Today's quote

President Obama is a closet Republican, corporatist President. He saved the banks within months of taking office, but frets that it'll just take time to save the middle class. If I hear him use that stale car-in-the-ditch blame game metaphor one more time, I'll scream. Thank goodness he finished his last campaign pep rally Sunday to a less than packed venue. Beginning Wednesday, the ads and the rhetoric will be forgotten and we will all confront reality.

It'll be time to hold Obama's feet to the fire and somehow get it into his thick centrist skull that compromise isn't working. If he wants a second term, he'll have to do better than refine his messaging techniques and whine about being unappreciated for saving the auto industry and throwing us a few snippets of health insurance reform in lieu of universal coverage. He'll have to clamp down on bank fraud in the foreclosure crisis, stand firm on protecting Social Security from the deficit reduction "Cat Food Commission" and take definite steps to disentangle the nation from the quagmire of Afghanistan. He must veto any extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent.

In a time of national crisis, the usual presidential ploy is to ask the public to make sacrifices, tighten our belts. That's not going to work in these times, for this nightmare - when the real unemployment rate is closer to 20 percent than the conservative official ten percent. If big businesses are hoarding money by either not hiring American or outsourcing manufacturing where the equivalent of Southern plantation slave labor still exists, they must be punitively taxed. They and their Republican enablers are positively un-American - and it's time to hurl the patriotism invective right back at them. Let the moralizers put their money where their mouths are for a change. Let them show they care about their country (even though they really don't).

Obama has been put on notice. Otherwise a 2012 primary challenge is a real possibility, along with the emergence of a viable progressive third party. Even the Tea Party crowd will get the picture soon enough when they don't get their country back from their wealthy GOP puppet masters.