Independent Caucus

English, The News, And My Grandfather

What do you think of the diminution of both print newspapers and network news channels generally viewed as just reporters of the news, and not having any particular side, at least none they let on to?

For a long time people viewed Cronkite or Roger Mudd or Brokaw that way. It started to change when they started to cave in to the craving for ratings out of those new hours (or half hours), and put in those roles people who wanted specifically to be "TV" journalists, and the celebrity that went along with that.

USA Today then was born, and caved in to both color and the seemingly ever-shrinking US attention span, with short articles, less attribution, and no words you would ever have to look up.

And instead of other newspapers thinking how sad that was, they followed suit. Now, the only newspaper that will still sometimes make me reach for a dictionary is the Times. The Journal, too, perhaps. But once they are gone, that's it: an era of top-level, honest, sourced, shoe-leather journalism will be dead. Extinct. When there used to be so many.

And young people could give a shit (please endulge that one four-letter foray, as young people would not say "crap").

They are a large reason for it. Those papers, and those news anchors, don't feed their addiction to sensationalism, and don't enable their arrested English skills. The anchors are already gone. In a world where ADD is the alien virus, news anchors have already been infected. Newspapers too, but for those two, and they will probably not survive.

I read an online news article recently, and it said something like, "The prevailing opinion was he would do better than her in the primary." Or something like that. Better than "her", I thought? "Better than she would do." "Finish the sentence", my dad told me, when I was about 11, "before you shorten it."

My God. It was a national source. You know, LA Times, Miami Herald, Washington Post. I can't recall. It wasn't caught because spell-check won't catch it, and because anyone under 35 would say it that way, and because editors have already fallen to deep budget cuts at print media, or have caught the virus and don't know any better themselves.

The English-educated in this country is way smaller than the college-educated, and nearly nonexistent among only the highs-school educated, or, say age 30 and down. What's more, no one cares. You could tell them point-blank, "Your English is remedial. 6th or 7th grade level at the very best. And your grammar is a clutter of errors." And do you know what would be the response? I kid you not. I PROMISE it would be this, "Yeah..whatever..."

They don't care. They have either given up on themselves in that respect, or they honestly and truly do not care, and have elevated "you know what I meant" to the highest level of attainment in the language.

I am soooo happy I am not one of them, and that I grew up when there was a broad-based respect for newspapers and news anchors and just news in general. European 20-somethings know more about America than American 20-somethings. And here again it is the fault of The Lamest Generation, self-important, self-indulgent, selfish, and not demanding enough of their children. It devolves from the same fault in character which motivates them to time and again put pressure on their elected representatives to "buy it now and borrow for it - do not reduce my paycheck - and take it out of my kids' paychecks later, with interest of course."

My father brought home a "C" in English one report card. His dad was a Sicilian immigrant, whose spoken English was terrible, but who regularly read The Complete Works Of Plato and other light reading, in English. His father said, angrily, "This is your country! This is your country's language! You speak and write it every day! How do you get a "C" in English?" Well, it was the last "C" he ever got.

Children, when young, and as teens, respond to the bar set for them. And it is not that challenging a bar, because it is not higher learning; it is not college; it is not graduate school; it is not doctorates and post-doctorates.

It is grade school, junior high, high school, and it takes some effort and some focus and some time to be sure, but it is not a high bar. It is the bedrock, foundational knowledge a society needs to be productive and democratic, too, since the citizens of a democracy are regularly asked to critically consider various candidates' positions and choose those who are to represent them. You simply can't be a drop-out with no capacity to make a critical judgment - because you can't really read or understand what the candidates or people at the water cooler are talking about - and be a democrat (small "d").

You are of no elective use to your country.

I can hear my great grandfather scolding them now. "It's your country! What do you mean you don't understand what's in the newspaper? It's in English! That's your country's language! What do you mean you can't tell me what that candidate stands for? Haven't you been paying attention? How can you be a citizen if you don't know? You aren't a citizen, you are simply breathing air, eating food, and taking up space if you cannot read, and understand, and tell me what you read, and what they stand for."

A whole couple generations now need my grandfather's scolding, but it won't happen. And even if he could come back and tell them I know what would be their reply, "Yeah...whatever...."

Barack Obama: Just Not What I Thought

I wanted to title it something even less flattering.  Really.  I shed the first three titles that came to me because they sounded, on their face, unkind, and too personal, things I criticize and rebel against in a media and political culture too fixated on insults and personal attacks.  And, besides, a title is just an entrance to what you want to say.  And "Not What I Thought" is a more than adequate entrance.

Still, I think it could, on substance, quite rightly be titled "Promises To Break" (sorry, couldn't help the take-off on the title "Promises To Keep" of Joe Biden's book which came out just as he started running, unsuccessfully ultimately, for President).  And, literally, part of what I want to communicate is captured by "Not As Smart As I Thought", though that is clearly inaccurate, in that, from an IQ standpoint, he's probably every bit as smart as I thought.  So, "smart" is not the right word.  "Correct" or "Wise" are probably closer.

So, you can see I'm fishing around.  Spending, so far, my first two paragraphs critiquing my own title tells you that what I am really trying to get across is a compendium of dissatisfaction that no one title fully conveys.

And I have to get on the road before the rest of the world does on this holiday travel Monday; so let me cut to the chase.

The economy is stagnating and Barack proposed yesterday to take another $30 billion loan from China, which she shall certainly grant, and use the borrowed funds to build infrastructure, much needed in this country after years of neglect and shortsightedness, mainly roads, bridges, and rail lines, as a Keynsian injection of cash into the economy, banking on a multiplier effect, of course, and a resulting jumpstart to the private sector which the private sector will then sustain beyond the period of government spending on infrastructure.

Those are all Keynsian notions.  Keynes was a great economist, and his philosophies certainly influenced Roosevelt's decision-making during the Depression to borrow (and that time, not from China, but the American people, so it was they who earned the interest, and the repayment) and spend in order to accomplish the same ends back then.

The trouble is, though there is a Nobel Prize for economics, as with physics, its formulas and theories are not as clear cut, clearly provable, or disprovable.  There are certain principles of economics (not Keynsian, necessarily, but any strain), like supply and demand, which hold true under certain assumptions - usually assumptions of "perfect" competition, when very rarely does that exist, meaning the principles themselves are defeated somewhat by the lack of meeting those assumptions.

The relationship between supply and demand is far simpler however than the Keynsian principle of multipliers, intuitively, as well as in reality.  Various assumptions need to hold.  And intuitively the concept is very difficult.  The principle basically says this.  First of all, note that GDP (gross domestic product) is like the nation's salary for one year.  It's what the nation "made", earned, collectively.  All of us.  Well, the multiplier says that if the government spends $1, then GDP goes up.  How much up depends on the size of the multiplier.  But the basic concept is this:  if the government spent money, cash money, on things like bridges, roads, or whatever, then the nation got richer.  Its "salary" went up.  The amount the U.S. collectively earned from all of our collective efforts increased.  America, in effect, got a raise.

Intuitively, you think, "Well, didn't it just get shifted?  I mean, the government doesn't 'make' anything, right?  All the money the government gets it gets from us, right?  We make some money, and then give the government some in taxes.  But it's a 'zero sum'; that is, we made less than otherwise, and the difference went to the government.  So, then, if they spend some of what we gave them, they just moved that money again to someone else.  Perhaps a bridge construction company.  But they didn't create any 'new' money, right?  America did not get a 'raise', right?  In fact, if the government borrowed the money not from the American people, but from a foreign country, where the interest on the loan will then leave our country for distant shores, then didn't that government spending actually 'cost' us money collectively, and make us collectively poorer, quite literally?"

A Keynsian economist would try to tell you, "No, no, and no...."  My point is that a non-Keynsian would counter with "Yes, yes, and yes...."  And because it's economics, and not physics, no laboratory test would prove conclusively one right and one wrong.

If those two people were witnesses in a civil case, as the jury, you'd have to throw out both of their testimony as equally compelling and directly contradictory.  In other words, one argument annihilates the other.  Matter and anti-matter, for you Star Trek fans.  What's left is the absence of both arguments.

So as respects Barack's plan to spend another $30 billion, what do we know for sure about it?  We know for sure he is not going to ask us, the current taxpayers, to pay for it.  So we know he's going to borrow it.  And he's going to borrow as he and George W. Bush before him borrowed all their money - the sale of T-Bills to foreign governments, mostly China.  So we know he's going to borrow it from China.  We know that increases our already historic debt and deficit.  We know the interest on the loan goes to China.  We know all of that for certain.

We know, therefore, that the proposal is this - that young people, many of whom are too young to vote, or even aren't born yet - shall repay the $30 billion plus a considerable interest (by the time it actually gets repaid) out of their lives.  This is a sacrifice.  He is asking it of them.  Actually, he's just telling them, because they can't vote.  He is telling them to sacrifice for their country.  More explicitly, he is asking them to sacrifice so that their parents might get a job, if currently unemployed, or have higher incomes now, because the tax being taken from them is $30 billion less than what it would need to be to pay for the infrastructure spending now.  Moreover, he is asking those congressmen and senators who represent those parents, and the parents themselves on whose vote those congressmen and senators are relying to get re-elected, he's asking all of them to live better now so that their children may live a more impoverished life later.

When did that become America's creed?

Screw your kids.

I'm am usually far, far from that blunt.  But $30 billion in borrowing to make life a little easier now is $30 billion which makes life worst later.

Unless you believe Keynes, and you assume a high enough multiplier.  If you do then $1 of spending by the government does not make us poorer (I guess the $1 is interest-free); further, the $1 is not just a shifting around of $1 a taxpayer gave the government, with a net effect of $0 change in America's income.  Nope, neither of those.  What you believe is that $1, which you have the government, and it then spent on a bridge, created $2 of earnings for someone else (if the multiplier is 2.0) or $3 (if the multiplier is 3.0, etc).  Now, how it's possible that if someone gives you a dollar and you give it to someone else, that somehow or another and extra dollar (totaling $2) was created in the transaction, is exactly what constitutes Keynes' multiplier theory.  But it's a very tough sell, is all I'll say.

Under that theory, if we can just borrow enough from China, and if the multiplier is high enough, the gain from the multiplier effect will be large enough to pay back the loan and the interest.

Who out there thinks that if we just borrow more, we can somehow completely pay off past borrowing with the Keynsian multiplied gains of the new borrowing?

Like I said, it's a very tough sell.  I don't agree with it, obviously.

I think Keynes got that one wrong.  I think someone will figure out, tough as it is to prove anything in economic theory, that the theory was fatally flawed.  Some smart person will do what smart people are often needed for - to prove something we, the less smart, knew intuitively to be the case.

And I'll finish now.  Here's why I say, "Not What I Thought".  I didn't think he was going to indebt the unrepresented like he did.  I didn't think the congressmen and senators representing the parents of the unrepresented would be rewarded with votes at the ballot boxes by those parents of the unrepresented.  I didn't think this generation - given our great history of each generation taking on the awesome responsibility of leaving a better country to their kids than they inherited - would so openly, and easily, and repeatedly, time and again and again and again so pervasively and knowingly and callously screw their kids - people with no vote of their own, and therefore no political power, and totally dependent on their parents, and their President, and their government to support public policies which will make their lives better, out of a historical tradition to do just that.

No young person should approve of their parents' politics if they support this President, or support congressmen or senators who support this President.

I am among the represented, and I deplor what this President is doing - attempting to live better now, so that later generations can suffer.  LIving better at their expense.  Barack Obama needs to lose re-election.  Democrats need to be represented by possbily Hillary Clinton or anyone repulsed by the notion of sacrifice NOW for the benefit of our children later.  It's what the Depression era did.  The Greatest Generation.  The generations subsequent are proving to be The Greatest Embarrassment.  And this President is demonstrating his membership, his inclusion in those generations.  This is not "change".  Not all all.  It's all too sadly the status quo.  It's Reagan.  It's truly everything since the era of Eisenhower, Kennday, Nixon.  Those presidents close a chapter.  To do as they did fiscally would be "change".  To do as they did in terms of investment in this country would be change (Kennedy: space; Ike: interstates; Nixon: opening of China).  To follow the already $700 billion stimulus the way Barack is by asking for another $30 billion is not change.  It's a change in national attitude from sacrifice to indulgence.  Barack is going to attempt to indulge in another $30 billion from those who can't vote.  Just watch how many of their parents...and congressmen and senators...respond with, "Amen, brother!...it's about time, because my employment is about to run out," and all array of similar reasons.

Change Afoot?..Just Not Obama's Foot

Did anyone quietly notice what quietly happened the other day in the U.S. Senate?  The same Senate where Democrats have nearly a super-majority in numbers?

They voted down a spending bill.  An unpaid-for, 100% borrowed spending bill.  And not some Senator's pet bridge to certain reelection. Nope. A bill that extended soon to expire tax cuts and unemployment benefits.

In an election year.

That bill should have been safe as Derek Jeter making the All-Star game.

It went down. Decisively. Because something like 10 or so centrist Dems were opposed to the fact that it was going to add something like another $80 billion to the debt or so.

That was money in voters' pockets, as I said, no public works project of some local and questionable value. It was cash. Borrowed from the Chinese to be sure, but cash.

If that vote occurred expressly because this is an election year, then maybe there is hope that the great and broad public concern about all our governmental red ink is finally beginning to resonate, and sink in, and affect the voting of our elected representatives.

Obama, for all his Harvard Law smarts, doesn't get it still - that some of the greatest dissatisfaction with George W. Bush was not his flouting of the rule of law or the Constitution, though flout he did, but his determination to not pay for anything while cutting taxes to the bone, especially for those who are in the higher income brackets, or make a lot of their money from investments.

It's true enough that we hated things like "Black sites" and "rendition", and firings of U.S. Attorneys for what looked suspiciously like political reasons. We didn't like the many outtakes and malappropisms. There was a feeling like we were collectively less smart with W in charge. But what galled so many in the all-important political center was George W. Bush taking us from a total national debt of $3.5 trillion at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency - the last 2 budgets of which actually paid down the principle of our debt with budget surpluses of around $200 billion per year - to a whopping $11 trillion, with annual deficits as far as the eye could see.

Well, the Obama White House projections are for about $1 trillion dollar deficits for each of the next 10 years. If he does that, he easily eclipses W and becomes the greatest debtor president of all time. Right now it's W. In percentage terms, it's Reagan (he tripled the debt). The thought that this White House is actually prepared to leave $22 trillion in debt to future presidents and generations is mindboggling.

And he made it clear he was ready and waiting to sign the legislation once it passed. But, alas, he did not get the opportunity.

There may finally be a groundwell in America to pay for things and stop borrowing. It's plain to see that while that's some of the change Obama campaigned on, that the source of that change will be coming from elsewhere, maybe, even from our elected representatives, through us, the way it's supposed to work.

What I Don't Want: More Of Same

Here's what I don't want, and that is another iteration of same.

I'm already starting to hear it, and starting to see what the playbook will be, and the hypocrisy of it all turns my stomach.

The "iteration" has gone this way.  The party in power runs the House and Senate like their own fiefdom, with stacked committee votes and a "suspension of the rules".  This makes for starkly partisan bills which 50% of Americans not just oppose, but hate, and I'm talking about the 50%, since we are divided about 50/50, who are from or favor the minority party.  If it's the Republicans in control, then inevitably there is the fiscal irresponsibility of tax cuts which are not offset by any budget cuts, i.e. any shrinking of the size of government, meaning that every dollar of "cut" is a dollar of additional "borrowing".  You might even hear Republicans revive, "Read my lips - no new taxes," but you will never hear them say, "Read my lips - no new borrowing."

If it's the Dems who are in control, then inevitably there are more governmentally invasive solutions to national problems, some which require such invasion - arguably, something like the rules surrounding banks, investment banks, and derivatives following the financial crisis - and others which do not require such invasion, but where such invasion is simply the Dems preferred way of dealing with things (some would argue the healthcare bill meets this description).  The Dems will vote to increase the benefits to - or at least not cut the benefits to - various entitlement programs, and yet they will not otherwise cut government to pay for the increases, or cut entitlement programs in order to make them more actuarily sound, favoring instead increases in entitlement taxes, which, of course, are transfers.

Dems will try to still beat their chest about being more fiscally responsible, and they will cite Bill Clinton.  But following George W. Bush's presidency, and his runaway deficits, the Dems and Obama had an opportunity to become the party of fiscal discipline in the eyes of the American people for the next generation.  And they blew it with the bailouts, the TARP, and their own lack of courage to cut government, seriously cut it, while putting the tax rates back where Bill Clinton had them, which was still lower than they had been for much of the nation's fiscally-sound history.

Basically, they have lost that claim with budget deficits which are now at levels George W. Bush never even contemplated (though a long way from exceeding George in total).  And they are not going down.  The Dems, further, are doing nothing to push them down, except initiate a commission to study the debt.  Just WAIT till its recommendations come out.  See if Pelosi and Reid (if they are still in charge) stick to their pledge to give whatever recommendations come out of that commission an up or down vote in the House and Senate.  I bet they balk, and don't allow it.  Or the Republicans balk, and try to stop it.  Because those recommendations - I promise you - will recommend cuts EVERYWHERE to stem all the red ink.  They will recommend an increase (and a significant one) in the qualifying age for Social Security.  They will recommend an increase in the tax rate for Medicare, and a tightening of the qualifications for Medicaid.  They will recommend significant weapons systems scrapped which the Pentagon has said for years they don't need, but whose congressmen and senators make sure continue to get their appropriation since made in their district.  They will recommend a stark contraction of our military-base footprint around the globe, and just overall a defense budget which is no longer larger than all the other major military powers combined.

See if THAT gets an up-or-down-no-amendments-allowed vote in EITHER the House or Senate.  If it does, I will buy you all dinner.  Those of you who read and comment (haha..a shameless grab for commentors), the quality and actual delivery of such claim will come down to a certain geographical convenience and the size of my own deeply in-question budget.  Ok, so there's probably no dinner.  But, anyway, I don't have to worry, because it's not happenin'!  Honestly, though, I hope it does.  And I hope I'll be shelling out some dinner somewhere.

But I digress.  And now I'm hungry.

My point is that the "iteration" is for the minority party to overblow the missteps and bad luck (Katrina, the oil spill) of the present time, claim that the majority is "out of touch" with the American people, and lastly, claim that "the majority is running this country into the ground with debt, and asking our grandchildren to foot the bill."  Blech!  I've heard that bullcrap SO many times.  It alternates back and forth coming out of the mouths of either minority Republicans or minority Democrats.  It's all bluster.  It's all crap.  And with each iteration, but for Bill Clinton, our debt gets worse, the bills which come out of Congress and get signed into law are to the liking of no more than 50% of the U.S. rather than 80% or more.  And the majority treats our political institutions like their own little fiefdoms, while all along, centrists and reasonable thinkers retire and leave public life out of disgust and disenchantment.

I don't want the Republicans again in November.  Are they going to fix anything?  Why in God's name should I believe they will?  I should much more likely believe that they will tax-cut us into deficits raging as furiously as are Obama's if not worse!

Both parties think borrowing is their own little perfect outlet!  For Republicans, it means they can keep government humming and spending pretty much as it is without reforming anything and more importantly pissing anyone off with big cuts, while at the same time cutting taxes!  It's their outlet for actually making that work while no checks bounce.  Actually, fiscally, the Dems are still better than the Republicans, because they actually don't increase the size of government much more if any more than Republicans (Republicans expand government with defense spending, and Dems with social spending), but they also don't cut taxes, or not as deeply, so they thereby guarantee more of the federal government's spending is paid for, yet nowhere near enough.

Anyway, correct me if I am off-base on any of that.  But I have seen this predictable cycle for so long...it goes all the way back to Reagan in '80.  That's 30 years of this!  It should look predictable by now!

The only fix for this is a constitutional amendment, a federal balanced-budget amendment.  It would resemble balance-budget amendments for all the states which mandate that government be paid for with collected tax revenues except for a state of emergency declared by the governor.  In this case, it would be a national emergency declared by the President.  Well, needless to say, in the Supreme Court, very few things for which the federal government borrows currently would meet that test.

It's the only solution for both parties.  Both need it.  Both have shown they need it.  America's fiscal future will look so much like Greece's or like Brazil's used to if we don't pass such an amendment.  I am for whichever candidate or candidates campaign for such an amendment, for whichever party champions it.  That will be my party, right there.

Tea Partiers Wrong To Join Republicans

The Tea Party is making a mistake if they align with the Republicans.

They are the first thing to come along in a while that looks like the beginnings of an alternative party to the Democrats and Republicans, with a genuinely alternative platform, a genuinely alternative set of priorities.

If they decide to run with the Republicans then they deserve the footnote to history they will become.

I don't know why, as author of a blog called Independent Caucus, why the Democrat and Republican parties are so radical. I am not a sufficient historian to comment as to whether they are more polar, more radical, and further from one another than at other times in history, or even what metric one would use to make the case for or against that claim. I only have my perception, nebulus as it is, and the similar perception expressed by various retired legislators, that things are more polar, more radical, more partisan, than they used to be earlier in my lifetime. It's one thing to have the perception, as Einstein did early on, that something was missing from Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics; and it is something else again, and altogether important to moving beyond something flawed to something better to identify and quantify that missing thing. I wish I had and could share in this post the E=Mc**2 of the radicalism of the American two-party system, a system which used to regularly resemble a Venn Diagram featuring a considerable intersection of opinion, and now, with a strict party-line vote on health care, looks like two completely stand-alone circles.

But overlay the size of those circles on the electorate who strongly agrees with each, and you will see, based on the polls, and how unpopular each party is, that the size of those circles is ever smaller. And what does that tell you? That there is a great, and increasingly great opportunity for the construction of a third party, a third circle, which can cover the broad swath of the American electorate unhappy with both the Democrats and Republicans.

That is the great opportunity of the Tea Parties, to be that, or the vanguard to that, and either way be something revolutionary and historic. But they immediately forfeit that opportunity if they decide to join a party with an overall approval of in the mid to high twenty percent range, and a party which has famously advanced so much of what the Tea Parties oppose, most obviously, the accumulation and carrying of a huge national debt. To join the Republicans is to immediately pour a considerable amount of water into an otherwise very strong cup of tea.

Health Insurance Reform et. al.

Wow, it's been a long time.  I like this stuff - public policy and the like - so much.  I am addicted to it, really.  And so it's remarkable to me that I could go so long and not post, especially since we've just gone through such a historic chapter in public policy with the whole development and passage of the health insurance reform bill.

There were lots of thoughts I had along the way, and I didn't share any of them.  I think I know why.  I had this prevailing feeling of despair throughout the whole thing, and disappointment.

I was happy that Democrats were trying to provide health insurance to 30 million Americans who did not have it.  I was happy that Democrats were trying to eliminate the denial of health insurance if you had a preexisting condition.  I was happy when, as the bill progressed toward its final form, the scoring of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan agency of the U.S. Congress) indicated that it would extend the life of Medicare and reduce federal expenditures overall by $1.3 trillion over the life of the bill.  Anyone who has read this blog with any regularity in the past knows how opposed I am to federal deficit spending, and the carrying of a large national debt.  On that point, I am right there with the Tea Party members.

But I felt tremendous disappointment throughout the health insurance reform debate, because of how then candidate Obama campaigned, how he said, how he very nearly promised this debate and others would progress with Republicans, in bipartisan fashion.  He told us he knew how to do that.  He did not.  Not on health care.  So, then, are we to believe he knows how to do it on the next issue, when health care was pushed through in the most partisan fashion, with a lot of fixed votes in committee (Democrats always have more members on the committee, so they can vote down every Republican amendment), and a final vote tally which included not a single Republican in the House or Senate.  The House or Senate.  Can you believe?  When is the last time that happened on a piece of legislation of such import and sweep?

So, is Obama the only one at fault for that?  Well, yeah, kinda, if your focus is his campaign message that he knew how to get legislation done in a bipartisan fashion.  Since it didn't happen, clearly he didn't.  So, he failed in that respect, and there are no two ways about it.  But did Republicans dig in and refuse to cooperate on crafting a bipartisan bill?  Was their level of intransigence beyond what Obama had experience with to that point in his career as U.S. Senator?  Did it prove a level above and beyond what Obama could have expected to encounter?  Perhaps he felt like he had built some good relationships on the other side of the aisle while in the Senate.  Perhaps he felt he knew 5 or 10 Republicans with whom he thought he could do business, and would be open to doing business with him.  Maybe he felt that adding Joe Biden, the longstanding Senator from Delaware, as his Vice President, would further increase the cooperation he could count on once President.  In that respect, if things unfolded that way, then health care was a serious wake-up call for Barack Obama.

So, I was disappointed.  What I thought would happen did not happen.  And what did I think would happen?

I thought Republicans would show a little humility from being in the minority, a pretty significant minority in both houses of the Congress.  And I thought Democrats would be not nearly so arrogant.  And I thought that Barack Obama would, at critical times, make a show of Presidential leadership and take on his own party if they began to legislate arrogantly.

Those 3 things.  Absolutely NONE of them happened.  None.

I thought that President Obama, on the issue of health care reform, would approach the Republican leadership and ask, "Ok, guys, what are your top 5 things?"  And, when they told him, he would have said, "Ok, here are our top 5.  Since included in our top 5 is a public option, and in yours is no public option, as a gesture of good faith, for this bill we throw that out.  But, agree to giving us 15-20 Republican Senate votes, and 40 or so House votes, if the final bill incorporates 3 of our remaining 4, and 2 of yours.  So, in other words, give us mandatory coverage (i.e. employer mandate and fines for individuals who refuse to buy insurance), no denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, and health insurance exchanges, and we will give you medical malpractice liability reform, and interstate purchase of insurance.  Done.  And the vote in the Senate is 80-20, and in the House is whatever it is with those 40 Republican "yea" votes.  What do you say?  Do we have a deal?"

That's what I thought would happen.  And there is precedent for legislating that way.  It's how Tip O'Neil and President Reagan addressed the issue of Social Security solvency, putting it on a sound actuarial footing for the next several decades.

So, truly then, and quite rightly, one could say that the President who truly knew how to legislate in bipartisan fashion was Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama.  To this point in his presidency, that statement is true enough.  He has more chances left.  But he's 0-for-1.

Happy New Year

Hello. I've had a little bubbly. I offer that as a disclaimer should there be a certain incoherence to this post.

We worry about politics as we should. When we stop worrying is when things can really go bad. So we worry. We argue. We debate. But typically we do it with no other prevailing goal than to win. And not just win. But vanquish. Vanquish.

And at the dawn of a new decade I ask why that should be the goal of our political interaction when it is not the goal of any other human interaction in which we all participate? Is it the goal in any marriage to vanquish your spouse, to angle for 100% of what you want while working hard to see that your spouse gets 0% of what he or she wants? But that's how the two major parties approach their politics.

Why is it that in football a 30-20 score is still a victory, but in politics it's not unless the score is 50-0?

And if political parties demand of themselves 50-0, then very little will ever get done.

In poliics, as a politician, it comes down fundamentally to what are your needs? What is it you want? When the Declaration of Independence talked of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was happiness conceived as the successful (though unlikely) vanquishing of your opponent?

If happiness comes from things, tangible things, like having health insurance, or bringing down the cost of same, then why must it arrive along a partisan divide, where Republicans get all or none of what they want, or the reverse?

If a score is 30-20, and you are the 20, you are still motivated to become the 30 next time. Or better. It doesn't have to be all or nothing to satisfy, to bring happiness. But that's how the Congress is operating, and how it legislates.

Until 30-20 is again an acceptable winning score, you will see legislative solutions which are inadequate for a great democracy, and you will see problems persist. Rather, a vanquishing approach, applied to a marriage or friendship or team at work, would certainly result in no wife, no friend, no compatible team dynamic. So, again, it comes down to what defines happiness, to what makes you happy. If it's winning, defined as getting nearly all you want while denying the other side all they want, then you probably don't see the Congress as broken at all. If it's based on something besides just winning, then our current system is in disrepair and should be fixed asap.

He's Right And He's Right

This a short post since typing it on my iPhone.

I heard John McCain speak on the Senate floor yesterday. His basic point? That candidate Obama said he would take a political approach to reforming health care which embodied "change", that it would be a bipartisan group he would convene, and that debate would take place before the cameras of CSPAN, but did no such thing as president. He called him out. Called him a hypocrit, in effect. I heard that and said, "He's right."

Then I heard Senator Harkin after. And he responded that Republicans never got their caucus together with a proposal they themselves would both support in large numbers and could reasonably offer to the majority Democrats - a proposal something like "give us real medical malpractice liability reform and interstate competition of insurance, and we will vote for this in large numbers, even if it includes a public option and no specific exclusion on funding of abortions."

And I said, "He's right."

I sometimes want to blame the system. And I don't believe our system of doling out committee chairmanships is democratic, true enough. But blaming the system is in this case far too charitable. It comes down to men and women, citizen legislators, elected to lead, with the freedom and opportunity and responsibility to lead, who individually and collectively choose not to.

I say throw them all out...first chance you get. But it begs the question, getting back to the system, what's the chance better and more courageous and more responsible leaders follow?

John Kerry Worried About Teabaggers

I got this email from John Kerry, or so it said, likely mega-distributed to me and tens of thousands of other people whose email addresses are known to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), asking for contributions in order to defend against contests with future Republican candidates who are actively raising lots of money by appealing directly to the various "Tea Party" groups.  The email said this:

"Either we match the passion and activism of these new forces in the Republican Party, or they'll be choosing who's sitting in the Senate, steering our country's course. If we don't match them dollar-for-dollar, we will lose Senate seats in 2010. And the loss of even one or two would flip crucial votes in their favor and doom President Obama's agenda."

I had the following reaction.  I sent it just as a "reply", a reply to an email no doubt that was never intended to be replied to.  So I'm sure my reply was read by no one.  By posting on this blog I make sure it is read by everyone who matters.  :)  Here it is:

****************************************************

Dear Senator Kerry,

I'm sure your email was not intended for a reply, so I assume you won't get this.  On the off chance you do, I humbly offer this brief reply.

Even President Obama often talks about the never-ending quest to build a more perfect union.  It's partly why I voted for him, that he gives voice to that fundamental mission of democracy and representative government.

But our current form remains far from perfect, and that is a key impetus behind the so-called Tea Party movement.  Our form of union, of government, of democracy persists under this as past presidents, Speakers, majority leaders, and committee chairs as not sufficiently or fairly enough representative of what was expressed at the ballot box in the last election or last several.  Until that changes, you will have frustration, partisanship, and outrage by the minority in this country, and minority movements like the Teabaggers will enjoy both energy and funding.

Until power wielded in our government is a fair representation of recent elections, you will have these angry minority groups.  They simply have no alternative but to be angry, because they have no hope of seeing the government respond to them legislatively in anything remotely relative to their numbers at the polls.

When the country can split at the polls 52% to 48%, for instance, in a given district, state, or in aggregate across the nation, and yet the victor(s) in the election legislate as if the vote were 100% to nothing, then all that is left for the 48% is anger, frustration, and partisanship.

When the country can basically be split legislatively 52% to 48% across the country, and yet 100% of the committee chairmen in the House and Senate are from the party of 52%, then the 48% can only be angry and frustrated and motivated to do all they can to make the majority fail so that they might win back the majority as the only possible means for legislatively getting anything at all that they and those who voted for them want.

If you want to defuse groups like the Teabaggers, use your power in a manner very much a profile in courage and start an effort to change the rules in the House and Senate such that the number of chairmanships by party reflects each party's relative numbers in each body.  Change rules which majority parties currently use to deny votes on minority bills or amendments.  And be a key figure in our wonderful American saga and American history in advancing for her and her future generations a more perfect union.  Please consider going that route rather than the well-worn and less-perfect route of trying to beat the minority into submission by attempting to marginalize them, raise more money than them, and so on, and using undemocratic means to do so.  In a 52/48 America, I care what the 48 wants, and I care very much, whether I am one of them or not, and I implore you to care as well.

Yours sincerely,

Joseph Intili

No Obama In Berlin?

Obama did not travel to Berlin for the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years hence. The wall "fell" when the East Germans opened the Brandenburg Gate rather than forcibly dispurse the thousands of East Germans who had gathered there after a sequence of events had given hope that liberation from Soviet control and physical separation from the "west" was at hand. The date was November 9, 1989.

The wall had been there for over 30 years. As President Kennedy said during his great speech at the wall in 1961, as the wall was being constructed, it was the physical as well as symbolic divider between the governing doctrines of democracy and communism, of liberty and totalitarianism. The opening of the gate on November 9, 1989 was the physical as well as symbolic end to communism and totalitarianism in Europe. It was the end of the Cold War, and with that, it was the true and final end to World Wars I and II. And it was the end to the conflict which had been the primary concern of all past U. S. presidents back to Truman.

And President Obama stays home? He sends...a video? Oh my God...

Thankfully, Hillary was there. Symbolically, Hillary is always more than just Secretary of State. But, still...

How does President Obama expect to make good on his campaign promise to forge better ties with Europe if he is going to snub their most significant historical commemorations?

Hillary's been all around the world and back recently, with her trip to Pakistan. News reports of that trip were that notables accompanying her on that trip, as the trip wore on, looked progressively more exhausted. But not Hillary. So, she travels well. Good. But, for goodness sakes, President Obama, go with her to Berlin! Don't pass on Berlin. Don't send an emissary. Don't send a VIDEO - holy jeez - just freaking be there! JFK is rolling over. And so is President Reagan, whose "...bring down this wall!" speech stoked tremendous hope in East Germans and all under Soviet control that the west had not forgotten about them.

He sent a video...

I can't believe that...