Tag: politics

Read this column by Thomas Friedman and this satire.

A level-heading analysis from David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

Fat and happy government workers, however easy the caricature may be, are not the cause of our looming federal and state deficits. Neither are spineless politicians.

The cause is Americans’ collective desire for low taxes and generous government benefits. We want our politicians to promise us tax cuts, a strong military, safe streets, good schools and unchanged Medicare and Social Security. And promise it all they do.

Eventually, we will have to pay for the government we want, regardless of what happens in Wisconsin.

Here’s the quote. Who said it?

Will America be led by a president elected by a majority of the American people? Or will we be intimidated and blackmailed into following the path dictated by a disruptive radical and militant minority?
…
In my view, this Fall, any candidate in any party who voices radical sentiment or who courts or enjoys the support of radical elements ought to be voted out of office by the American people. It’s just too dangerous.

From Montclair SocioBlog.

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

* South Carolina – 50th
* North Carolina – 49th
* Georgia – 48th
* Texas – 47th
* Virginia – 44th

If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country. Let’s keep it that way.

I haven’t verified these stats. But I do want to point out that teachers unions are often accused of looking out for themselves before looking out for their students. Perhaps the same should be said of union busters.

Also, consider this–it’s not so crazy–perhaps what’s good for teachers isgood for students.

Happy Boxing Day (if you’re Canadian). Or Second Day of Christmas (if you’re Dutch).

Why don’t we have two-day holidays (especially the Friday after Thanksgiving)?

In the news:

People in jail recording themselves reading books for their kids to listen to.

The DEA is big and scary and still unable to stop world leaders from dealing drugs.

And the New York Times has an article about the pay of elties. A person born poor (bottom fifth of the income distribution) in “the Land Of Opportunity,” is much more likely to die poor that a person born poor in, say, socialist Sweden or England (the chances are 42%, 25%, and 30%, respectively). Not to mention our poor are poorer.

And this is interesting: In my dad’s Princeton class of 1956, 450 of 750 graduates served in the military. By comparison, a third of recent Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance (one of the reasons I didn’t like Princeton). Just eight went into the military.

Speaking of the military: The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.

Other signs the times are a-changing, for the worse:

In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.

No doubt because the American economy is so much stronger today. But seriously… Why do we let this happen? Why do people insist on believing that regulation is the problem, that unrestrained for-profit corporations have our best interests in mind, and the only thing federal government is good for is the military?

It just don’t make sense.

Halliburton pays Nigeria $250 million to drop their case against former CEO Dick Cheney… for paying Nigerian official $180 million between 1994 and 2004 to secure a $6 billion contract. So says the BBC.

The Air Force is blocking its personnel from using work computers to view the Web sites of more than 25 news organizations and blogs that have posted Wikileaks. So says the Times (one of the blocked sites).

Phew. God forbid Air Force personnel would know what is free information to the rest of the world.

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority.”

Don’t forget to close that barn door on the way out. U.S.A., baby!

It always bothers me when people bitch about court decisions because they don’t agree with the politics. It’s one thing to be pro-abortion (as I am) or pro illegal immigration (got me there, too) or anti-2nd Amendment (not too fond of how some people interpret it, personally). It’s another to think that every Supreme-Court decision needs to be decided in favor of your particular belief rather than the greater issue on which the courts are supposed to make such decisions.

The Supreme Court doesn’t (or shouldn’t) decide if a specific law is good or bad; it decides if a given issue is constitutional. I think Roe v. Wade was a pretty weak Supreme Court decision. And yet I believe that every woman should have the right to have an abortion on demand.

Much of the Civil Rights Movement was helped by court cases that relied on greater moral issues more than strict constitutional interpretations. That’s fine by me too. I also understand that every decision shouldn’t be decided on technical grounds or original intent (see, for instance, the 7th Amendment).

Bush v. Gore? Now thatwas a terrible decision. But the court has always been political. And to some extent it should be.

Why do I mention this? Because I love Obamacare!

OK, actually, I’m just saying that to be provocative. I think Obamacare is too limited and health care should be single-payer, for everybody, and nationalized! But what do I care? I havehealth care.

I support health care as both a political and moral issue. The free market does not and cannot provide health care. That said, I could fully support a court decision that says that federal government shouldn’t be able to tell citizens they have to buy anything. I’m a states’ rights liberal! But not too many of us in this club, I can’t help but notice.

I just wish more conservative so-called states’ righters were equally supportive of states’ rights when it came to issues they don’t like, like drug legalization, or highway funds. The power of the federal government should not be a liberal versus conservative issue. But as long as it is, here’s to health care surviving court challenges!

I can’t help but think the release of all this information is somehow good. I certainly don’t feel less safe. I do worry about informants being outed and killed. But are they? And other than that, wouldn’t it be better if our government was more open? I mean, has anybody learned anything we didn’t already know? If so, maybe this will lead to some diplomatic breakthroughs somewhere.

Or maybe, like Iran said, the leaks are all an American plot! I like that idea.

What are your thoughts?

Mark Shields has a good column about a speech by Robert Gates, “the one memorable speech of the 2010 campaign”:

Gates spoke directly of an avoided undemocratic reality — that most Americans have grown detached from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the great civilian majority has come to view military service as “something for other people to do.”

Those “other people,” as Gates reminded us, come overwhelmingly from a “tiny sliver of America” concentrated in the South and the Rocky Mountain West, in rural areas and small towns.

There is the distinct possibility that eventually the U.S. military and its leaders will be estranged — culturally and geographically — from the civilian population it is defending.

Then Shields quotes my father:

Nobody understood this as well as the late military scholar and ex-GI, Charles Moskos, who told me that the U.S. “national interest is determined not so much by the cause, itself, but instead by who is willing to die for that cause.”

Moskos continued: “Only when the privileged do military service, only when the elite youth are under fire does the nation define the cause as worth the blood of our young people.” He added that, in both World Wars, the British nobility had higher casualty rates than did the British working class.