food stamps — representing a 20.8% increase in the program 1 in six Americans receive services from anti-poverty programs, 50 million are now on Medicaid,nearly 15 million are unemployed, 1 in every seven mortgages are underwater, 10 million are receiving unemployment benefits,4.7 million are dropping out of the job market after extended unemployment. The “young guns” answer amounts to watching both bleed out. Comparatively, a bullet actually seems more merciful, but the effect on the economy is the same: finishing it off.

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In keeping with the western-themed title of Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, allow me to set the scene: It’s well past high noon, and as the dust settles the economy lies bleeding. Looks like it’s all over but the dyin’ and the buryin’. But wait! Here come the "young guns" galloping into the scene. But have they come to save the day, or finish the job.

That depends on what they’re packin’, and it ain’t a first aid kit. It looks like their same old ammo used the first time around.

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"It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care."

Shirley Sherrod – on her forced resignation from the USDA within hours airing of a heavily edited video of Sherrod speaking at an NAACP event by right wing media, in an attempt to portray her and the NAACP as racist. The full video of Sherrod’s speech showed otherwise.

Mr. President,

With all due respect, it’s time to man up. It is time, way past time for you to grow into the job you were elected to do, and promised to do. It is time to stand up and be the man we hope we elected. It is time to justify that hope, and the trust that was placed in you. It is time to pick up the mantle of history that has been entrusted to you and prove yourself worthy of carrying it forward.

Too much is at stake now. Too many people are beginning to think their faith in you was misplaced. What’s worse is you are proving them right.

Strike one was Van Jones.

Strike two was ACORN.

And now Shirley Sherrod had become strike three.

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