By DF on Wed, 08/01/2012 - 12:36pm | Politics, Social Justice
My dear Daggers, I know it's summer and there's a lot of fun stuff going on. Why, there's the Olympics and Mitt Romney making an ass of himself overseas and bigots slingin' chicken and what not, but I thought it might be pertinent to highlight how some of the citizens of Anaheim have been enjoying their summer:
Wolf Blitzer takes a break from his busy schedule starring as a sycophantic Muppet on CNN to pen a blog post as sycophantic Muppet on CNN's web site. His thesis: Rich politicians surely are noble creatures for getting out there on the campaign trail instead of enjoying their upper crust lifestyle. The pudding gets a bit richer when he erases all hope that he might somehow be talking about a real person somewhere by naming the current crop of animatronic GOP hopefuls as the specific people that he is actively admiring.
I stumbled across a site called SOPAOpera that's keeping track of who is and isn't supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the PROTECT-IP Act, SOPA's counterpart in the Senate. The site also tracks how much money congresscritters have received from the entertainment and tech industries respectively. SOPAOpera lists the data source as OpenSecrets, which indexes FEC data.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a double-dipper, collecting a salary and retirement benefits simultaneously, according to a personal financial disclosure form made public Friday.
Note to the reader: I had originally planned to divide what follows as a series of posts in order to better present the ideas herein. However, I've decided to simply cram it all into one post in the interest of getting the ideas out there and hopefully sparking a discussion. I know that this isn't in the interest of good writing, but I think the prospect of getting these ideas out, here and now, is a more pressing matter.
One interesting thing about the current American political climate is that you only ever seem to hear the phrase "class war" coming out of the mouths of those on the political right. Predictably, talk of raising taxes on millionaires, which I regard as a political slam dunk that probably should have been a center-piece of Democratic politicking for some time now, has also raised cries of class warfare from the right of the political spectrum.
Our own Genghis recently wrote a post that posed the rhetorical question, "Why should you vote for Obama?" The purpose of his post seemed to be to spark thought and discussion about what Obama's potential campaign paths might be in the face of expectedly dreary economic conditions during the 2012 cycle, which reminded of a new model of presidential elections by UCLA's Lynn Vavreck.
She was one of my favorite people in the econ blogosphere because she combined very sharp economic accumen with deep thinking about the moral implications of economic policy. Really, the best kind of economist.
She was a contributor to TPM Cafe and was linked to by Paul Krugman on a number of occasions.
I think that it's fair to say we would all be in better shape if the current manifestion of conservatism in America looked less like Sarah Palin and more like David Frum. I really disliked his views of 9/11 and the Iraq War. He's also credited with coining the phrase "axis of evil." And he was not a crossover conservative in 2008, voting for McCain despite his opinion that Sarah Palin was unqualified.
Punditry notwithstanding, this remains true: The sky is not falling. Aside from some specific details vis a vis Tea Partiers and ongoing demographic changes, there is pretty much nothing really surprising about what happened last night from an historical perspective.
You know what would really simplify and improve the American political system presently? I'll tell you: We should all just give our money directly to corporations! At least, that's what Glenn Beck is apparently advising his audience to do in the form of making political donations directly to the Chamber of Commerce. Media Matters sums it up:
Ah, the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. No, not the courtroom of Judge Judy - the United States Senate. Once a bastion of the elite and much more a body that represented state legislatures than Da Peehpuhl (as we say here in California), then civilized by the 17th Amendment, it is now the Place Where Good Legislation Goes to Die on the Vine.
PROTIP: If you're going to take someone to task for their supposed bigotry, it's probably best that your whole argument not devolve into a weird tirade about how Jews run everything... including the company that employs you.
Anyway, peace out to Rick Sanchez, whose Twitterfied brand of infotainment was the final nail in the coffin containing my erstwhile relationship with cable news two years ago. Cancelled my cable and haven't looked back.
