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Ed Schultz pretty well lays it in the line with what a whole lot of the progressive community thinks about President Obama right now. Katrina Vanden Heuvel from The Nation weighs in on how "angry, infuriated and heartbroken" the base is and that they need to stand up if they don't want things to be very ugly in 2010. As Ed notes, the President needs to quit listening to Rahm Emanuel and the insurance lobby and start paying attention to those that got him elected.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

ED SCHULTZ: Good evening, Americans. And welcome to THE ED SHOW from New York.

Mr. President, pull that chair up in front of the fireplace here. What you say we sit down and have a little talk here tonight? What do you think, huh?

The base is restless. They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. They are looking for your GPS coordinates.

They want to know, where are you? They think we can do a heck of a lot better. Liberals and progressives think that they`re not being treated properly.

Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you`re nothing but a sellout, a corporate sellout, out that. I know it`s tough audio, but I`m your buddy Ed. I`ve got to tell you this. I don`t think anybody else is.

You aren`t listening to the very people who put you in office, Mr. President. This isn`t about your legacy. It`s about the people in America who need health care now.

Mr. President, I don`t know if you`ve noticed or not, but you have carved out the most important elements of reform. The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry. They get a bunch of new customers.

Here is what Wendell Potter, a friend of mine, told me on the program last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WENDELL POTTER: The Senate bill is full of loopholes, and the insurance industry knows that. In fact, they`ve made sure that they are in there.

One in particular will allow employers to charge certain workers thousands of dollars more just based on health factors. And it can be obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol.

The insurance industry will be able to write the rules. They are not being set in the legislation as currently written.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHULTZ: Mr. President, don`t leave the room. We`ve got some more talking to do. You can`t make it?

Apparently none of that matters. You see, at the White House, not long ago, the president told liberal Democrats to suck it up and listen to Joe Lieberman`s version on health care.

Now, here`s what gets me. The guy standing behind Obama is the biggest taker from big pharma and the insurance industry. Our old buddy, Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, is taking $3.4 million from the health industry over the last six years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That`s an average of $1,500 a day to Baucus from big health care.

Now, the travesty continues. Last night, 30 Democrats voted against an amendment that would help you and me, the consumers -- the drug importation bill.

It would let consumers buy prescription drugs from overseas at a fraction of the price that we pay right now. But you see, voting for it would have really endangered the deal that the White House cut with big pharma.

Mr. Personality, Rahm Emanuel, he must have gotten a hell of a deal. So, the Democrats got together and they killed it. So much for change we can believe in.

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From the Today Show Oct. 15, 2009. Dylan Ratigan and Michael Moore slam Wall Street for the latest round of bonuses being paid to their executives after being rescued by our tax dollars.

Lauer: Dylan, let me start with you. There are going to be a lot of confused people out here. The Dow is over 10,000 again. The bonuses are back, but on Main Street you’ve got money still tight, spending is tough, people can’t get mortgages, and unemployment is still a problem. Is it just the reality now that Wall Street and Main Street are completely disconnected?

Ratigan: Largely they were. Unfortunately the government has changed the rules on behalf of Wall St. to allow them access to trillions of our dollars as you and I have discussed, as Michael Moore has documented. When you have access to trillions of dollars of taxpayer money with no strings attached, it's very easy to make a few billion dollars. A billion is only 1/1000 of a trillion and because our government is allowing the indulgence of the risk taking of the trillions of our own money not only is it allowing Wall Street to make the billions, but it is also depriving the rest of our economy out of the use of those funds which is why you see the heart wrenching antidotes that Michael Moore is so good at portraying.

There is a direct connection between those who you see suffering in films that Michael documents and the abdication of duty by our government to allow all the taxpayer money we all work so hard to create to be the plaything, the gambling toy, of the financial industry as opposed to forcing the financial industry to get back to the business of being investors and becoming the next Warren Buffet, actually putting money into the economy as opposed to taking it out.

Lauer: Michael, let me make sure people understand this. The Wall Street Journal report says that firms are going to pay out about a $140 billion dollars in bonuses this year. The year before the economic meltdown, 2007, they paid out about $130 billion, so it’s gone up. How is this news going to go over with people like the ones in your home state Michigan that just found out unemployment is 15.3% in that state?

Moore: Well eventually people aren’t going to take it and I don’t know how many gated communities these people who are taking this $140 billion in bonuses, I don’t know how many castles with moats around them they can build, but I’ll tell you something—there’s an anger that’s building out there and I mean Matt, these people, they burned down our economy. They completely crashed it. And now they're getting rewarded for it. It would be like I burned down your house today and then tomorrow you send me a check for it thanking me. It's absolutely insane that we allow this to happen but not surprising because that’s our capitalist system. They can get away with it because it’s legal. They can get away with it because they can make whatever they want to make. They can take whatever they want to take. There’s no such thing as enough.

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Rachel Maddow breaks down who is behind the smears against ACORN and why, and how dishonest the reporting has been by the right wing media on the topic.

MADDOW: It may seem like the only thing happening in Congress these days is the never-ending fight over and of health reform. But if you happen to be watching the House floor at 3:00 this afternoon, this is what you would have seen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. STEVE KING ®, IOWA: Who has consistently called for the clean-

up of the corrupt ACORN, the criminal enterprise ACORN and all of their affiliates? It‘s been people on the Republican side of the aisle that have done that. This is the star of ACORN. He is—he is the lead chief organizer. He is the—he is the person who told the people at ACORN, “I will invite you into the—and we will be setting the agenda for America,” even before he is inaugurated as president of the United States. This is the man who worked for ACORN.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: This is the star of ACORN!

That was paranoid Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa, today, railing against the community organizing group ACORN, and falsely accusing President Obama of being ACORN‘s lead chief organizer. This sort of animus toward ACORN is something that‘s been percolating on the right for a really long time, but it‘s broken open recently as even Democrats in Congress have decided to go along with efforts to defund and demonize ACORN, and some Republican governors have even enthusiastically defunded ACORN as well, despite the fact that those governors didn‘t fund them in the first place.

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Part 1

Part 2

From GoLeftTV:

Thanks to an almost complete lack of regulation, the executives on Wall Street were able to gamble our economy for their own personal gain, ignoring ethics and in some cases the rule of law along the way. And while Congress is still trying to figure out whether or not to take action, the labor movement in America has decided to take matters into their own hands. Mike Papantonio of Air America's Ring of Fire talks with Richard Trumka, the secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, who has some big ideas on how to reign in the corruption and greed that has become too commonplace among Wall Street insiders.

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Charles Grassley is starting to sound as incoherent during his television interviews as he does in his Tweets. Grassley doesn't think we need more regulation. We just need more transparency. Yeah, that's going to make the finace companies behave. And when asked if the banks are in any position to protest if they're not going to make as much money, Grassley comes back with this:

Greed is human nature. We shouldn't blame greed any more than you'd blame gravity when a plane has an accident and goes down.

I'm sorry Senator, but I think we can blame greed for the mess we're in. Greed and the unwillingness of the government to put a check on it.

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Keith's Special Comment March 19, 2009. He goes after the Banks and all the chaos they have brought down on our heads.

Enough!

Olbermann: To all of you in the Corporate boardrooms.

Stop viewing the public's reaction to this naked, unhindered robbery of the public coffers, and your audacious, immeasurable sense of proprietorship and entitlement stop viewing our anger as some kind of brief impediment, some traffic delay that keeps you from your God-given corporate ballpark sponsorships, and perpetually remodeled offices, and the divine right of $38 million "compensation packages."

You, gentlemen and ladies, and not the good and long-suffering average people of this country, you are fomenting rage in this nation. You are the losers in this equation, and the people are the generous ones; they have not assembled in the streets with pitch-forks and flaming torches. You are the ones perceived — understood in a visceral and even transcendent way — as the committers of what is becoming class economic rape.

And heed this one word before these people grow weary of forgiving you, and instead decide to bring the "good life" — which you have built on their backs — crashing down on top of your heads. When the next boardroom needs re-modeling, or the next bonus paid, or the next jet purchased, remember that one word:

Enough!

And that means you, Citigroup and their leader---Vikram Pandit.

Citigroup confirmed Thursday that it planned to spend about $10 million on new offices for Vikram Pandit, its chief executive, and his lieutenants, saying the project would help it save money over time.

Affidavits filed with the New York Department of Buildings show that Citigroup, which has received $45 billion in government rescue aid, expects to pay at least $3.2 million for basic construction like wall removal, plumbing and fire safety at the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters. That figure does not include expenses like architect fees or furnishings.

‘‘In this environment, it absolutely sends the wrong message,’’ said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, referring to the office renovations. ‘‘Timing in life is everything.’’

Full transcript below the fold.

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