Quote of the week

You know, I have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years - "Don't let Obama do anything". What kills me is, apparently that's the Democrats' plan, too. - Bill Maher, New Rules, 9/25/09

The Runner up, from the same diatribe:

30% interest on credit cards? Are you kidding me? It's a good thing for the banks the Supreme Court legalized sodomy.

You know it's bad when even NPR is reporting on Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize and they can't keep the "REALLY?!" out of their voices. I mean, seriously, I thought the prize was supposed to go to someone who had actually accomplished something. But after nine months in office, we still have prisoners in Gitmo (with Obama neither ruling out more torture nor doing away with the other secret prisons), soldiers in Iraq and Afganistan (with no real hope of them coming home anytime soon), "don't ask don't tell" still prevails in the military, the economy is still in the tank, and many of the more heinous policies of the Bush administration are still being carried on, in both the foreign and domestic arenas. And of course, there's the current health care debacle, which not only is not taking the shape that Obama campaigned on, but is proving an effective distraction from other just as pressing matters. And for those who say (as I've tried to up to this point) that 9 months isn't long enough to judge the president's long-term effectiveness, since it's apparently enough to judge his worthiness for the peace prize, it would seem it's also long enough to judge him on other matters.

Of course, as Maher points out in his above-quoted New Rules segment, it's not just the president and congress that's at fault here, but also "we the people". No, I'm not suggesting that the teabaggers are right in disrupting town hall meetings and showing their racist stripes and comparing Obama to Hitler, but I am suggesting that maybe it's time that we, as Americans, start speaking up again, start standing up for ourselves, and start demanding that a President who has a majority in both houses of congress stop trying to "reach across the aisle" to people who have NO interest in being reached out to, stop trying to build some kind of imaginary coalition with people whose only objective is to tear him down and regain power for themselves (actually, Rush Limbaugh, much as I hate to admit it, may be the most honest conservative out there when he says that he hopes that Obama does fail in his goals - it's obvious that he's far from the only one that feels that way, but he's one of the few who will actually admit it), and instead start using the power of his office and the power of his party's control of congress to actually DO SOMETHING and fulfill those lofty goals and dreams that we elected him on. As Maher also says, "What happened to change? And when did the fierce urgency of 'now' become 'Your call is important to us, please continue to hold'?"

Here's the full video:
(fair warning, this is definitely not family friendly, and not safe for work)