The facts are that Democratic Mayor of Newark Cory Booker, former Democratic Representative Harold Ford of Tennessee, and former Obama business advisor Steven Rattner criticized Barack Obama for his advertisement, calling it inappropriate to shame capital investment firms. But these are not all the facts, as only one out of three news outlets reveals.

In its coverage of this kerfuffle, ABC News refers simply to a “divide among Democrats over the portrayal of Romney’s Bain days.” Veering more firmly into blatant inaccuracy, FOX News refers to Obama’s detractors as “rank and file.” But Brayden Simms of Metro News nails the pattern down tight when he considers why some prominent Democrats so harshly criticized Barack Obama recently. Simms writes:

Ford is currently a managing director for Morgan Stanley. Rattner co-founded a private equity firm and worked for Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and others. Booker is a sitting politician whose job is directly linked to the financial sector: Bain and other similar firms contributed hundreds of thousands to his last election.

Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Bain Capital — all firms to which Cory Booker, Harold Ford and Steven Rattner are in thrall — have the common feature of gutting American industries, kicking Americans out of work and subjecting American workers’ hard-earned pensions to jeopardy. Booker, Ford and Rattner are springing to their corporate masters’ defense. Big Finance Democrats like Booker, Rattner and Ford are more than willing to throw Barack Obama under the bus because their allegiance to money is stronger than their allegiance to a candidate.

In explaining why he thought finance capitalism should be above criticism by mere plebes, Rattner revealed his value system:

Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for its investors. It did it superbly well.

Rattner got this one thing right: megafinance corporations are not “job creators” after all. They’re wealth extractors and concentrators on behalf of their already wealthy investors. If you think that kind of behavior should be above question and purged from discussion, then by all means stand with Mitt Romney on the Republican side and with his allies in the “centrist” faction of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, isn’t it time to walk away?

Gary Ackerman, Jason Altmire, Robert Andrews, Joe Baca, John Barrow, Shelley Berkley, Howard Berman, Sanford Bishop, Tim Bishop, Dan Boren, Leon Boswell, Bob Brady, Corrine Brown, Russ Carnahan, John Carney, Ben Chandler, Judy Chu, Gerald Connolly, Jim Cooper, Jim Costa, Joe Courtney, Mark Critz, Henry Cuellar, Elijah Cummings, Susan Davis, Norm Dicks, John Dingell, Lloyd Doggett, Joe Donnelly, Eliot Engel, Charles Gonzalez, Al Green, Gene Green, Colleen Hanabusa, Martin Heinrich, Brian Higgins, Ruben Hinojosa, Mazie Hirono, Kathy Hochul, Tim Holden, Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, Sheila Jackson Lee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Jim Jordan, Marcy Kaptur, Dale Kildee, Larry Kissell, James Langevin, John Larson, Sander Levin, Dan Lipinski, David Loebsack, Jim Matheson, Carolyn McCarthy, Carolyn McCarthy, Mike McIntyre, Jim McNerney, Gregory Meeks, Bill Owens, Ed Pastor, Ed Perlmutter, Collin Peterson, Silvestre Reyes, Laura Richardson, Mike Ross, Dutch Ruppersberger, Adam Schiff, David Scott, Terri Sewell, Brad Sherman, Heath Shuler, Albio Sires, Adam Smith, Betty Sutton, Ed Towns, Nikki Tsongas, Peter Visclosky, and Tim Walz

These are the names of the 77 Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted on Friday in favor of passing H.R. 4310, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.

You may remember how, last year, Republicans in Congress pushed Democrats into what was called a “compromise”. The deal was that a Special Committee from the House and Senate would be authorized to come up with a plan for reducing the budget deficit, through increases in revenue or through reductions in spending. That committee had a deadline to come up with a plan, and if they didn’t meet that deadline, then there would be automatic spending reductions in programs like Medicare and the military.

There would be no new taxes if the deadline wasn’t met, though, so the Republicans on that Special Committee just sat there, with no intention to come up with any plan, happy to let the spending reductions go into place. This year, there were supposed to be automatic reductions in money for Medicare and for the military alike.

The cuts in Medicare are coming through, but with the version of the National Defense Authorization Act just passed by the House of Representatives, the cuts in military spending do not take place. A vote for this legislation, essentially, is a vote to allow cuts in Medicare without any counter-balancing cuts in military spending or tax increases. It’s a vote to put all the economic burden onto working Americans, while allowing the wealthy to keep their special tax loopholes.

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 as passed by the House of Friday preserves spending on extravagant weapons program that the Pentagon says it doesn’t want. It keeps open redundant military bases that are not strategically necessary.

The money to pay for this wasteful military spending is being taken from older Americans, by reducing their health care benefits.

Who would vote for such a thing? Well, almost every Republican in the House of Representatives voted in favor of this unjust redistribution of wealth. It’s not just a Republican problem, though. The 77 Democrats listed above voted to approve this unjust arrangement as well.

These Democratic politicians don’t deserve to be re-elected. If you are represented by one of the Democrats listed above, give your representative a call through the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask to be connected to your representative’s office, and leave a simple message with the aide who picks up the phone: I’m a liberal, and I won’t be voting for you in November, and it’s because you voted for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013.

Could it go in a more liberal direction?

Right now, there are no Senate candidates in Maine running on a Green Party line, but there are four Democratic candidates declared for the seat.

There’s Benjamin Pollard, an environmental activist. That’s cool, but he writes in the first substantive lines of his Issues page that, “The partisan divisions in our Congress and in our nation have become so severe that our national security is now more at risk than at any time since the end of the Cold War.” Is our national security now more at risk than at any time since 1989? I’m not seeing it. This kind of thinking can lead in great leaps and bounds to a vote in favor of war. It was bipartisan fervor, not partisan divisions, that got us into the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Matt Dunlap doesn’t even bring up foreign policy on his issues page. His ideas about environmental policy are also missing. He seems roughly progressive on economic issues, but voters need to know more. It’s not just the economy, stupid.

Cynthia Dill doesn’t include environmental issues on her issues page, but she uses a very encouraging phrase when discussing foreign policy: “We must begin to beat swords into ploughshares…” She also is on the record as having voted in favor of marriage equality.

Then there’s Jon Hinck. Hinck doesn’t have an issues page yet, but he does remind us that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace USA. That’s intriguing, but what would you do in the U.S. Senate? Co-found a Greenpeace caucus?

It’s just a few weeks until the Democratic primary election, and still, these candidates all need to bring the voters more information.

John Barrow
Sanford Bishop
Dan Boren
Ben Chandler
Henry Cuellar
Jim Matheson
Mike McIntyre
Gary Peters
Collin Peterson
Laura Richardson
Mike Ross
Heath Shuler

The Franks amendment eliminates funding for programs in which the United States cooperates with Russia to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The reason that Trent Franks, other congressional Republicans and these 12 Democrats gave for eliminating nuclear nonproliferation: Russia has given military aid to Syria.

I don’t know anyone who would argue that the Syrian government is a decent regime deserving of any kind of foreign support. However, Russian support for the Syrian government is a functionally separate issue. If nuclear weapons materials and technology from Russia go unprotected, and are taken by terrorists, mercenaries, or agents of another government, such an incident would do nothing to help overthrow the current Syrian regime. It would only create an additional foreign policy problem, and put the world in even greater risk of a nuclear holocaust.

The amount of spending required for the benefit of protection from nuclear weapons proliferation is minimal. If these dozen Democrats really wanted to save money, they could have voted for another proposed amendment to H.R. 4310, from Congressman Ed Markey. The Markey amendment would have saved a large amount of money by delaying the development of a new generation of bomber aircraft designed specifically to shoot nuclear missiles at foreign cities from a long range.

The Markey amendment was defeated. All but one (Gary Peters) of the dozen Democrats who voted in favor of ending nuclear nonproliferation voted against delaying the development of the expensive nuclear bomber.

The issue isn’t what’s happening in Syria at the moment. It isn’t cutting spending. The issue is nuclear weapons. Too many members of Congress favor the expansion of America’s nuclear weapons, and don’t care to even try to control the spread of nuclear weapons out of Russia.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he’s confident that a provision supporting same-sex marriage will be added to the Democratic Party platform. Of course, he doesn’t get to make that decision on his own. Democratic Party delegates have to introduce and approve such an addition to the platform.

11 state Democratic chairs have called for the addition of marriage equality to their party’s platform. 22 Democratic U.S. senators have done the same. Of course, these numbers constitute only a minority of Democratic politicians in their respective spheres.

It’s a nice thing that some prominent individual Democrats are now indicating some openness to marriage equality. Such expressions aren’t what matter in the end, however. What we need is national law, or judicial recognition of laws that already exist, that guarantee equal legal status for heterosexual and homosexual marriages.

Add this issue to the list of policy matters to watch during the Democratic National Convention.

“Grass-Roots” is a strange term for what the articles describe, which is an organized effort to channel money from a few extremely wealthy individuals into centrally-controlled organizations that will then attempt to manipulate people into voting a certain way. The idea of grassroots organizing is that it’s supposed to be supported from the lowest levels first, like the way that grass grows, without reliance on centralized organizations or large sources of support. In grassroots organizing, people who have little power individually can form networks together that cannot be easily defeated because even when one part of the organization is attacked, new shoots can rise up to fill in, just as grass roots run in a complex weave of long thin contributions from many different plants to occupy a large space. In a piece of genuine turf, individual roots aren’t growing to create some kind of predetermined shape. The strong mat of green that results from their work is a result of unpredictable growth that doesn’t have a pattern that’s easy to pick apart. Its strength is that it is a jumbled mess.

What George Soros and his wealthy fellows are doing is giving a big load of fertilizer to a group of organizations that grow more like trees. These organizations have a centralized trunk and root system, and without those centralized systems, the organizations will die. Cut them back from the top, and they won’t regrow. They haven’t grown spontaneously from a network of small individuals. They’re the results of single seeds that have grown individually large and powerful.

The New York Times articles writes that the big donations to support the Democratic Party will fund “‘get-out-the-vote efforts’ directed toward young voters, single women, black voters and Latinos”. If the donations truly supported grassroots efforts, these get-out-the-vote campaigns would be directed by young voters, single women, black voters and Latinos, not directed toward them.

Big media organizations such as the New York Times have lost touch with what genuine grassroots organizations look like. What these corporate news operations describe with the the term “grassroots” nowadays is rather like their own organizations: Designed for consumption by individuals, but only though a system of distribution controlled from the top down, powered by large payments from a few sources with a lot of money. What’s supposed to make these efforts “grassroots” in this newspeak is that people of low and moderate income are supposed to be enticed to volunteer, but their efforts as volunteers are controlled from central offices. These supposedly “grassroots” volunteers don’t get to contribute ideas to influence the central organization’s mission. They’re more like members of The Borg than they are like real grass roots.

The contributions of George Soros and other wealthy individuals to these political organizations is being characterized as “liberal”. I’m a liberal, and so I may be expected to clap at this big infusion of cash. However, the money’s focus is actually more to support the Democratic Party, which is increasingly opposed to the implementation liberal ideas.

Organizations more deserving of the terms “liberal” and “grassroots” have been unpalatable to the Democratic Party. They’re the locally-created, loosely interconnected but independent organizations of the Occupy Movement.

As people are converging in Manhattan to engage in May Day political demonstrations against abusive Wall Street power brokers, the New York State Green Party has issued the following endorsement of the protests: “Green Party members will participate in the May 1 General Strike organized by the Occupy Movement and the May 1 Coalition and will join thousands of union members, students, immigrants, and others across the US in the first national strike in the nation’s history… The Green Party of New York State and Park Slope Greens have endorsed Occupy Wall Street’s May 1 General Strike actions.” The national Green Party has also signed onto the statement. Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, will be participating in the general strike protests in person, on the street.

The Democratic Party claims to speak for working Americans, but I can find no endorsement of the May Day protests by the Democratic Party at any level, national, state or local. Barack Obama has a fundraiser tonight at which people who pay extra money get “VIP” status, but President Obama won’t endorse the May Day protests.

Why? Is it because, after the Democratic Party helped Republicans in Congress pass legislation that is now forcing cuts in education, Medicare, mass transit, and environmental protection, the Democrats are too ashamed of themselves to be seen alongside real working Americans?

Democratic readers, maybe I’m missing something. Prove me wrong. Find just one national Democratic Party leader who has endorsed, or even acknowledge, today’s May Day protests for economic justice.

The oddest part of McIntyre’s little religious rant was when he sermonized, “We know that the true source of power cannot be found here in the Halls of Congress or in the Oval Office in the West Wing or in the chambers of the Supreme Court, but only on our knees before the one who is the true source of power!”

Does Congressman McIntyre really believe that? I don’t think so, because he’s spent his whole career pursuing power through corporate money, and through the power of government, not through prayer. If Mike McIntyre truly believed that true power is found in prayer, rather than in Congress, he’d be back home praying, not working like hell year after year to stay in Congress.

Mike McIntyre doesn’t care enough about prayer to center his own life around the practice, so what right does he have to lecture to the rest of us about how we’re not praying enough? Like most other conspicuously religious politicians, Representative McIntyre is just using prayer as a theatrical prop, to try to gain votes for himself.

Praying loudly in the public square is not what the Jesus suggested. I wish there were someone around to remind Mike McIntyre about that… someone like… gosh, I don’t know who…

Talk is cheap. When they think we’re not looking, these same politicians present legislation that discourages the regrowth of American manufacturing.

Take, as an example, Senator Patrick Leahy. Leahy talks big about protecting American jobs from outsourcing. Not too long ago, Leahy gave a speech, declaring, “For the past two decades our country has witnessed a disturbing trend towards outsourcing American jobs abroad. What began as a way for domestic manufacturers to cut labor costs has blown into a full-fledged sprint by some U.S. manufacturing and service companies to move as much production offshore as possible.”

Senator Leahy was singing a different tune yesterday, though. Yesterday, Leahy introduced legislation that will, if passed, protect exemptions from reasonable import fees for foreign-made ski boots.

There used to be a lot of ski boots made in the USA. Not so anymore. Now, thanks to foreign competition that uses abusive, dangerous and environmentally toxic conditions to cut costs, most ski boots are made outside of America. There’s only one ski boot manufacturer left in the USA that I could find: Dale Boot, which manufactures high-end custom made ski boots.

It’s tough for anyone to set up a ski boot manufacturing business in the USA, when existing ski boot companies cut costs by compromising their ethics in factories operated in countries where autocratic rulers keep workers in submission to their bosses. With S. 2302, “A bill to extend the temporary suspension of duty on certain ski boots, cross country ski footwear, and snowboard boots.” Senator Leahy is helping to preserve impediments to the creation of American manufacturing jobs in ski boot factories here in the USA.

It’s not as if Senator Leahy’s suspension of import fees on foreign-made ski boots is helping the working people of America. Most working Americans don’t have the time or extra money to spend on ski vacations in the mountains of Vermont anyway. Leahy is doing a favor for the executives and well-off shareholders of corporations that squeeze their profits from sweatshop labor. It’s legislation for the One Percent, and their posh hot tubbing leisure at the lodge.

This week, the most talked about presidential candidate isn’t even a presidential candidate… at least not in 2012. She may be in 2016.

The meme of Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 has surged online. Over at our Presidential campaign t-shirt shop, Hillary Clinton for President tshirts have by far outsold Barack Obama shirts this week. The most popular proclaims, I supported Hillary Clinton before it was cool to support Hillary Clinton.

What’s going on with this idea? Where did it come from?

Is the growing popularity of Hillary 2016 due to a quality that Clinton has herself, or is it due more to fatigue with the Obama vs. Romney contest we’re currently supposed to be focused on?

Would you support Hillary Clinton for President in 2016? Why or why not?