Reply #249: I would say that the author of the article never worked

[JDPriestly]

with homeless people, never spent 8-10 hours a day in the very dingiest most desperate part of a large city.

The part of the population of our country that is beyond despair is too great to waste much concern about whether Blue Dog Democrats' whose main concern is protecting the interests of their donors are re-elected.

It is very easy for over-paid political experts to sit in judgment on progressives. But if they spent a few days in an urban criminal court where those poor who are too cynical and angry to be present in the courtroom without shackles and outside a cage are held as their sentences are read to them,

if they spent a few hours in a dependency court where the children of the poor are rescued from their frustrated, impatient, angry parents only to be placed in worse situations in foster care,

if they only spent an afternoon a week for a year or so volunteering at a Juvenile Hall listening to the stories of kids whose lives were messed up by the poverty of their grandparents before they were even born,

then maybe they would understand why compromise at the expense of social programs is unacceptable to real progressives.

The poor pay the price not only for their own crimes but also for the crimes of the very rich.

If only the Blue Dog Democrats and "moderates" would spend as much time chastising and passing laws to reign in the crimes of the rich as they do the outrageous thinking of the "far left," maybe our country could make some progress.

I will bet you that the author of the article linked to in the OP lives a comfortable life and knows nothing of the world I describe above.

Because when you see a courtroom with a large cage enclosing angry, potentially violent prisoners in their shackles, when you talk to a teenaged boy who is in Juvenile Hall and grieving in loneliness about the death of his brother in a drive-by-shooting on the previous day, the sorrows of the CEO who doesn't want to pay a slightly higher percentage of tax on his millions just somehow seem trivial.

Sorry, I have to edit so often. I have trouble reading the courier typeface in the drafts of the messages I post.