Just checked out the election results...

[Dunkopf]

Politics can be fun to debate and I am happy that the mods are letting us do it. As long as we stay civil we should be ok. Strange as it seems we all really want the same thing. We just want to get out of this recession and have America once again be the great country that we love. I love this country. The politicians drive me nutty though. That includes a number of them on the side of the aisle that I support.

 

[ivan3]

I have WHAT in my yard? wrote: I was very excited about the tea party when it started. I truly believe that we need at least one more party to give this mess some balance. But, the Koch brothers really stepped into it and it got skewed when Murdoch decided to throw his support behind it. There are some wonderful intelligent people who have good clear ideas about where this country should be headed. But, they are out-shouted by people who want this to become an American Christian Taliban.

I object to labeling of every sort. Incendiary labeling does not move the debate along. If a specific position/policy is objectionable, I'll bite.

Though I object to Teddy Roosevelt's referring to Thomas Paine as "That dirty little atheist", (Q: Teddy, what `bible' did George Washington read from, at Valley Forge, to inspire his troops? I'm sure he would have known the right answer: A: Common Sense by Thomas Paine), I'm also cognizant of the contributions to the Republic, that have flowed from the several Great Awakenings' that have occurred during the course of our history. The Second being the most important in terms of a legacy. In the plus column this `revival' created the movement for women's rights (yes, Virginia, YOU, and not your father or husband, are responsible for YOUR salvation) this led to the suffrage movement, and has pretty much morphed into something that would be totally unrecognizable to those `ladies'. The impetus given to the abolition movement was the exemplary outcome (revivalists made no distinction as to the percentage of melanin in one's epidermis - all who come can be saved). In the minus column is the birth of the temperance movement. While, on a level of individual choice, this is a laudable goal, it has since become a taxpayer funded subsidy program supporting both cops and dealers and we call it the War On Drugs.

Should any organization that can lobby government, receive government `assistance,' directly or indirectly, be taxed? Absolutely. But that is a battle to be fought by a different generation (in probably a different century).

The reference to the Taliban, however, leads back to my obsession with a National Energy Policy and the uselessness of `name calling' in foreign policy in particular. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan the cry went up about the `godless commies!'. A satisfying label and it played well in Peoria, but the fact is that Russia was about as `communist' as I am Marilyn Monroe (Post-Czarist with a bit of `progressive' social reform sprinkled on between purges and progroms). Our real problem was that Russian policy makers have always dreamed of a warm water port and the path to the sea went through Afghanistan and down into our Middle East Tar Pit. Instead of having a career foreign service dept. (like most nations) we have a State Dept. with political appointees (`you say they're commie and the poor Saudis, etc. need us? We'll not bother with the facts - votes in the next election trump those every time').

So, what did we do?

Special textbooks were published in local Afghan languages, designed by the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha under a USAID grant in the early 1980s. Written by American Afghanistan experts and anti-Soviet Afghan educators, they aimed at promoting jihadi values and militant training among Afghans. USAID paid the University of Nebraska $51 million from 1984 to 1994 to develop and design these textbooks, which were mostly printed in Pakistan. Over 13 million were distributed at Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani madrasas (religious seminaries where Muslim priests are educated and trained) where students learned basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles. After the war ended, these textbooks were still used in Afghan schools. Even the Taliban found them suitable.

Well, we know how well that bit of foreign aid paid off, don't we?

Unlike the Department of State, the Government Accountability Office is headed by an individual appointed to a 15yr. term (Comptroller General). U.S. budgets have to be vetted by the GAO every year. This policy was instituted in 1996. The GAO has not signed off on a single budget since then (don't feel a need to kowtow to the`elected'). I'll post the overview for 2009:

The federal government faces even larger fiscal challenges in the long term. As discussed in this 2009 Financial Report of the United States Government (Financial Report),
the federal government is on an unsustainable long-term fiscal path driven primarily by rising health care costs and known demographic trends. The Statement of Social Insurance, for example, shows that the present value of projected scheduled benefits exceeds earmarked revenues for social insurance programs (e.g., Social Security and Medicare) by about $46 trillion over the next 75-year period. In addition, our most recent long-term simulations for all federal government programs show that absent policy changes, debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP could exceed the historical high reached in the aftermath of World War II in a little over 10 years. Absent a change in policy, under this scenario, the interest costs on the growing debt together with spending on major entitlement programs could absorb 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue in 2019. 11 Clearly, this is not sustainable.

From: http://www.gao.gov/financial/fy2009financialreport.html

I do not think that any particularly outrageous behavior from our representatives is possible - the constraints are obvious and the electorate's patience is thin.

I'll close this rambling with a quote from Lewis Lapham's final column from this month's Harper's (don't often agree with him but he reminds me of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken), it has to do with our focus on 24hr. news cycles and simplistic overgeneralizations (that's right - read widely, read the history, don't be fooled by anyone whose voice is followed by a commercial message - write your reps! yeah, give up an hour of tv and get cracking - lord, I wish I had the web when I was in High School!):

The more interesting questions are epistemological. How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a OE gure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that with-in the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

Thanks to all! Crowing but not flogging is a good thing (don't want the mods to throw us in the soup) BYC is the only forum I'll bother with (a long time ago I used to post up programs in the alt.HP48SX on the usenet - that's it)

ed: formatting​

 

[Organics North]

Dang ivan3,
That text is a piece of artwork! Regardless of your viewpoint. (Not in any way saying I agree or disagree ..)
Simply saying a well written piece of text..

Dunkopf, Indeed! I for one am feeling a bit more American and optimistic that in fact we can have different opinions while having the exact same goal in mind.. (I fully admit I am no better than any other person, who some times expresses a bit too narrow minded opinion in my writing..) Here here to those that tolerate and respond with a cool head! That is respectful and polite!@!!!

Be well

ON