House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, piqued with White House pressure to accept the Senate health reform bill, threw a rare rhetorical elbow Tuesday at President Barack Obama, questioning his commitment to his 2008 campaign promises.
A leadership aide said it was no accident.
Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.
A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.
“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.
WASHINGTON
(AP) – The White House was put on the defensive Wednesday after President Barack Obama pushed congressional leaders to fast-track health care legislation behind closed doors despite his campaign promises of an open process.
I have to admit, I saw the pie charts and couldn’t read the post.
Can you IMAGINE a party SO intent on POWER that they’d go THIS MUCh against the will of THE PEOPLE?
BZ….this is getting scarier and scarier. DAYUM
Pretty much.
But not YET completely unsalvageable.
BZ
BZ –
I can’t begin to say how I hope you’re wrong about the Republicans screwing this up…
But bitter experience has shown me you’re probably right.
I do, however, take solace in Dodd’s ‘retirement’…
cjh
Obama talked a good game when on the campaign trail, but as usually that talk was just that, talk. Nancy somuch as said this yesterday. They people are about as transparent as a lump of coal and just as dirty. The pie charts tell the story, but at this point in time they don’t care. Remember the Democrats are collectist and they don’t worry about a senator or two loosing his job–the individual doesn’t count with these guys its the group(the collective)!
Both parties have a similar problem. Both know how to campaign and neither knows how to govern.
The libs know that their days are numbered so they are like cornered animals. You can’t reason with them.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20100107/pl_cq_politics/politics3276175
Great, JUST when we thought the farther right the Republicans go, the better chance we have in 2010 (which I agree with), the RNC is now criticizing Steele for (supposedly) going too “TEA PARTY”.
We’re in a party which thinks MODERATE IS BETTER.
HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
cj: all I have to go by is history; what has the GOP done in the past when it has any sort of opportunity to actually move more conservative?
Ron: you’ve made an excellent point; we should realize that the Demorats really do NOT much care what kind of price they pay in order to steamroller ObamaKare and CapNTax. I think there WILL be a price to pay; but more on that later.
Shoprat: I have to disagree a tad bit; I believe the Demorats can out-campaign the GOP quite handily. But yes, neither side knows what to do once seated in power.
Z: yes; Moderate is just where the GOP thinks it needs to be. That worked so well this past year, did it not?
BZ
I wonder why the GOP has never been able to learn from past mistakes?
Why can’t the Republican Party learn from its mistakes? From the man who made it that way:
“This had, regrettably but perhaps inevitably, tended to throw the party into the hands not merely of the conservatives but of the reactionaries; of men who, sometimes for personal and improper reasons, but more often with entire sincerity and uprightness of purpose, distrusted anything that was progressive and dreaded radicalism. These men still from force of habit applauded what Lincoln had done in the way of radical dealing with the abuses of his day; but they did not apply the spirit in which Lincoln worked to the abuses of their own day. Both houses of Congress were controlled by these men.
[..]
I made a resolute effort to get on with all three and with their followers, and I have no question that they made an equally resolute effort to get on with me. We succeeded in working together, although with increasing friction, for some years, I pushing forward and they hanging back. Gradually, however, I was forced to abandon the effort to persuade them to come my way, and then I achieved results only by appealing over the heads of the Senate and House leaders to the people, who were the masters of both of us. I continued in this way to get results until almost the close of my term; and the Republican party became once more the progressive and indeed the fairly radical progressive party of the Nation. When my successor was chosen, however, the leaders of the House and Senate, or most of them, felt that it was safe to come to a break with me, and the last or short session of Congress, held between the election of my successor and his inauguration four months later, saw a series of contests between the majorities in the two houses of Congress and the President,—myself,—quite as bitter as if they and I had belonged to opposite political parties. However, I held my own. I was not able to push through the legislation I desired during these four months, but I was able to prevent them doing anything I did not desire, or undoing anything that I had already succeeded in getting done.” – Theodore Roosevelt
By the time you got to the late ’20s the Republican Party was a Progressive Party… which is what Goldwater hated. Reagan did not turn that tide, as notice all the ‘bi-partisan’ Republicans willing to ‘reach across the aisle’ to their fellow Progressives in the Democratic Party. They don’t need to learn as they can count on no one holding them to anything they say because they are Progressive. Conservatives have been fighting for decades to get a few people elected to start turning that tide… but Incumbistani Emirs have the power and privelege behind them and have thwarted that time and again.
After nearly 100 solid years of Progressives in power we have: a devalued currency, some segements of society treated differently than others by law, an unfair income tax, a stultified House that no longer sets is size by proportion, directly elected Senators, States no longer holding the federal purse strings, regulations out the wazoo to the point where you are most likely guilty of something no matter what your political stripe. Plus we got idiots applauding authoritarian government that wants to ‘help’ us, which means take everyone’s liberty away to put us into servitude to the State.
What comes next will not be pretty in America.
Necessary, yes. Pretty, no.