Obama the Failure: We Needed a Benevolent Dictator. You'll Burn in the "Republican lake of Fire"

So the republicans took the senate and kept the house, though they aren't veto-proof. President Obama is in for a lot of headaches during his final two years in office. But he brought in on himself with weak leadership and his non-agenda which consisted largely of reversing Bush-era policies: closing Guantanamo Prison, reversing middle- and upper-class tax cuts, ending war-mongering etc.

While the repubs are indeed "the party of 'No'", the latest president and vice president to come from their numbers had an agenda -- right, wrong or indifferent. Outside of reversing Bush-era policies, Obama dreamed that he might eliminate partisan bickering and congressional dysfunction. While I won't discuss what I think are the reasons for his failure in this blog post, it is clear that he failed.

I foresee Obama spending most or all of 2015 whining about the cards he's been dealt and most or all of 2016 putting down a literal American revolution. He'll feel like a devil in a republican Lake of Fire. (There's more truth to that simile than you might realize.) For his failure to be the benevolent dictator that this country needs, I'll love watching him suffer. He should've gone hard much sooner.

As for local DC politics,I've pasted a slightly edited e-mail below. I sent this to hundreds of my contacts yesterday.....

I hate to say it but life just got harder with the election win of Muriel (or shall I say "More o' Hell"?) Bowser. Though I'm with the Statehood Green Party, I would have preferred David Catania for mayor. I've told many people that he is famously mean and that we need the likes of Catania to force DC Government to think more and to function better. I'm very familiar with the ignorance of the Dept. of Human Services and would assume that the ignorance is system-wide. (I have anecdotal evidence of ignorance in other departments that touch Human Services in some way.) Given what I know about Fenty whose protege "More o' Hell" Bowser is, the ignorance and dysfunction will continue. And without Clarence Carter (who was somewhat capable of the necessary meanness that makes people think) as the DHS director, that mayoral, system-wide stupidity that MoH Bowser promises to bring can't be rectified at the cabinet level.

I had high hopes that Catania would use his mean streak to make the business community back the f**k up and let them know that he's here for everybody, not just the gentrifiers -- that he will ensure that economic growth doesn't squeeze out poor residents. Those hopes have been dashed for the next four years. My statement assumes that the stress of the job, much of which will be brought by yours truly, doesn't kill MoH Bowser and spur a special election. Maybe she'll get caught up in a scandal and be indicted. Let's hope. (Never before have I actually hoped for a scandal; but, I'm terrified by her win.) I'll make it my business to give her MY Hell from the very start (maybe as soon as Wednesday, November 12^th, 2014). She and her council chief of staff Joy Holland received this message, BTW.

On the morning of November 5th as I entered a Starbucks, a homeless vendor of the Street Sense newspaper who was familiar with my views approached me to tell me the bad news about the MoH Bowser win. He also said that she is meeting with developers already. Pity. This is all the more reason to move forward with my "Worker Wednesdays" idea mentioned in my October 26th. 2014 blog post and hyperlinked into my e-mail signature.

I was disappointed that neither Graylan Hagler nor Eugene Puryear won the at-large council seats. Unlike with the mayoral race, it seems that DC voted for the candidate that they were most familiar with in most other races. (That was NOT the case in Ward 1.) I seems that DC is not ready to think outside of the "two screwed-up party" box.

David Catania is a formerly-repubican Independent who broke ranks with the party due to its dysfunction and lack of real moral fiber. He would not have been beholden to a party had he won. He is gay, which I'm indifferent to. Nonetheless, he could have been more of a champion for the LGBT community if he had won. He might have been the city's first White mayor, another matter that I'm indifferent to but which rounds out the list of characteristics that he has which no other DC mayor has ever had: not beholden to a party, non-Dumbocratic, gay and White. Damn, he lost!!!!!

Our advocacy just got harder. We'll need to redouble our efforts to assert the right of the poor to live in DC and of ALL the homeless to obtain housing here. Our only real hope lies within Kristy Greenwalt, the director of the ICH. She is responsive to the needs and requests (demands) of the poor. Let's collectively recommend her to Bowser. (If Bowser hires Kristy, I might change how I feel about Bowser and see her as that "woman apart" that she claims to be. If so, I'll publish that statement widely.)

Of lesser consequence but still important is that Bowser not retain Allen Lew as city addsinistrator. he lorded over the construction of the Nationals stadium and the Convention Center which displaced and priced out many poor people. Now he chairs the body that is charged with decreasing homelessness which went from 6,546 people in January 2011 when he took the position to almost 9,000 now in a city of 650,000. He also pissed me off at the June 17th, 2014 ICH meeting when he euphemised my statement about the ICH failing. He said, "We're not failing. We're facing bigger challenges". I thought at that moment about how he needed to be smacked -- for starters anyway.

In closing, I voted in flavor of Initiative 71 to legalize (Senorita) Marijuana in "El Distrito". After all, why lock folk up for smoking weed if and when they aren't harming or infringing upon the rights of others??? It passed. Yeah!!!!!