TELL REPUBLICAN FAMILY MEMBERS AT THANKSGIVING DINNER

 

1. In the past three years, the deficit has fallen faster than in any three-year stretch since World War II.

2. The U.S. recovery has been one of the best in the world.

3. The GOP is the food-stamp party. 

4. Ronald Reagan socialized medicine in the United States.

5. America creates more jobs when a Democrat is in the White House.

See details at The National Memo. 

I realize this post may be too late for Thanksgiving dinner, but you can save the list for Christmas dinner, which is right around the corner.   

SO WHO YA GONNA VOTE FOR?

The delegates at the DNC look like the people in the country.

What kind of people do you want to run your country? The folks who organized the RNC or the folks who organized the DNC? If the winner is the party who put on the best convention, then there is no contest. The Democrats orchestrated a near-perfect convention.  The purpose of a political convention today is no longer about choosing candidates for president and vice-president, because that's all settled beforehand.  The hope of the Democratic leadership is to fire up the delegates to the convention, the activists and the not-so-active voters watching at home and in gatherings around the country, both Democrats, independents, and stray Republicans to vote and to work to get out the vote which the Republicans are so very anxious to suppress in the battleground states.  The atmosphere at the DNC was electric.  The crowd was fired up. The convention was a huge success.

Because of Isaac, what I saw of the RNC was mostly on videos, and it was Dullsville.  I did not last 5 minutes with any of the major speeches, though I did watch Clint Eastwood to the bitter end of his conversation with the empty chair.  I'm not sure why, but I couldn't seem to click the stop button.  Note to Paul Ryan: Lying speeches can be boring.  The Republican delegates, along with a good many Republicans at large do not have warm, fuzzy feelings about Romney, but they liked some of what he and the other speakers said.  The delegates even applauded Ryan's lies.  The Dem delegates seemed to love Obama, which does make a difference in the enthusiasm of the crowd at the convention and that of the viewers at home. Disclosure: I am biased.

The delegates at the RNC look like the crowd at the country club.

While I am rather cynical about politics here in the US, seeing much of the talk from both parties for the BS that it is, I do believe this election is important and that the team that is elected will make a difference, for good or for ill.  Both parties neglected the matter of increasing poverty in the country, but to suggest an equivalency in the policies of Democrats and Republicans stretches credibility beyond the limit. The dog-eat-dog Darwinian policies of the present Republican Party are shocking and scandalous.  The corporate culture will continue to run the country no matter which party is in charge in the office of the president and the legislature, but let's not pretend that the coming election will affect the poor in the same way. Even marginal attention to the plight of the poor will have an impact, and which party is more likely to address the problem? Note that Sr Simone Campbell, the voice of conscience at the DNC, mentioned the Ryan/Romney budget at the beginning of her speech.

The disappearing middle class is a crisis that if not addressed will increase the numbers of those living in poverty, and we'll end up as a banana republic, with a society that consists of the very rich and the very poor and quite a small middle class. Although I'm disappointed that the Democrats did not highlight the problem of poverty in the country as I would have liked, I believe this election will make a difference to the poor, even if only in a moderate way.

DNC photo from Time.
RNC picture from The Huffington Post.
Sign from Prior Aelred's Facebook page.

TED CENSORS NICK HANAUER SPEECH

TED: Ideas worth spreading - Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world



Apparently, the talk in the video was not riveting enough for the folks who make decisions at TED.  Or perhaps it was too riveting.

From IBTimes:

Nick Hanauer, a multimillionaire venture capitalist from Seattle, believes that rich people like himself aren't job creators. He made this known during a March 1 TED University conference where he spoke about income inequality, but that talk was censored.

The National Journal reported that officials at TED, a popular series of Web-based talks, told Hanauer in an April email that they wanted to put his talk "out into the world!" However, they quickly shifted gear and said the venture capitalist's talk was "political" and too controversial to be posted.

"Political" and controversial?  I'm no economist, but the speech sounds like Economics 101 to me.  Granted it's only one view of which policies are best to create wealth, thus, according to TED, Hanauer's ideas are not worth spreading.  The speech seems eminently sensible to me, but I'm sure that many would vehemently oppose the policies Hanauer recommends.  If the purpose of an organization is to spread worthwhile ideas, then it seems to me avoiding controversy would be virtually impossible, unless you're in the business of exploring only conservative, Republican, business-oriented, ideas.

But wait!

According to the Journal's report, TED curator Chris Anderson had reacted by saying Hanauer's talk "probably ranks as one of the most politically controversial talks we've ever run, and we need to be really careful when" to post it.

Anderson was urging extra caution especially since another politically sensitive TED talk, by Melinda Gates on contraception, was about to be released, in the midst of a media firestorm over comments by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Media firestorm!  Rush Limbaugh!   

Now TED hearkens back to the 19th and early 20th century, when contraception truly was controversial because, in the present day, a few Roman Catholic bishops scream loud and long about contraception, which makes Melinda Gates speech on the subject "controversial", and heaven forbid that the organization have two "controversial" talks in a row.  This organization is surely not in the business of boldly exploring a variety of ideas, but is apparently rather determined to explore only "safe" ideas.  And what is "safe"?

I searched for the Hanauer talk at the TED website, thinking perhaps the group had changed its collective mind about the censorship, but with no results.  Still, the talk is now public on YouTube.  Censorship is more difficult in the age of technology.

Thanks to Ann V for the link.

WHAT GOVERNOR JINDAL AND HIS HELPERS DID FOR LOUISIANA

From the Editor's Column in the summer issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas:

Inventing America and Destroying Louisiana

It was Washington's generation that had to invent America and all its institutions and envision what a great nation ought to be. It was Washington and his contemporaries, foremost among them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who understood that a national government had to secure revenue for its institutions, and was obligated not only to provide for the national defense and the delivery of mail, but also to found libraries and universities, and to promote exploration, learning, and a civil society.

So how bitter it is for us to descend to the present political movement in Louisiana, of an infantile populism that imagines it can have a democracy and not and not have taxes adequate to provide for the commonwealth, that would savage by a loss of $300 million a year to a higher education system that had just barely gained the ranks of respectability, that incarcerates its own citizens at the highest rate in the free world, that has a high school graduation rate of of 59 percent, that slashes its arts programs 60 percent in a single year and completely eliminates funding for humanities? It is a barbarism we are imposing on ourselves, a dark that descends from the head of the stairs.

To put it in more colloquial terms, imagine that Louisiana was a football team in a 50-team league and finished perennially, year after year, in 49th or 50th place. Would we not be firing its coaches and running them out of town rather than even contemplating re-appointing them? Would the citizens really care that the tickets cost only a nickel and clamor to see such a team play? And yet politically, that is the low bar we have set for ourselves: in education, in health care, in literacy, in the humanities and culture. And it is not being imposed by Washington or people from New Jersey; we have done it to ourselves.

The complete loss of the state appropriation for the humanities, just recently at $2 million annually, will cost the state $14 million annually in economic impact, increase our illiteracy...and diminish the quality of life incalculably. I could delineate this in detail but I will suffice to illustrate the result as Laurence Sterne might have in his prescient post-modern novel "Tristram Shandy":

as a black hole.

Martin Sartisky, Ph. D.
Editor-in-Chief

There you have it. We have done it to ourselves. And Bobby Jindal is very likely to be reelected on his platform of no new taxes and ridding ourselves of the old taxes. Governance by slash and burn. Unfortunately, if I said, "Only in Louisiana!" I would not speak truth. We are surely at the extreme of the spectrum, but the same sort of madness is spread throughout the land.

ABOUT WHAT I EXPECTED

My Political Views
I am a left moderate social libertarian
Left: 6.02, Libertarian: 2.32

Political Spectrum Quiz

H/T to Tobias, who is a true free spirit.

UPDATE: I left out some of my results.

My Culture War Stance
Score: -6.91

Political Spectrum Quiz


My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -8.63

Political Spectrum Quiz