Either the Republicans did nothing when we were in charge, or we passed reckless tax cuts and new spending and unnecessary wars and removed the separation between church and state and other such misdeeds. I would like to regain the majority so liberals could reenter a state of confusion choosing daily between the doing nothing and ruining the country by doing things insults.

jerseyhoya wrote:Either the Republicans did nothing when we were in charge, or we passed reckless tax cuts and new spending and unnecessary wars and removed the separation between church and state and other such misdeeds. I would like to regain the majority so liberals could reenter a state of confusion choosing daily between the doing nothing and ruining the country by doing things insults.

so you didn't read the article I linked to then

You called it a not very good article

So no, no I did not read it

jerseyhoya wrote:Either the Republicans did nothing when we were in charge, or we passed reckless tax cuts and new spending and unnecessary wars and removed the separation between church and state and other such misdeeds. I would like to regain the majority so liberals could reenter a state of confusion choosing daily between the doing nothing and ruining the country by doing things insults.

I don't like to get partisan in these threads, but... Republicans did little to nothing to address the major problems of the country going forward: unsustainable budgets, dysfunctional health care, declining public education and public/private innovation systems. They made some of these problems worse, thanks to the tax cuts and the wars and the deregulation. (Democrats don't have clean hands on any of that either, but they weren't driving the train for the most part.) All these problems were known ten years ago.

If the Rs plan to do anything differently upon regaining the majority, I haven't heard about it. They seem to be resolutely against efficiency gains in Medicare, cutting any defense spending anywhere ever, doing anything at all to address consequences of climate change, or reforming entitlements in a way that doesn't exacerbate the problems (e.g. privatizing Social Security). It's all faith-based policymaking, blindly following dogmatic tenets in one issue area after another, and when things go wrong offering absurd explanations ("poor people taking mortgages crashed the economy") rather than re-examining the underlying assumptions. Palin is the emblematic modern Republican.

There's a lot wrong with the Democrats. They're constrained by their own interest groups, they usually can't get their shit together, and many of them come pre-corrupted. But at least they seem to be serious about trying to govern. Republicans once were, too; what I find endlessly amusing about the Reagan fetishism is that the guy's core practicality would render him an odious RINO in the eyes of today's loudest and proudest conservatives. But right now, aside from a few outliers in past or present governorships like John Huntsman and maybe (and kind of shockingly) Mitch Daniels and to some extent Jeb Bush or Huckabee, and a few outsider thinkers like Gingrich when his meds are right and the Grand New Party guys, I just see a semi-organized temper tantrum.

I hope the party comes back to the serious work; we really need them.

Honestly, dajafi, while the Republican may not be boasting about their accomplishments, they did do a few good things, though they had help from the Dems. S-chips was no doubt a good piece of legislation, and I'd put NCLB in the same league with the Dem's health care reform. Both of these land mark pieces of legislation are steps in the right direction, and they are a foundation for future reform.

TenuredVulture wrote:Honestly, dajafi, while the Republican may not be boasting about their accomplishments, they did do a few good things, though they had help from the Dems. S-chips was no doubt a good piece of legislation, and I'd put NCLB in the same league with the Dem's health care reform. Both of these land mark pieces of legislation are steps in the right direction, and they are a foundation for future reform.

Damn--I meant to make the point that NCLB was a start and a positive step at least philosophically, if not operationally. I changed my language from "nothing" to "little to nothing" when I thought of that measure but forgot to note it specifically. I agree it lays a foundation for meaningful education reform, even if they didn't fund it as they'd promised to and let the standards mostly go to crap.

But your examples kind of make the point: S-CHIP was passed in '97 IIRC, with subsequent attempts to amend it squelched (and vetoed by Bush in the last Congress before this one after the Ds had retaken majorities). NCLB came in Bush's first year, when he wanted to build some bipartisan cred. For the last five years of Republican control, they cut taxes, rattled sabers and held a lot of hearings on stuff like flag burning.

(This is also why I'm glad the Ds are pushing their agenda somewhat rigorously now; I know that if they're still in the majority by, say, 2013, it's likely to get similarly gruesome in terms of substantive vs. symbolic activity.)

jerseyhoya wrote:You called it a not very good article

So no, no I did not read it

Poor choice of terms on my part. It's not so much 'not very good' as poorly argued.

Its author suggests that

[t]he real battle in Washington is seldom between conservatives and liberals or the right and the left or “red America” and “blue America.” It is nearly always a more local contest, over which politicians will enjoy the privilege of representing the interests of the rich.

we're in the majority!!!!! YES WERE WINNING!!!!!

Can anyone explain Ross Douthat to me?

Heaven and Nature

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Douthat finds that life on this swirling dustball (probably one of several inhabited by creatures similarly vexed by his exalted self-consciousness) must be tragic if it isn't somehow redeemed by a fantastical old guy and his firstborn, who happen to live in the sky.

He's got the wrong adjective; the self-aggrandizing wretch undoubtedly meant 'pitiful'.

drsmooth wrote:Can anyone explain Ross Douthat to me?

Heaven and Nature

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Douthat finds that life on this swirling dustball (probably one of several inhabited by creatures similarly vexed by his exalted self-consciousness) must be tragic if it isn't somehow redeemed by a fantastical old guy and his firstborn, who happen to live in the sky.

He's got the wrong adjective; the self-aggrandizing wretch undoubtedly meant 'pitiful'.

Douthat is pumping not so much for God or religion as for a particular religion. Religion serves some of our higher spiritual needs, but in its particularity (only those of this denomination are right thinking and will be saved, and really only they can be trusted to be ethical, because the people of other religions are following false Gods.) essentially tribal. This is a piece with the conservatives alledged liberal attack on Christmas, Christianity and religion generally. What it is is an attack on the 'other'. An unwillingess to see the creation of an America in which people of all religions, or no religion, can be comfortable and can be viewed as living ethical lives.

In this particular essay, he takes on pantheism, or the God of nature, but is really attacking as well the deist view of God. Conservative Christians believe that they belong to the only true religion and the nation and its culture should be structured around their beliefs. There particular religious views and cultural views really are just the tribal culture their ancestors brought with them from the old country. Thus, conservative Protestants distrust moderate or mainstream less literal Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, deists, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddists, agnostics,atheists, gays, African Americans, and Hispanics. As those at the Palin rallies protested, they are losing 'their America' to all these other groups of 'other' who constitute the majority of people in this nation.
They don't understand why they can't continue living their 1930s or 1950s lives in their rural towns. This has been going on since the end of slavery and segregation were viewed as the end of a way of life and the institutions from which many derived their sense of self importance. He is horrified that Hollywood might assume that God is on the side of the environment, rather than that of those who would exploit it.

I don't have a huge problem with going back as dust and ashes.

No 2010 campaign for Giuliani

This is being painted as a big blow to the Republicans' chances in that Senate race, but Flickebrand is going to be such a weak candidate that any semi-plausible Republican with some money and a bit of charisma will give her a real race, and could maybe win. I seriously wish one of the many Dems in the House delegation who loathe her had gone ahead with a primary run; too bad Rahm scared them all off six months back.

Re: my Douthat post above, I was not sufficiently clear. Douthat is a convert to the religion in which I was raised. I feel his op-ed piece has missed its chief organizing ideas almost completely, effectively placing a vain & needful self at its center.

In disdaining a nihilistic world view he manages to assert, mostly by insinuation, a preference for a universe centered on a pathetic, anxious humankind and its yearnings for external 'salvation'. I confess I find such a universe unappealing.

I'm sure it's possible his essay does not adequately encompass his views on the matter.

Parker Griffin switches to the GOP

1 down, 40 to go

jerseyhoya wrote:Parker Griffin switches to the GOP

1 down, 40 to go

With luck he's so insulted you can't get his name right that he switches back

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Parker Griffin switches to the GOP

1 down, 40 to go

With luck he's so insulted you can't get his name right that he switches back

Hahaha, wow

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgoaTqWMZ-E&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVC3OIdcYLs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Man I like that second ad a lot. Great work.

Bill Maher/Joe Scarborough interview

Let's go back to your discussion about health-care reform that you are now talking about in your stand-up act. If the president ends up supporting a health-care-reform bill that doesn't contain a public option, but does have the amendment that restricts abortion funding, will progressives have been betrayed or abandoned by the Democratic Party running Congress?

I think that we were abandoned by the Democratic Party years and years and years ago. I don't, as I said, think we have a progressive party. They were abandoned by the Democratic Party on gun control. They were abandoned by the Democratic Party on catering to the needs of the banks and the credit-card companies before the people. I mean, when the Democratic Party is OK with 30 percent interest credit cards, I think any discussion of betrayal is late. There's not a society in the world that hasn't condemned usury. There is not a religion, you'll be happy to know, or a religious philosopher that hasn't condemned the practice of usury. The reason we don't have loan sharks anymore is because that's what banks do legally. If there was any time to bring out a can of socialist whoop-ass, it would be now on that.

So the latest controversy in Camden County is an attempt to privatize our county jail. Although everybody in power insists that a site, and, in fact, the ultimate corrections firm, are unknown, there are zoning hearings scheduled for a site on Mount Ephraim Avenue in South Camden's Morgan Village neighborhood. Of course, the hearing is specifically for the Mount Ephraim site and the application was submitted by Community Education Centers, Inc. but the site and corrections firm are unknown.

This particular site actually sits near the borders of Camden, Haddon Township, Woodlynne and Collingswood and is less than one mile from an elementary school located in West Collingswood. Needless to say, residents are going to be out in full force on January 4th.

Here is a story about it:
http://www.courierpostonline.com/articl ... 006/news01