The Bush tax cuts expire in exactly five weeks.

[woo me with science]

5. We are being set up to be grateful for a crumb

or for the absence of a certain blow, in the midst of a continued beating.

All the rhetoric is being set up to praise the President if he merely *refrains* from taking this or that particular bludgeon to the poor and middle classes.

This is how far we have been suckered to the right. We drown in a sea of platitudes about austerity, validation of Republican framing and lies, from neoDemocrats, as though we should be grateful and consider it a great victory if we can just elicit from our Democratic President a promise not to ATTACK us in this or that particular way. We are suckered to welcome and celebrate a new round of austerity, as long as we get a promise that *certain* attacks on the poor and elderly may not be included.

What we are owed is a complete change in rhetoric and in direction. We are owed passionate, public acknowledgement of the truth about how we have been looted and robbed and impoverished for 30 years, with all of our wealth going to a few greedy pigs at the top. And we are owed a clear plan not just to refrain from certain types of further assaults on our mothers and fathers and grandparents and children and neighbors and friends, but to REVERSE the crimes that have already been perpetrated on millions of us.

Instead, we are fed more garbage right-wing rhetoric about "shared sacrifice" and taught to be grateful if we are merely spared certain particular, additional swipes of the axe.