I've long felt that Rahm Emanuel was a total prick. I felt he sabotaged progressives in primary elections. I feel he played a major role in creating the bluedog problem we now have in the congress.
I think he's been involved with setting up the deal with big pharma that led to the Whitehouse blocking Byron Dorgan's bill that would have allowed Americans to buy drugs from Canada and overseas-- and which, by its failure, probably led Dorgan to decide no to run for election again.
We know he's said something along the lines that actions of progressives were "f*cking retarded."
Matthew Rothschild, of The Progressive, writes, summing things up nicely,
I was reading the cover story of the New York Times Sunday Magazine the
other day--the one about Obama's team taking Capitol Hill--and I came
upon the following quote from Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
"The only nonnegotiable principle here," he said, "is success.
Everything else is negotiable."
That's the problem I have with Emanuel--and with Obama.
There's no principle they're willing to go to the mat for.
They didn't fight for universal single-payer health care.
They didn't fight for giving judges the authority to reduce the
mortgages of people in bankruptcy.
They didn't fight against the bank bailout.
They didn't fight to keep GM from shutting down plants and laying off
21,000 people, even when they're taking ownership of GM.
They didn't fight for marriage equality or against don't ask, don't
tell.
They didn't fight against indefinite detention without trial; hell,
they've embraced it.
They didn't fight to dismantle Bush's entire edifice of repression,
including the NSA spying and the Military Commissions Act.
And they haven't fought to bring the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to
speedier close.
Emanuel's comment is the very definition of being unprincipled. From a
DLC-er like him, I'm not surprised.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)