If the Democrats want to keep control of the House, they need to have something to campaign on this fall. During the presidential campaign, the party promise reform -- but so far, other than a mild health care bill, there's no real reform on the table.

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"Mild health care bill?" LOL. It was a direct corporate bailout/give-away to the mangled health "care" industry. Period.

The so-called Democrats could have every seat in the House and Senate and the current corporate status quo would continue. But, if the so-called Democrats want to continue their charade they could of course campaign on the simplistic marketing slogans of the 2008 campaign. "Hope" and "change we can believe in" BS. Just drag that out again. It will work. Most people aren't paying any attention to this stuff at all. They think things are just fine and Obama is still their hero/messiah/savior. Those marketing slogans worked the first time to fool the gullible sheep. There are no real reforms on Pelosi's table just as she took impeachment off her table. The only thing on her table is continuing the corporate status quo.

Meanwhile, check this out. I remember people screaming during the campaign, "The #1 reason for voting for Obama is the Supreme Court. Supreme Court. Supreme Court. Supreme Court."

Check this out:

Kagan in Context: Shafting Progressive Values
Truthout.org
The article was written by former Obama believer, Norman Solomon

If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens - and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it's part of a pattern. The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.

"It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf. "They are technologically very advanced."

On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a centrist baseline has smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction. Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles.

"During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration's bogus category of 'enemy combatant,' whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right," University of Illinois law Professor Francis Boyle noted last month. "Now, in her current job as U.S. Solicitor General, Kagan is quarterbacking the continuation of the Bush administration's illegal and unconstitutional positions in U.S. federal court litigation around the country, including in the U.S. Supreme Court."

Boyle added: "Kagan has said 'I love the Federalist Society.' This is a right-wing group; almost all of the Bush administration lawyers responsible for its war and torture memos are members of the Federalist Society."

The departing Justice Stevens was a defender of civil liberties. Unless the Senate refuses to approve Kagan for the Supreme Court, the nation's top court is very likely to become more hostile to civil liberties and less inclined to put limits on presidential power.

Here is yet another clear indication that progressives must mobilize to challenge the White House on matters of principle. Otherwise, history will judge us harshly - and it should.

For more than 15 months, evidence has mounted that President Obama routinely combines progressive rhetoric with contrary actions. As one bad decision after another has emanated from the Oval Office, some progressives have favored denial - even though, if the name "Bush" or "McCain" had been attached to the same presidential policies, the same progressives would have been screaming bloody murder. [Sam's comment: I've been saying the same thing. I've talked about the hypocrisy of the Obama believers.]

But enabling bad policies, with silent acquiescence or anemic dissent, encourages more of them. At this point, progressive groups and individuals who pretend that Obama's policies merely need a few tweaks, or just suffer from a few anomalous deficiencies, are whistling past a political graveyard.

At the same time, with less than six months to go before Election Day, there are very real prospects of a big Republican victory that could shift majority control of Congress. [Sam's comment: shift it from what? How can one shift a "right" shift? Duh. The Republicans and Democrats work for their corporate owners. It doesn't make any difference which "team" is in power. You get the status quo of the corporations either way. You get what the corporations want under corporate fascism. You still haven't figured that out, Norman? Who's writing the legislation? The corporations. That's who.] Progressives have a huge stake in averting a GOP takeover on Capitol Hill. [Sam's comment: LOL! The GOP has been in power for years now and the so-called Democrats are their employees. When will you figure that out, Norman? Man, some people are thick.]

The corporate-military centrism of the Obama administration has demoralized and demobilized the Democratic Party's largely progressive base - the same base that swept Nancy Pelosi into the House speaker's office and then Barack Obama into the White House. National polls now show Democrats to be much less enthusiastic about voting in November than their Republican counterparts.

The conventional political wisdom (about as accurate as the claim that "oil rigs today generally don't cause spills") is that when a Democratic president moves rightward, his party gains strength against Republicans. But Democrats reaped the whirlwind of that pseudo-logic in 1994 - after President Clinton shafted much of the Democratic base by pushing through the corporate NAFTA trade pact against the wishes of labor, environmental and human rights constituencies. That's how Newt Gingrich and other right-wing zealots got to run Congress starting in January 1995.

For progressives, giving the Obama administration one benefit of the doubt after another has not prevented matters from getting worse:

* At the moment, US troop levels are nearing 100,000 in Afghanistan.
* Massive quantities of oil are belching into the Gulf of Mexico.
* The White House has signaled de facto acceptance of a high unemployment rate for several more years, while offering weak GOP-lite countermeasures like tax breaks for businesses.
* Nuclear power subsidies are getting powerful support from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, while meaningful action against global warming is nowhere in sight.
* The Justice Department continues to backtrack on civil liberties.

[Sam's comment: your list doesn't even begin to cover the majority of what Bush3 has done and is continuing to do. That's a very clear/sanitized list you have there.]

And, now, if the president's nomination of Kagan is successful, the result will move the Supreme Court to the right.

Progressives should fight the Kagan nomination.

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And then there's this:

Google this:
Elena Kagan: Toward a Pro-GM Supreme Court?
The article is from: theatlantic dot com

Please Google:

Abuses at US ‘Black Jail’ in Afghanistan confirmed

---and---

BBC News: Red Cross confirms 'second jail' at Bagram, Afghanistan

Pelosi is just a corporate whore, always has been. So that pretty much answers your question about why she doesn't support this bill. Her support and sometimes tepid opposition to war is unpopular in her district, but the facts that she's been in office so long and her ascendance to Speaker of the House get people to vote for her, as stupid as that is. However, I would have loved to see what Cindy Sheehan would have done against Pelosi if Sheehan had the same amount of campaign money.