Alan Simpson calls seniors "old coots" while dancing with a can.

[madfloridian]

This is one of the Third Way president, Jon Cowan's, brilliant ideas. He helped found a site called The Can Kicks Back to push cuts to the safety nets like Social Security. Simpson looks absolutely ridiculous as he takes part in this ad for a faux progressive group that in reality was funded by billionaires. More below the video.

A little background about this group which really is not progressive at all.

Activists versus the governing class

Jon Cowan once again ginning up faux youth outrage.


Coming soon: a new pressure group called “The Can Kicks Back,” which aims to turn younger Americans into an anti-deficit avenging army. It will surely attempt to play a role in the post-election talks surrounding the “fiscal cliff.” This offensive bears a slight odor of deja vu, however, because one of its organizers is Jonathan Cowan, who 20 years ago attempted to recruit Gen Xers in a similar campaign propelled by a brash, ultimately buffoonish group called Lead … Or Leave.

Today, Jon Cowan is the president of Third Way, which calls itself “the nation’s leading centrist policy institution” and is certainly one of the most prominent center-right pressure groups in Washington. Its board of trustees reads like a Who’s Who of Wall Street, hedge fund and real estate barons and it enjoys privileged access to the national media. (Cowan himself is a close personal friend and guru to Matt Bai, the New York Times Magazine’s chief political correspondent and a leading cheerleader for center-right deficit hawks.)

Cowan popped up in a slightly different guise this summer, as an advisor to “The Can Kicks Back,” (http://www.thecankicksback.org/) billed as a new campaign by “Millennials … pushing for a non-partisan ‘grand bargain’ to fix our fiscal future.” Other advisors to the new group include such usual suspects as Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson (authors of the much-discussed Bowles-Simpson plan to balance the budget mostly through slashing Social Security, Medicare, and domestic social programs), former Sen. Evan Bayh, and former comptroller General David Walker.

According to Salon's Alex Pareene this group is having financial problems.

Sad fake “millennial” anti-debt group completely broke and confused

Everyone is having a bit of a laugh today at the expense of “The Can Kicks Back,” the youth-oriented affiliate of the group known as “Fix the Debt,” which is yet another of the many organizations funded by single-minded deficit hawk billionaire Pete Peterson, along with a few of his similarly wealthy peers. The Can Kicks Back, which was supposed to nurture a youth movement to support Peterson’s goal of social insurance cuts and tax reform, now finds itself “nearly broke,” according to various internal documents obtained by Politico’s Byron Tau. As of November: “The group’s cash reserves were down to $70,000, with more than $75,000 in outstanding donor commitments …” And they’re having trouble with the fundraising.

One fundraising problem The Can Kicks Back has faced is the entirely accurate perception that it is not actually a grass-roots organization of young people deeply concerned with reckless entitlement spending and unsustainable long-term debt, but rather yet another front group — and in this case a particularly ineffective one — for the small network of billionaires who have spent decades advocating tax cuts and the rolling back of Social Security and Medicare benefits, in the name of fiscal responsibility. It turns out that most young Americans, being members of a generation that has had some trouble with the job market, don’t care about the federal government’s 30-year debt projections as much as they care about “having enough money for food and rent.”

[arely staircase]

1. I had no idea Third Way was anything other than a derisive term used here about Democrats

who support the president. So it is an actual organization nobody has heard of. Huh. And yeah he looks rediculous.

[madfloridian]

2. Yep, it's a think tank like the DLC was, pushing corporate views and needs.

And determined that there will be cuts in some way to Social Security.

[arely staircase]

4. well they can kiss my ass

Though I have mixed feelings about the DLC. While my politics are to their left nominating a more centrist candidate (Clinton) did lead us out of the presidential political wilderness.

[TheMathieu]

3. This group grows more irrelevant with each day. nt

[madfloridian]

5. Agreed on that.

Never a grassroots group, so pretty irrelevant from the start.