ask a silly question

...like whether or not the President is a war criminal.

Or whether he can really do anything.

It's like Avedon says

...Obama had the power to do many, many good things, and he refused every opportunity to do them. He refused to even attempt the most basic steps of negotiation with the opposition, asking not for a higher goal than what we really needed, but a lower goal as a pre-compromise, thus lowering the bar further still. He alleged (when he was trying to get elected) that he believed single-payer was the best way to go, but then he started babbling about the public option before he'd even started making a case for single-payer, having simply declared that passing single-payer wasn't politically feasible. (Oh, yeah? Start pounding it into the general public that everyone in America can get effectively free health care without raising taxes, and see how far Congress gets trying to resist it past the next election.) He even telegraphed to the press that he wasn't even really trying to get his so-called "compromise" of the public option, but instead was hoping the threat of the public option would frighten the insurance companies into slightly softening their viciously predatory and fraudulent practices - which it didn't. If he'd really wanted single-payer, he could of course have spent a lot of time explaining how real socialized medicine actually works in Britain and used it as the scare image of what "the left" was demanding, forcing the not-so-left to welcome single-payer as a longed-for compromise. And that has been his pattern with everything...

So don't ask about why the Laureate has done rather less than anticipated. It isn't just that

...he hangs out with guys from the Chicago School of Economics...

He is a professor of law there.

Just a bit tighter than simply hanging out...

It's not like we weren't warned, though. [tip o'teh tinfoil to Charles II] Naomi Klein manages to damn both the Oborg and the Clintonista in one breath. An admirable economy of words, there. And a good point to those who still wistfully look back longingly at Hillary.

It's the same story. Things aren't going to straighten out until the Chicago School paradigm is completely abandoned, and there's little chance of that. It's the Company modus operandi until the fossil fuels are completely gone.