IcyPatriot

Sheesh ... a slam dunk of post ... nice one ...

PatsFanInVa

My long-***** post above is, by and large, in agreement w/you - with the caveat that we're not always supposed to agree, and when we do, we're not always supposed to get it right.

The way democracy differs is that it's fair, not that it's efficient.

On the particular point of social security, we're looking at 2037 for insolvency. Currently (before the 1/3 cut, supposedly for 1 year, in the FICA tax), "insolvency" would mean getting 75% or so of the promised benefit, if nothing is done to fix the program.

SS is a great example of your "people are bad" theory. It is now slightly more screwed than ever before, because cutting the FICA tax is a "stimulative" measure, right now.

But we better put that FICA tax back where it was, or those bills come due much earlier. Will it happen? Children like candy. We act like children. This tax cut is the candy. We'll cry and whine if it goes away, just like any other "temporary" tax cut.

It's way less odious than the "temporary" Bush cuts that have been going for 10 years now.

But watch the flurry of idiots reciting their "any tax is evil and bad" catechism in response to this post.

This is what kills me. There are unpleasant things we have to do, no doubt about, no argument about it. Watch the amount of heated debate over such ideas here. No wonder "the government is broken."

The pres. did a good one the other night - he said "hey, let's close the loopholes, and then reduce our corporate tax rates." The GOP heard "reduce the corporate tax rate, and slobbered like pavlov's dogs when they hear the bell.

But 2/3 of America's corporations -- weighted toward the largest and best-heeled ones -- pay no corporate taxes in the first place.

Hence his prioritization of the loophole-closing over the tax rate itself. Smaht.

I just don't know that as a people we'll vote for sane programs with enough consistency not to fall behind vis a vis other economies/governments. We'll see.

PFnV

Titus Pullo

Are you quoting Michael Steele?

Ilikehappyppl

Great Post, could not agree more. I went and read what you posted earlier and your right on the money.

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PatsFanInVa

LOLOL

Yeah, you know, from "War and Peace". The second volume I think, "The Empire Strikes Back."

I actually saw Steele on Maddow the other night... you would think it would be a crappy combination, but he was actually very, very personable. His politics are still nonsensical, but I was amazed he was not the brain-dead buffoon he became in the GOP chair role. Probably because any gaffing was okay, now that he's Citizen Steele.

Tale of 2 Steeles, if you will.

IcyPatriot

this is a great opinion piece regarding Obama's speech. which let's face it ... is pretty much the problem with every Presidential speech ... more rah rah than substance and problem solving.

This is why we are broke ... we really don't want to hear hard solutions.

President Obama's "Sputnik Moment" Turns Into Throwing Spaghetti on the Wall | BuzzFlash.org

Stockholders ... Americans?.... don't care about real American solutions do they?
That great big sucking sound redux.
who builds infrastructure? Union workers do ... don't piss them off.
Military people don't really care about American soil problems ... do they?
The article then goes on to criticize Obama ... which is kind of shallow ... because if it was Hillary, or McCain, or Romney ... the speech would have been similar ... has it ever been different?

Presidential speeches are like homecoming pep rally's from the high school days. pep rally's never discuss the real probabilities of winning the game either.

The Brandon Five

It's easy to think that Western liberal democracy is the natural evolution of human society...hence our complacency.

PatsFanInVa

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” -- Oscar Wilde

DarrylS

IMO it is fractured more than broken.. currently in NOLA for some disaster training, and observing the world going by.

Decadence is alive and well, and folks are still trying to sell their sisters on the sidewalk. People are still queued up at the favorite restaurants.. so as bad as the economy is, people are spending and some are puking in the alleys.

An interesting conversation had while getting some air during this training, ran into a guy who just got in from an oil rig in Indonesia.. he works one month on and one month off.. he was a tad grouchy as he had to spend the weekend with his second wife and daughter at a cheerleading competition.. anyways he was telling me that even though the moratorium has been lifted there is no new drilling for oil in the gulf.. and most of the floating deepwater platforms have been floated down to Brazil.

And I thought that drilling was going on..

OTOH had some oysters and fresh shrimp from the gulf so guess there is some recovery.. who knows the long term effect.

Getting back to the subject at hand, government is fractured.. and have to wonder with the easy access to the news and the advent of the blogosphere we are just seeing more.. none of this is new. Since the Civil Rights act government have gotten more polarized and perhaps this is the culmination of about 40 years of contentious politics made more evident by social media.

The succession presidents since LBJ have just made it more and more polarized.. whether it be Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2 or Obama all of these in their own way have helped with the current injury.

Will it change, probably not, but lots of people play with a fracture and do not miss a beat.. this is a time of tremendous political upheaval and suspect that it will probably remain the same for a while and then some equilibrium will set in.. but then someone will pull some idiotic shenanigans and we will ask the question again.

The whole issue of social media cannot be downplayed, and have to wonder if whoever masters this method will be our most favorite politicians of the future...

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PatsFanInVa

Lots of interesting observations here, will stick with 1 or 2 I have something to say about... especially your last one, was just thinking about this...

Side-note on this one... I'm thinking the devil is in the details...

I think drilling is going on, but more to the point, production was never suspended... so if he only drills new wells, his part of the industry was affected by the moratorium, and I have no idea what the lead-time is prior to him getting into the act -- you have to figure that pipeline, no pun intended, would be backed up before his work picks back up.

We have at the moment a democratization of ideas.

This sounds good. In a way, it is. Anybody should, after all, be able to be heard.

However, there used to be "gatekeepers": real editors, fact checkers, and the like. This pertained for every species of available media. Real news organizations lived and died on the reliability of their information. Gossip was gossip, and if something traveled through the airwaves, for the most part, it was real news. Whether you complain of a corporate or a liberal bias, prior to cable (for example,) there was a "center" to what was considered legitimate news coverage.

The dispersal of news across the cable landscape, and the migration of "news" into entertainment, were the beginning, but only a harbinger of the age we're in now. Even news as entertainment is packaged and pushed.

Consider what we've been seeing lately in Iran and now Algeria and Egypt: flash mob as revolution, and -- this is important -- by leaderless movements.

These movements replicate in the real world the structure of the social networks they use to communicate. As if to gild the lily, it's thought that the movement in Egypt reached a tipping point due to... wait for it... wikileaks.

So we have democratization of information, democratization of discussion of that information, and democratization/decentralization of action based on that (and other) information.

Similarly, the U.S. is itself in a populist mode, once again displaying "throw the bums out" behavior, but without a successor ideology, and without a thought-out program of action based on the acquisition of power.

The difficulty is not for the democratization of discourse, which we consider a good, but for anti-elitist ideological reasons.

The difficulty is that the quality of discourse decreases as it is democratized.

Electronic media seem tailor-made for any point of view to be taken to an extreme. In Iran or Egypt, this may be a good thing. In the U.S., is it?

Caveat - there are no doubt defenders of the Egyptian or Iranian status quos who do not think this is a good thing.

I am a defender of an American status quo -- that is, electoral politics, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, that sort of thing.

Social networks are ultimately anarchic, and their fruits, thus far, appear to recapitulate that anarchic tendency.

When each person's opinion is weighted equally, that's a fair hearing of opinion. When what each person says is accorded a roughly equivalent chance of being factually accurate, we have lost a very significant value that the "gatekeepers" can bring us.

Naturally, the "gatekeepers" can be accused of bringing us badly chosen and edited information. I would counter that you need to base your consumption of "real" news on its fact content, to create a market for fact-based journalism. The wild success of news-as-entertainment, together with the abysmal performance (by comparison) of the real news, is a good indicator of the amount of patience we have with this approach.

I don't know where we go next, and whether it is good or bad. Freud said America is an experiment... a failed experiment. Personally, I don't think that is the case. I think the experiment continues.... in good times, I think the adventure continues.

But what's been lost is that we have to inform ourselves -- not rile ourselves up, not argue to defend an ideology, but know the actual facts -- to have the vital conversations on which the future depends.

The ultimate democratization of information cannot be confused with an ultimate democracy in the evaluation of information, if we wish to live in a world where the best information is the information we use to form our opinions and instruct our actions.

PFnV