A DEMOCRATIC MANIFESTO: Launching a Democratic Primary Challenge to Barack Obama

Perhaps Barack Obama has indeed tried his best in the Presidency -" but his best is just not good enough for us Democrats, or indeed for the Nation as a whole. After eight years of Bush the Second, including two very costly and unwinnable wars; major financial and economic disasters; the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita debacles; tax breaks for the rich and super-rich while many millions more fall below the poverty line; the sanctioning of torture and endless violations of our civil and constitutional rights; and the further degradation of our natural environment to benefit mega-corporations, in 2008 America clearly said: Enough -"more than enough! It's time to elect a Democratic President and Congress, and start over. How well has that worked for us, over the past two years?

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Poll: Obama's Looking Weak for Re-Election in 2012

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama emerges from a bruising midterm election with uncertain prospects for the next one in 2012, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll. Nearly half of his own base — 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents — want someone to challenge him for the Democratic nomination, according to the poll.

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Chris Hedges: Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion

There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.

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Paul Craig Roberts: How Republicans Created Executive Branch Hegemony

For more than a decade, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has been sounding the alarm about the neoconservative power grab that is destroying everything in its path, ensuring that there will soon be no justice, no civil liberties, no accountability -- no Constitution. In early March 2008, Roberts wrote that regardless of the outcome of future elections, the power the Republicans accumulated in the executive branch, making it for all practical purposes a dictatorship, will remain.

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Henry Giroux: There's No Democratic Culture in America -- We Live in an Era of Imposed Amnesia

We live in an age in which punitive justice and a theater of cruelty have become the defining elements of a mainstream cultural apparatus that trades in historical and social amnesia. How else to explain the electoral sweep that just put the most egregious Republican Party candidates back in power?

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Europe Ponders US Elections Results

For several weeks before the recent U.S. election, there was much nervous speculation among Europeans as they watched the fluctuations of the poll numbers. Now that the results are in, Europeans are perplexed by this turn back toward the politics of the Bush-Cheney era.

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2012 Could Be Worse For Democrats Than 2010

WASHINGTON Last week's election was bad for Democrats. The next one could be worse. Senate Democrats running in 2012 will be trying to hold their jobs in states where Republicans just scored major congressional and gubernatorial victories Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Virginia.

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Frank Schaeffer: "End Times" -- Election Results Reflect Biblical Republican Paranoia

One reason the Republicans won on Tuesday is because many of their supporters have already given up on this world and are waiting for the next. I know, I used to be one of them.

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Tom Hayden: Midterm Election Results a Setback for Peace

The November election was a setback for the peace movement, not only because of the defeat of Sen. Russ Feingold but for deeper reasons.

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David DeGraw: Midterm Election Further Demonstrates Need for Revolution

The Obama referendum came in and he got what he deserved. When you run on change and leave the same criminals in positions of power and dont hold anyone accountable for obvious crimes, and allow them to continue to commit those crimes, you deserve to lose your power. This is what happens when you put Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of the economy, and support Ben Bernanke for reconfirmation as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is what happens when you keep Robert Gates as your Secretary of Defense and General Petraeus in charge of your wars. This is what happens when you lie to protect the interests of BP over the American people. This is what happens when you bailout Wall Street and the health care industry and sell out everyone else. This is what happens when your rhetoric is the opposite of your actions. The past two years have clearly exposed Obama as a spineless corporate puppet and he deserves to be voted out in 2012.

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